Stupid Sports Slogans Are Relevant To Your Interests

I'm at one of those points in the semester where I've been putting so many words together that the idea of putting more words together makes me feel the lethargic despair people have in mind when they use words like "Sisyphean."

Normally in this situation I would look at my "blog ideas" note, where I put down all potential blog ideas -- even ones that seem dumb, weird, and unpromising. In case you're interested, rejected topics today include "hair" -- in which i was going to say something how the energy of hair-styling in post-Maria Puerto Rico is both life affirming and makes me appreciate how hair-lazy I am, "The sad side of fine-tuned consumer preferences" -- which was going to explore the very distinctive kind of grimness I associate with hearing someone express detailed knowledge about what seem to me manufactured differences in things I'd never be interested in buying anyway, and "stupid capitalist dilemmas," which would have focused on annoying questions like "Is it ethically wrong to opt out of targeted advertising on a site whose existence and profitability you want to continue?"

But today, I'm not up to it. Instead I'll share with you this photograph that I took at the gym. As a philosopher, I'm used to having my mind philosophizing in non-philosophizing contexts. I remember some motivational poster at the gym years ago that said that if you set aside worry about the future and regret about the past, you would be happy in the present. I was like .. that is clearly not true. I can be unhappy about the present just as well as I can about the future or the past. Just watch me.

Here it is:

As you can see, here we have another philosophically rich idea: "Choose progress over perfection."

Because I'm naturally grouchy and argumentative, when I saw this my first thought was to try to think how wrong it was. But then I started thinking about it, and actually "choosing progress over perfection" is something I do all the time. Perfection is paralyzing. Even having high standards can get in your way. I was a little shocked to realize how often I deflate my own anxieties by saying to myself, "Well, whatever. Just keep this moving forward into the next step, and then you can see how it's going."

I would even go so far as to say that it may be the areas where perfection rings your bell can be the areas where it's the most difficult to move forward, because choosing progress over perfection becomes so difficult. When I was a kid I was into music, and I took lessons, first on the flute and later on the piano. I loved the piano, but I loved it in this weird way where my own deficiencies as a learner drove me crazy with frustration. I knew, intellectually, that I would have to practice and improve slowly. But hearing myself produce music that sounded bad? I couldn't handle it emotionally.

Though I'm invested in my intellectual work and writing, I'm not invested in them in that way. I have the same problem of being endlessly unhappy with what I produce, but for some reason it doesn't give me that intense feeling of rage and irritation. So in that domain, I really can choose progress over perfection.

I would go so far as to say that "choose progress over perfection" is useful advice for a lot of intellectual and creative work. These kinds of projects are psychologically demanding along multiple dimensions. The blank page, the critic in your head, yada yada yada.

We need all the tools we can get. If some of them come from stupid sports slogans, so what? Maybe they're actually on to something.

Partner Dancing Needs A Queer Revolution

I used to dance when I was young, and then I didn't dance for a long, long time, and then I started to want to dance again. So I started thinking about "what kinds of dancing," and one aspect of the contemporary dance scene that one immediately confronts is that a lot of dancing is geared either toward performance or toward what I learned is called "social dancing." And a lot of social dancing is partner dancing, where two people dance together.

In North America, partner dancing seems to include ballroom dancing, waltz, tango, salsa, and related styles. I want to dance to have a good time, not to perform, so on the face of it, social dancing is just what I'm looking for, and I like the idea of partner dancing -- dancing with someone. As I've known for decades, though, social partner dancing presents a person with an immediate problem: one person has to follow the other.

I've tried partner dancing a few times in my life, and leading and following is one of the first lessons. A shocking amount of partner dancing seems to still involve a man and a woman paired up together, and when it does, it's the man who leads and the woman who follows. OK, it's 2017, so that's a little nuts right off the bat. But when you start being instructed on how to follow, you realize it's even crazier than its sounds.

I remember in one class being told that to be a good follower, you had to be ultra attentive to the tiniest gestures and glances of your partner, so you could sense, as immediately as possible, what direction they were going to go in, and what move they were going to do. It's not like a "Simon Says" situation. It's more like immersing yourself in a study of the physicality of the other person, to sense them, understand them, and respond to them.

I remember when I heard that I was kind of horrified. I mean, one of the things that makes it difficult to be a woman in the modern world is that women are socialized to study men, sense them, understand them, and respond to them. And while it would be nice in romance if everyone would study, sense, understanding, and respond to others, in public life and work the gendered difference in this activity becomes a huge problem. know a lot of women share my sense that in those contexts, studying, sensing, understanding and responding to men's every motion and glance is what we're trying to unlearn. And now doing it is going to be part of my dancing? My dancing I am doing for fun?

If you think I'm exaggerating the creepiness of following, notice that the "following" advice on this page includes the sentence: "I tell women 'you are a food cart, with steel arms and really good wheels.'"

This is no good. Something should change so social partner dancing can get away from all these heteronormative styles and norms. Maybe there are already queer social dances and places that I just don't know about. But even if there are, they haven't made their way to my local dancing class studios, which are in a big city and probably have a lot of queer clientele already. So, what to do?

What does it mean to dance "with someone" if neither person is following? One idea would be for there to be more set and choreographed dances that people would learn. What's wrong with dances that follow a specific script of where you go and what steps you do and when? Then if both people know the dance, they can do it together, without anyone following.

In fact, if the steps are choreographed and always the same, the sensing and responding that is an annoying part of gendered following could become a lighter and more mutual thing. Making sure the dance moves smoothly is something both people could do together. Weren't there European dances that like this back in the day?

If you look at this description of The Quadrille, you'll see a highly structured dance with multiple couples. Interestingly, the Quadrille is related to modern square dancing -- a form in which dance figures are "called." Why can't that structure be danced to cool new music with cool new moves? That seems like it would be really fun.

I thought about this idea before, when I was in BodyAttack. As regular readers know, I'm obsessed with this class, which is officially a "sports inspired" workout class -- but if you've been, you know it has a lot of goofy moves and a hilarious anthemic track 8 with a chorus-line feeling. Anyway, a few years ago a release came out where the "agility track" involved getting into groups on either side of the room, and moving toward one another and then away, facing front and then facing one another, all set to this incredibly infectious electronic dance song "Hardcore Salsa 2K14 (Hardstyle Edit)."

It was really fun. When I did it in Paris at the gym near Place de la République, it was in the dark with disco lights on, and it was awesome. I remember thinking: this is like a dance. If I'd known what a quadrille was, I might have thought, "This is like a quadrille." Why not more things like that? Not only could the people identify in any way gender-wise, the partners could shift around during the dance, which would actually be cool and awesome.

In some ways partner dancing is such an antidote to the ills of modern life. It is an essentially in-person activity, it is artistic, it encourages everyone making themselves a little bit vulnerable, and it doesn't require expensive equipment. Plus -- it is dancing! If only we could solve the leader-follower thing, we'd really be getting somewhere.

Portrait Of An Artist As A Woman: Saint Phalle, Subversiveness, and Sex

Lifesaver fountain by Niki de Saint Phalle in Duisburg, Germany. Photo by JuergeunG, reproduced here under Creative Commons License.

I don't know if you happened to read Ariel Levy's recent New Yorker profile of the artist Niki de Saint Phalle, who built gigantic sculptures in the hills of Tuscany in the 1970s.

Personally, I read the piece with mixed feelings. On the one hand, the gigantic sculptures really speak to me. They look so cool, looming out of the countryside. Plus, during the twenty years she worked on them, she lived in the sphinx sculpture, with her bedroom inside one breast and her kitchen inside the other. How cool is that?

On the other hand, as I read more about the artist herself, I felt ... annoyed. Saint Phalle lived a life full of self-created drama. She had a lot of "personal charisma," which helped to get people to pay attention to her art. She did a lot of pieces involving shooting a gun at stuff. About those pieces, she said, "I mean, it isn’t as beautiful as war, it isn’t as beautiful as seeing someone killed or the atom bomb, but it’s the most that I can do!" She had children, whom she then completely ignored.

But even these things, which are annoying to me, are complex and multifaceted. The shooting paintings, which she started in the early 60s, began as an attack on domesticity and the suffocating lives women were expected to live. Properly irritated that the way male artists could go around doing whatever they want while women were expected to cook dinner, she decided she would, herself, just start doing whatever she wanted. Part of that, obviously, was prioritizing her art over her children -- as so many men have done before her.

Levy puts it this way: "If American radical feminism of the time was about rewriting the rules of society, Saint Phalle had a different notion: she felt that the rules simply did not apply to her." I can really resonate with this. Because while it's important to change the rules, it's also important to have people just going off and doing something completely different. That's what art -- and artists -- are all about.

So the fact that she made a point of living, and doing art, in ways that challenge gender norms -- well, that's cool and kind of heroic.

And yet. The art historian Catherine Dossi is quoted here as saying that the more successful Saint Phalle got, the more her "challenge" to the establishment shifted away from "blowing up" domesticity, and more toward being a "femme fatale. "Always an extraordinary beauty, she starting doing more than making paintings -- she started putting on tight white jumpsuits and inviting people to watch her look amazing making them.

Frankly, on one level this is just depressing. Because making yourself hot and then inviting people to watch you do what you're doing? Not so much in the "challenging gender norms" category. Watching a sexy and beautiful woman do something is stereotypical.

And to me, even the mere fact of her beauty itself is frustrating. Do you realize how often when you read a story like this about a woman that it turns out her beauty and sex appeal is an important part of the story? Um -- always? Do you know how reading these stories over and over makes young girls classify themselves from the get-go -- the beauties, who can do the things they want, and the non-beauties, who have to play nice, find their way through, make people like them in other ways?

So I admit that when I learned about the white jumpsuits, my first reaction was disappointment and frustration. Really?

And yet -- however. The truth is that the link between beauty and subversiveness for women is real -- and even if it's a link they don't want it, it is put on them by the rest of the world. Saint Phalle says it herself:

"Here I was, an attractive girl (if I had been ugly, they would have said I had a complex and not paid any attention), screaming against men in my interviews and shooting."

She's right. And it's the same thing Courtney Love said -- correctly -- about getting cosmetic surgery (including a nose job) in her youth:

"I have to be pretty if I’m going to get over. And I have to get over if I’m gonna fuck [the system] up. And I’m gonna fuck it up."

And really, on top of everything, there's just the girls who want to have fun aspect. As women who have sex with men and men who have sex with men and everyone who has sex with men knows: if you want to have sex with men, and you want them to find you attractive, it's usually going to matter whether you look the part.

In this interview, Courtney Love lays it out with characteristic bluntness:

"When you’re fat like I was ... you do not get to fuck the boys you want to fuck. Right? Right? ... I swear to God, Lisa. I was a fat girl my whole life. No one would fuck, and when they did they’d do things like fart in front of me ... The minute I got skinny and got a nose job and became photogenic, and all of a sudden I had a bidding war, and every boy I ever wanted, wanted me."

Thinking about the matter this way, if you think it's important for women to get to enjoy life's pleasures, and if it's true that in our world a lot of those pleasures are more easily accessed the cuter you get -- well, I can't blame anyone for wanting to be as cute as possible.

So I guess all in all, if Saint Phalle wanted to wear white jumpsuits, and sleep around, and pal around with Jean Tinguely, and make giant Nanas -- big, bright female dancers with small heads and huge hips and breasts -- well, more power to her.

My Midlife Music Crisis

I love music. There are ways in which music is one of my favorite things, maybe my most favorite thing. And yet, at this point in my life, I seldom listen to music. So: WTF?

Part of the problem is pretty basic and really boils down to: what am I going to listen to? Like a lot of white Gen-Xers, I spent my youth listening to things like Iggy Pop, The Clash, The Velvet Underground, Nirvana, with doses of The Cure and Blondie for lighter side.

There's a sense in which I never stopped loving music like that. But it presents a problem, which is, how does it fit into my life? So much of a certain kind of popular music puts me in a certain mood -- a mood almost incompatible with the life I live now. At this point, when is the right moment for getting all wound up with aggressive, sexual, and possibly destructive behavior? Answer: never.

A lot of people my age transition into other things. They develop a new interest in Latin jazz, or classic R&B, or whatever. Abstractly this seems like the ideal solution. But for various reasons it's not happening for me.

One of those reasons has to do with something I think of as "music start-up costs" -- something that is huge for me but that I almost never hear people talking about. The idea of music start-up costs is that for me, listening to new music is hugely different from listening to familiar music. And it's not just different -- it's difficult.

Listening to new music, even when I like it, and actively want to listen to it, often feels to me really, really challenging. It's something I have to make a plan about, something I don't want to do at the end of long day doing other cognitively challenging things, something that uses up active willpower and is not at all a form of relaxation.

Is this something particular about me? That I can't enjoy music without entering into it, that I can't enter into it if I can't understand it, that I can't understand it on the first few listens? Or is this one of those things everyone experiences but just doesn't talk about because it doesn't seem cool?

Right now I have a ton of music on my iPhone that I want to listen to but haven't and maybe won't. Frank Ocean. Kendrick Lamar. The new MIA album Matangi. Watch the Throne. Zebra Katz. An album of old remastered Scott Joplin songs. People told me to listen to Formation -- I want to, but I haven't.

All of this music is probably great, and all of it is music that if I'd heard it a few times without realizing it -- so my subconscious could process it without me -- I'd probably be all into it. It's all music I want to listen to, but because of the start-up costs, it isn't happening.

In one sense, I expect that having this kind of midlife music crisis is a pretty common and universal sort of thing -- I mean, there's a reason that when we picture middle-aged people we picture people driving around playing whatever they danced to in high school.

In another sense, though, I feel like my experience tells us something interesting about life in 2016 North America. Because the obvious thing that's missing, the thing that would solve my problem, is just hearing music without having to go out of my way to listen to it.

And there is something about the modern media landscape, where you can pick and choose exactly what you want and everyone has their own micro-obsession, that seems to decrease this sense of things just being in the atmosphere. Don't get me wrong: I love the modern media landscape. I love the way if your thing is some tiny thing that no one else likes you can get all into it all by yourself. But -- still, I think it does have this negative effect. I mean, it's different from the old days where you'd turn your alarm clock to KROQ and you'd hear whatever everyone else was hearing.

Actually, one of the few music experiences I am still able to get really into is opera. One reason, I think, is that once you're at an opera, not only are you a captive audience, but the structure of the music itself is a clever mix of the familiar and the new. Each bit of music is new, but the underlying themes are always there.

After I saw Verdi's Rigoletto for the first time, I couldn't stop thinking about "La donna è mobile." (Yes, this literally translates as "women are fickle," but if you think that's what it means in context you're missing the whole point of the opera). When I looked it up, I learned that soon after the premier in 1851, "every gondolier in Venice was singing it."

How cool is that? I don't know what the 2016 equivalent of this would be, or even if there is one. For now, the closest I get is when I go to my exercise class, where the geniuses at Les Mills have picked out just the songs I didn't know I wanted to hear, and I fall in love without knowing it, and then I go home and listen to the songs -- songs that are already utterly familiar to me.

I don't love it that my music listening is so highly determined by fitness people. Something about that seems wrong. But what am I going to do?

Yes, Sometimes I Love Stupid, Problematic, And Even Sexist Things

A few weeks ago I was in the group exercise class BodyPump, and it was a "new release" -- which means new music, new choreography, and everyone doing the same new thing, all at the same time, for a while. Usually with music it takes me a few listens to get into it, but in this case as soon as the lunge track came on I was like "Oh, I LIKE THIS SONG."

I was also a little like, "WTF?" "Sleepless nights at the château"? "Visualize it"? "Kush kush?" Or was that "cutch cutch"? Anyway I got home and looked up the tracklist for the release, and I found out the song was "Peanut Butter Jelly," by the Swedish duo Galantis: "Sleepless nights at the château; Visualize it; I'll give you something to do ... Spread it like peanut butter jelly; Do it like I owe you some money; Spread it like peanut butter jelly; Do it like I owe you some money; Money, money, money ... "

The blog post where I happened to find out that information had one comment, and it was a comment about that song. The comment was from a BodyPump instructor who was pissed off, and who wrote, in part, ".. that lunge track is misogynistic and obscene. Why don't YOU 'spread it like I owe you some money?' Oh, if only I could perform like a prostitute can. Hate women much?"

Uh-oh. Had I fallen for a song that was sexist or misogynistic? Honestly, it wouldn't be the first time. It seems like I'm always getting all into something and then discovering that many people in my peer group find that thing a problem.

For example, I love Fellini movies, and one of the things I love about them is the way they deal with sex, desire, and the dilemmas of sexual novelty. As I wrote about in a recent blog post, when a woman loves a movie that deals with themes of male promiscuity and hot babes, there's always suspicion: what's a woman doing loving a movie like that? Isn't that kind of movie sexist and misogynistic?

As I explained there, though, if you want to see a movie about sex, desire, and the dilemmas of sexual novelty, you're almost forced to go see a movie about men, because of the sexism and double-standards of our society. So the problem isn't the movie. The problem is everything else.

But it's not only high-brow stuff where this happens. Maybe this will shock some people, but I also really liked that Robin Thicke song "Blurred Lines" that got everyone so mad a couple of years ago. I thought the song was catchy and fun, I thought the girls in the video were hot, and I thought "you're far from plastic" was a funny thing to say in a song.

Now let me emphasize: it's not that I didn't understand the criticism. When people said that "You know you want it" was an annoying and offensive thing to say, when they said the video had naked women and dressed men, when they pointed out that "blurred lines" seemed to suggest non-consensuality, I got it. It's just that instead of thinking "What a horrible song," I thought instead, "Oh, that's too bad, 'cause that's an otherwise fun song." 

I also thought, as I did with Fellini, that the problem is partly "everything else." As so often, it's because of sexism in society that we can't enjoy sexualization without experiencing it as sexist. In my perfect world, there'd be enough videos with naked men and dressed women that when there's naked women and dressed men, it reads as fun rather than as some kind of problem.

Even leaving aside the possible complexity of that topic, what always surprises me about the reaction to songs like "Blurred Lines" is how seldom anyone expresses ambivalence. When that song was popular, I felt like everyone who expressed an opinion felt either 1) that song is disgusting on all levels and the people who like it are stupid or 2) you feminazis better STFU about our song.

So, all this to say, I was in familiar territory with "Peanut Butter Jelly." I did, however, want to see if I could find out more about what the song was about and what other people thought the song was about. At this site there's no consensus. Does "kush kush" refer to marijuana? Or is it "cwtch cwtch," a Welsh word for hug? Is "ace high" a reference to gambling or is it a metaphor? What is "visualize it"?

When I found an interview with Galantis specifically about "Peanut Butter Jelly," I figured I'd hit the jackpot: song explained! But in fact in the entire interview no one talks about the meaning of the song at all. It's just all about the concept of disco retro. I feel like this fact tells us something deep and important about the modern world, but I don't know what it is.

Eventually I watched the video. In it, people are in a grocery store, schlepping around -- regular people, and one hot chick on roller skates. As the song goes on, everyone gets entranced: they throw off their clothes, start dancing around, eventually start making out.

Was the video offensive or progressive? Well -- it does have diversity of appearance, bodyshape, age and race. People are smiling, happy, dancing. But then: was this showcasing and promoting sexual freedom for everyone? Or was it subtly mocking everyone but the hot chick? I couldn't decide and I got tired thinking about it.

The following week I went to my BodyPump class, which has a wonderful instructor who has an LGBTQ vibe and a lot of tattoos. Just before the lunge track there was a music problem, and "Peanut Butter Jelly" didn't come on.

The instructor stopped everything to sort it out, and just as the song was starting up, he paused and smiled and said, "I love this song." And I smiled and nodded back: Yeah, I love it too : )

What Ever Happened To Dancing For Fun?

One of my favorite places in the whole city of Toronto is this seemingly ordinary spot in the bottom floor of the Eaton Centre -- a place just outside the Microsoft Store, where the store has set up a large Xbox display.

This spot is generally dark and drab. But occasionally it comes magically to life. And what brings it magically to life is the presence of groups of children dancing.

You see, often the display is showcasing whatever dance game the Xbox comes with. I know nothing about video games, but from what I can gather the game that involves a range of pop songs together with fun graphics and choreography that the player tries to dance along with.

You cannot imagine the awesomeness of the scene when children gather around, and play, and dance. They get really really really into this activity. The small ones are completely unselfconscious, jumping around, throwing their arms in the air, and making dramatic and showoffy gestures. The older ones are a bit shy, but they want to dance too -- and I think with the presence of so many small children being completely goofy they're sort of like, "Oh, what the hell." It's usually a mixed group, with boys and girls, people of various races, and kids dressed in all different ways.

When I encounter this scene I'm usually like "Oh My God, this is the nicest, cutest, most life-affirming thing I have seen in a long time." And I'm not the only one. When the dancing game is on, you can barely make your way past, because there are gangs of adults standing around watching the kids, smiling and laughing.

Often I pause for a few minutes, to steep my mind in the atmosphere of people enjoying themselves in a way that is so -- would "wholesome" be too ridiculous a word? Would "nice" be to insipid? I don't know -- there's just something so great about it, a kind of fun that makes more fun for more people the more there is of it.

Sometimes when I'm standing there watching, I start thinking about dancing and the peculiar modern state of dancing for fun.

I danced a lot as a young person. I danced in classes -- ballet and modern. As a kid I danced around the house, to whatever was on. As an adolescent and in college, I danced at parties, and, on one extremely memorable occasion, at a Violent Femmes concern in a small venue. It was really, really, really fun.

I would like to dance now. But as a person of a certain age, I find the dance landscape strange. Once you take "dance club at 2am with twenty-somethings" off your options-list, what is there, really?

Any kind of partner-dance has the whole Men-Lead-Women-Follow problem. Even setting aside the conceptual objections, I just can't see spending hours learning to be more attentive to a guy's every gesture so I can do what he decides we're going to do. Following means dealing with advice like this: "I tell women: 'you are a food cart, with steel arms and really good wheels.'" Sorry, no can do.

Then there's dancing where you learn a certain kind of craft. This is an idea I find appealing in the abstract, but when it comes down to it, I feel like it's just another thing I'd be trying, and failing, to be good at, another source of "fuck, why am I not better at this"? Got enough of those already, thank you. Even street dance, like hip-hop, once you're learning it in a class, becomes this sort of thing.

What ever happened to dancing just for fun? I feel like at some deep level, adults have become so massively self-conscious about dancing that they can only do it in these certain specific constrained sort of ways. There was this great moment on the WTF podcast when Marc Maron interviewed David Byrne and Marc asked something like, "You seem like a shy and nerdy person, so how did it come about that you became this guy who dances -- really dances like he means it?" And David Byrne said, very seriously: "The music healed me." By which I think he meant that the musicality and depth of funk and its cousins just changed him as a person.

That is an amazing thing. But how does it happen, exactly? Is there a way to package that, export it, extrapolate it, share it around? To create an actual Dance Dance Revolution? If we're going to invest in massive innovation projects, could we just drop the whole "self-driving cars" crap, and get to work on this instead?  

Writing Ruins Everything

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Portrait of a Woman, via Wikimedia Commons

There's a whole school of thought out there that says writing can be a form of therapy: if you experienced something bad or complicated or painful, you can write about it, and this will allow you to process your feelings and move on.

I never thought much about this idea until recently, because -- well, I'm not sure why, but part of the reason is probably that when I feel discouraged or unhappy in a substantive way, it's almost never consciously linked in my mind to something that happened in the past. It almost always takes the form more of general melancholia/what's-the-point/this-goddamn-vale-of-tears and not oh-this-thing-that-happened. Writing about that would just be blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.

I had occasion to think about it recently, though. For reasons having nothing to do with therapy and everything to do with oh-maybe-that-would-be-interesting-and-fun, I took a couple of memoir writing classes through the Gotham Writers Workshop. To my surprise, I found that writing about things made me experience them in a worse way.

For example, for one assignment I wrote a really short piece about how when I see an ambulance rushing somewhere with its siren on, I'm often reminded with a jolt of the night my father had a heart attack, when I was fifteen. Because we lived in a condo complex with complicated intertwined streets, as the ambulance was on its way the suggestion was made that I should walk through the dark quiet streets to the entrance to flag them down and show them the way to the house. And that's what I did.

I wrote about this experience, and I wrote about learning a few hours later that he had died. I wrote about how when I would see an ambulance on its way somewhere, I would often be cast momentarily back to the fear and sadness of that night, and I would picture some other family, waiting for this ambulance, and I would imagine their fear and sadness. I wrote about how I would often then be briefly suspended in time, reminded of the fragility of human life and human happiness.

The teacher liked the piece. She suggested I might submit it to be published, in an online literary forum for very short pieces, after making some revisions. As I made the revisions, I had a mix of feelings. The changes were improving the writing as a piece of writing, but at the same time, I felt like crafting the narrative into the right sort of narrative meant shifting my understanding and perception of what had happened and how it had felt.

Its a recurring problem for me with writing. When it comes to memoir, the shaping of a narrative feels a lot like lying. Every piece I ended up writing for those courses, I felt like I had to turn a series of "well, I don't know, there was this, but there was also that"; things were happening that were unrelated but felt important; who-the-hell-knows-what-is-going-on into some story about How I Changed or What I Learned.

After all that narrative shaping, I felt like I had trouble getting the confusingness of the original memories back. Instead, I had these new memories, organized in a neater, tidier, more standardized, more McMuffin kind of way.

It was like the old messy and less interpreted memories had been overwritten.

After I revised the short piece about ambulances, I submitted it to the forum my teacher had suggested. A couple of weeks later they rejected it. Honestly, when I found out it was rejected, I wasn't as disappointed as I'd thought I'd be -- I almost had a sense of relief that the mood of that piece wasn't a mood I'd be putting out into the world. But still. Being rejected always sucks.

Now when I see an ambulance, instead of thinking about fear and sadness and the fragility of life, I'm reminded instead of writing this piece, and I'm reminded of the experience of having it rejected.

In a way you might think this would be an improvement, replacing a very painful and sad memory with a merely annoying one. But it doesn't feel like an improvement at all. It feels like a total loss.

The People Of Finland Have Nice Things. Why Can't We?

I went to Helsinki last week, and on the taxi ride home from the airport, the driver said, "Oh, Finland! They have a lot of Buddhas there. Right?" I didn't know what to say.

But this post isn't about those famous Finnish Buddhas. It's about some Nice Things of Finland, some things Finland has that make life nice and that make you wonder, "Why can't we have that at home?"

First, consider these city statues. All around North America there are statues celebrating war people. Statues of soldiers. Statues of guys on horses. Phallic shaped statues commemorating war activities.

By contrast, in Helsinki we have things like this novelist:

and this Laplandian moose:

Don't these statues immediately convey a culture of peace and arts and quiet reflection? Why can't we have statues of people sitting around thinking?

Next, consider gender representation in the arts. I went to the big Ateneum museum, and I saw a bunch of paintings by the Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck. Here is her "Self-portrait with Black Background":

There were also tons of women in the museum of contemporary art. This doesn't seem to be some kind of gender initiative or whatever. It's just that there's a pretty gender egalitarian society, and in it some women paint and make art, and their art get into the big galleries. How hard is that? Why can't we have that at home? At the Pompidou, to get art by women on the walls, they have to to put on a big special thing.

Finally, how do the people of Finland just have things organized and comfortable where we cannot? The food is fresh and good. Everything is clearly labeled with respect to allergies, gluten, and lactose. When it's time to pay you say "I had the pea soup and pancake" and they say "That's 8 euros" and you pay and it takes two seconds.

The most striking example of this for me was at the Helsinki Philharmonic. The concert was excellent and fun along several dimensions, but what took my by surprise was how well set-up it was for the things you need at a concert. Knowing that in a cold climate everyone will arrive with large coats, there are armies of coat checkers at 40 stations, ready and waiting. Check it out:

Also, knowing people will be wanting to drink and snack before the concert and at intermission -- especially since the snacks are fresh and delicious! -- there are rows and rows of tables set up. This is just a small sample:

I don't know what it's like where you live, but the concert halls I go to fail these basic items in a pretty dramatic way. The food is packaged crap. At the opera house here in Toronto, there is almost no place to sit or set your drink down. This is especially ridiculous given the number of older attendees. It leads to the sad sad spectacle of dozens of people crowding around a few teeny tables leaning on canes as they try to eat ice cream, and seventy-year-olds sitting on the staircase looking uncomfortable.

Why can't we have comfortable tables and lovely snacks at home? Is that too much to ask?

When I'm in North America too long, I start to think, "Oh yeah, we can't have X, because X is so difficult." And then I go away and I'm like, "Wait. They have X here. And they make it look so easy. Our warlike, unequal, sexist, crappified qualities aren't some kind of default setting for modern life. They're actually a sign of real pathologies.

We Are In Exile, From We Know Not What

Johannes Vermeer, View of Delft, via Wikimedia Commons

What if you were plucked up out of your life and sent to another planet where things were similar but just worse all around? What if the people were sort of like people here, only they were really slow-witted, ugly, unhealthy and quick to anger and indignation? What if the natural environment were really harsh, so that just getting food and water took a huge amount of time and effort?

What if your travel transmogrified you, so that when you arrived, you too became slow-witted, ugly, unhealthy and quick to anger and indignation? Suddenly you're scarred and mottled and covered in acne - and so is everyone else.

Got the mental picture?

Confession: sometimes I feel like that person now. I mean, I feel like I came from somewhere else, where beings were beings -- where intelligence and beauty were everyone's birthright and peace and pleasure had a proper home. The home planet. A better place. Then I look around at the human condition and think to myself, "My god, how do people live like this?"

If you think of humans as essentially noble intelligent creatures, the conditions we're living in are appalling. We're easily brought down by any number of simple viruses. We're a weird assortment of misplaced orifices and skin you can damage with a fingernail, without even the dignity of fur or a tail. We can't get our basic needs met without either enslaving other people or coming up with ridiculous gadgets. You get even two of us together and get us on virtually any subject, and we'll find something to disagree about. And our poor little feelings are so easily bruised. The icing on the cake: less than a hundred or so years of muddling through, BAM! It's over. No do-overs. No second chances. No probation, and no court of appeals.

I feel like it's the kind of thing you're not supposed to talk about in polite company. The Party Line, at least these days, is gratitude and appreciation. The idea that you're dreaming of better world seems vaguely politically suspect, something like a First World Problem.


And, indeed, I used to think I was in a small minority feeling this way so often, missing the home planet, that maybe I was depressed or sick in the head in some other way.

But the more I thought about it, the more I started to see it as a pretty common feeling -- it just has other names. What is heaven, but a home planet that's in the future rather than the past? Same for post-humanism. Same thing for any number of yearnings for Something Else.

And then I remembered reading in Proust about art and the way a painting could be an indication of something from a better world. This article in the Independent about Dutch art in literature confirmed my memory and put it in context. It's in The Captive, and the character of Bergotte is dying, and he goes to revisit Vermeer's "View of Delft."

As the article says, there is a tiny patch of yellow wall, so perfectly painted as to represent beauty in itself. And the yellow patch -- and particularly the perfection with which it is painted -- "appears to the dying Bergotte like a coded signal from a better world, 'based on kindness, scrupulousness, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth, before perhaps returning there to live once again.'"

My garden-variety Disappointedness With Life, the tech geek's post-humanist Dream, and Proust's hearing of the faintest call from a world, unlike our own, of sense and beauty where we can finally live in peace and happiness -- these might seem like different things but I think they all speak to the same feeling, widely shared if not widely discussed.

It's the feeling of Exile from Something Else, We Know Not What.

Guest Post: Cool People

This guest post is by my former co-blogger at Commonwealth and Commonwealth, Captain Colossal. 

I have always wanted to be cool. I will always want to be cool. I’m in my late thirties now, and I am confident that if I live to eighty I will still want, in some shadowy recess of my mind, to be cool.

I grew up in a neighborhood that turned out, when I was around twenty, to be very cool. You understand, I didn’t know when I was growing up there that it was cool. It was only later, when the newspaper wrote a story about it and celebrities started relocating there, that I learned that it was cool. But it was cool while I was growing up there, cooler in some ways than it is now, I just didn’t know it. I wasn’t tapped into it. Lucinda Williams was writing music off in the hills and all kinds of people were doing crazy interesting things and I was wandering around in my own little world.

I went away and then later I moved back there. When I moved back there I knew it was cool. I lived there and I was pretty unhappy for reasons that had little to do with coolness. And then I moved away again. Last week, I was listening to a band that is now moderately famous. They lived in that neighborhood and played music there during that second time that I was living there, and they weren’t famous then (I didn’t know anything about them) but now they are, a bit. I always think about that when I listen to their music. And I always think that I should have befriended them then, on the same principle that I should have invested my $27.65 in savings in Google in 1993.

And then I remember what going to parties and bars and online dating in this widely-recognized-to-be-cool neighborhood was like. I would be in a place, thinking I was pretty cute with my Budweiser and my Marlboros and my line of patter. And there would be these people with important haircuts and cool clothes and I would look at them and I would think, these people are too cool to want to hang out with me. My mind could not formulate any points of common humanity between me and them. If I look at pictures of this band and try to imagine them as people rather than members of a moderately famous band, I realize that I would never have felt comfortable talking to them.

In fact, it’s them being famous that creates a relationship between me and them. Relationship is not the right word, but it kind of is. I have a way of relating to them: I appreciate what they do. They make music and I like it. They don’t have a relationship with me in particular, but they have a general relationship with me as one of the people appreciating them and maybe spending money on their music or buying a t-shirt as a show of support. If I wanted to say something to the people in this band I could write them a letter and say, I think your music is great. But if I were able to travel back in time to the era when I lived in the same place as them and were able to be at the same party or bar or whatever, I would have nothing to say. There would be no bridge between me and them. Which I guess means that people are not really that much like Google stock.

When I was seventeen I thought the coolest thing in the entire world would be to be a surfer and I didn’t do anything about it except look at the pictures of the vast blue ocean in the one surfing magazine that I bought for myself in an airport. And then when I was in my late twenties it hit me again that surfing was the coolest thing in the world and I kicked myself for not having taken those seventeen-year old impulses seriously, for lacking follow through. Then I took a surfing lesson and the ocean rolled me around in my wetsuit and I thought, I can’t do this. None of the qualities that surfing required were qualities that I had. Upper body strength, balance, physical courage -- I lacked them all. And so I gave up on surfing. But sometimes I still look out at the vast blue ocean and think that maybe if I tried again, everything would be different. In the same way, that urge, to sidle up to the source of things I like, to buy coolness low and sell high, hits me in the stomach every now and then. I just try to let it wash over me.

Our Insatiable Needs For Content, Or, What Does A Surfer Want?

Lucius Fox checks his screens

Here is a true thing about me: put me in front of a TV set with a remote control, and I will flip channels. I will flip channels even if there is something good on. I will flip channels way past the point of being bored and antsy. I will choose to flip through the channels sequentially, making sure I check out even the channels like ESPN where the odds of my being interested trend toward zero.

My propensity for flipping is a major reason I don't have a TV. Sure, "there are some good things on TV," as people always say. But you know who isn't watching them? Channel flippers. Also, while it's one thing to waste your life watching bad TV, it's a whole other thing entirely to waste your life flipping channels, and failing to actually watch anything. Talk about pathological.

I might be unusual in my extreme inability to watch actual shows. But I think the roots of my problem are widely shared, and typically manifest themselves in an inordinate preference for "what's on," "what's happening now," and "what's new."


If we're talking about "news," it makes sense: you want today's news. But much of the content people enjoy isn't news at all. It's entertainment, or art, or opinions, or whatever. For most of the websites I enjoy looking at, you could stumble on a post from a year ago and if it was dated "today" and you hadn't seen it before you'd never know.

And yet: if their favorite site doesn't update, are people like "Oh, no problem, I'll read something old"? No: it's like, "Where's My Today Thing?! I need Today's Thing, the Thing for Today!"

Even when it comes to something like the New York Times crossword puzzle -- where, honestly, how is there a reason to prefer "today's" puzzle to any other puzzle you haven't yet done -- one from last year, say? There isn't any. And yet, prefer today's puzzle I do, by a gulf as wide as the difference between doing a puzzle and chucking the whole project for some less challenging one like looking at cats on the internet.

Recently on his WTF podcast Marc Maron mentioned our insatiable needs for content -- the way no matter how much an entertainer produces, the next day there's a clamor for more. What you got now? Got something now? Is that a twitter fight you're having! Yay, twitter fight! You got some new comedy for us now? How about now?

I got thinking that in one way it is odd: the amount of available content is vast, beyond anyone's wildest imagination, whoever your favorite entertainer or comedian is, I'm there there are immense reserves of youtube videos and other things that are by people similar enough that you would be entertained. But that's not what people want, I think. They don't want generic "content." They want something else -- not just something they haven't seen, but something that is "what's happening now."

I really have no idea what the deal is, but here are two theories -- one warm and fuzzy, the other depressing and awful.

The warm and fuzzy theory is that people want what's "happening now" because that's actually a way of connecting, indirectly, to other people, and we humans -- well, we're nothing if not beings who want to stay in touch. One pleasing thing about doing "today's puzzle" is that everyone else is doing "today's puzzle." Even if you never talk to those people about it, you can know that across the world, people are shaking their heads at "gam" as the answer to "bit of cheesecake" (Monday, January 6, 2014).

When you're watching "what's on," lots of other people are too. You're having a shared experience, even if you never see or engage with those people and even if you would be annoyed and irritated at actually talking to them about anything. When you watch what's on, the world watches with you. It's nice.

The depressing and awful theory is that people want what's new because they are, way more than they even realize, deeply dissatisfied with what's available, and want something completely different, and the new -- well, the new has not YET proven itself to be dissatisfying.

This, I think, explains the endless channel flipping, the people who stay up late to surf the internet even though they're actually bored, and the people dying for Marc Maron to get into a twitter feud. Even if we don't realize it consciously, what we're really after is something else. What we want is: NOT THIS.

The depressing theory explains the addictive nature of so many content habits. If what you want is something different, and what you get is more of the same, it's no mystery why you're still sitting there, flipping, clicking, surfing, poking around, trying to find the thing that will give you the feeling you want, a feeling you're never going to have anyway.

Authenticity: Don't Worry About It

One of the more annoying things an older generation can do to a younger generation is pretend that the hardships of the past were somehow integral to a greater authenticity and richness of life.

This morning I listened to Marc Maron interview Dave Grohl, lately of the Foo Fighters and formerly of Nirvana.  I love Marc's WTF podcast, and I'm a fan of Nirvana.  It was interesting to hear some of the history behind music recording and how it's changed and all that.

Occasionally, though, this talk wandered dangerously close to You Kids With Your Computers And Your ProTools You Can't Really Make Music With Integrity. 

Dave Grohl recently helped make a documentary about a recording studio.  Featuring prominently in that movie is a handmade analogue mixing console that was used to create the album Nevermind. 

I'm perfectly willing to believe that this was an amazing machine, unlike its counterparts, that helped make the album sound as it did.  But there's also a vague suggestion burbling in there that to have authenticity and integrity in music you need to avoid technology, and that authenticity and integrity in general require staying close to the original versions of things.

That's a funny argument to make if you're involved in a rock band.  Because obviously, you're already a million miles away from the original versions of things.  I mean, according to that logic, all music should be unplugged and unrecorded. 

It's weird to say, the technology my youth:  good!  The technology of today:  bad!

There's a funny moment exemplifying this point when Dave Grohl is talking about how these days kids just do a take or two, and then they move on, figuring anything can be cleaned up with the software.  He describes how, back in the day, he once worked with a producer who made him do forty takes of the same part of something before getting one that he thought was right. 

Fine -- but it also doesn't really make sense.  I mean, the whole idea of forty takes of the same part of something -- if you were coming at this from the point of view before recording devices, and you had the idea that authenticity and integrity required keeping it close to the source, well clearly the forty takes would be exactly the sort of thing you'd find abominable.  Forty takes!

I've never bought into this particular form of authenticity or integrity at all.  I mean, yes, there's something cool about doing things absent technological intervention.  But then there's something cool about technology that allows you do to anything.  They're just cool in different ways.  If you program your computer to move some hammers inside a piano to play Beethoven just exactly how you want it to sound, that's not "playing the piano," exactly, but it is representing something honest and real about your musical judgments:  it's representing what's in your head, without dependence on your particular hands and your particular nervous system.  The second one isn't any less human than the first -- in some ways it's more human, because everything comes from someone's mind and not from the contingencies of certain hands or certain machines. 

In my opinion, what makes for certain kinds of greatness isn't authenticity, but constraints.  It doesn't matter what the constraints are:  they can come from anywhere.  But there's something about having to work within some set of boundaries, some ways things are made difficult, that makes end results more interesting.

This, I believe, is why painting is so endlessly and timelessly interesting.  Even though a sculpture is three-dimensional and even though a photograph can depict things, painting has its own thing going on.  Not because painting somehow has authenticity and integrity where sculpture and photography don't, but just because the constraints of paint on a surface happen to be the kind of constraints that drive people to do really interesting things, things they wouldn't consider doing if they had a different set of tools and a different set of possibilities.

So I would say:  constraints, yes; authenticity, not so much.

The nicest part of the Dave Grohl interview is when he describes learning to play the drums by arranging pillows and furniture around his bed in a certain way, stealing some sticks meant for drumming in a marching band, and practicing endlessly to the records of Black Flag and The Ramones.  It was a few years before his family could afford to buy him a real drum set.  The end result was a very particular style of drumming:  he hits really hard and moves really fast. 

The story exemplifies a second theme of the interview:  if you want to do something, just start doing it.  Don't get obsessed with trying to become some kind of expert, with trying to hit it out of the park on the first try.  I would add:  and don't worry about being authentic, either. 

Two Moons, But Still Too Much Like Real Life: Reflections on Murakami's 1Q84

I've always had a complicated reader relationship with Haruki Murakami. 

I mean, at the level of pages and characters I'm totally drawn in.  I'm like "Ooh, there's an oddball girl with a weird name and now she's talking to the disaffected hero.  What is her backstory?  What is she going to say?  I need to know now." 

But at the level of the book, I'm often mystified and kind of blank.  I'm wondering, "was there a point to that?  Is the point the pointlessness itself?  If I think that's annoying, am I a philistine? Am I just missing something?

I just finished Murakami's most recent three-volume novel, 1Q84.   Right of the bat:  as is made obvious, the title is an allusion to 1984, and thus in some way to Orwell's novel.  So I'm asking myself:  is this book supposed to be in any way related to, or a commentary on, 1984?

Wow, wrong question.  Because who can figure that out?  1984 was about a horrifying future of totalitarianism and state control through The Party which is everywhere and all powerful -- going so far as to create reality to suit its needs. 

1Q84 is about an alternative reality (maybe) and two characters who share a mysterious connection.  There's a religious sect with weird beliefs which might be true.  There's a world with two moons.  There's a math teacher.  There's a female assassin.  There's a sinister detective-type guy.  There are complex musings on metaphysics. 

So:  Is Murakami saying that religious sects are dangerous the way totalitarianism is?  Murakami did also write a book on the 1995 sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subway, carried out by the cult Aum Shinrikyo, so it's not farfetched.  Or is he making a larger point about the nature of good and evil, implicitly disagreeing with Orwell's blanket condemnation of some characters and some behaviors?  Is the idea that God or his agents are, like the Party of 1984, always in control so that we, like poor Winston, are just pawns?

I don't think I'm making a controversial claim when I say that there is no way this book intends anything so straightforward.  It may not intend anything on these topics.  It may not intend any particular thing at all.  You might have to take it at face value.  There's a religious sect.  There's a math teacher.  There's a female assassin.  Stop. 

The reader in me feels -- well, she feels annoyed by this.  So does Janet Maslin, by the way, who writes of 1Q84 the New York Times review:

"And is it actually about anything? Don’t be silly. Mr. Murakami is far too playful and allusive an artist to be restricted by a banal criterion like that one."

Obviously this is unfair, because a book can be about stuff without having some kind of message or unifying narrative.  I'm sure there are about a million ways to talk intelligently about why and how this is so but perhaps the most obvious is this:  life doesn't have a message or unifying narrative; why should literature?  Isn't the best way of being true to reality to deny the tidiness of a story that ties together loose ends and shows how things are all connected?

Sure.  Of course.  That idea is intellectually unimpeachable. 

And yet.  I think there's something here that goes beyond the matter of narrative tidiness and loose ends. 

Just before I read 1Q84 I reread Nabokov's novel Pale Fire.  In case you haven't read it, the text of Pale Fire is structured as a commentary on a 1000 word fictional poem that forms part of the book itself.  In certain ways, you couldn't ask for a book with more opacity, ambiguity, and general weirdness.  Virtually every important question you could have about what is going on in the book is left, at the end, without a clear answer.

And yet, one never leaves Pale Fire with a feeling of confusion, uncertainty, or blankness.  On the contrary.  Speaking for myself, I finished Pale Fire with a swoosh of dread and a frightening exhilaration.  I don't know exactly what "happened" -- or didn't -- in Pale Fire.  But the book is definitely about some things.

One of the most powerful feelings I get reading Nabokov is that I'm being given the opportunity to encounter something genuinely heartbreaking about the human condition without just faltering in its face.  Reading Nabokov is like passing through the hurricane of humanity with just the proper protection and supplies to know you'll make it to the other side.  Tying up narrative loose ends isn't really a necessary part of that

Is there an analogue for 1Q84?  I don't know.  When I was near the end of it, I stayed up late to finish because I really really wanted to know what was going to happen.  There was an oddball girl with a weird name, and a disaffected hero, and I was dying to know what was going to happen.

And then I finished the book.  And even though the book had "an ending" in the clearest possible way, I was left with an empty feeling.  A feeling of:  OK, so that happened.  OK.

In one way, I guess that's a lot like life, since most of life ends with "OK, so that happened." I guess for me it makes literature too much like life.  I not only know that feeling, I'm kind of sick to death of that feeling.  In literature I'm looking for something else.

Clearly Murakami is thinking about some of the same questions.   In 1Q84 there's a character who is a novelist, and there's a review of a book he's worked on, and the review says in part:

"As a story, the work is put together in an exceptionally interesting way and it carries the reader along to the very end but when it comes to [certain crucial questions] we are left in a pool of mysterious question marks.  This may well be the author's intention, but many readers are likely to take this lack of clarification as a sign of "authorial laziness " ... in the future [the author] may well need to explain [this] deliberately cryptic posture."

I'm sure Murakami does get a lot of reviews like this:  reviews that whine about his refusal to tell us what is going on. 

In 1Q84, he goes on to describe the fictional author's response:  puzzlement, that a writer who "carried the reader along to the very end" could be considered lazy, but also uncertainty, about whether the critic might be right. 

That phrase -- pool of mysterious question marks -- is beautiful and a perfect illustration of what I'm saying.  It's just like real life.  It's a little too much like real life, where we never know what is going on either. 

Being Versus Doing: A Plea For Being

A Dandy, by Georges Jacques Gatine (1773-1831), a painting by Carle Vernet [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

I was the kind of little kid who dreamed of becoming Miss America, or a fashion model, or at least a cheerleader.  My hero in life was Cher.  I dreamed of halter tops, hot pants, and crazy shoes.  I can't remember a time when I wasn't thinking about high heels.

When I was young my feminist mom taught me a few things about those particular dreams (thanks, Mom!).  She pointed out that girls are taught to want to be things -- pretty, fashionable, pleasing -- whereas guys are taught to want to do things.  The message was clear:  you too should want to do things.

Of course, I already did want to do things.  I was also the kind of little kid who liked to do puzzles and make stuff, a nerd who was into math, and music, and school, and all that.  Focusing on the Doing rather than the Being came naturally. 

The advice was, of course, excellent.  But why was it excellent?

It's sometimes thought that this kind of advice is good because Doing is somehow better than Being.  But I've come to think the whole Being versus Doing thing is not so clear cut.  Because Being is pretty great.  And Doing -- it's maybe a little overrated.  Here in the Last Days of Western Civilization, we've become so Doing Doing Doing.  It's wearing me out.  What about Being?

What is it about fashion and beauty that make them seem like Being rather than Doing?  I take it the answer is something like:  they're Being because even though they are activities, they are activities that are focused on the responses of others.  Doing is supposed to be somehow independent of those responses.  You invent something, you play your best, you climb some stupid mountain, and those things are supposed to matter regardless of whether you look good doing them and regardless if anyone cares.  And that kind of Doing is supposed to be better. 

If you put the distinction that way, though, you get this question:  what about art? 

Art is thought of as Doing.  But it's not independent of the responses of others.  It's all about the responses of others.  If you're trying to become a great painter or a great dancer or a great musician, you're trying to do something to which other people will respond to in a certain way. 

But that would make art less of a Doing than other activities, and if Doing is better, would make art less worthwhile than those other activities.  But surely art is as -- or more -- worthwhile than Doings like sports and hiking?

I think the answer is that Doing isn't really better than Being, because they're both good.  Of course people want others to respond to them in certain ways:  what could be more human?  A good life will have both kinds of activities -- those centered on the responses of others and those centered on the responses of one's self.

One reason we've gotten so screwed up about this is that sex and gender identities, especially historically, pressure women toward More Being and Less Doing.  And because we humans are kind of crude in our application of concepts, this means they also pressure men to become More Doing and Less Being.  This would explain the absurd connection in modern North American between masculinity and anti-art-ism.

So we've got an imbalance.  To right the imbalance, women should remember the importance of Doing and not give in the pressures for Being.  Feminism correctly reminds us of this, and that's why my mother's advice was good.  But this has nothing to do with Being being somehow inherently less good than Doing.

It follows from this that men should remember the importance of Being and not give into the pressures for Doing.  Norms of modern masculinity sanction a few limited forms of Being, like owning a fancy car.  But the range is pretty impoverished, and the cultural pressures from the gender police are crazy.  A guy can't even shop for a nice shirt these days without people getting all wound up about it. 

If men could enjoy fashion, beauty, and being pleasing to others, like the dandy in the painting above, we'd all be better off.

Writing Is Too Much Like Stripping

Gaston Bussière (French, 1862-1929): “Exotic Dancers”, c. 1880; oil on canvas, 45” x 35” 

This post has three main themes:  Writing is a lot like stripping.  Writing has become too much like stripping.  Writing on the internet is like stripping at a party full of strangers.

Writing is a lot like stripping.

We all know that part of the pleasure of reading is encountering authors through their words.  And we all know that part of good writing is letting enough of your inner secret self shine through. 

I recently read Sam Lipsyte's novel The Ask -- which is excellent, by the way -- and there's a scene where a father with a toddler is dropping off his kid at a daycare, or trying to anyway, because they daycare is closed, and he encounters a mother trying to drop off her toddler, and they start talking in a way that is sort of jokey and flirty at the same time, and the father gets really caught up in it, and his marriage is sort of in trouble, and he thinks to himself, Hey, Are We Going Back To Her Place for Sex?

It's a great, great, scene.  When I read it, I had the predictable experiences of Oh It Made Me See The World Differently and Oh I Felt Some Feelings! but in addition to that stuff I had a powerful sense of knowing something very intimate about Sam Lipsyte. Not something I could pin down.  Not something crude like he had those particular thoughts or whatever.  But something.  Let's be honest:  that feeling is a big part of the pleasure of reading.

The reason it's like stripping and not like simple undressing is that you have to keep the reader engaged.  Someone who tells you everything right up front:  that's boring.  Someone who tantalizes you with just enough so you need to know more: that's the stuff of literary crushes.

Writing has become too much like stripping.

Much as I'm down with the whole yeah-you-gotta-show-yourself-dude! aspect of things, I think the revealing of the personal is way out of control.  Readers -- and watchers, too, for that matter -- are obsessed less and less with the artwork and more and more with the person behind it.  Memoirs are taking off.  Reality TV is everywhere.  Novels are in decline.  Even novel writers are expected to be on twitter saying stuff about themselves to get readers interested.

I'm not afraid to say it:  excessive interest in the producer of art is a serious moral failing.  It's intellectually lazy, and it's often the product of a mind made soft from too much social networking, too much TMZ, too much Real Housewives, Top Chef, and Project Runway, and not enough -- well, not enough novel reading and sitting quietly thinking about stuff. 

I mean, it's nice that y'all are so curious about one another.  But this shit is out of control.

Writing on the internet is like stripping at a party full of strangers.

It's one thing to reveal stuff about your inner life on a piece of paper, where someone is going to be sitting quietly in a room alone and it's just the two of you having this intimate thing going on.  It's another thing to reveal your inner life on the web, where there are zillions of people sharing a conversation in the comments about whatever personal thing you happened to share. 

The whole internet comments thing is something I really did not see coming.  It's especially weird to me when it's commentary on the news.  I mean, I wasn't so surprised that people would want to share music and use Facebook and watch videos online.  Seems natural to me.  But the idea that people would be clamoring to make comments, dying to express their opinions, in short form, on random stuff in the news -- this just seems to me really surprising and strange.

For instance, this morning I got interested in a Globe and Mail article about open marriage.  At the time I'm writing there are 281 comments on this article.  Some of them say things like "Well, this might work for some people but not for very many" and "I wouldn't be able to do this I'm too jealous" and "An 'open marriage' isn't a marriage at all."

Leaving aside the quality and content of these comments, I just don't even get what motivates people to express ideas like this on the internet.  Do they feel like they're talking with one another?  Are they trying to connect?  Do they just have a need to express something and have no other outlet? I just don't know.

If good writing is always like stripping but the revealing of the personal is out of control, there seems to me to be only one solution.  We'd have to keep the striptease aspect of writing on the internet, but scale back the context and particulars.  Like, you know how the Victorians were so covered up and weird about sex that they saw sexual excitement in everything?  An uncovered ankle, the touch of a hand?  Maybe it could be like that:  everyone reserved enough about their personal lives that the merest detail would seem like a huge deal?

And now you're thinking "Seriously?  Are you living on planet earth?"

I know, I know,  But a girl can dream, can't she?

Some Graphic Novels And Comics You Should Read

“What are the ten comics works you consider your favorites, the best, or the most significant?”  

 That was the question recently posed by The Hooded Utilitarian (The what?  don't ask me, I don't know).   I'm not sure who they posed the question to.  But the answers were collated, or edited, or something, and then presented here.   I learned about this from the always awesome Ted Rall, who posted about it on his blog. 

I was pleased to see Rall mention and praise Alison Bechdel's Fun Home ("the first graphic novel to fulfill the form’s potential as literature").   But I was really weirded out -- OK, maybe even appalled -- to see that as far as I could tell no other women comic artists or women writers mentioned by anyone.  I don't know all the names so I could be overstating.  But not by much.  Weird, since many of the best graphic novels and comics are either drawn by or written by women or both.  

So, this list.  This list is not "BEST COMICS" or "BEST COMICS FOR GIRLZ" or even "MY FAVORITE COMICS EVER."   It's just a list of some comics, authors, and writers that are so good you should read them and that aren't your everyday super-hero stuff. 

In no particular order:

1.  Alison Bechdel's Fun Home.

Fun Home is a memoir of growing up, a reflection on gay and lesbian identity, and a gripping story about a relationship between a father and daughter.  The drawings give the story an intimacy you can't imagine experiencing in reading a regular novel.

2.  Marguerite Abouet  and Clément Oubrerie, Aya (a story in six volumes)

The story is about life in Ivory Coast in the late 70s/early 80s, and focuses on the young adulthood of three young women:  Aya, Bintou, and Adjoua.  The author, Abouet, who moved from Ivory Coast to France when she was a kid, wrote these books partly to show people that Africa is not just a place of violence and famine but is also a cool and interesting place where regular life happens.  The story and the drawing are both incredible beyond belief.  Available in French, English, and other languages.

 
3.  Marguerite Abouet and Singeon, Bienvenue

Also written by Abouet, Bienvenue takes place in Paris and tells the story of a nervous young woman whose parents gave her the awkward name of "Bienvenue" (which means "Welcome").  I love this book because you never get to see a heroine who is kind of grouchy and says what she thinks but is also really likable.  But that's what Bienvenue is like.

4.  Anything by Julie Doucet

I wrote about her on my old blog.  Julie Doucet is like nothing you've ever read:  free associative, a little crazy, and a girl's eye view of the world.  This cover of one of her books will give you some idea what she's like.

 5.  Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis 1 and 2
 
Satrapi's amazing books describe growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution.  The drawing style is amazingly suited to conveying conflicting and complex emotions and the weird atmosphere surrounding the characters. 

6.  Lynda Barry, like, everything, but I love the Maybonne and Marlys books best, like Come Over, Come Over.

Everything you need to know about that very confusing thing that is life as a girl on planet earth.  It's here.

7.  Roz Chast

Chast is more a cartoonist and comic artist than a graphic novelist.  I think her comics are hilarious and in addition to being funny they always make me feel at home in the world, which for me is really saying something.

 8.  Delaf et Dubuc, Les Nombrils

I don't know anything about these authors and I had trouble even figuring out where this story was taking place, but it centers on three girls:  a kind of ordinary looking tomboy and her two super-popular and glamorous "friends" -- who abuse her but get abused in turn by the fates so it all evens out.  Somehow I found the crazy obsessions of "les filles" -- boys with motorcycles, super short shorts,  etc. -- massively charming.

9. Alison Bechdel, Dykes to Watch Out For

Recently issued in a convenient collection as The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For.  You'll laugh, you'll cry, DTWOF has everything anyone could ever want in a comic series.   

I've probably forgotten some things.  But as I said, these are just some things you should read!