demongin.org

I Kissed a Girl

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 18:59:35 -0600

An open letter to the world's sociologists and taste-makers: ruminations on the lack of generic rules and constraints for writing about the manner in which every generation mistakenly believes that it invented sex.

Much more remarkable than the phenomenon it describes, is the pressing need apparently felt by each generation's leading intellectual lights to discuss the manner in which every generation deludes itself into the belief that it invented sex.

Additionally, the very fact that the epigram is a commonplace is good evidence of the prevalence of writing that describes the manner in which each generation's sexual maturation is represented in popular art: the phrase "every generation thinks they invented sex" could hardly have been exulted to the level of cliche without the help of a legion of volunteers whose tireless laboring resulted in a not insignificant amount of ink having been spilled in the effort of ensuring that a significant portion of American cultural criticism and commentary of the 20th century was devoted to helping us learn the phrase--and, more importantly, the idea--by rote.

And why has this been the case? Well, one very plausible explanation for the prevalence and popularity of this sort of criticism is the ease with which one can write it without leaving his personal Comfort Zone.

It doesn't take a brilliant imagination or copious research to start pre-writing and even blocking out paragraphs for the music nerd blog post about how Katy Perry's breakthrough Top 40 smash "I Kissed a Girl" doesn't even make an oblique reference to Jill Sobule's 90's classic. Throw down a few lines about what it means that Sobule, whose generation (the Xers) are now bored and old, now speaks dismissively of Perry's song and thus the novelty felt by younger persons at plumbing the (hilariously shallow) depths of their own sexuality:

"It will be about how I kissed her, left the dull boyfriend, got gay-married in California, and really no one gave a shit."

Then wrap the whole thing up with a bow in the form of an impossibly snobby reference to Ani DiFranco's "If it isn't Her" or even kick it old school with some HD Sapphic Modernism.

Be sure also to use snappy neologisms like "celesbian" and "fauxmosexual".

At any rate, the point is that any subject can be put across in this form; it's an easy cipher. Writing about "how" and "to what ends" people write about the sexuality of others is one easy way to frame up and represent specialized knowledge that you already possess. The hypothetical blogger might juxtapose the lyrical content of the above-mentioned songs in order to make a point about how Youth is always the standard-bearer of sexual urgency and ignorance and how Old Age is always dismissive of youth and he wouldn't even have to query JSTOR to do it.

Another possible explanation for the abundance of write that takes "each generation believes it invented sex" as its thesis, might be the unusual degree of creative and social license granted to the author by virtue of the subject matter. Taking up this thesis is a great opportunity to playfully push the rules of politeness and test the reader's willingness to suffer crudeness.

When writing about the manner in which his peers or those slightly younger than him have come to grips with their own sexuality, the writer is given free reign to write with an earnestness that intentionally borders on sententiousness (and occasionally pole vaults across that border). With or without irony, the writer who takes one generation's fumbling (groping) progress towards understanding its own sexuality as his topic is free to depict mature themes in a graphic manner, giddily euphemise the taboos of his own milieu in an ever-winking, mock-anthropological tone and pun liberally.

And as anyone who has done any serious social-scientific writing and analysis can confirm, any opportunity to set aside one's professional gravitas and set one's hand to working with a subject that demands silliness and lightheartedness is not to be missed.

(If you don't believe me, find communitas proponnent Clifford Geertz's article on Balinese cock-fighting and social performance in South America. Better yet, find Geertz and call him a liar if he claims not to have gleefully peppered his article with dick jokes.)

A third possible explanation for the popularity and prevalence of writing that endeavors to throw a light on the after-hours doings of young humans in heat is the fact that it titillates without being titillating. It's sizzle-hot copy by virtue of its subject matter, but it's at a significant remove and therefore can not be accused of having crossed any boundaries in the sands of decency.

It's an easy hook and it comes with no strings attached.

Whatever the reason for its ubiquity, it's my feeling that this sort of writing is a genre. The Internet-tubes are chock full of everything from book-length studies of the manner in which every generation thinks it invented sex, one to five thousand word articles on the topic, AP/Reuters summaries, countless footnotes and blurbs, etc. And if the ubiquity of a thesis and the forms to which it lends itself are such that it may go unmentioned when a popular writer makes an appeal to it, then we're talking about a genre.

In a piece for Salon by Tracy Clark-Flory, you've got a professional piece of writing about professional writing that comes close to acknowledging the status of "every generation thinks it invented sex" as a genre. In the piece, a professional writer is discussing the fortunes of her peers who, by virtue of the fact that they a.) work a beat and b.) work the sex beat, are a de facto part of the sex industry. Clark-Flory proceeds from there to describe how these writers have been impacted by recent economic turmoil--how they are indirect victims of the capital "R" Recession--and wonders aloud about what this might mean for them and their audiences.

Throughout her reportage, Clark-Flory and the writers whose predicament she discusses, take for granted that so-called "sex journalism" is a journalistic commodity not totally unlike the business news, arts coverage, etc. She even goes this far:

"I don't read sex columns for the voyeuristic thrill, either; I read them for the same reason I read novels or watch movies--it helps me to intimately know people. Good sex writing is like an inkblot test, for the author and reader."

There is, as is almost always the case in sex meta-commentary, more noise than signal in that quote. The above-the-fray sobriety and general immunity to titillation with which she purports herself is extremely unlikely (to put it mildly) and distracts from the point by drawing the reader's attention to the writer's dishonesty.

This doesn't make her observations useless, however. Many have observed that in order to be plausible, a lie must be founded upon some kind of truth. And the truth in which Clark-Flory's fib is rooted is the one we've been discussing. Her point, lost as it is in her tortuous (non-)confessional, is that sex columns are a journalistic commodity and it is therefore perfectly logical to pursue the manner in which people relate to sex columns with unimpassioned, clinical(-esque) analysis.

The fact that she offers the Rorschach test as an analogue for reading sex columns is not an accident. If we can look at one person's relation to a given bit of racy journalism and give it Cartesian coordinates, then we are creating an object for study. And if we've got one object, we can create more just like it and have groups of objects. And if we've got groups of these objects to study and describe, there are going to be schools that consistently describe similar groups of objects in the same way. And thus we have generic responses.

A genre is, after all, a set of representational conventions that can be safely assumed or taken for granted. If one of the supporting cast in a Vietnam War movie is a fast-talking, politically indifferent black man from a major metropolitan area who uses cheerful antique slang to describe drug and spouse abuse, no one bats a lash in offense or wonders what the screenplay writer might have been getting at. It's an obvious appeal to genre.

It follows then, that if, in the course of his supercilious caviling, MTV's Kurt Loder lampoons Lindsay Lohan's latest love-interest(s) with a tongue-in-cheek near-reference to The New Our Bodies Our Selves without having to explain what he's trying to imply about a.) LL's motivations and b.) those who have been critical of her motivations, then he's making an appeal to popular genre-sense.

It is widely accepted and understood that criticism of a given celebrity's sexual antics may take any of a given number of forms, and that the discussion of those forms would be (very literally) academic, then we're dealing with a genre.

And if we truly have a genre on our hands (as I believe we do), then what sense does it make that we haven't yet got a critical language in which to discuss it. Why haven't we got a terminology for the iconography and isomorphology of writing about "sex writing". If so many writers are writing about the false-starts, wildly lurching progress and hard stops of each generation's progress towards sexual self-definition that we can reasonably roll our eyes at what we correctly identify as "old hat", then why don't we have words for the attributes by which we recognize that particular hat?

The Moon is Waxing Crescent (5% of Full)

Resolution and Resignation Revisited

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 22:21:11 -0600

A short meditation on the failing proposition of out-pacing one's own demons.

This afternoon, I sent out a Tyranny Belle Subscription Service email that announced and revealed the details of a number of previously secret projects. Here's a list:

The 2008 installment of Jingle Belles (the annual Tyranny Belle Records Christmas compilation) is available online. Get it at http://tyrannybelle.com/jbv2.
I am playing the drums in a new band called The Sweetheart Brigade. Our debut show is set to take place at Quenchers on Saturday, January 17, 2009; we'll be headlining the release party for the new full-length album from Noman.
The Sweetheart Brigade also has a new website: http://thesweetheartbrigade.com and just released our first track. It's a cover of Wham's Last Christmas

and you can download it from http://tyrannybelle.com.
The Sweetheart Brigade will be releasing our debut EP on January 17th.

It sounds like a lot of work: organize the troops, learn the parts, record the music, coordinate the various bands and booking guys and get the show on the calendar, design the website and distribute the content while holding down a full-time job, learning a new instrument, rehearsing for a new EP and running around in the arctic wind-chill to avoid the social fall-out that inevitably rsults from failing (either through negligence or beligerence) to participate in the federally mandated annual boondoggle in which my fellow Americans and I attempt to cheerfully Weekend-at-Bernie's the bloated corpse of Corporate Retail across the finish line on our backs once again in direct spite of common sense, basic macro-economics and the undiscussed but universal consensus that brick-and-mortar retail is deader than fucking fried chicken.

It definitely sounds like a lot of work, but honestly, it represents about one half of what I had wanted to have done. The whole distasteful cluster-fuck that is the annual tithe we Americans--irrepressibly chipper, even in the face of the most monotonous and inane yeoman's work--chummily encourage one another to pay to Big Corporate Retail is, now that I'm thinking about it, a nice metaphor for the way the month of December functions within the year.

Basically, while you're out Christmas shopping, what remains foremost in your mind is that at the end of what began so hopefully but rapidly became interminable, is the fact that you're going to eventually collapse into a chair, sigh deeply and congratulate yourself on having purchsed even more things for people who already have more things than they'll ever need or use.

You got dragged along a fool's errand and now you feel heroic for having come through it in one piece but it's the sort of heroism that you know is fake, so you feel compelled to do some kind of penance. Hence the New Year's Resolution. The empty self-congratulatory feelings of marching in the Consumer's Rut(tm) for the benefit of Corporate Retail and the federal officials whose ability to share in the profits of which depends on how successfully they are able to transform the will of Corporate Retail into law demand redress.

Or purgation.

In fact, the reason that New Year's Eve is such a notorious liquor holiday is a direct result of the fact that surviving the emotional and financial suplex of the Christmas holiday invariably leaves one with the sort of post-traumatic stress that demands to be released by intense selfishness (i.e. general emotional abandon). Having just committed an unforgivable act of resignation (i.e. buying widgets so that corporate raiders can swim in private indoor pools and travel in their own Gulf Streams), we attempt to cheer ourselves up by making resolutions.

And that's what December is. It's the month where you collapse at the end of a 12 month stretch of compromises, exhausted at the effort of meeting what everyone insists are basic obligations, and then force yourself back to your feet and resolve to do better next time.

The Moon is Waning Crescent (11% of Full)

Corporate Retail and the Winter Tithe

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 13:23:34 -0600
A quick cut-and-paste of a question put to my friends on NewAthens.org.

So, Christmas being upon us, I've been reflecting recently on why exactly we tithe.

Tithing is the human habit of paying a meaningful percentage (historically 10%, hence the word) of one's annual income to a group whose decision-making procedures have nothing to do with you. A tithe is different from a tax because a.) the percentage of your annual income is meaningful, but not back-breaking (a tax is, by definition, burdensome) and b.) a tax is compulsory, whereas people tithe voluntarily.

The temptation, since we associate the tithe with the middle ages, is to say that people in the western world tithe because, like the border collie who runs in circles around people because it cannot forget the hundreds of generation of herding instinct imprinted upon its cells, we simply cannot break our Medieval habits.

I don't buy that, however. Mostly I don't buy it because tithing to Mother Church was itself deduced from the descriptions provided in the apostolic books and letters of what we would call communes: long before any pope issued any bull that instructed people to voluntarily pay him approximately 10% of their annual wealth, the great, great, great grandparents of the Evangelists had been tithing to...whom or whatever...in exactly the same loosely-defined manner in which we contemporary Americans pay our annual tithe to Mega Corporate retail.

So the question "whence the tithing instinct", since it can be resolved neither by medievalists nor by gospel scholars, devolves to classicists who, I suspect (but cannot confirm), would pass the buck one step further, into the penumbra of Greek antiquity and on into the reeking blackness of what amounts to pre-history. By which I mean to say, "the question falls to anthropologists."

Which means, for those of you unfamiliar with anthropology and the methods of anthropologists, that the question is up for grabs: whoever comes up with the most germane answer gets the prize.

So why is there this hard-wired tithing instinct? Why are humans (generally) compelled to annual contribute a portion of our income to institutions that exclude us from everything except for their long, dark shadows?

The Moon is Waning Gibbous (80% of Full)

Manhattan Mores and Wall Street Argot

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 06:42:20 -0600
On the olfactory slap and tickle of the half-bath and the gymnasium; its origins and contemporary applications.

There is the light, woody chalk-sweetness of lavender.

That particular aroma, thanks to the subtle, imponderable, continental-drift like influence that Indo-European lore has had upon a hundred generations of witless homemakers, remains true to its Latin etymology: lavender belongs in immaculate suburban half-baths with pillar sinks, bright-gleaming hardwood and neatly arranged hand towels with lace fringe.

To those whose childhood was set in the suburbs, lavender is the fine-ground confectioner's sugar that settles noiselessly upon the bronchioles as the thousand punishing points of teardrop-fixture glare are abruptly replaced by the petroleum jelly blur of the undulating votive and the muffled refrigerator silence of having miraculously escaped the dryer-full-of-wet-shoes tumult and the cloying red meat and butter smell of the family gathering. The suburban half-bath is a church-like space--occupied only on special occasions during which it is used intensely--and replete with clean, greaseless surfaces, turquoise and seafoam soaps in the shape of the spira mirabilis a dignified silence and the lavender smell that was the half-bath's defining characteristic long before the first Roman stonemason ever set his sextant upon the Capitoline at an emperor's behest is the smell of the death-like stillness, silent, clammy darkness and niggling terror of the suburban male's earliest, dead-of-the-night attempts at masturbation.

And this is why suburban shopping mall retailers who traffic in scented soaps and candles have so many stories to tell about outbursts and quarrels. As the fragrance machines propel a static breeze of synthetic male axillary extracts and the smell of apples down the opal-bright Pythagorean mouse-maze boulevards that the Mega Corps have artlessly lined with that same unmistakable Madison Avenue iconography that has been inspiring a deep-abiding sense of physical inadequacy and unsatisfiable social longing in the American consumer since the 1950's, the sexually-charged atmosphere of the mall is guaranteed by the fact that the adolescent girls and middle-aged women who are encouraged to gather in these sorts of places will, by virtue of the sheer number of them and the ferocity of the chemical, aural and visual assault that is being waged against them, have worked one another into a frothing lather of hormonal over-secretion, confused agora-philia and emotional terror. When the right neuron crosses paths with the right heart-shaped lavender soap? Blammo! Instant shouting match.

There is also the rotting fruit smell of the gymnasium.

It is a smell that floods the mind with the metaphors of medieval monasticism. Calories "burn" within us like the monk burned with longing for the beatific vision like the pentecostal tongues burned with the iridescence of holiness. These calories, furthermore, can be counted--measured with a simple math and therefore comprehended and rendered manageable.

Personal trainers use MS Word to work up tabular recapitulations of the "science" of caloric "intake" and "output" while New York's graphic artists litter the magazine rack with covers depicting an eternal youth that is yours for the taking, if you will simply sit, contemplate the numbers that are ours by virtue of the revelations of modern science and learn how to live according to knowledge of the sublime gemmatria of human perfection. These writings blithely recapitulate that which had formerly made the medieval discursis unique as a genre of writing; with an emphasis on numbers and the attainment of perfection through contemplation of same, the truest of true believers write and read devotedly in the corporate scriptoria of New York and LA, reprinting their meditations and reveries for benefit of those who have gathered to be overwhelmed by the chemistry of mixed mammal sweat in a confined space, to celebrate the penitential rush that comes from tearing their own muscle tissue and revel in the discipline that leads to perfection.

And the sweet, subtly sickening smell of rotting fruit--the one that is as simple and unmistakable as the thin try sourness of Jim Beam white label bourbon--is inescapable in these places.

Finally, when one considers the sensory "jargon" of the shopping mall alongside the sensory "jargon" of the gymnasium, one cannot help but consider which place is the place in which he'll enjoy the more visceral, carnal experience.

There is the gymnasium, where one would expect that man's "fleshiness" would be enshrined and his vanity would be enthroned. And then there is the shopping mall, where one would expect to see a more intellectual game being played.

But in reality, we have just the opposite: the gymnasium is a place of high-mindedness and metaphors cribbed from medieval theology where there is no sophisticated melange of odors designed to titillate and befuddle while the shopping mall is a place where man is bludgeoned this way and that by the 100-handed corporate Briareus into a feral pongid, bereft of anything even vaguely human and possessed only of a colorblind concupiscence, a row of razor-sharp teeth and two rapacious and only vaguely prehensile claws.

The Moon is Waning Gibbous (82% of Full)

A Good Ear

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 22:53:32 -0600
On intuition and the cultivation of a refined intuition.

Often, when attempting to praise or blame someone for his intuitive approach to problem-solving or artifact-creating, it will suffice to describe, in basic qualitative terms, the nature of his ear.

"He's got a really good ear."

Or maybe he's got a tin ear. In either case, the idea is that he has accomplished or created something that is evidence of a well-developed intuition for the manipulation of his chosen medium. Maybe he was born with this intuitive grasp of his medium. Maybe it was Maybelline.

In either case, the human ear stands in here as a synecdoche for the sense of hearing. The sense of hearing stands in metaphorically for the ability to understand things of a certain nature in a certain way. Specifically, in this turn of phrase, the implication is that the sense of hearing is a sense that is not easy to train; it is therefore the case that any decisions made on the basis of what the trained ear allows its possessor to perceive are decisions that are made in light of understandings and conclusions at which one does not arrive without substantial toil.

Basically, when you say that he's got a good ear or a tin ear, what you're saying is that he's either put in his hours and earned his stripes or he hasn't: he either did the reading or he showed up to class unprepared and forced everyone else to endure his halting bullshit as he flailed desperately in an ill-advised attempt to cover his tracks (or, rather, an ill-advised attempt to cover for his lack of tracks by hastily fabricating obviously artificial ones).

The Moon is Waxing Gibbous (95% of Full)

Behind the Screeds

Thu, 4 Dec 2008 22:58:57 -0600
A summary of what's been happening in the meantime.

I've been spread fairly thin lately. But not so thin that I haven't got the time to check in and mention what it is that has been stretching me so thin.
I have been attempting to post once a day to AllNightNeonSunrise. ANNS is kind of an experiment in what happens when micro-blogging (e.g. the sort of thing you do on twitter) requires more than simply describing what you're currently doing: each post requires an image, a third-party quote, a link to another website and a title in addition to a body and therefore lends a different insight into what is actually happening in the mind of the poster.
Having fallen behind during my week-long Thanksgiving hiatus, I am now caught up with my media consumption journal: check out November and December. There are a few things that are going to be filed under December (on account of my having to play catch-up), but such is life in a world where I'm too lazy to manually massage the data in order to make it more accurately resemble my actual life.
Against my better judgment, I have begun to read Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. Taking up this modern fiction classic about medieval monasticism goes against my better judgment on account of the fact that the years of my life during which I closely studied medieval monasticism and theology are ones that I have no desire to revisit, let alone relive every time I happen upon a spare minute in which I can crack a paperback. There's just too much sentiment there.
Keep in mind also that I am working on a new, secret band. The work is coming along nicely and details (however scant) should be forthcoming within the month.

The Moon is Waxing Crescent (41% of Full)

Fire-water Glissando

Tue, 2 Dec 2008 23:16:18 -0600
A list of recent observations having to do with professionalism and social grace.

I've learned a few things in the week since my last full-length post. Allow me to share:
The reason that certain people, e.g. William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens, were able to be taken seriously as writers while holding down full-time jobs was that they were professionals in a time when professionals had secretaries. These secretaries allowed them to do the research they needed to do and kept their records and notes in good order. This is, as anyone will tell you, the most important part of writing. What prevents many contemporary professionals from being successful writers is the fact that meat-secretaries have been replaced with productivity software and the current generation of professionals considers productivity software either a.) too difficult to learn or b.) somehow antithetical to the idea of being a writer.
One of my favorite things to do is turn partially-remembered bits and pieces of famous literature into anecdotes and retell them as though I were somehow involved. "This one time, Nietzsche was like, 'writing a good novel simply requires writing a page's worth of words a day; almost anyone can do that' Man--what a crazy fucker". One of my favorite subjects for this is mythology, "OK, so then Zeus wakes up and, through a monster hangover, realizes that he's a.) alone on Mt. Ida and b.) that Juno is probably on Earth, making a shambles of the plan. It is at this point that he freaks directly the fuck out and I'm like, 'sidling quietly away...'." I do this because it's a charming way to bullshit my way through material that I cannot fully recall. Additionally, I do this so that if I do end up being called on my bullshit, I've got the fact that I was obviously not aiming for 100% factual accuracy.
If you walk into a hostile co-worker's office with a big smile on your face and just keep smiling at them, they will eventually smile back. This has yet to fail me: I have smiled thousands of screw-faced stress cases into submission in my short time as a professional. You've heard of letting a smile be your umbrella? Well, a smile can also be a maul.
There is such a thing called "keyman insurance". This insurance allows stakeholders in a given group or company to collect money from an insurer if something should happen to a certain member of that group or company. If, for example, you're a venture capitalist and you're invested heavily in a start-up company whose destiny is very clearly in the hands of a single man who was just killed while attempting to digest an incorrectly prepared fugu liver, this is the sort of insurance you'll wish that you had purchased months ago. The best thing about such insurance is that it allows investors--a notoriously nervous crowd--to put a monthly value on their own paranoia.

The Moon is Waxing Crescent (23% of Full)

Gayland Road

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 23:06:42 -0600
Social gestures and Brechtian gest, taking human gestation as a jumping-off point.

There is that old joke that one is sometimes obliged by expectant mothers to recapitulate:
I see. Did you know that fertility is hereditary? It's true: if your parents didn't have any children, then neither will you.

Then there's the one that works similarly, the one where when confronted with the news of a pregnancy, you're expected to respond with chummy flippancy:
Knocked up, eh? You know, they know what causes that now.

Finally, there's the one that almost sounds like commisseration and, if delivered correctly, can come off in such a way as to completely neutralize the whole pregnancy conversation and return it to a more profitable subject:
Congratulations. So when do you start the epidural?

But the sad fact of the matter is that there is no intelligent or graceful way to respond to someone who tells you, point blank, that she is with child: the best you can hope to do is to reach into the memory banks, grab something rote and more-or-less appropriate, place the appropriate emphasis on it and hope that the gesture will put enough English on the conversation that it will rapidly change course, without too much additional labor, and become less embarrassing for everyone involved.

This is a consequence of two facts:
We no longer live in a world where the human reproductive process is in any mythologized.
We continue to live in a world where the majority of people are, in vain defiance of the ubiquitous and horrifying environmental, social and political science dealing with world overpopulation, unashamed to reproduce.
Additionally problematic is the fact that the meandering and perilous Labyrinth into which an expectant mother will rudely hurl unexpecting interlocutors becomes increasingly tortuous as the mother herself becomes increasingly conservative.

Imagine a Cartesian graph where the X axis increases with the number of conservative attitudes espoused by the mother-to-be and the Y axis increases with your lack of personal familiarity with her. Imagine a woman who you barely know and who fancies herself a staunch Objectivist who has voted a straight Republician ticket for the last decade. Now imagine she tells you that she's pregnant.

On the one hand, you're kind of a dickhead for the fact that your mind has just flooded with generic hardcore footage. On the other hand, she's also a huge dickhead for the fact that she just walked up to a relative stranger and demanded that he imagine one or more of her angrily blushing orifices straining to accomodate one or more wildly convulsing pricks and ultimately failing to contain the lion's share of the teaspoon of semen that is now drooling lazily towards the crinkly pucker of her dun colored sphincter and then expecting him to say something that does not further exacerbate an increasingly irretrievable social disaster.

Now, finally, imagine that this person who you know, by virtue of her outspoken social and politial conservatism, does not have an agile enough mind to take any subsequent comments in the spirit they were intended. What then?

I'll tell you what then: it is suddenly upon you to diffuse the situation by taking up the subjects of sex, death and the whole maudlin pageant of gory, carnal misery that plays painfully out during the long, pitiful march from the former to the latter in such a way as to end on a different subject; to begin with a dirge and end with a merry, capering waltz.

And if you can't do that? Well, then you've just got no social skills.

The Moon is Waning Crescent (3% of Full)

Special Unspoken Radiations

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:18:00 -0600
Reflections on a dinner date.

My step-father and I squared off tonight.

The confrontation was--as the best ones are--completely non-verbal. He had been tallying my Goose Island 312s and my mother's tree-tinis and was hurling the bottom line at me with every furtive glance in my direction. I wonder, in fully sauced retrospect, whether he could somehow have guessed that I was a flask and two beers into the bag before he had even parked his Pontiac Vibe at the meter in front of the Weinstein's Jewish funeral facility.

Maybe not "guessed." Maybe "assumed."

At any rate, the confrontation between he and I, though it never was verbalized, went something like this:

HIM: "I do not consume alcoholic beverages because I consider it immoral. I must therefore condescend to any person who chooses to do so. I must also, due to the fact that my emotional and moral growth has been severely retarded by having been born and raised in the Midwest, pay for this check not matter what rules of good taste or common sense contradict. And, believe you me, the idea of paying $45 for a woman to drink cocktails is offensive to me.

Additionally, I regard your Leftist hyperbole as offensive on account of the fact that I do not consider political events of international significance to have any bearing on my health, wealth or well-being: in my entire life--nearly 50 years!--not a single Leftist screed about criminality on Wall Street, malfeasance in the Oval Office or merchants in the Temple has ever amounted to much more than a sound-bite from a 60 Minutes interview or a History Channel truism about how "a war-time economy is a boom-time economy" or how "history will always remember John Kennedy as the man whose death symbolized America's loss of Innocence and Ronald Reagan as the man whose one-liners toppled Communism."

ME: "I do not watch television because I cannot afford to keep a television--I have neither the space nor the resources to tithe (i.e. forfeit 10% of my total income) annually to Big Media. Nor shall I ever subscribe to any service that does not provide content on demand beucase I am committed to a media that is not decided by corporate edict or restrained by any man's law. I therefore consider your entire life, the childish, coloring-book morality and the baroque mythology of connoisseurship which you pay to have affirmed (daily!) for you by Madison Avenue to be twice as immoral as the worst offense against your hapless Gen X consummerism than you could ever possibly imagine.

Oh, and speaking of that, E.T. fucking sucked worse than Achtung, Baby and Hysteria combined.

But as I was saying, and believe you me, the idea of purchasing a high definition television, arguing aggressively in favor of my right to remain too ignorant and incompetent to plug it into a computer and hanging it in my drawing room as if it were some sort of symbol of the social and economic progress that I personally hade made or, better yet, of the human experience at large, is offensive to me. Furthermore, I believe that the money that you annually spend on that Golden Calf would have been much better spent on cocktails. For, you see, cocktails, once they've been metabolized, are rendered inert: your subscription to Big Media, on the other hand, is a Strega Nona's Cauldron of the most actively debilitating and bilioius poison yet squeezed from Man's hypothalamus, or, as I like to call it, the Devil's scrotum.

The older guy and the younger slappy-fighthing it out over dinner in a trendy Northside cafe, each suddenly assuming the mantle of mouthpiece of his whole generation on a moment's notice.

Or, better yet, two belligerent males fighting over the right to decide the fate of a female. Shit-slinging, chest-thumping, etc., etc.

The Moon is Waning Crescent (37% of Full)

I Am Very Literally Making this up as I Go

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 05:09:10 -0600
Why I will never be employed by the Obama-stration.

The oldest advice in writing is this: "write what you know."

The reason that this is the oldest advice in writing is that for as long as people have been writing, most of them have been afraid--deathly afraid--of appearing foolish. If you're not writing "what you know", then you must be fudging the details or (worse) straight up fabricating them. And when your writings find their way into the hands of someone who knows better, he will at once know you for a fool. Thus will you appear foolish.

And, as I believe I just mentioned, the fear of appearing foolish has been held over the head of those who were considering writing fiction for as long as anyone can remember. And, for as long as anyone can remember, serious writers have been utterly unafflicted by any such anxieties. In fact, most of the All Star Team has made a point of drawing attention to the fact that writing "what you know" just makes you look, at best, like you're disingenously "playing it small" or, at worst, like a sanctimonious prick.

In C20 Mad Ezra demonstrated that with enough force of personality, one could become an expert pianist in two weeks and enjoy the acclaim of friends, family and journalists without ever taking a lesson. In C19 the importance of being earnest--of playing well but lacking emotion--was skewered famously, frequently and to rave reviews. In C16 Polonius warbled stupidly about "to thine own self be true" and got big laughs from people whose idea of a good time was a public execution, who frequently died from bacterial infections and who lacked any dental technology more sophisticated than the ball-peen hammer. Back in C14 the so-called Gawain poet became the greatest poet that our humble language can boast by describing the exploits of a knight who managed to succeed at his incredibly difficult tasks because of the fact that he had no idea that his every action was being observed, considered and would eventually be held against him. And, all the way back in C12, Bernard of Clairvaux scored both hems and haws from ascetics, masochists and ancorites across Europe as he chided the Cluniacs for knowing more about Eggs Benedict than the Canticum Canticorum.

The major players? They are--to a man--in favor of going out on a limb, of winging it: of playing it fast and loose.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but when you blithely accept the advice of nine out of 10 writing teachers and stick to writing "what you know", you're doing so in defiance of thousands of years of great writers. Even Homer, who we credit with having written the greatest story yet written by a human man, was winging it: "Sing, goddess, of the anger of Achilles, son of Pelleus", he wrote, and essentially admitted (in the first line of the motherfucking Iliad!) that he hadn't the first idea about the offended thymos of that lion-hearted, strong running slayer of men or the outrage that went with it.

It seems to me that the big idea behind the bad advice that is portioned out daily by composition instructors and well-intentioned creative mentors the world over is that if you write only "what you know", anyone who challenges the factual accuracy and (thereby) the sincerity of your writing will, if he sticks with it long enough, have to confront you as a person. Eventually, your critic will have to look you in the eye and call you a fraud to your face: if you are in fact not a fraud, you'll be able to prove that he is, in fact, the actual fraud and thereby vindicate yourself in the eyes of...

...anyone who actually cares one jot about your intellectual and artistic integrity.

And that, my friends, is the approximate point at which the wheels fall off. It is also, not coincidentally, what those giants of literature (you know, the ones whose works I misrepresented above) all knew implicitly: they didn't care one way or the other what the next guy thought about them as a person.

Ezra Pound wasn't up late at night fretting over whether anyone "got" the Cantos and understood how well he understood the Odyssey. Oscar Wilde's De Profundis is more than testament enough to the fact that he wasn't concerned with what anyone thought about who he was or how he lived his life. That Shakespeare stuffs the mouths of idiots with such idiotic commonplaces as the one that is the subject of this essay is good evidence that he didn't set much stock by them. The Gawain poet's synymous protagonist succeeds by virtue of his good intentions and not his thorough knowledge of who is plotting against him or why. And if Bernard believed that the Cluniac brothers would have best served God by writing what they knew, he wouldn't have mocked them for having wasted so much time and ink on their various gourmet preoccupations.

When you write what you know, you might as well keep that writing to yourself: it does little or nothing for anyone other than its author.

Finally, what I think this all boils down to is this: when someone tells you to "write what you know", what they're really saying is more like, "don't say anything that anyone will ever be able to hold up as proof that you're a drunk or a fag or a draft dodger or that maybe you're not as psychotically self-disciplined as they believe that you want them to believe that you are."

And people take this advice because, for a perversely convoluted tangle of reasons that are well beyond the scope of this essay, they have allowed others to get the impression that they are tee-totaling, unhesitatingly and strictly heterosexual war heroes who sleep for four hours a night and live at a calorie defecit. And they desire desperately to prevent this belief that they have allowed to become inspired in others from being challenged.

I have no such desires.

But not because I am any great lover of the truth: I don't broadcast my personal meditations, ruminations and impressions because I believe in some kind of truth-imperative. I could honestly give or take total transparency as a way of life. As far as I am any kind of judge, those who confide their deepest, darkest secrets in me occupy the same spot on my personal moral hierarchy as those who tell me only what I need to know. I am no great lover of the truth.

But I do hate lies.

God, how I hate lies.

The Moon is Waning Gibbous (58% of Full)