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BAD WRITING has seemingly always been with us.
So has bad writing by academics, self-styled “communications” experts, and others who presumably ought to know better.
I’ve certainly attempted to read a lot of it as part of my cultural-critiquing career. And some of the worst comes from self-styled political leftists–guys ‘n’ gals who supposedly want to overthrow existing elitist institutions in favor of a sociopolitical regime more responsive to The People.
The teaching-biz trade mag Lingua Franca came out last month with a whole article on the topic of whether bad writing was necessary. It’s apparently a big issue in certain ivory-tower circles, according to writer James Miller: “Must one write clearly, as [George] Orwell argued, or are thinkers who are truly radical and subversive compelled to write radically and subversively–or even opaquely, as if through a glass darkly?”
Some campus-leftist obscurantists, of course, aren’t really dreaming for a Dictatorship of the Prolateriat but rather, whether they admit it or not, for a Dictatorship of the Intelligentsia–a society in which learned theoriticians will rationally decide what’s best for everyone (a sort of cross between Sweden and Singapore). Such ideologues will naturally go for ideological discourse that doesn’t make a whiff of sense to outsiders.
Others, according to Miller, actually defend their writing style with anti-authoritarian arguments.
Miller quotes ’50s German philosopher Theodor Adorno as proclaiming that “lucidity, objectivity, and concise precision” are merely “ideologies” that have been “invented” by “editors and then writers” for “their own accommodation….” “Concrete and positive suggestions for change merely strengthen [the power of the status quo], either as ways of administering the unadministratable, or by calling down repression from the monstrous totality itself.”
In short (just the way Adorno wouldn’t want it): Readable writing can’t help but reflect standardized, conformist ways of thinking. To imagine a truly radical alternative to the way things are, you’ve gotta use different thought processes, and use written forms that reflect these processes.
I don’t buy it.
You see, there’s this little discipline called “technical writing.” Maybe you’ve heard of it. A lot of ladies and gents in this hi-tech age are studying it.
One of the tenets of good tech writing is that some topics are naturally complex–such as PC hardware and software design, operation, and maintenance. But they still can and should be explained as clearly as reasonably possible, without losing necessary detail or treating the reader as an idiot. Certain works of tech writing necessarily require that the reader have a basic familiarity with the topic at hand, and will use certain nouns and verbs not used in everyday discourse, but should still strive to communicate what they’re trying to communicate effectively and efficiently.
Political and social theories can be as complex as circuit-board schematics and C++ programming code, if not more. But, as shown in the products of Common Courage Press and Seven Stories Press, among others, these ideas can still be expressed in readable, persuasive ways.
TOMORROW: The one sexual behavior women never do–or do they?
ELSEWHERE:
I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT CHRISTMAS for over two months.
And almost none of it involved what presents I wanted.
Researching and writing some three dozen Xmas-themed freelance tidbits for Everything Holidays has taught me a thing or twelve about how I view the season. Some of these new-found notions:
Certain “one-true-church” outfits, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, think this represents the dilution of Christian purity with pagan influences. As someone who believes purity is something for show dogs, I happen to like this mix-‘n’-match iconography. Indeed, if Christians hadn’t learned early on to borrow from assorted cultural traditions, we’d have no Christian punk bands today. (You can choose for yourself what you think about that.)
The weirdness is to be found in the goofball presents and decorations; the truly odd spectacle that is the Christmas episode of a TV series (even Pokemon and He-Man have ’em!); the curiously unsexy spectacle of “erotic” holiday cards (Hint: If you’re nude, you really shouldn’t stand that close to Christmas-tree needles); and in the basic all-American contradictions surrounding the modern holiday season.
But the human race is an oddball, mongrel species.
And any holiday promising hope and renewal to humans had better offer these things to humans as they, as we, are–nerds and geeks and dorks and hotheads and eggheads and dopes and neer-do-wells and fussbudgets and all the rest of us.
In the immortal words of Rudolph’s pal Yukon Cornelius, even among misfits you’re misfits.
MONDAY: Movie memories on the streets.
IT’S A POST-SOLSTICE MISCmedia, the online column that had just gotten used to less than 8.5 hours of sunlight when the nights suddenly started getting shorter again.
For one thing, the long nites have left me plenty-O-time, and the right climactic setting, to get caught up in all the reading matter I’d obtained at the last Tower Books clearance sale six months before.
That, in turn, meant I could turn my eye toward some of the literary zines that have popped up of late.
Such as August Avo and Doug “Das” Andersson’s Klang.
It first appeared almost three years ago, disappeared after one issue, and has now reappeared, with three tabloid installments produced thus far.
Each issue mixes two serials with one-shot short stories, poems, line art (including some old Durer woodcuts), and other supplementary material.
Andersson’s serial, “The Transformation,” starts with an antihero who applies a sexual-enhancement salve and turns into a donkey. The first, origin-story installment has its lame parts (such as its fictional names for Seattle and Woodland Park Zoo); but the next two segments go places Kafka never nightmared. In the third part, that includes a Fundamentalist Y2K survivalist farm, where our protagonist (a literal “ass man”) is enslaved to run an old-fashioned flour mill.
Avo’s serial, “Badge” (purported to be a translation of a “bestselling Russian novel by Sasha Klinokov”), is even more ambitious. Since it’s now online at the above link, I won’t try to explain or summarize it. I will say that, no matter what its true origins, it does a grand job of capturing the epic-tragedy spirit of classic pre-USSR Russian lit; as situated in the epic tragedy that much of post-USSR Russia has become.
But the zine’s best part is “Notes on the American Novel” by the pseudonymous “JAD,” appearing on the back pages of issues 1 and 3. These pithy aphorisms revolve around a pair of premises: (1) The Novel, in the classical definition, is a European art form unsuited to capturing U.S. social realities; and (2) this inadequacy reveals fundamental flaws about U.S. society:
Slightly more optimistic views on fin-de-siecle American writing can be found in Context, an in-bookstore tabloid review from the Illinois-based Dalkey Archive Press. Besides tributes to great authors from other times and places (Borges, Calvino, Flann O’Brien, Henry James, Samuel Beckett), it’s got thoughtful praise for Diane Williams, David Markson, and McSweeney’s. (Dalkey publishes Williams and Markson; and its placement of its own authors as implied heirs to modern-lit’s greats is a PR move for sure; but, at least in the case of Williams, it’s deserved.)
Whether Williams’s tight, internalized short-shorts; Markson’s hibrow story-essays; or McSweeney’s high whimsy mark new directions for storytelling in the new whatever-period-of-time-you-wanna-call-it will, natch, have to be answered later.
But at least they, and the Klang guys, are asking some of the right questions.
TOMORROW: A festive holiday message.
LISTEN UP: Your fave online columnist might be appearing on a local talk-radio outlet soon. Maybe even this Friday. Further details forthcoming.
NOT TOO LONG AGO, I used to gloat to my friends in the rest of Seattle.
I was luckier than they were, because I lived in Summit Cable territory. That meant I got almost 20 cool channels that the losers out in TCI neighborhoods couldn’t.
The tables have since turned. TCI was bought by AT&T, which promptly worked to finish up the fiber-optic cable installations TCI had lagged on for years. Summit, which already had fiber in its downtown and south-end service areas, was bought by a multi-regional company called Millennium Digital Media.
The respective buyers saw new fortunes to be made in cable-modem services and expanded “digital cable” channel selections.
So now, AT&T Cable customers can get the likes of TV Land, BBC America, the Food Network, the Game Show Network, and several other specialty channels offering prime examples of TV programming at its most direct; shows that come close to the Platonic ideals of entertainment and info programming.
Last month, Millennium trotted out its own digital channel lineup. For dozens more bucks a month, you can get dozens more premium and pay-per-view movie channels.
And nothing else.
This is way wrong. Television and video are more than just post-theatrical transmission mechanisms for feature films. TV has its own family of program genres.
A feature film is a one-shot. It’s constructed of scenes, which are constructed of individual shots. Even a low-budget film is made with this kind of rigorous pre-planning.
A TV show is usually an ongoing operation; a premise built to last a hundred episodes or more.
A TV show is built of segments; some of which may intercut across different scenes of action. These segments are, in traditional studio-based productions, made with several cameras running at once; this means individual “scenes” involve continuous flows of acting, movement, etc., rather than individual shots cut together to simulate continuity.
Because of time/money constraints, and the need for ongoing viewer identification with characters, TV shows are much more dialogue-heavy than features.
(Among other effects, this means social-theorists who use TV viewing as evidence of “the decline of words” are almost hilariously misinformed. TV’s all about words; though some of those words are better-chosen than others.)
Movies are about sitting in the dark, with a few friends and a lot of strangers, sharing in one larger-than-life sensory experience. TV’s about sitting comfortably in a well-lit room, alone or with a few pals and/or relatives, paying greater or lesser attention to a succession of smaller-than-life spectacles.
Aside from documentaries and occasional episodic films like Tales From the Darkside, movies are almost always dramatized works telling a single fictional (or fictionalized) story over the course of 80 to 180 minutes.
TV shows, in contrast, encompass episodic sitcoms, ongoing serials, limited-run serials (miniseries), anthology dramas, quasi-anthology dramas (such as crime shows where only the detectives appear in more than one episode), nonfiction storytelling (documentaries, newsmagazines, “reality” shows), and other formats that exist in no other medium.
The success of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? proves that audiences, even in a cable-fragmented TV universe with umpteen movie channels, are still attracted to pure-TV entertainment when it’s done right.
If only Millennium Digital could understand that.
TOMORROW: Are transit authorities passively capitulating to tax-cutters or sneaking an activist end-run around them?
ONCE AGAIN, something I originally did for Everything Holidays. This time, the topic’s infamous Xmas gifts.
It’s said, “It’s not the gift but the thought that counts.” If so, some of these gifts represent less than the highest thoughts.
Moving from the merely ill-advised to the totally dorky, American Express last year asked people to send in real, really dumb, presents. Some of the “Most Outrageous Gift Contest” entrants included:
Some folks try to make up for less-than-stellar gifts by including a less-than-stellar card. Like so much of North American culture, modern Christmas cards let you buy a mass-produced item to express your individuality.
Some of the basic types:
TOMORROW: Why digital cable TV ought to have more than just movies.
IN OTHER NEWS: 60 Minutes II last night juxtaposed the Eugene anarchists with the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia–who could be interpreted as having also dreamed of destroying industrial society and imposing a neo-agrarian regime upon a less-than-willing populace. If I were a conspiracy theorist, which I’m not, I’d imagine an “objective” attempt to discredit the WTO window-breakers’ cause.
IN STILL OTHER NEWS: It’s a sad day for Great Pumpkin worshippers everywhere.
AESTHETIC DISCIPLINE, as the Oulipo guys keep proclaiming, is the real key to creativity.
Four filmmakers in Denmark took this notion to heart when they came up with the Dogme 95 movement.
Among the points of the movement’s “Vow of Chastity”:
Just about all of these disciplines had appeared in many indie and art films over the years (though not all in the same film), from Godard’s Weekend to Cassavetes’s Husbands. What the Dogme instigators did was codify a particular set of disciplines devised for a maximum sense of “realism.”
Three “officially certified” Dogme films have been made thus far. The first to get a U.S. release is The Celebration, by Thomas Vinterberg. Far from the spare “kitchen-sink” movie the above Dogme disciplines might make you imagine, it’s a vast, intense, tragic drama of suppressed secrets, predicated upon a family reunion dinner in which a young man “toasts” his father’s birthday by outing the old man as a child molester.
The Celebration sports just-beneath-the-top performances by a huge cast, colorful locations and costumes, tautly-framed shots, and flashy editing and sound mixing. It’s not a filmed play; it’s a real movie.
And it’s a good point-O-comparison with a more popular handheld-camera-shot movie, The Blair Witch Project.
You who have seen Blair Witch can see where it conforms to and differs from the Dogme format. It’s partly in black-and-white and it has a “genre” (horror) premise, two things Dogme disallows.
But it has no background music or special effects. It covers a specific set of characters through a specific sequence of actions in a specific time and place. It’s filmed on real locations (no studio sets). The protagonists’ violent fate is not overtly shown. It’s not a spectacle of gore but a character study (albeit with sometimes borderline-insuffrable characters).
The Celebration shows how filmmaking techniques can be pared away to make “realistic” stories more intimate. Blair Witch shows how a similar minimalism can make a “genre” story seem more real.
Both films point the way toward a possible post-blockbuster future for the cinema.
MONDAY: Guilty-pleasure music.
IT’S A LABOR DAY MISC. WORLD, perhaps the only online column that has never been to Burning Man.
JAY JACOBS STORES, R.I.P.: Another locally-owned chain succumbs to the global giants. Or is it rather the case of a mall-based specialty chain succumbing to the big-box superstores? You decide.
AT WIT’S START: Last Friday, I discussed Francine Prose’s rant in Harper’s about PC but poorly-written stories force-fed to kids in high-school English classes.
I suggested an alternative: A sequence of courses in which the teens would be introduced to Great Kickass Writing.
My own introduction to G.K.W. came some time after college. I’d come to believe there were two main kinds of fiction: the popular stuff (which, considering how well it sold, had to have some solid construction and fun elements, right?) and the highbrow stuff (like the turgid prose I’d been forced to read as a student).
I thought I’d try to cleanse my mind from the boring highbrow stuff and learn to read bestsellers.
Only, to my surprise, the bestsellers I picked up were even worse-written than my old English Lit required texts had been.
Ponderous science-fiction trilogies in which the future was always exactly like the present only more so. Sluggish fantasy epics about how, five thousand years after the Earth was nuked, a race of wizards emerged. Fictional Presidential widows marrying fictional Greek shipping tycoons. Whodunits in which the most grisly wastes of human lives were treated as mere premises for clue-solvin.’
Then a kind person introduced me to Flann O’Brien.
Real wit! Real pacing! Funny characters! Clever yet poignant stories!
My life was forever changed.
No longer would I settle for unadventurous “adventure” stories, flaccid “horror,” or clueless “mysteries.” Nope, I would insist, and still insist, on Great Kickass Writing.
Herewith, a few links to Great Kickass Writing on the Web:
never seen before but I couldn’t check them out because I’d been away from my desk too long.”
TOMORROW: As 1/1/00 approaches, Y2K survivalists become less communalist and more capitalist.
ELSEWHERE: A Disney subsidiary offered free home pages; this was one result…
TODAY’S MISC. WORLD is dedicated to America’s only locally-produced sketch comedy show on commercial TV, Almost Live, now canned after 15 years. It means host John Keister, my old UW Daily staffmate, will now have to get more commercial gigs selling cell phones. It also dashes my hopes of ever getting paid and/or acknowledged for the occasional gag from this column they’ve stolen over the years. And, of course, it means the fine citizens of Kent, the suburb AL has always loved to chastize, can sleep a little easier.
Don’t put the blame for the show’s axing on “a changing Seattle,” but on a changing TV landscape. Every year, fewer viewers are patronizing the old-line network-affiliate stations (which have, by and large, reduced their definition of “local” programming to sports and mayhem-based news). This meant AL’s ratings declined to where it was only a break-even operation (not only did it have a full-time staff of ten writer-actors, it was the last show on KING to utilize a full studio crew, with humans operating the cameras and everything).
BACK-TO-SCHOOL DAZE: In the September Harper’s, the highly respected author Francine Prose (Guided Tours of Hell, Hunters and Gatherers) complains about the institionally-endorsed mediocrities assigned for reading by innocent high-school students.
Prose’s long rant piece, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read” (not available online), asserts whole generations of potential lit-lovers have been permanently turned off from the joys of reading by the less-than-enticing stories they’re made to read in school, and by misguided approaches taken to teaching the kids about even the good writing that makes the English Lit cut.
Like some of her more politically-conservative fellow critics, Prose puts some of the blame on administrators and politicians obsessed with using English Lit to teach “diversity” and other life lessons. Prose figures that because these bureaucrats want to make sure the kids learn nothing more or less than the precisely intended lesson plan, they force-feed the kids really mediocre PC-lit.
She’s got a particular beef against Clinton’s fave poet Maya Angelou, the equally-sanctimonious Alice Walker, Harper Lee’s one-dimensional racism memoir To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, Brave New World, Ordinary People, Studs Lonigan, and teachers who reduce all discussion of Huckleberry Finn to a mere rant about its author’s alleged received racism.
Prose says there are plenty of better stories out there about rape, racism, girls’ self-discovery, boys’ temptations to cruelty, etc. etc. But the schools keep on assigning the mediocrities.
She suggests many possible motivations and/or intended or unintended results of force-feeding Our Kids such bureaucratically-acceptable bad writing (it’ll turn the kids into TV-viewing, advertiser-friendly, thinking-challenged drones).
She skirts around a much more plausible consequence–that a diet of low-quality literature might raise a generation of potential school-administration bureaucrats, more interested in what which is collectively-acceptable than that which is really, really good.
What I would do: Divide high-school lit into two sequences. One would continue the life-lessons-thru-storytelling schtick (a technique well-used throughout the history of most civilizations), only using better-written stories. The other track would be strictly about intro’ing kids to some Great Kickass Writing.
This writing could still be from all sorts of races, genders, and nationalities; it’d even do a better “diversity” job ‘cuz it’d showcase some of the best stuff from all over, instead of causing kids to associate minority and/or female authors with dull verbiage or one-dimensional ideologies.
MONDAY:Some examples of Great Kickass Writing.
IN OTHER NEWS: Scientists now say they can genetically-modify mice to make them more intelligent. Only one response is possible: “Are you pondering what I’m pondering, Pinky?…”
ELSEWHERE: This woman wants “to ban the word ‘cool’ from the Web’s lexicon…”
According to this list, what you’re looking at right now is not a “webzine.” So be it.
BEFORE WE BEGIN TODAY, a gracious thanx to all who came to my big event last night at the downtown Seattle Borders Books. Another such event’s coming next Thursday (see below). And, again, apologies to those who couldn’t access this site earlier this morning. (I’ve been assured, again, that it won’t happen again.) But for now…
I CLOSED LAST NIGHT’S SHOW with some aphorisms and words-O-wisdom. Here are some more. (Some of these I’ve used before, on the site or in other scattered writings.)
IF YOU MISSED last night’s wonderful live reading/event, there’s another promo for The Big Book of MISC. next Thursday, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there. Aloha.
MONDAY: How can one be “hip” when there are fewer and fewer “squares” to rebel against?
ELSEWHERE: Some of the top cliches in bad erotic writing: “Everyone has a perfect body you could break a brick on…” “All women in a position of authority have secret desires to be submissive…” “Any woman described as having a scientific occupation will invariably be occupied with making her breasts larger…” “No jealousy…”
ANOTHER BREAK from the full-length webcol, for the old-time Misc. schtick of little stuff from all over.
AD VERBS: Remember when we all used to scoff at ’60s pop hits being turned into dumb commercials? Now there’s ’80s pop hits given the same treatment.
Johnson & Johnson, f’rinstance, is selling contact lenses with a recent dance remix of the Dream Academy’s “Life In a Northern Town,” a Britpop tune originally about survival amid the economic doldrums in a forlorn industrial corner of Thatcher’s England. Not necessarily the most appropriate tuneage for aggressive brand-name marketing or for a product that promises ease and security. Speaking of relief…
TAKING THE CURE: In 1976, Canadian raconteur Don Herron (best known stateside as Hee Haw radio announcer Charlie Fahrquarson) called Gerald Ford’s swine-flu vaccine crusade “the cure for which there is no known disease.” In 1989, I heard a doctor on TV predict the 21st century would be all about hooking everybody on genetically-engineered prescriptions to treat conditions not yet known to exist.
Now, Michelle Cottle in the New Republic reoprts on the newest psychological/medical fad, “social phobia” (what used to be called chronic shyness, before drug companies said they had a treatment for it):
“…One wonders how much of the nation’s social phobia epidemic stems from our growing sense that everyone should be aggressive, be assertive, and strive for the limelight. Forget the life of quiet contemplation. We are a society that glorifies celebrities and celebrates in-your-face personalities such as Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura…. “Increasingly, we have little admiration–or patience–for those who don’t reach out and grab life by the throat. And if we have to put one-eighth of the population on expensive medication to bring them into line, then so be it.”
“…One wonders how much of the nation’s social phobia epidemic stems from our growing sense that everyone should be aggressive, be assertive, and strive for the limelight. Forget the life of quiet contemplation. We are a society that glorifies celebrities and celebrates in-your-face personalities such as Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura….
“Increasingly, we have little admiration–or patience–for those who don’t reach out and grab life by the throat. And if we have to put one-eighth of the population on expensive medication to bring them into line, then so be it.”
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE DAY: Ready for yet another upscale “urban lifestyle” journal? The publishers of Metropolitan Living sure hope so. It’s slick, it’s colorful, it’s bright and breezy. And, of course, it has acres of restaurant reviews (though, unlike certain no-longer-published mags of its ilk, it doesn’t charge restaurants money to get reviewed.) And, like slick monthlies in some other towns, it’s got articles about topics other than the proper spending of consumer wealth–what a concept! (Free from plastic boxes all over town, or from 400 Mercer St., #408,Seattle 98109.) Elsewhere in magland…
THE SO-CALLED ‘REAL AMERICA’ has finally gotten to see the endlessly hyped Talk magazine, and it’s not half as stupid as its own publicity makes it out to be. There’s long articles, many of which are about big real-life concerns rather than just about The Least Interesting People In The World (a.k.a. “celebrities”). And it was an encouraging surprise to see, in a mag so full of fashion ads, a long expose of misery and survival in a Mexican sweatshop town (though none of the lo-wage factories in it were identified as garment plants). Just one major beef: It was released to stores in NY/LA/DC on Aug. 3, but not to anyplace else until Aug. 10. Hey, editrix Tina Brown: That old capital/provinces cultural-dichotomy concept is SO passe. And a minor beef: It’s co-owned by Disney thru its Miramax Films subsidiary. When Miramax was independent, it claimed to be about film-as-art, not Hollywood hype. While Talk’s content isn’t as hype-centric as initially feared, its promotional campaign certainly is.
PASSAGE OF THE DAY (from the film version of The Road to Wellville: “If I hear one more word of German, I’m going to take this stick and shove it up your alimentary canal!”
MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya. The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike in downtown Seattle. If you can’t make it then or want a double dose, there’s another one the following Thursday, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there or be a parallellogram.
TOMORROW: How prejudiced are you? No, not “those people” in bad-old Mainstream America, YOU!
ELSEWHERE: A slew of books tells Brits how Americans manage, more or less, to mix the “pluribus” with the “unum”…
THREE WEEKS OR SO BACK, we discussed the latest online craze, the weblog–a kind of Website that contains little or no original content, but still expresses its author’s personality and tastes through a carefully-chosen set of links to content on other sites.
Online journals are sometimes listed in weblog sites’ link-lists of other weblogs, but they’re very different. They’re like weblogs’ mirror images. They’re all or almost-all made up of original writing, usually very personal writing.
Like the human race itself, web-journals are a diverse lot. Some are better designed than others. Some are better written than others. Some have a lot more to say than others.
But they all involve ordinary, usually non-pro writers taking an ongoing look at the worlds around them and putting short, pithy thoughts about them up for all to see.
(Well, maybe not “all”: Some journalers include home-page disclaimers along the lines of, “If you personally know me, please do not read this.”)
Some places where you can learn more:
Some examples:
MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya. The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike in downtown Seattle. Be there or be a parallellogram.
TOMORROW: Two new slick print mags, plus “social phobia” as a chemically-treatable condition.
ELSEWHERE:Day trading’s described as “Doom for lonely grownups, a single-shooter fantasy with NASDAQ supplying the mutant targets”…
AFTER ALL the self-parodic inanities on TV attempting to appeal to “guy culture,” finally came something that put it all into historical perspective.
A brief voice-over passage in Showtime’s Sex in the 20th Century noted that, as a Nation of Immigrants, the U.S. has long had a sub-population of sexually-frustrated single men. In the late decades of the last century and the early decades of this one, our big cities and factory towns teemed with tens of thousands of Euro and Asian settlers who came over without moms, wives, girlfriends, or kids. (Chinese-American immigration was officially male-only for many of those years.) Westward expansion created frontier and ex-frontier communities comprised mostly of unattached males.
It was for the patronage of these men that America developed the rowdy saloon culture and the raunchy/satirical burlesque shows (both of which were fought by women’s suffragists and other “progressives”). Not to mention underground porn, “stag films,” and a once-booming brothel biz. (The documentary noted that prostitution provided the only coital opportunity for these immigrant and pioneer men.)
Anti-censorship and sex-freedom advocates today like to blame the differences between U.S. and Euro sexual attitudes on a damaging legacy of Victorian prudes. What the activists neglect is how and why those prudes came into power in the ’20s and early ’30s.
As women gained more political clout (and neared gender-parity in these ethnic and working-class communities), their sociopolitical agenda almost always included the eradication of the “guy culture” of the day.
To the “progressives” and the suffragists as well as to social conservatives, the world of single men, especially the hedonistic elements of that world, represented everything icky and worse–pre-penecillin STDs, the self-destruction of alcoholism and other drug abuse, laziness, cynical attitudes toward patriotism and the work ethic, a flight from family commitments, disrespect toward women, profanity, irreligiousness, and the pigsty living conditions still commonly associated with the undomesticated male.
So the saloons were shut down (Prohibition speakeasies had a much more coed patronage). Red-light districts were quashed one city at a time. Burlesque houses were busted. By 1934, Hollywood movies were strictly censored.
(One could also mention the implicit racism in the progressives’ “clean” and bland civic aesthetic, but that’s a topic for another day.)
To this day, the single male is treated as a social-sexual pariah in many “progressive” and even “alternative” circles, and not just by radical feminists either. Some “sex-positive” authors and journals that advocate women’s sexual liberation have a heck of a hard time accepting non-gay men’s right to sexual expression (except in the forms of masochism or servility). “Swing” clubs routinely ban femaleless males from attending; the more wholesome nudist movement used to do the same (some nudist camps still do).
And the current wave of “guy” magazines and TV shows wallow in icky-man stereotypes as universal givens.
And both corporate porn and reverse-sexist writers allow no exceptions to the premise of male=brainless sleazebag.
But beneath all these one-dimensional overgeneralizations lies a basic truth. Men need women. For sex and a hell of a lot more.
And women may no longer need men for brute-strength labor or protection, but a society unbalanced on the yin side is just as dysfunction as a society unbalanced on the yang siade.
Gender parity will happen not just when men are forced to fully respect women, but when women allow themselves to fully respect men. Then more women and men might feel more comfortable with their own yang energies, and we could all feel freer to enjoy wining, dining, coiting, and other hedonistic pleasures.
MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya. The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike in downtown Seattle. Be there or be rhomboidal.
TOMORROW: Web journals, the evil (or is it good?) twins of Weblogs.
ELSEWHERE: UK essayist Theodore Dalrymple’s got an alternate explanation for our troubles accepting the hedonistic life: “Southern Europeans seem to enjoy themselves more than northerners”–including the Brits and much of the folks in their North American ex-colonies–“who regard even pleasure as a duty… in the south one drinks to enhance life, in the north to drown one’s sorrows”… Once there was a nation whose leaders openly denounced liquor, tobacco, and even meat, and which funded pioneering cancer research. Too bad about some of its other policies…
LAST FRIDAY, we discussed the continuing blight of suburban sprawl and what might possibly be done in upcoming years to make those Nowheresvilles more eco- and people-friendly.
What drives the sprawl, of course, is a growing population that needs to live, work, and go to school somewhere. But what if there won’t be as many additional folk in coming decades as folk today expect there to be?
An Atlantic Monthly article claims not only won’t there be a Soylent Green-style overpopulation catastrophe, but the world’s supply of living humans might actually decline in the long run.
Author Max Singer expects world-pop numbers to grow at ever slower and slower rates; so “within fifty years or so world population will peak at about eight billion”–still a way-scary two billion more than we have now–“before starting a fairly rapid decline.” Indeed, “unless people’s values change greatly, several centuries from now there could be fewer people living in the entire world than live in the United States today.”
Singer claims the real reason for this reversal wouldn’t be AIDS in Africa or economic collapse in Russia or girl-abortions in China or eco-disasters or wars or declining sperm counts, but the spread of modern attitudes about work and family. If this transpires, our grandchildren (however many we have) might not have to eat one another, but they’ll have other issues to face. The North American economic system’s pretty much always been premised on growth–more people, and more wealth for some of these people to spend on consumer goods. What would a more-deaths-than-births world mean to one’s career or personal ambitions?
It should be mentioned, though the Atlantic doesn’t fully mention it, that Singer’s a leader in the near-right Hudson Institute, a prolific producer of reports and policy papers asking citizens and governments to ignore those loudmouth environmentalists about pollution, tainted food, nuclear waste, and assorted other issues in which the insitute believes big business should be given the benefit of all doubts. Singer’s Atlantic article just might be considered to be possibly part of a larger scheme of attempting to rebuff enviro-doom-warners at any opportunity.
But the U.N. figures Singer cites seem plausible. And he’s not calling for the developed countries to breed away, but simply reporting what he claims is an almost-inevitable trend (albeit one that won’t prove true or false for a long time).
Who knows? Maybe that radical-green “Voluntary Human Extinction Movement” just might find its dreams nearly fulfilled–after everybody in the group today will have died.
(For another viewpoint, check out Zero Population Growth’s Y6B site.)
MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya. The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike in downtown Seattle. Be there or be equilateral.
TOMORROW: Less need-to-breed might increase the number of single men, America’s socio-sexual outcasts since way back.
UPDATE: We’ve already told you of the totally separate, and apparently feuding, sites Seattlemusic.com and Seattlemusic.org. I’ve since learned of a third name-game player–Seattlemusic.net!
ELSEWHERE: The same Atlantic issue mentioned above has a somewhat amusing “Periodic Table of Rejected Elements,” including Imodium, Xena, Hydrox, and Fahrfergnuven… Everybody loves wacky inventions, especially when the inventors are (apparently) totally sincere in their intentions…
FOR THE THIRD YEAR, we’ve gathered a veritable barrage of quality tomeage for your edification and enjoyment at the beach, the airport, the RV waste-disposal station, or wherever else you might find yourself wanting or needing to kill some quality time, and assembled it as the Misc. World Midsummer Reading List.
(Some of these titles may be subjected to longer reviews in the coming weeks.)
intermediate-to-advanced word puzzles, you’ll like this.
AND SOME OF YOUR SUGGESTIONS:
MONDAY: I try to get a DSL line.
IT’S MISC. WORLD’S end-of-the-month clearance. Get the following Famous Maker commentary items now at big savings! (I’ve wanted to have a clothing company called “Famous Maker” even longer than I’ve wanted to have a band called “Special Guest.”)
A SLOW HAND, AND EVERYTHING ELSE: Saw a beautiful poster on Capitol Hill announcing, in neo-mod lettering, what from a far distance looked like “Butoh Erotica.” A closer reading, however, revealed the poster was actually advertising a performance-art evening of “Butch Erotica.”
While I strongly support tuff-gal lesbians’ empowered expressions of their sexual selves, I can’t stop imagining the possibilities of making specifically-sexually-themed works from the slow, deliberate, Japanese-born genre of Butoh dance, which already is often exquisitely sensuous (and occasionally flesh-revealing).
What would be the bad part about Butoh sex? Getting that white makeup on (or off of) the delicate areas.
What would be the good parts about Butoh sex? Flexibility, variety of positions, and never worrying about it ending in mere minutes (or even in mere hours).
DOMAIN THING: There are now separate Websites called seattlemusic.org and seattlemusic.com.
The latter site promotes a company that employs Seattle Symphony musicians to record background music for Hollywood movies (yes, Virginia, there are still a few movies being made that utilize real “soundtrack music” rather than cobbling together a bunch of would-be pop hits).
The former site’s one of several that offer promo and publicity for up-‘n’-coming rock-pop-jazz-whatever bands (others include Seattlesounds.com, The Tentacle, and Turmoil’s Seattle Music Web).
Last I heard, attorneys were in the process of sorting out whether seattlemusic.com will get to order seattlemusic.org to find a different URL.
THE NEXT ITEM UP FOR BIDS: For odd fetishists and home-decorators of particular tastes, Bonnie Burton of grrl.com offers Shop Til You Drop, a mailing list devoted to the weirdest items on eBay auctions.
“I’m not joking about weird either,” Burton promises. “We’re talking taxidermy reptiles and old medical tools here!” I’m still waiting to see steel ingots and decorative crankshafts. But I’m sure they’ll show up eventually…
CONJUNCTION JUNCTION: The complaints about Microsoft never stop! Besides the ongoing federal suits, there’s legal action taken by AOL against MS’s new ripoff of/competitor to AOL Instant Messenger, and rumored threats of action about Windows supposedly messing with files created for Adobe Acrobat Reader, leaving ’em unreadable.
But now here’s a flaw in MS software that just might be the weirdest yet. The company’s own MSNBC site reports, “Microsoft Word 97 for Windows may crash or you may receive an error message when you are typing a long sentence that includes several conjunctions (such as ‘and’ or ‘or’) along with at least one preposition (such as ‘to,’ ‘from,’ ‘of’ or ‘by’).”
I’ve heard of “grammar check” features trying to discourage all would-be Faulknerisms in the name of no-nonsense businesslike clarity, but this goes far beyond…
TOMORROW: The third annual Misc. World Midsummer Reading List.
