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Praying for Turkey, Part 2
by guest columnist Charlotte Quinn
(IN YESTERDAY’S INSTALLMENT: Our guest columnist travels to Samsun, Turkey to make a documentary about the Amazon warrior legends, and finds a country enmeshed in its own present-day wars–including the war against Kurdish separatist guerrillas, whose leader, Ocalan, has just been captured by Turkish authorities.)
ON THE KURDISH FRONT, a great deal of death and despair. Perhaps the worst part of the trip. That week, my hosts were informed that their friend, who was doing his mandatory military service, had lost an eye from a Kurdish mine in Batman, a city in southeast Turkey.
In an effort to soothe their grief and the impending doom of their own upcoming military service, I told them I’d read the war is almost over with the Kurds! Hadn’t they read that, from his prison cell, Ocalan asked his people to withdraw?
But the Turks shook their heads. The newspapers were lying, they said (yes, they know). Kurds and Turks are killing each other as much as before. All their friends are dying.
I asked, “What is the solution?” They said there is no solution. The war will continue forever, because the government and the Kurds won’t talk.
It was pretty fucking sad. I was sitting in a hotel lobby with five young men who had not yet served their 18 months (there’s no concienscious objection in Turkey). I sat there thinking they were going to die too, because of this war they don’t even believe in.
Strangely enough, the #1 song while I was in Turkey was by a Kurdish singer, Ibraham Tatlises. I think it speaks a lot about this generation. All the young Turks loved him. They even dance to him in the discotheques.
TARKAN ISN’T SO LUCKY. Tarkan is the Turkish equivalent of our Beck (or maybe our Ricky Martin, more truly, I guess, considering the corniness of Turkish pop). He fled the country to evade his military service. He’s now incredibly successful in Europe–especially in Paris, where they love really good looking ultra cool skinny young men who look good with eyeliner.
And although he’s still (strangely) greatly admired for his music, the Turks will tell you they don’t like Tarkan personally. He didn’t do his duty. It could be they were censoring themselves again, but here’s a story:
One night I was dancing at a discotheque and suddenly everyone cleared the floor. I kept dancing, thinking in my twisted American way that maybe everyone just wanted to watch the cool American. I found out later it was Tarkan’s song. Big mistake.
A really scary guy in a Don Johnson-type suit walked up to me and asked what country I was from. (A Turk wouldn’t have danced to Tarkan). Once it was established I was an ignorant American tourist, I was out of danger’s way. I wish Americans would do the same to Ricky Martin fans.
Did I mention discotheques in Turkey frisk for guns? (Just as easy to buy a gun in Turkey as America, but no high-school shootouts. Hmmm….)
THEY ARE ALL MUSLIMS. Five times a day, and very loudly, someone sings prayers to Allah from the nearest mosque. Sometimes there are many nearby mosques and the songs collide. It’s sweet, though, and loud. The electrical speakers really aren’t necessary; you can just hear them fine without the amps.
The Matrix was just coming out in the theaters. I was stuck in an ear-shattering prayer to Allah from a couple different speakers, and all I remember is Keanu Reeves’s life-size cutout gazing at me. Allah Akbar, they say. God is the greatest.
It was really something else, the prayers. We would be headed to some archaeological site and the people in the car would park at a mosque and go pray and come back and drive. I was embarrassed that they weren’t at all embarrassed at their own spirituality. In respect, I would pray in the car.
My prayer is always the same one.
“God, I pray that everyone prays.”
TOMORROW: From City Light to City Extra Light.
ELSEWHERE:
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?
NEW-MILLENNIUM HYPE’S DIED DOWN ENOUGH by now, I trust (this is being written a couple days in advance), that you won’t mind if I start in again bashing those futurists who can’t imagine a future without their own sort running things.
Just as Xerox staff futurists imagined future offices all centered around copiers, the NY and Calif. cultural trend-diviners keep presuming all pop-cult product in years to come will be funnelled thru the likes of Viacom, Time Warner, Hearst, Fox, and Silicon Valley’s most prominent dot-coms.
DIgital video? To the likes of Newsweek, it’s just a new toy for Hollywood.
MP3s? The NY Times has officially dismissed its utility as anything but a promo mechanism for established major-label acts.
At some press junket three or four years ago, a PR agent from LA confided in me what she believed to be the eternal procedure of pop-cult trends (whether they be in the fields of music, fashion, food, games, or graphics):
1. Something catches on somewhere. It could be anything, it could be from anywhere. But it will die unless–
2. The NY/LA/SF nexus takes it over and turns it into something mass-marketable; then–
3. The masses everywhere eat it up, get tired of it, and patiently await the next trend foisted upon them.
I told her that was going to cease to be the inevitable course of everything one of these years. She refused to believe me.
Even today, with the Net and DIY-culture spreading visions and ideas from every-which-place to every-which-place (including many visions and ideas I heartily oppose) without the Northeast/Southwest gatekeepers, I still read from folks who cling to the belief that America inevitably follows wherever Calif. and/or NY lead.
It’s never been true that everything from underwear to ethnic-group proportions follows slavishly from the NE/SW axis. Country music, while eventually taken over by the media giants (even the Nashville Network’s now owned by CBS), developed far from the nation’s top-right and lower-left corners. So did R&B, rockabilly, gospel, ragtime, jazz, etc. etc.
American literature has its occasional Updike or Fitzgerald, but also plenty of Weltys, Faulkners, Cathers, Poes, Hemingways, and others from all over.
What could these creators, and others in the performing and design and visual arts, have done without centralized publishers, galleries, agents, and other middlemen controlling (or preventing) audience access? Quite a bit more than they did, I reckon.
And as online distribution and publicity, DIY publishing and filmmaking, specialty film-festival circuits, and other ascendent means of cultural production mature, the artistically-minded of the 21st Century won’t have to even bother dumbing down their work to what some guy in Hollywood thinks Americans will get.
I’ve talked about this a lot, I know; but I’ve failed to give one particularly clear example: The live theater.
New Yorkers still like to imagine “the national theater” as consisting only of those stages situated on a certain 12-mile-long island off the Atlantic coast, and inferior “regional theater” as anything staged on the North American mainland.
T’aint the case no more.
These days, the real drama action takes place in the likes of Minneapolis, Louisville, and Ashland (and, yes, Seattle). What Broadway’s stuck with these days is touristy musical product, often conceived in London (or, for a few years this past decade, in Toronto) to play long enough to spawn touring versions in all the “restored” downtown ex-movie palaces of the U.S. and Canada. Off-Broadway these days gets its material from the other regions at least as often as it feeds material to them.
Another example: I’m writing this while listening to a giveaway CD from Riffage.com, one of the many commercial websites now putting up music by indie and unsigned bands from all over, in vast quantities. (Others include EMusic, Giant Radio, and MP3.com.)
This particular CD uses MP3 compression to cram in 150 tracks, all by bands I’ve never heard of and may never hear of again. And that’s OK. I’m perfectly happy with a future where more musicians might be able to practice their art their own way and make a half-decent material living at it; as opposed to a recent past where thousands gave up in frustration as all the money and attention went to a few promoted superstars (whose lives often wound up in VH1 Behind the Music-style tragedies).
Sure, there’s mucho mediocrity on the Riffage CD. But that’s OK too.
I’d rather have a wide regional and stylistic range of mediocrity than some LA promoter’s homogenized, narrow selection of mediocrity.
TOMORROW: This same geographic-centricism as applied to topics of race and politics.
IN OTHER NEWS: Some of you might have seen a parody Nike ad disseminated by countless e-mail attachments during the WTO fiasco. It depicted a nonviolent protester attempting to flee from Darth Vader-esque riot cops. The tag line: “Just Do It. Run Like Hell.” Well, during the college football bowl games (ending tonight), there’s a real Nike commercial depicting an everyday jogger dutifully executing his morning run in spite of numerous Y2K-fantasy disasters and destructions all around–including street riots.
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.
ON MONDAY AND TUESDAY, I’d discussed Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian tract.
In it, a “refined” young man of 1880s Boston awakens from a 113-year trance to find himself in the all-enlightened, worry-free Year 2000. The doctor who’d revived him (and the doc’s comely daughter) then spend the rest of the book telling him how wonderful everything has become.
The chief feature of Bellamy’s future is a singular, government-run “Industrial Army” that owns all the means of production and distribution, employs every citizen aged 21-45 (except child-bearing women), and pays everybody the same wage (less-desirable jobs offer shorter hours or other non-monetary perks).
Obviously, nothing like that ever happened. Soviet communisim was a police-state regime that used egalitarian ideals to justify its brutality. Euro-socialism featured government-owned industrial companies that operated just like privately-owned companies, only less efficiently and less profitably.
But could Bellamy’s fantasy have ever worked in anything close to its pure form? Undoubtedly not.
It would’ve required that everybody (or at least enough people to impose their will on the rest) submit to a single, purified ideology based on rationality and selflessness. Any uncensored history of any major religious movement shows how impossible that is, even within a single generation.
We are an ambitious and competitive species. The “rugged individualist” notion, long exploited by U.S. corporations and advertisers, has a real basis in human nature.
We are also a diverse species. Especially in the U.S. whose citizens are gathered from the whole rest of the world. Bellamy’s totalized mass society would require a social re-engineering project even greater, and more uprooting, than that of the steam-age society he’d lived in. The kindly-doctor character’s insistence that all these changes had coalesced peacefully, as an inevitable final stage of industrial consolidation, may be the least likely-seeming prediction in the whole tome.
As I wrote previously, most utopian fantasies require that everybody in a whole society conform to the writer’s prescribed sensibility. (Some even require that everybody belong to the writer’s own gender or race.)
In most cases, the prescribed sensibility is that of a writer, or at least of a planner–ordered, systematic, more knowledgeable about structures than about people.
The impossibility of such monocultural utopias hasn’t stopped writers and planners from thinking them up. But at least some folks are realizing any idealized future has to acknowledge that people are different from one another and always will be.
We’ll talk more about this idea of a post-mass, post-postmodern future in future weeks.
TOMORROW: Musings on Biggest-Shopping-Day Eve.
AS WE LEFT OFF YESTERDAY, I’d finally gotten around to reading Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy’s (1850-96) 1888 utopian tract.
The chief feature of Bellamy’s future is a singular, government-run “Industrial Army” that owns all the means of production and distribution, employs every male and childless female citizen from the age of 21 until mandatory retirement at 45, and pays everybody the same wage (less-desirable jobs offer shorter hours or other non-monetary perks).
Some other aspects of Bellamy’s ideal state:
One person’s utopia, someone I can’t remember once wrote, is another person’s reign of terror. You don’t have to be a Red-baiter to see elements of other folks’ dystopian nightmares within Bellamy’s utopian dreams.
Soviet-style communism used some of the same ideals spouted by Bellamy to justify its police-state brutalities. But the “human face” experiment of post-WWII Euro-socialism had its own problems–uncompetitive enterprises, bureaucratic sloth & corruption, massive worker dissatisfaction.
Of course, neither of those systems went as far as Bellamy would’ve liked. They still had rich-poor gaps and ruling classes. But that’s reality for you.
TOMORROW: Back to the (more likely) future.
SINCE IT’S THE LAST ‘TRIPLE-DOUBLE’ DAY of the century (11/22/99–get it?), I’ve got just as good an excuse as any of the current barrage of century-in-review pundits to go off and pontificate.
But instead of reviewing all the supposedly most important movies, CDs, public speeches, world leaders, or stadium-organ songs of the past 100 years, let’s skip the present century altogether and instead look at the 21st century as somebody imagined it in the 19th.
Edward Bellamy (1850-96) wrote Looking Backward in 1888. Many critics consider it the first major utopian novel written in the U.S.
Like most of the perfect-future tales that have followed, Bellamy’s is less of a story than a tract. The plot, such as it is, is pretty much over by page 50–a wealthy, “refined” young man of 1887 Boston, who’s come to loathe most of railroad-age industrial society, awakens from a 113-year trance to find himself in the all-enlightened, worry-free Year 2000.
From then on, just about all that happens is that our 19th-century sleepyhead looks around the future Beantown, while the kindly doctor who’d awakened him (and the doc’s smashingly-beautiful daughter) simply tell him everything about how wonderful everything has become. (The doctor has a wife, but we see or hear almost nothing of her.)
There are no conflict points in the story, but that’s part of the point.
Bellamy’s ideal future is one of those in which most anything that could result in trauma, let alone drama, has been systematically removed from the social condition.
Indeed, in one chapter the awakened narrator reads from a late-20th-century novel (you millennium-sticklers out there will be relieved to hear Bellamy refers to 2000 as part of the 20th century). Without detailing this other story’s plot or characters, the narrator tells us how weird it was for him to read…
“…a romance from which shall be excluded all effects drawn from the contrasts of wealth and poverty, education and ignorance, coarseness and refinement, high and low, all motives drawn from social pride and ambition, the desire of being richer or the fear of being poorer… a romance in which there should, indeed, be love galore, but love unfettered by artificial barriers created by differences of station or possessions, owning no other law but that of the heart.”
As you might’ve guessed, Bellamy’s is one of those utopias where nobody goes hungry but nobody’s obscenely wealthy. That’s ’cause everybody works for one employer (a strict-yet-benevolent government “Industrial Army”) for the same wage. (Physical labor and other unpopular jobs are made to be as attractive as cushy office posts, by offering shorter hours or unspecified prestige perks)
It was a popular fantasy at the time it was written. Many of Bellamy’s readers had become baffled by the rapidly-changing industrial scene and its massive social consequences–which by 1888 had already included urbanization, telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, monopolies and cartels running key industries, the mass immigration of low-paid laborers from such places as Germany and China, the lonely-guy culture of single-male immigrant workers (hookers, saloons, gambling), tenement housing, coal-smoke pollution, nationally advertised brand-name products, and the first large-scale labor strikes.
To those dismayed by the 1880s present, an end-O-history future, a stable and prosaic future with no conflicts or worries, would seem mighty desirable.
TOMORROW: More on why Bellamy’s scheme wouldn’t work, why he and his readers thought it might, and lessons for muddling through the real century-switch.
LET’S TRY TO GET THIS STRAIGHT. A couple weeks ago, a teenage boy from the Seattle suburbs was hospitalized for severe injuries, following a backyard boxing match that got a little out of hand. News media immediately branded the incident as an obvious copycat of the movie Fight Club.
Then, a few days later, the mom of the injured boy revealed that he and most of the other kids involved in the bout hadn’t seen Fight Club, but had simply been attempting to emulate their real-life boxing heroes.
On the immediate level, it doesn’t matter whether the kid wanted to be Brad Pitt or Ali. It still got him a night in intensive care. On another level, it shows how today’s ever-more-tabloidy media are oh-so willing to exploit personal tragedies, and to believe and spread silly hype angles concerning these incidents.
But the differences go deeper.
Fight Club, based on a novel by Portland writer Chuck Palahniuk (a book described to me by one reader as “a novel clearly written to be made into a movie”), posits a present-day dystopia in which emasculated, office-cubicle-imprisoned, studly white guys have few options to reclaim themselves. Our antihero first sits in on other people’s self-help and 12-step groups, then falls in with a gang of white-collar nihilists who get their kicks in bare-knuckle extreme fighting. Then, the charismatic gang leader reveals himself to have loftier, even more violent ambitions. The “Club” adopts a Manson-esque agenda of generating random violence in order to cause a general state of chaos.
Thankfully, the real world isn’t in such a sorry state.
What the suburban teens were doing was undoubtedly just good old fashioned male bonding via competition. Something young males have done at least since the days of ancient Sparta. One of the boys landed a heavier punch than he’d intended to. But that sort of thing, alas, happens–just as boys can get hurt in more organized sport competitions.
For a good view of the positive values of bloodsport, check out the Canadian movie Les Boys. It’s not on video Stateside (I saw it on Cinemax), but the amiable hockey comedy was one of Canada’s top box-office draws in ’97 and has spawned two sequels.
It stars Marc Messier (no relation to real hockey star Mark Messier) as a middle-aged, small-town Quebec bar owner who leads an amateur hockey team. The minimal plot involves his gambling debt to a small-time hood, which leads to a game between Les Boys and a team of the hood’s hand-picked thugs with ownership of the bar at stake. The real attractions are the characters of Les Boys. They joke and banter, they check and fight, they shoot, they score.
More importantly, they live in a real community. One that recognizes the need for Boys’ Night Out. One that realizes testosteronic rages, when safely expressed in the proper context, might lead to permanent knee damage but also to enduring friendships, stronger families, and a personal pride (even in defeat) that can help one overcome the daily grind.
MONDAY: Can you tell me how to get–how to get to Coronation Street?
A pompous profile of the in-between generation that fails to mention punk rock, hiphop, zines, or any cultural artifacts more “indie” than Indiana Jones….
I’VE OFTEN LIKED to define “Northwest environmentalists” as the people who moved here in the ’80s, complaining about all the people who moved here in the ’90s.
Back before Puget Sound became cyber-boomtown, ex-Cali and Eastern rovers with dough would move up here hoping to Get Away From It All. Only they managed to bring “It All” with them, in the form of traffic congestion, inflated housing prices, dumb phony “regional cuisine” restaurants, and particularly increased wear-‘n’-tear on the hiking trails and X-C ski routes which, to them, symbolized temporary escape from the crush of humanity.
(I also like to say I do my part to keep our wilderness areas unspoiled by not going there.)
Anyhoo, all this is nothing new. Humans have always struggled to create what they hope will be ideal living environments, only to then dream of another realm where everything would be different somehow–more “natural,” more mystical, more magical, more heroic, less stressful, less humdrum.
Which brings me to today’s book–Escapism, by Univ. of Wisconsin geographer Yi-Fu Tuan.
In this slim but intellectually-rigorous volume, Tuan proclaims that “a human being is an animal who is congenitally indisposed to accept reality as it is.”
Therefore, to ridicule somebody’s ideas or visions as “fantasy,” “myth,” or “escapist” is more than insulting. It’s a denial of basic human nature, the nature that enabled our species to spend these past millennia steadily constructing more permanent and effective escapes from nature and its cruelties.
For one example, he offers the genre of landscape painting. Tuan asserts it only developed as European and Chinese civilizations got “advanced” enough that The Land was no longer seen as the all-powerful, dangerous, fickle element upon which humans totally depended; but instead as the relatively tamed, pastoral setting of a relatively stable existence.
For another example, here’s his quite rational argument against the E-droppers’ hyperbole about druggies somehow being the Next Stage of Human Evolution:
“Drugs that produce sensations of orgasmic power and visions of mystical intensity do not turn their consumers into better, more enlightened people. One reason why they do not–apart from the chemical damage they inflict on the human system–is [a] fixation on unique particulars at the expense of their weave and patter. From this we understand why artworks are superior to drugs in cleansing perception. Though they cannot produce amphetamine’s euphoria, they make up for it at an intellectual level by putting objects and events in context. They hint at, if not explicitly state, the relatedness–the larger pattern….”
As you might surmise, Tuan’s a generalist whose essaying goes pretty far afield, taking vague definitions of “escape” and “escapism” as a springboard for broad discussions of human nature. Such as this passage, with which many of the harassed-as-kids computer-nerd types out there might identify:
“The Navajo father commends thinking for its poewr to produce temporary stays against disorder. Many societies, however, recognize that thinking without some immediate, practical end in mind can cause unhappiness that, indeed, it is itself evidence of unhappiness. Happy people have no reason to think; they live rather than question living. To Inuits, thinking signifies either craziness or the strength to have independent views. Both qualities are antisocial and to be deplored…. “Even in modern America, thinking is suspect. It is something done by the idly curious or by discontented people; it is subversive of established values; it undermines communal coherence and promotes individualism. There is an element of truth in all these accusations. In an Updike novel, a working-class father thinks about his son reading. It makes him feel cut off from his son. ‘He doesn’t know why it makes him nervous to see the kid read. Like he’s plotting something. They say you should encourage it, reading, but they never say why.'”
“The Navajo father commends thinking for its poewr to produce temporary stays against disorder. Many societies, however, recognize that thinking without some immediate, practical end in mind can cause unhappiness that, indeed, it is itself evidence of unhappiness. Happy people have no reason to think; they live rather than question living. To Inuits, thinking signifies either craziness or the strength to have independent views. Both qualities are antisocial and to be deplored….
“Even in modern America, thinking is suspect. It is something done by the idly curious or by discontented people; it is subversive of established values; it undermines communal coherence and promotes individualism. There is an element of truth in all these accusations. In an Updike novel, a working-class father thinks about his son reading. It makes him feel cut off from his son. ‘He doesn’t know why it makes him nervous to see the kid read. Like he’s plotting something. They say you should encourage it, reading, but they never say why.'”
Thankfully, history’s had its share of ladies ‘n’ gents who’ve dared to break this taboo. Including Yi-Fu Tuan.
TOMORROW: Remember kids, Fight Club’s only a movie.
YESTERDAY, I looked at a book collecting “Postmodern American Fiction” and wondered when Western society was ever going to get over postmodernism and start being and/or doing something new.
If you think of “the modern era” as everything since the Renaissance and Francis Bacon, as many PoMo theorists do, then you might be a little less impatient than me.
The modern era, by this definition, has gone on so long that its failings and fissures are all-too-evident to the PoMo skeptic–but has also become so entrenched that the good postmodernist can’t think of a thing to do except ironically kvetch about it.
But if you think of “the modern era” as essentially the 20th century, as I do (maybe we could appease all factions by calling the electricity-and-motorized-transport age “late modern”), then there might be a little hope.
As seen in the handy comparison charts on some college-course websites, the mostly-reactive tenets of the various substrains of PoMo thought do contain, here and there, a few hints of prescriptions for a more positive-minded future. Not many, but at least a few.
And it’s fairly clear to most anyone that, due to several interrelated factors (computers and other advanced communications electronics, Global Business, ever-bifurcating subcultures, socialism’s crash-‘n’-burn, enviro-awareness, feminism, religious revivalism, STDs, indie-pop, etc. etc.), that the late-late-modern dream of a post-WWII utopia where everybody would rationally coexist in one homogenous society, under the benevolent guidance of the Best ‘n’ the Brightest, is pretty much shot.
So, the big End-O-Millennium question is, What Next?
In occasional pieces over the next few weeks, I’ll try to forge a guess.
To start, it’s fairly clear the old late-modernism, in both aesthetics and philosophy, was predicated upon early-to-mid-century advances in metallurgy, streamlining, communications technology, etc. Advances that led to air travel (and the bombing of Hiroshima), broadcasting (and the media monopoly), small-press publishing (and Holocaust-revisionist tracts), personal transportation (and gridlock), declining death rates (and soaring populations), etc.
Postmodernism, I’ve posited above, was and is a state of mind predicated upon people having gotten tired of those onetime “advances” and their eventually-evident limitations.
But can there be an era after the postmodern or late-modern? I say yes, and it’s already showing up.
Some gals ‘n’ guys are being paid small fortunes to tell people with money what they want to hear–that the new era will be especially beneficial to persons such as these pundits’ audiences. It’s a revolution, but merely a “revolution in business,” that has no chance to ever become a revolution against business.
As I’ll explain in tomorrow’s installment, I’m less sure about that.
TOMORROW: Why George Gilder’s future won’t quite happen, if we’re lucky.
I recently spent a few days pretty much shut-in by the painful recovery from extreme oral surgery.
The extended couch-time gave me a chance to finally finish Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology.
It’s 632 pages of tiny type. Except for the theoretical-essay collection at the end, none of it’s horrible. Many of the pieces are, indeed, good. A few would even qualify for my own highest honorific, Great Kickass Writing.
(Among them: The piece of Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations, Sherman Alexie’s Captivity, Tim O’Brien’s How to Tell a True War Story, and pieces of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee and Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions.)
But, of course, the whole project of a postmodern anthology brings one to ask what the hell “postmodern” is anymore (besides an already-obsolete term MTV once used to use to announce videos by The The or New Order).
Some of the pieces do seem to take a more-or-less literal interpretation of the adjective–i.e., they express a culture in which “modernity” has grown old and stale but in which nothing’s come up to replace it.
That’s the world of endless air-quotes, where everything’s an ironic insincerity. The world of Douglas Coupland, for instance. A literary world very similar to the nihilism of the Sex Pistols (who, in turn, were heavily influenced by group svengali Malcolm McLaren’s time with the PoMo ideologues of the French Situationist movement).
A second category of stories in the collection attempt to imagine a world beyond the world beyond the modern. Where modernism sought a bright, clean, shiny future (as seen in a mid-century literature of clean writing about rational decision-makers) and postmodernism saw the limitations of that future, some of these folks (such as William Gibson) try to celebrate the coming of a decentered, decentralized, chaos-theory society. (Something similar to the society I’ve been celebrating on this site.)
But in a chaos culture, there will always be those who would simply exchange the old hierarchical order for a new one. That’s what you get with the likes of local writer Joanna Russ, who (in an excerpt from her novel The Female Man) imagines a sci-fi alternate dimension in which everything’s darned-near perfect because the whole population is not only composed exclusively of women, but of women who share a certain sensibility.
Like most utopians, Russ’s ideal society consists pretty much solely of people exactly like herself. In this regard, she’s quite modern, or at least pre-postmodern. Her fantasy is of little use toward helping real-world folk figure out how to live among hundreds of ethnicities, dozens of gender-role variants, and thousands of conflicting worldviews.
As the book’s website notes, this collection was at least partly meant as a college reader. Certainly some of the closing essays belong strictly within campus grounds–they’ve got that peculiar combination of borderline-incomprehensible communications-theory lingo and academic-left sanctimony that implies another dreamed utopian future, the very old-modern wish for a dictatorship of the academics.
But then again, the name “Postmodern” implies that we have only yesterday’s modernism (with its utopian dreams of well-ordered civility and certainty under one centralized authority system or another) to either long for or to scoff at, without any new worldview to replace it.
I like to think we can learn to become “post-” that by now.
TOMORROW: After PoMo, then what?
IN OTHER NEWS: It’s been a fast news week in my town, climaxing with the potential beginning-O-the-end of the century’s last major empire….
IN STILL OTHER NEWS: …But it’s a great week for us adopted fans of college football’s formerly most luckless team; now eligible for its first bowl game since ’65 (before college teams started using separate offensive and defensive squads). Remember: Once a Beaver, Always a Beaver!
TODAY’S AN “OFF-OFF-YEAR” ELECTION, the kind where neither Presidents, Congresspeople, nor state legislators stand up for the picking.
My town holds its big municipal elections during odd-numbered years, so as to give its own politicians the spotlight.
And, as it happens, the Talk-Radio Right has one of its “across-the-board tax cut” schemes on the ballot, in the form of a state initiative.
And, as it also happens, the state initiative and the Seattle City Council elections both turn out to involve appeals to “We The People” against the common enemy of both rightish “populists” and leftish “progressives”–the corporate middle-of-the-road.
The eternally-lovable Jim Hightower likes to say there’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos. But so far, the center has managed to hold, at least in segments of the American system–albeit as a center that’s drifted steadily rightward.
The Religious Right has had fewer successes in its attempts at “morals” legislation in recent years; the prog-left has been equally unsuccessful at reforming health care or getting working folks a fairer share of the economic boom.
Instead, big business and its wholly-owned politicians have pretty much had a free run in the U.S. Executive Branch, in the Federal Reserve System, and in many state and local jurisdictions. All the talk in the post-Reagan era about new paradigms or the end-of-politics-as-we-know it has, thus far, still found the entrenched old-line powers-that-be still being.
That doesn’t mean they’re not running scared, at least around these parts.
Seattle news media are chock full of heavy-handed wrangling over the potential devastating effects of Initiative 695, which would replace graduated-rate motor vehicle taxes with a flat $30 fee–and would impose tuff referenda requirements any time the Washington legislature wanted to add any new revenue source.
As phony-populist “across the board” tax cuts go, this is a particularly clever fraud. It cuts just enough from average folks’ car taxes to seem like a sensible bargain to average voters. But it cuts hundreds or even thousands from what the big boys pay for their Lamborghini SUVs.
And the funds it cuts from include funds targeted for transportation (including the new regional light-rail scheme as well as road-fixing) and those used by the state to prop up county governments.
I-695’s so extreme, the business lobby loathes it. It would potentially cripple some of the basic infrastructure business needs to get its goods trucked around, and the referendum part would make it damn difficult for the state to create new business-subsidy plans, like those used for the new baseball and football stadia.
But the Washington State Republican leadership felt it needed the talk-radio gang’s rabblerousing capabilities more than business’s patronage, and endorsed 695. No matter what happens in today’s vote, a possibly permanent rift has been created between the Rabid Right and the corporate powers who used to be its chief beneficiaries.
Meanwhile, five of the nine Seattle City Council seats are for grabs (all are citywide races).
In four of these contests, self-styled “progressive” candidates (Curt Firestone, Judy Nicastro, Charlie Chong, and incumbent Peter Steinbrueck) not only won their primaries but won by big enough margins that they’re threatening, with fellow prog-candidate Dawn Mason and incumbent prog Nick Licata (whose re-election bid comes in the next half-cycle), to form a majority coalition that could push for renters’ rights, slow the pace of gentrification, and block new subsidies for corporate-backed development plans.
And oh yeah–they also just might, if given half the chance, officially call BS on city attorney Mark Sidran’s “civility” laws, a systematic war on poor people, black people, young people, and anybody else who doesn’t fit the downtown business establishment’s upscale-boomer target market.
So some members of Sidran’s upscale fan base, led by a Microsoft executive (as if those guys knew a damn thing about “civility”), are spending “soft money” on behalf of the progs’ opponents.
In a municipal system traditionally run by corporate-Democrat machine politics, we’ve got a real, essentially partisan, race here. Should be fun.
TOMORROW: A self-styled “alternative” magazine whines about not getting the opportunity to sell out to big advertisers.
JUST OVER A WEEK AGO, I attended a reception for a specially-commissioned set of works by ten top contemporary artists.
All the artists had to start with the same object and paint or otherwise decorate it to their tastes.
The objects of beauty: Five-foot-tall fiberglass coffee mugs.
It was a promo piece for Millstone Coffee, the Everett, WA-founded, value-priced, supermarket gourmet-coffee operation that was bought a couple years back by none other than Procter & Gamble, the conglomerate ruthlessly fictionalized in Richard Powers’s novel Gain.
P&G’s been running national TV spots touting Millstone as the real coffee lover’s alternative to “that leading specialty-coffee chain,” alleging that other company’s more interested in selling T-shirts (i.e., promoting its brand name) than in serving up the finest quality java.
That’s a mighty allegation to be made by P&G, which practically invented brand-name marketing early in this century.
But anyhoo, they’re trying to emphasize that real-coffee-lovers image by test marketing a line of even gourmet-er beans, “Millstone Exotics.” That’s where the artists came in.
They include several whose work I’ve followed for some time–Parris Broderick, Meghan Trainor, and Shawn Wolfe.
Their colorfully-decorated big mugs, to be trucked around to public outdoor viewing spaces in the cities where Millstone Exotics will initially be marketed (Seattle, Portland, and Spokane), were meant by the company to convey a new image for the new higher-end product line; as something even fancy-schmancier than the stuff found in the coffee-store chains.
(Even though Millstone is now made at P&G’s existing coffee plants as well as its original Everett facility, and is shipped to supermarkets by the same distribution infrastructure that brings you Tide, Tampax, Iams pet foods, and diet snacks made with Olestra.)
Anyhoo (again), the artists at the reception expressed no public qualms about the project (many have done commercially-commissioned work before); not even for a company traditionally known for less than avant-garde cultural visions. And, goodness knows, in today’s art climate they could certainly use the income.
I have just one beef about the project. Because the giant cups were devised for outdoor display during the winter, they were molded with sealed tops. They can’t be reused (without a lot of hacksawing) as something an exotic dancer could jump out from.
Not even for the old “Won’t you join me in a cup of coffee?” gag.
IN OTHER NEWS: Some background reading about the fashion industry’s “friends” in Saipan.
TOMORROW: Another possible way to restore contemporary art’s place in urban society.
THINGS OF BEAUTY: The current issue of the architecture mag Arcade carries the cover headline, “So There Are A Lot of Female Public Artists. So What?”
The short title essay, by Carolyn Law (not yet available online as of this writing), attempts to define a universal feminine aesthetic behind the success of certain women in the realm of government-commissioned sculpture and environmental-art pieces. A philosophy that would link women’s historic role in influencing the look of the home, the private built-environment, and many women’s current careers in influencing the public built-environment.
Law further believes (citing Carol Gilligan’s book In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development) in a universal female point of view.
“Women,” as Law paraphrases Gilligan, “tend to define the world through an ethic of caring, take into account circumstances and relationships in our consideration of events, and think of responsibility as a response to diverse considerations rather than a limiting action defined by rules and beliefs….
“As we work in the larger community of neighborhoods, towns, and cities, the potential exists for advancing a sense of meaning and living that is grounded in a complex sense of relationships, a recognition of the need for a flowing connection, less bounded by a hierarchy of rules and beliefs. I believe that this perspective can lead us to a more creative, more cooperative mode of life.”
I’d offer an additional, less ideological reason for the achievements of some of the artists profiled in the Arcade issue’s other articles (Sheila Klein, Norie Sato, Linda Beaumont, Elizabeth Connor, Beliz Brother, et al.).
Artists whose work isn’t really very much alike, except in its shared sensibility of reassurance and emotional safety–something the buyers of public art (always justifiably paranoid of news-media “You Paid For THIS?” pieces and of censorious conservatives) like a lot.
My theory: Commercial-gallery art is run by a business aesthetic of rugged individualism and PR hype.
Public art is bought and sold by bureaucracies, in committee meetings–a realm North American women have historically felt comfortable in (c.f. school boards, church planning committees, ladies’ aid societies, et al.).
Women in other careers could study these traditional areas of strength, to help organize more female-friendly structures in their own lines of work.
This goes beyond early-’80s “networking” buzzwords.
It also shouldn’t be construed into a belief that everything in every social institution would be automatically better if “Women” were ruling them (no specific ones, just generic “Women”).
For one thing, even the most officially “progressive” committee- or collective-style organizations can degenerate into quite hierarchical, procedure-laden entities, or into dictatorships of the bullheaded. Certainly, anyone who’s been involved with a public-art bureaucracy can tell a few horror stories about its internal politics and those participants (M or F) who exploit and abuse it.
We’ll close this with remarks elsewhere in the Arcade issue by Beliz Brother:
“I make sculptures that are components of a larger spatial experience, rather than isolated elements…. I develop public art projects that respond to civic need, to a specific space, to the human condition…. Is this gender specific?”
IN OTHER NEWS: Twenty years ago, my then-UW Daily colleague and now unemployed TV raconteur John Keister wrote a mock proposal for “Homosexual Cliff Notes”–study guides what would help you write a guaranteed-“A” essay proving every major character in every major literary work was really gay. Now, someone appears to have actually written such a guide, only covering composers, musicians, and singers.
WORD-O-THE-DAY: “Gazumping.”
TOMORROW: “Alternative” college radio, sold out or rescued?
LAST FRIDAY, we discussed Susan Faludi’s book Stiffed, in which she claims that there’s no universal male conspiracy against women and that the socio-emotional problems faced by many current males are due neither to any supposed innate male evility nor to feminist ball-busters, but rather to a social and economic system that values money and power, and which devalues the personal worth of individuals of all genders.
Still, it’s one thing for a female author of impeccible feminist credentials to speak out in sympathy toward men.
It might be even more provocative for a male to proclaim male equality–not superiority, but equality.
That’s what illustrator/performance artist Douglas Davis did recently in two essays for the New York Press, “The Wick vs. the Prick: Heterophobia and the Gender Wars” and “Phallus Rising: Or, the Prisoner of Joy.” (The original pieces are no longer on the paper’s site (it maintains only its current issue on its site), but Davis has put it up somewhere on the “Hyper Texts” section of his own site and also has a forum site based on some of the ideas in them.)
Some of his ideas:
We need yang as much as yin; masculine energy can be a force for good; it’s perfectly OK to be a male (or a female who actually likes males); and, if we play our cards right, the next century could lead toward a “Wild Future” in which we get beyond such superficial arguments and instead learn to celebrate our selves and our others’ selves–female, male, straight, gay, bi, wild, mild, and everything else.
Some of my takes on these ideas:
I’m just old enough (42) to have discovered sex at the exact same time the mass media did. I didn’t get the valuable lesson that if the media were lying to me about sex they must be lying to me about other topics. Nor did I grow up in an America where hardcore video was easily borrowable from your next-door-neighbor’s parents’ basement.
Early-’90s style hardcore porn turns me off, as do the Brit-inspired “bloke magazines” such as Maxim. Both are predicated on a soulless, brainless, heartless stereotype of male heterosexual desire; a stereotype ultimately not far from that of certain sexist female essayists.
Allegedly “sex positive” ideologies that try to limit the range of permissible nongay sexual behavior to masturbation, chaste S/M, and media-mediated fantasies only make things worse. They reinforce the ultimate loneliness of the late-modern condition. They promote the orgasm as just another consumer activity, no more life-changing or world-changing than a really good bottle of wine.
Yes, there will be a Wild Future. But not quite the way the “dildonics” advocates proposed it seven or eight years back. Rather, it will be a celebration of all sexualities (male as well as female; hetero as well as gay; “Total Woman” Christians as well as leather-Goth-neopagans). At its center will be the central act of biological existence, M/F coitus. In a post-mass world, all the countless other sex expressions (lesbian, gay, transgender, assorted fetishes and kinks) will continue to blossom; but the central act will remain the figurative maypole around which all these other variants dance their joyous dances, sometimes glancing back at the maypole and sometimes not.
I oppose the dichotomy that claims there can only be two kinds of nongay male sexuality: evil and suppressed. We must promote positive notions of masculinity, neither brutal nor emasculated, neither dominant nor submissive, not against women but with women.
TOMORROW: A few more old buildings and their hidden tales.
