Accismus

Venice has its first ever female gondolier!

Way back in college, when I visited Venice during my summer abroad in Italy, I asked my gondolier if there were any women gondoliers, and he laughed at me, and explained that, though there are often women who try out to be gondoliers, it’s not really a job they can do, because it takes so much upper body strength to shunt the gondolas under the bridges and so forth, and none of them are ever able to pass the tests. Since then, I’ve frequently made jokes about being an aspiring gondolier – I don’t know why, but the conversation just stuck in my head.

Way to go, Boscolo! This makes me really happy. (Even though Venice is sinking, so it’ll soon be a moot point anyway.)

Apparently, they’re making a movie out of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (starring Keira Knightley). If you haven’t read it, it’s about a group of clones in Britain bred to be harvested for organs. The clones make up a specific social class, and the appropriate ways in which they are and are not permitted to interact in British society is eerily familiar to, well, any regular class division. Which leads this blogger to the observation that:

. . . it’s the way the British class system works—it’s not got much to do with money, nothing stops people from going where they don’t belong except their sense that it isn’t where they belong. This is the inexorable pressure that keeps Ishiguro’s clones where they belong, and it’s a lot scarier than barbed wire and dogs.

And this blogger, responding to that one, remarks:

Living in the US is more interesting still. The Irish experience – a small country where you very nearly know everyone, and everyone very nearly knows you (or at least, can place your family and mutual connections within a few minutes of starting to talk to you – Kieran had a post on this years ago) is probably quite foreign to most Americans. And getting away from it is liberating – it’s nice to live in a place where nobody knows about your background, and nobody would care if they did know.

Wh-what?!?!

Now, we may not have India’s caste system or Britain’s social shame, but class is indeed around in America. From the ancient yet still persisting rigid divisions of the Old South (Wilkes’s (old money upper), O’Hara’s (new money land-owning ascendant), Yankees (new money working class), Slattery’s (white trash), black people (slaves); and see also: Atticus attempting to explain to Scout why her friendliness to Walter Cunningham must be tinged with condescension in order to be truly appropriate) to the stratification of neighborhoods in Manhattan and Chicago (which I won’t go into), class has been alive and well everywhere I’ve lived. And from The Official Preppy Handbook to Stuff White People Like, the curious trappings and poses of class have always made for entertaining tongue-in-cheek social criticism. And now we have The Return of the Player by Michael Tolkin, reviewed here in The Atlantic by Sandra Tsing Loh:

Fussell’s topmost denizens were “out of sight” in hilltop manses at the end of long, curving driveways. The billionaires in Michael Tolkin’s hilariously mordant The Return of the Player are even farther out, prow-jousting at sea in their satellite-technology-equipped yachts. Indeed, this novel is such a teeth-gnashingly precise class almanac, that Tolkin should surely replace Tom Wolfe as our modern-day high-society-anxiety chronicler (at least of the West Coast variety).

Successful artists and writers (although not dancers or actors, and musicians only sometimes) have always been curiously exempt from social class rankings, haven’t they? According to Loh’s article, a group of X individuals (basically, whatever current generation of the upper-middle class just graduated from college) are the new classless. . . which is interesting, since it used to be that real artists could escape class by virtue of their accomplishments, and now apparently, pseudo-artists escape class by virtue of their postures.

The first 3/4’s of Loh’s article are very funny, but she spends the last 1/4 mocking some strawman group of young snobs that she seems to feel are having way more fun than she is and deserve a good kick in the pants. As always, my living in New York might skew my perspective, but the members of the “X” group I know have always already been living just like Loh predicts they will be forced to since the downturn. And incidentally, among the many contributing causes to the economic crash, I do not think that the “prized self-­expression and . . . embrace of personal choice” of Xers is even slightly responsible for “the collapse of capitalism.” Come on. My generation is hardly the first to have a little fun before it settled down to reproducing.

According to Richard Florida, there are three basic classes these days: working, service and creative. Florida studies the amount of each class in various countries to determine what affect stratification has on economic output, technological innovation, entrepreneurship and happiness. I won’t keep you in suspense: you’ll surely be shocked to hear that the “creative class” sweeps every category. Oddly, my own social class – the “bystanding class” – is not addressed.

Of course, one significant marker of social class is beginning to dissolve: we are all pretty much wearing jeans and Ts now, regardless of age, occupation or social station. This is absolutely horrifying to cranky old men like George Will, who now have no easy way to tell who’s important enough for them to pay attention to:

Denim is the carefully calculated costume of people eager to communicate indifference to appearances. But the appearances that people choose to present in public are cues from which we make inferences about their maturity and respect for those to whom they are presenting themselves.

Aw! If everyone wears jeans, how can George Will tell if people are presenting themselves to him with respect or with impudence? Just be glad they’re still presenting at all, George, that’s all I can say.

Perhaps we’ll all burst forth Samuel Becketts one day:

En attendant, Beckett writes self-­admittedly “pestilential” letters about waiting. In Dublin, he records the “fruitless retreat from Monday to Friday and then the degrading cotton wool interpolation of the weekend” and acknowledges that he’s “more than ever frightened by the prospect of effort, initiative & even the little self-assertion of getting about from one place to another.” In London, he sleeps “more and more — 10 hours at a stretch. I wish it were 20.” In Paris, he is “paralyzed in listlessness” and has “done nothing.”

Certainly describes my year.

Also this:

Laid upon this bare outline, in the course of the letters, is a palimpsest of all the other things that Beckett could have done, or sought to do, but never did. He put in for lectureships at Cape Town and Milan, though with little expectation, or even hope, of success. “Now that I have assembled testimonials,” he wrote of the South African plan, in 1937, “I am in a position to abstain from applying.”

Please excuse this little rant about cheek kissing. I am very physical-contact-avoidant. I do not like to be hugged, squeezed, patted or kissed by anyone other than immediate family members or people I am involved with romantically. As an attractive young woman, however, I am subject to a lot of poking and prodding, although, given my general thorniness and seriousness, I probably get a lot less of it than most young women.

I absolutely hate it. I used to rudely rebuff all physical contact, but as I got older, I began to be more sensitive to intent, and gradually grew to tolerate pyramid-shaped hugs of welcome and farewell from friends both close and casual. I still didn’t like it. But I put up with it.

Then, the cheek kissing began. I don’t know if it was an age thing, or a geographic location thing, or a general trend, but it seemed to start up all at once, and now it’s ubiquitous, and I Fucking HATE it! I don’t want to be kissed! And now, horror of horrors, it’s verging into actual, close-mouthed kissing! I have experienced this once or twice, and it’s just awful. I don’t even want to be hugged! Why can’t people respect that without my having to be rude? Why is it assumed that I’m down with being physically touched? Why can’t we just make warm eye contact, which frankly, in my opinion, is more than enough intimacy to be going forward with?

You know, I understand wanting a bit of physical contact to demonstrate affection and personal connection, to distinguish friends who approve of each other from merely tolerated professional acquaintances. And I think that the best form of physical connection is…a solid, gripping squeeze on the upper arm. Seriously. It’s distant, but warm; it enables you to make eye contact; it’s familiar, but not overly so; it’s physical, but not romantic. It doesn’t involve lips, or breasts squashing against each other awkwardly, or chins bashing into each other. You can vary it in intensity and duration according to occasion/level of sentiment to be expressed. It’s perfect.

Can we somehow usher in the upper arm squeeze as the new friendly hello-and-goodbye physical gesture? I’m going to start doing it; hopefully, it will catch on.

I just read Z.Z. Packer’s short story, “The Ant of the Self,” and want to quote the following exchange, in which some old guys in a bar ask the young male protagonist why he says he felt ‘relieved’ to attend the Million Man March:

I try to think. ‘I don’t know. I’m the only black kid in my class. Like a fucking mascot or something,’ I say, surprised that I said the f-word out loud, but shaking my head as though I said words like that every day. ‘I just get tired of it. You skip it for a day and it feels like a vacation. That’s why I was glad.’

There’s a round of nodding. Not sympathy, just acknowledgment.

‘Man,’ the guy with the goiter says, ‘I’m happy to hear that. You got the luxury of feeling tired. Back in the day, before you were born, couldn’t that type of shit happen.’

He seems to be saying less than he means, and looks at me, his eyes piercing, his goiter looking like he’s swallowed a lightbulb. ‘We the ones fought for you to be in school with the white folks.’ He looks behind him, as if checking if any white people are around, though that’s about as likely as Ray Bivens Jr. going sober. He lowers his voice so that he sounds almost kind. ‘We sent you to go spy on them. See how the hell those white folks make all that money! Now you talking ’bout a vacation!’

The man with the goiter is right, of course, but I think the boy is right, too. Things are always better than they used to be, and things can always be better. It seems like most people get to a certain age, and expect everything to stop where it is. They think the world is done, and get aggravated that younger people still aren’t happy. It’s like they expect the new generation to just sit around ruminating on the great work the previous generation accomplished. But each generation has its own work to do.

People are never going to stop moving, pushing forward, and wanting more and better. Society is not perfectible, so we’ll always have something to work on, and work we should. And if somehow society did manage to perfect itself, well, we’d probably have to fuck it up again to give everyone something to do. It’s the job of young people to zero in on ways in which our society is falling short, and pick at it non-stop.

Of course, I don’t myself work for change in any way. But I think everybody else ought to. I’m too busy complaining.

Although what some might call ‘complaining,’ I like to think of as ‘calling a spade a spade.’ And really, as bad a rep as complaining gets, change doesn’t entirely come from revolutions (and revolutions can’t be called out of nothing). Change mostly comes from hard work, but on a smaller scale, it also comes from nagging, bitching and whining. Change comes from being humorless. Change comes from pointing out a shortcoming over and over and over again, until nobody can ignore it. We all hate whiners, but where people won’t give money or volunteer time, they will whine and bitch and moan at everyone around them. And eventually, like water dripping on stone, that constant nagging shapes the thing it chafes against. The simplest example I can think of is lazy, hateful humor, based on stupid stereotypes. This stuff used to kill (at unmixed parties), because it didn’t require a genius to think up or understand. But then people started whining about it, saying it was hateful and not funny. It took a long time, but now those jokes fall flat as farts, so no one tells them anymore.

Which brings me to this Clint Eastwood (him again?) quote (linked to by Ann Althouse):

“You can only tell them today with one hand over your mouth otherwise you will be insulted as a racist. I find that ridiculous. In those earlier days every friendly clique had a ‘Sam the Jew’ or ‘José the Mexican’ – but we didn’t think anything of it or have a racist thought. It was normal that we made jokes based on our nationality or ethnicity. That was never a problem. I don’t want to be politically correct. We’re all spending too much time and energy trying to be politically correct about everything.”

Well, but, you know who also wouldn’t find ‘Jose the Mexican’ jokes particularly funny (other than Mexicans)? The ancient Greeks. Or Eskimo. Or 19th century Brits. Jokes are only funny insofar as they are timely. And these old race-based gems don’t kill anymore because, first of all, they’re tired, and second of all, they no longer reflect most people’s reality. I know a lot of people who are Jewish or Hispanic, but I don’t think of that as somehow hilariously noteworthy, or the central thing about them. If there’s more than one Jewish person in your circle, how do you decide which one gets known as “the Jew”? A “Jose the Mexican” joke depends on Jose being the only Mexican you know. I think these “jokes” depend on an unfamiliarity that no longer exists. Nowadays, it’s unlikely that everybody at your party will look exactly like you.

But people who still tell these jokes think that secretly, everybody thinks they’re hilarious; it’s just that everyone’s too scared to laugh. Riiiiiiight.

You know who are never P.C.? Comics. Sure, on TV and in movies, everybody has a whole list of topics they can’t touch to avoid alienating any one of dozens of advertising sponsors, but if you go to live comedy clubs, you’ll hear all sorts of jokes about every race, ethnicity, social group and class. But (some of) these jokes are funny, because they are relevant, and they reflect a reality of how people are really living now, and the assumptions that people make about each other. If the jokes are smart and hit home, people laugh.

At a certain point, if everyone has stopped laughing at your ‘Jose the Mexican’ joke, you have to blame the joke. Not the crowd.

Why do I stir my coffee counterclockwise? Is this more effective, or merely habit? Is it perhaps offensive + off-putting to others? Do not stir coffee counterclockwise, unless certain culture is tolerant of same.

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Oh, how rapturously, tremendously, monumentally do I adore Gide! I want to wrap Gide around myself + go running through the streets! I want to wear Gide around as a hat! I want to lick every page of Gide, to absorb it through my pores, to drink it like water! I want to bathe myself in Gide. Which reminds me: bathe daily.

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Was lying in bed telling H. how much I desired to possess her utterly. Not sure what she said in response, as I was busy contemplating how pretentious my use of word “utterly.” Do not use “utterly” in intimate confessions, as it sounds premeditated + insincere. At any rate, suppose H. did not feel same, as I am now writing this, rather than possessing her utterly. Wait, did she go home? …Shit.

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Had baby.

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Have discovered Kafka! Oh, bless! A thousand, shuddering, deep, rapturous cries of joy spring from my soul! How did I live + breathe + eat before I knew of this felicity? From now on, it’s all Kafka, all the time.

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Bathe every other day.

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I do not feel X. with my son, as much as with H. Not at all X. with Philip. A little bit X. with our current congressional representative. X. with coworker Y. definitely, but only on Tuesdays. Not so much X. with anyone on the weekends…is this because of weekends, or because of X.?

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It seems that a certain pore on my right cheek is slightly larger than those around it. Is this something that can be corrected without great trouble or expense? Look into it.

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Today, created self, destroyed self, + created self again, as usual. Yesterday not so productive – did not create self so much as merely tinker with aspects of self. Philip walked in while tinkering with self. Embarrassed.

After reading the above, considered erasing. But then, reconsidered. I ought to be honest with myself, even (or especially?) in aspects of myself I would rather were not so. Don’t be embarrassed of revealing self in front of Philip, who, after all, loves me. And don’t be embarrassed of admitting (to self or [especially?] in print) own embarrassment about embarrassment, or, for that matter, of admitting embarrassment about embarrassment over own embarrassment.

Considered erasing above, as conclusion drawn seems to negate necessity of initial observation. Reconsidered. All is valid. Do not waste time on such circuitous contemplation in future.

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Bathe, Susan. Bathe. Damn it, how hard is this to remember?!

In matters of grooming and dress, I am sometimes stylish, but rarely fashionable. I hope the same holds true for my creative output, but unfortunately, I fear the opposite is frequently the case for my ideas.

As this article points out:

There is a vast gap between fashion and style. Fashion is about clothes and their relationship to the moment. Style is about you and your relationship to yourself.

And

Style is also one part personality: spirit, verve, attitude, wit, inventiveness. It demands the desire and confidence to express whatever mood one wishes. Such variability is not only necessary but a reflection of a person’s unique complexity as a human being. People want to be themselves and to be seen as themselves. In order to work, style must reflect the real self, the character and personality of the individual; anything less appears to be a costume.

As anyone who’s ever tried to wear something too advanced for them knows, you can’t fake style that doesn’t belong to you. Nothing looks sillier than a person dressed in a way that makes them self-conscious and uncomfortable. I knew early on that I would not do well in outfits that needed to be managed, and in shoes that required an adjustment in pace. I might look silly wearing flip-flops with a cocktail dress, but believe me, I look far stupider trying to mince around in heels like I mean it.

Having recently moved into a new apartment, I’ve been setting up my room, and it occurred to me that, with each move over the years, the way I design my living and working space has more and more conformed to a certain, specific style, regardless of the differences in the actual rooms themselves (which differences have been vast). I like clean surfaces, a good deal of floor space, blues and greens, and stacks of things. I do not like anything small, decorative or incidental. I don’t have knick-knacks, or pictures on the walls.  There is almost nothing in my room that doesn’t have a daily, utilitarian purpose. It’s fascist-chic.  But at the same time, I do choose my useful objects with aesthetic qualities in mind.

Here’s designer Nikolay Saveliev (via Kottke):

 I like the idea of a consolidated aesthetic totality; what you make looks like what you listen to, sounds like what you wear, and speaks like what you believe in. In simpler terms, my girlfriend might look like she’s in a band I’d listen to, my haircut looks like it belongs in the chair I’m sitting in, and the work I’m designing might be written about in a book that I would read. Even my cat has to figure in there somehow. It’s a meticulous thing to maintain, but probably comes from the fact that I’ve discovered mostly everything through music, whether it’s ideologies, writers, artists, designers, cultures, subcultures, or other music. So it’s easy to tie things back into your work, as long as you keep your eyes and ears open, and maintain a healthy dose of critical thought.

Um, okay.  But actually, I think that many of us structure our lives this way to some extent, without being fully conscious of it. You design a personality in the same way you design your look. You pick and choose your political and religious philosophies. Choosing not to decorate a room can be as much a nod to one’s style as decorating it. I design my eating habits to match whatever goals I’m working on at any given time. I live in Williamsburg, land of dressing the part: you can’t be a starving artist if you look flush and fed, so everyone wears rags that accentuate their willful anorexia. Their slight waistlines reflect their genius (possibly in a more literal way than they’d prefer).

One big benefit to creating and adhering to a fully defined personal style is that it helps us easily weed through the massive amount of options that are available to us in every respect. Walking into a department store can be a dizzying horror of over-stimulation . . . unless you know you only wear black shift dresses, or only wear certain labels, or have a system whereby you purchase one kicky garment per month for the precise amount left over after you’ve met your expenses. Picking a book can be overwhelming, unless you narrow your interests to World War II and Catherine the Great, or vow never to read literature by contemporary authors, or only read comedies or mysteries. Style works as a sorting mechanism. If someone refuses to read Harry Potter no matter how much you assure them they’ll love it if they just give it a chance, it’s because it’s not a part of their self-defined style. It doesn’t fit.  Maybe they’ve decided they don’t do children’s literature, or fantasies, or anything that everybody’s currently into, and if they admit the possibility of liking this one exception, they have to alter their entire criteria, and that’s a whole big thing. 

We all enjoy constant and easy access to such an abundance of information and culture now. The challenge today is choosing what to consume and what to skip. All Them often say that the population is getting stupider, but I think the opposite is true, and, as this (cheering, if long) article proposes, the level of the dialogue has really gone up:

In most rich countries, the old distinction between high and popular culture is breaking down. . . . Millions more people are going to museums, literary festivals and operas; millions more watch demanding television programmes or download serious-minded podcasts. Not all these activities count as mind-stretching, of course. Some are downright fluffy. But, says Donna Renney, the chief executive of the Cheltenham Festivals, audiences increasingly want “the buzz you get from working that little bit harder”. This is a dramatic yet often unrecognised development. “When people talk and write about culture,” says Ira Glass, the creator of the riveting public-radio show “This American Life”, “it’s apocalyptic. We tell ourselves that everything is in bad shape. But the opposite is true. There’s an abundance of really interesting things going on all around us.”

I read an article (somewhere, some time ago..in The New Yorker, maybe?) that discussed how much more sophisticated television shows have gotten. Sure, there are a number of dumb ones, and quite a lot of formulaic ones, as well, but shows such as The Sopranos, Lost, Deadwood, etc. are unprecedented in their complexity, requiring viewers to retain and recall a great number of fully-developed characters enacting multiple storylines, which proceed at differing paces and occasionally overlap and inform each other in complicated ways.

I don’t know why it’s so often said that the web is making people stupider. I can hardly see how people in general can help but grow more and more sophisticated as we all have greater and greater exposure to…well, everything.

Sort of.

But then again, perhaps we’re all generalists, dabblers and fakes. Whereas there used to (by which I mean, you know, back then) be fewer intellectuals (by which I mean people who spent a good deal of their time reading, thinking and writing), those intellectuals really dug in. They were all equally familiar with an agreed-upon canon, they had classical educations. Maybe now there are more people who are somewhat interested and a little bit knowledgeable about a great many things, but the standards of deep and specific scholarship have declined, along with the number of serious scholars. Or not – I’m not basing any of this on actual data.

Here’s one challenge to the above article:

Yes, I believe that society is consuming more high culture, but why? Is it because we desire to learn, or because we want to appear that we’ve learned-that we’re cultured, intelligent, and eclectic? Since, particularly due the hipster oeuvre, intelligence is the new chic.

Chic, and easy to attain. Learn to pronounce Foucault, drop a well-placed Freaks and Geeks reference, read a few Great Books, subscribe to HBO and the Economist, mix in a little ironic Lil Wayne appreciation, and suddenly, you’ve got class, intelligence, and culture. And everyone perusing your Facebook knows it. Appearance, not reality.

(via Readerville)

I’m not one of those cheerleaders that believe reading in itself is somehow a wonderful intellectual activity, regardless of the literary content of the material. Is reading the back of a Cheerios box a more intellectual task than watching Citizen Kane? Likewise, I wouldn’t say that reading (or watching or listening to) something you’re completely unable to truly comprehend is a worthwhile way to spend your time. I remember reading Animal Farm in ninth grade, before I had any knowledge whatsoever of political theory or Stalinist Russia (although not all of my classmates were so woefully ignorant), and I got nothing out of it at the time, even though I was able to successfully fake comprehension.

But at the same time, intellectual curiosity is desirable in and of itself, and if that intellectual curiosity is only born of social trends, well, so much the better. If society is making it trendy to be smart, well-read and verbose, isn’t that preferable to honoring thinness, stupidity and purchasing power? And if most people don’t possess a great amount of in-depth knowledge about very many things, isn’t it better to know something about some things than nothing about anything?

I hope so.  If not, I should really stop writing this blog.

So, this is annoying:

Can you still make it from scratch in America? That’s the question that Adam Shepard asked himself in college. On graduation, he took a train to Charleston, South Carolina and started out with nothing but $25 and a backpack. A year later, he had a car, and apartment, and $2500 in the bank. How he did it — and what he learned along the way — is the story of his new book, Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream.

See, the thing is, though, the book really ought to be called “Me; $25; a firm grasp of the English language; a good understanding of appropriate business and social etiquette; a clever brain and healthy and attractive white body [assuming the cover illustration is meant to depict the author]; the self-possession that comes of having been raised by a family that loved me, paid attention to me, and was able to provide for me; the social skills that come from having been brought up in a safe community where I enjoyed a stable support network of friends and family, and a safe and decent school with adequate funding; the freedom of being unaccompanied by any dependent children or ill or disabled relatives; the confidence that comes from knowing if my little low-stakes gambit here fails miserably I can just go back to my nice home; a college degree[!!!]; and the Search for the American Dream, which I have already extensively benefited from, and everybody who meets me immediately knows it, even if I am dressed in a potato sack and boasting proudly of how I have temporarily elected to live like the poor folk do in hopes of scoring a book deal.”

But then, that’s a lot to fit on a book jacket.

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Also, apparently old people don’t particularly like being talked to like they’re babies, even when they’ve totally lost their minds:

“The main task for a person with Alzheimer’s is to maintain a sense of self or personhood,” Dr. Williams said. “If you know you’re losing your cognitive abilities and trying to maintain your personhood, and someone talks to you like a baby, it’s upsetting to you.”

(via Feministing)

I understand that.  I absolutely hate being talked to like I’m a baby. A lot of men like to talk to attractive young women like they’re babies – I seriously can’t count the number of times when some older man I barely know has explained to me (affectionately) that I am such a sweet, sensitive young person. What he clearly means is, ‘You’re pretty, but I know it’s inappropriate for me to be attracted to you, so I’m going to treat you like you’re my precious little daughter.’ Which, besides being presumptuous and offensive, is even more amazing in light of the fact that I am cranky, standoffish and self-absorbed, especially upon first acquaintance. That’s maybe a little hard on myself, but at any rate, I could not possibly be mistaken for a cuddly, approachable people-pleaser…except by men who are bound and determined to believe that all pretty women come prepackaged with Disney princess personalities.

At any rate, if actually becoming cranky old people won’t save us all from being cooed at and patted like we’re puppies, what the hell will? I hope I don’t get dementia, because I’ve already decided that if I make it to my 80s and don’t have anything more I really want to accomplish, I’m going to spend the rest of my days trying every possible kind of super hard-core drug. That will be my Earthly reward for a life full of self-denial and jogging, and I sure hope Alzheimer’s doesn’t rob me of the opportunity, or I’m gonna be pissed.

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Two funny things:

First of all, I think this is my favorite liveblogging of a debate thus far…

…and Chuck Klosterman’s A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century is hilarious, if long (via Kottke).

So, the hell with this current economic crisis – I’m far more interested in watching this John McCain guy run around!  No one can say he’s not…central!

And luckily, his second-in-command can field the tough questions while he’s off ensuring his centrality:

That’s why I say I, like every American I’m speaking with, we’re ill about this position that we have been put in. Where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. Um, helping, oh, it’s got to be about job creation, too. Shoring up our economy, and getting it back on the right track. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions, and tax relief for Americans, and trade — we have got to see trade as opportunity, not as, uh, competitive, um, scary thing, but one in five jobs created in the trade sector today. We’ve got to look at that as more opportunity. All of those things under the umbrella of job creation.

Oh, I see.  Thanks for clearing all that up.

At least Alan Fishman is having a good day.

So, I recently joined the YMCA in my neighborhood.  As it’s been over two years since I belonged to a gym and had regular access to weights, I’ve entirely forgotten my old regimen.  So, I bought a few women’s exercise-type magazines to find a couple of routines.  I usually steer clear of women’s magazines because they tend to make me both angry and depressed, and these were no exception.

I seem to recall reading Shape several years ago, and it was 95% about actual exercise, and the models were all ripped. Not anymore.  Now, it’s 95% hideously overpriced clothes, and interviews with lying celebrities (“I mostly care about being happy and healthy, and my kids!”), and advice on how not to eat, or do anything much but spend insane amounts on worthless crap.  And only 40 pages in (or 3 pages in, if you don’t count advertisements), there is an interview with Kaley Cuoco.  Apparently, she is an actor on a sitcom, The Big Bang Theory.  I’d never heard of her or the show.  She’s 22-years-old, and this is what she has to say:

I go to [spinning] class three times a week, without fail.  I always get there early so I can sit in the front of the studio, and I’m ready to go as soon as the instructor comes in.*

And:

…right now I can’t get enough of the 6-inch vegetarian whole-wheat sandwich from Subway.  I pick one up after my Spin class . . . It’s my default meal; I know exactly how many calories are in it – 260 – and I never have to think about what to order.*

And worst of all:

Diet cola is my absolute favorite drink in the world; I used to drink four cans a day.  But to help me cut down, I’ve turned it into a treat.  Now, instead of having dessert, I’ll have a can of diet soda.  Putting a limit on how often I can drink it has helped me appreciate it more.*

Oh my God, Kaley!  I want to kill myself!  You are the saddest girl in the whole world!

Seriously, I myself am far more ascetic in most respects than your average person could bear to be, and I often find my own self depressing in some ways.  But even I want to kidnap this girl and make her go on some insane sky-diving, Fleet-Week-cruising, cocaine-snorting adventure in irresponsible hedonism.  What’s the point of being rich and famous if your best idea of an awesome time is go to spin class and then eat a Subway sandwich and drink a can of Diet Coke?

Jeez.

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These quotes taken from Shape’s October 2008 issue (Vol. 28, No. 2); I don’t really know what the procedure is for footnoting in a blog post.  Please don’t sue me, Shape.  Oh, and also – your magazine blows.

I have been so gobsmacked by this whole Palin thing that I’ve been completely unable to write anything about it; all I can do is splutter. I have many objections to Palin, but I suppose that if I am to articulate the one, basic thing that has so deeply angered me about the way in which she was presented to the American people, it’s the massively insulting suggestion that women who were excited about the idea of a Hillary Clinton presidency might be anything other than utterly dismayed by the idea of a Sarah Palin vice presidency (and very possibly, presidency).

I personally define feminism quite broadly, and while some readers of this blog will disagree, I think it is entirely possible for a person to be both a political conservative and a feminist (although I’m unlikely to agree with such a person on the particulars of women’s rights). And these people may very well be thrilled with Sarah Palin (although frankly, I think even they ought to see she is a poor candidate), because she represents (I guess?) their values and their interests. But she does not represent the values or interests of Hillary Clinton supporters, and she does not represent the values or interests of liberal feminists.

Feminism holds that what is between a person’s legs ought not to overrule, or in any way reflect on what is between a person’s ears.  Clearly, Sarah Palin has a neoconservative ideology firmly lodged between her ears, and my opinion about that is not the more favorable because of what she has between her legs.

As for the rest of what’s wrong with Palin, here’s what a lot of much smarter people than me have to say (sorry for the very lengthy quotes, but I don’t think anybody really clicks on the links):

Katha Pollitt:

. . . Palin, who went back to work when Trig was three days old, gets nothing but praise from Phyllis Schlafly, James Dobson and the folks at National Review, who usually blame all the ills of modern America on those neurotic, harried, selfish, frustrated, child-neglecting, husband-castrating working mothers. Even stranger, her five-months-pregnant 17-year-old, Bristol, gets nothing but compassion and respect from Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and others who have spent their careers slut-shaming teens for having sex–and blaming their parents for letting it happen.

If there were an Olympics for hypocrisy, the Republican Party would have more gold medals than Michael Phelps. And Palin would be wearing quite a few of them. It takes chutzpah for a mother to thrust her pregnant teen into the world’s harshest spotlight and then demand the world respect the girl’s privacy. But then it takes chutzpah to support criminalizing abortion and then praise Bristol’s “decision” to have the baby. The right to decide, and privacy, after all, are two of the things Palin wants to deny every other woman, and every other family, in America.

Cintra Wilson:

We’ve been shanghaied. This is sick. We need to slap the face of our bad frat-boy date and walk home from this drive-in movie. Sarah Palin may put out to be popular, but the rest of America’s women don’t need to do the same.

If not, what the hell? John McCain should go the whole Hugh Hefner route and have eight V.P.s that all look exactly like Sarah Palin.

It’s McCain’s world, girls: You’d just live in it.

Ann at Feministing:

. . . Bill Kristol was claiming McCain would pick Palin — and that would prove that Republicans are “much more open to strong women.” Frankly, that’s bullshit. Republicans are more open to a certain type of woman — one who is strongly against things like equal pay, universal health care, and reproductive freedom. In other words, the party is pro-woman-candidates, as long as they enact anti-woman policies.

Rebecca Traister:

In this “Handmaid’s Tale”-inflected universe, in which femininity is worshipped but females will be denied rights, CNBC pundit Donny Deutsch tells us that we’re witnessing “a new creation … of the feminist ideal,” the feminism being so ideal because instead of being voiced by hairy old bats with unattractive ideas about intellect and economy and politics and power, it’s now embodied by a woman who, according to Deutsch, does what Hillary Clinton did not: “put a skirt on.” “I want her watching my kids,” says Deutsch. “I want her laying next to me in bed.”

Welcome to 2008, the year a tough, wonky woman won a primary (lots of them, actually), an inspiring black man secured his party’s nomination for the presidency, and a television talking head felt free to opine that a woman is qualified for executive office because he wants to bed her and have her watch his kids! Stop the election; I want to get off.

Latoya at Feministe compares Palin to Rice:

You can hate someone’s policies and still defend them from ad hominem arguments. I hate when people say that Condoleezza Rice is a sellout and that she isn’t black. That’s a ridiculous assertion to make. However, that does not make Condoleezza Rice a civil rights leader just because she is black and in a position of power.

I hate when people say Sarah Palin is not a woman, or she is a tool of the patriarchy, or any of the other non policy related attacks I’ve seen leveled at her from all kinds of places. But that doesn’t mean you need to start sipping the “this is a victory for women” kool aid. It isn’t. Sarah Palin does not magically become a champion for all women, everywhere, just because she happens to be a woman in a position of power.

Courtney Martin in The American Prospect:

And, in perhaps the most offensive display of her “wimp factor” agenda, she attempted to discredit community organizing by feminizing it. She sarcastically told conventioneering Republicans (along with millions of Americans watching on television), “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities.” It was an eerie echo of what oblivious men in positions of traditional power have been saying for centuries: that the work of community building — whether it be child-rearing, elder-caring, teaching, nursing, social work, or, yes, community organizing — isn’t really work at all. That, despite being the backbone of our economy and the heart of our civic life, it doesn’t count because it doesn’t involve power suits and bottom lines. What makes this ridicule of community-building even more ironic is that the GOP is simultaneously glorifying Palin’s role as caregiver of her own sprawling family.

(via Feministing)

Jessica at Feministing, on the various MSM journalists who leapt to praise Palin’s feminism:

Take Wall Street Journal reporter Naomi Schaefer Riley, who writes that progressives should rest easy about Palin’s candidacy because “most American evangelicals have wholeheartedly embraced the idea of women in the workplace.” A radical feminist sentiment if there ever was one! But perhaps one should take Riley with a grain of salt, considering she’s the same reporter who wrote that murdered NY college student Imette St. Guillen should have known better than to be out drinking at 3am. Victim-blamers aren’t exactly bastions of feminist thought.

Similarly, Bitch Ph.D. responds to the WSJ article on why feminists hate Palin:

[The argument] isn’t that Sarah Palin is “too good at having it all.” It’s that Sarah Palin has the same needs other women do, but that she refuses to support policies that would supply them to women who, unlike herself, don’t have large extended families, husbands with good-paying flexible work, jobs of their own that pay well and require very few hours, and lots and lots of money to pay for help if and when those other things aren’t enough.

On the other side, Camille Paglia, bless her, is predictably cuckoo for Palin:

Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.

So, okay, feminists (always excepting Paglia) aren’t wild for her on women’s issues.  But what about the rest of her positions?

Well, there are the scandals. That whole Troopergate thing:

Josh Marshall:

We rely on elected officials not to use the power of their office to pursue personal agendas or vendettas. It’s called an abuse of power. There is ample evidence that Palin used her power as governor to get her ex-brother-in-law fired. When his boss refused to fire him, she fired his boss. She first denied Monegan’s claims of pressure to fire Wooten and then had to amend her story when evidence proved otherwise. The available evidence now suggests that she 1) tried to have an ex-relative fired from his job for personal reasons, something that was clearly inappropriate, and perhaps illegal, though possibly understandable in human terms, 2) fired a state official for not himself acting inappropriately by firing the relative, 3) lied to the public about what happened and 4) continues to lie about what happened.

Also, see this update.

More here at Feministing.

…and the rape kit stuff:

Bitch, Ph.D.:

First, the story breaks that under Palin’s watch, Wasilla women who went to the police saying that they had been sexually assaulted by a man, were charged for the rape kit. In case anyone doesn’t know, a rape kit is an exam done for the purpose of collecting and preserving evidence–it’s not a medical procedure. And yet, despite the fact that it’s similar to collecting fingerprints, taking photos of a crime scene, or doing ballistics analysis, the city of Wasilla insisted on charging women, or their insurance companies, for the kit, rather than using city funds. As of today, neither McCain, Palin, nor anyone on either of their staff teams has commented on this story. What’s the problem-too ridiculous to dignify with a response? Hardly, especially when the former Governor, Tony Knowles, has acknowledged that Wasilla was the only town in Alaska doing it. Prompting the state legislature to pass a law forbidding them from doing so.

Yglesias on both issues.

…and TPM on earmarks.

Juan Cole, on Palin’s religion:

The most noxious belief that Palin shares with Muslim fundamentalists is her conviction that faith is not a private affair of individuals but rather a moral imperative that believers should import into statecraft wherever they have the opportunity to do so. That is the point of her pledge to shape the judiciary. Such a theocratic impulse is incompatible with the Founding Fathers’ commitment to tolerance and democracy, which is why they forbade the government to “establish” or officially support any particular religion or denomination.

Well, and but here’s Christopher Hitchens:

She has inarticulately said that her gubernatorial work would be hampered “if the people of Alaska’s heart isn’t right with god.” Her local shout-and-holler tabernacle apparently believes that Jews can be converted to Jesus and homosexuals can be “cured.” I cannot wait to see Obama and Biden explain how this isn’t the case or how it’s much worse than, and quite different from, Obama’s own raving and ranting pastor in Chicago or Biden’s lifelong allegiance to the most anti-”choice” church on the planet. The difference, if there is one, is that Palin is probably sincere whereas the Democratic team is almost certainly hypocritical. The same is true of the boring contest over who can be the most populist, and of the positively sinister race to see who can be the most demagogically anti-Washington. With this kind of immaturity right across both tickets, it’s insulting to be asked to decide on the basis of experience, let alone “readiness.”

As to the actual issues, there are no pithy quotes to extract, plus she hasn’t done that much yet:

Many liberals are concerned about picking on Palin the person as opposed to attacking Palin the politician. One of the problems with Palin is that her executive resume is so thin there isn’t a whole lot to critique.

…but if you’re interested, here’s a summary of Palin’s views at Firedoglake, which comes to the conclusion that:

Underneath her attractive and youthful exterior, Sarah Palin is no different from the old white guys running the Republican Party. She doesn’t care about good government, she doesn’t believe in science, she wants everyone to live in accordance with her Old Testament Christian values. Basically, she’s Tom Coburn with boobs.

And finally, and most substantively, Lindsay Beyerstein summarizes an in-depth NYT article on everything Palin.

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In conclusion, I cannot get excited about a woman who plans to use the power she has attained to make it more difficult for other women to follow in her footsteps.  Beyond women’s rights (which is certainly a significant enough issue to stand all on its own, half the population being women and all), I am of course uninterested in a candidate who fully intends to take this country further in a direction which I believe is bad for all of us.

At the end of the day, I guess that’s all I really need to say.

(If you haven’t already seen the Fey & Poehler SNL bit, click here and watch it nowrightnow.)

I wish that interviews were conducted like debates, and that at a certain point, a buzzer would go off and you would just have to stop talking immediately, right then, no matter what you were saying, you would just have to shut the hell up and put a period on it.

Sometimes I look at a person (for example, an interviewer) who’s found himself on the wrong side of my conversational onslaught, and as I run on, I pity them. I look at them, sitting there helplessly under the relentless stream of my monologue. Perhaps they’ll soon start bleeding from the ears.

They ought to seize control of the conversation, stand up and wrestle it away from me, take charge. They ought to scream, drop it! Drop the conversation immediately and back slowly away from it! I swear to God, miss, if you launch so much as one more syllable my way, I will leap across this desk and tear your throat out with my teeth!

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Also, while I’m talking about interviews, polite social behavior, and first impressions in general, have you ever wondered what those overbearing people who, upon being introduced to a total stranger, (a) initiate far more physical contact than is appropriate or desired; and/or (b) launch into a long, self-promoting recitation of everything they’re up to lately as if the person they’ve just met could possibly give half a shit…have you ever wondered, I say, what those people are thinking? Apparently, they’re thinking that they are creating a fantastic impression:

Another common pattern we all go through is the handshake. Why not do it a little differently?  One of my favorites to do in a social setting (especially with someone you just met recently) is to go for the hug instead of the handshake. They will put out their hand. Just stare it for a second as if you are confused and then open you arms wide and say “I think I’d like a hug instead” with a big smile. People will crack up laughing and instantly you have a connection.

Worst. Advice. Ever.

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As mainstream Christianity in the U.S. continues to be ever more triumphantly dominated by those who consider willful ignorance a blessed virtue, it’s nice to see that the Church of England has made a small concession to reality:

“The statement will read: Charles Darwin: 200 years from your birth, the Church of England owes you an apology for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still. We try to practise the old virtues of ‘faith seeking understanding’ and hope that makes some amends.”

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Finally, you tell ‘em, Patty Judge.

David Foster Wallace took his own life on Friday. As I’ve mentioned a few times on this blog, he was one of my top favorite authors.

“He is one of the main writers who brought ambition, a sense of play, a joy in storytelling and an exuberant experimentalism of form back to the novel in the late ’80s and early 1990s,” Ulin said. “And he really restored the notion of the novel as a kind of canvas on which a writer can do anything.”

Here’s a link to Wallace’s great Atlantic article about talk radio hosts.

And here’s a commencement speech he gave at Kenyon college.

The 1000+ page Infinite Jest is infinitely worth it, but I understand most people don’t have as much free time as I do.

Wallace left a wonderful body of work behind for us.  His death is terribly upsetting.

UPDATE:  McSweeney’s has a lovely thread of remembrances of Wallace.

My personal discovery of Wallace’s writing is kind of funny, so I’ll tell it here.  My first year in Chicago, I was in a bar with two friends, and we met these two guys from Alaska.  One of the guys really hit it off with one of my friends, and they ended up dating for a couple months.  The other one began casually dating my other friend.  One night a few weeks later, these boys invited us all down to their house, which was at the very bottom tip of the South Side of Chicago.  Somebody’s parents owned the house and were letting them live in it free of charge, but it was weird that they lived there, and anyone who’s spent much time in Chicago will know immediately why.  At any rate, it was far, far, far away from our stomping grounds, and the night of the dinner, we all drove down there in my friend’s car.

When we got down there, the guy dating my friend (in the more casual of the two relationships) greeted me with a giant hug and launched into an excited recap of various authors and films we’d discussed at the bar when we first met.  I had barely gotten through the door before he’d foisted two books and a DVD on me that he just knew I’d love, and I just had to read and watch them and let him know what I thought, and he was so glad I’d come, and did I like pasta, because he had cooked.

Needless to say, my friend who was dating him was less than pleased.  It was a terribly awkward, uncomfortable evening, and I couldn’t escape, because they lived South of where all public transportation stopped.  I finally caught a ride back with another guy who’d been there (who then insisted I stop off at a bar for a drink with him, realized he had no cash, and rushed me out of the bar because he was running out on the check…which I did not find out about until several weeks later).  Meanwhile, back on the South Side, my friend ended things with the book-lending guy that night.  My other friend (the one in the more serious relationship) had a messy breakup months later, and so we all fell out of contact with both those guys.  I kept running into the non-book-lending one, and he would tell me that I really had to return his roommates’ property, but then he wouldn’t call me or have his roommate call me…anyway, I still have all that stuff today.

What does all this have to do with David Foster Wallace?  Well, one of the books was Infinite Jest, and it sat, huge and mostly ignored, like the Bible or the OED, on a dusty shelf in my apartment…until one long, bleak, lonely, sad winter, when I finally cracked it open, crawled into it, and fell in love.

It’s the grand reinstatement of Feminist Thursday!

First of all, let me just say I finally found a beer I can drink in good conscience. I’m less thrilled to say that it’s Fosters, as Fosters isn’t that good or widely available, and generally comes in giant oilcans that I’d rather not admit I can drink by carrying around with me. But regardless, I’m tickled pink with them for this, and happy that at long last, here’s a beer company that doesn’t feel it can afford to alienate half the population.  (Although, none of the above is really true, as Fosters advertising is just as offensive to women as all the other beer ads.)

Also, the Olympics have been going on; they’ve provided all manner of things for everybody to get pissed off about, and feminists are not left out:

First of all, are the uniforms too sexy? I don’t know, actually. While I do understand the point here, and while it’s certainly not okay for female athletes to be treated like objects. . . on the other hand, the skimpiness of women’s Olympic uniforms doesn’t really make me angry. Athletes are walking representations of what bodies can look like and what bodies can do, and you know, of course people are going to ogle them. What really upsets me is when men like (or are encouraged to like) ogling undernourished, undeveloped, weak, hairless, diminished women – listless, helpless waifs who closely resemble (or are) prepubescent girls, and whose “sexiness” lies entirely in their powerlessness. Frankly, I think the ogling of Olympian bodies is a huge step in the right direction. If only all young girls could think the best way to be sexy is to look like you can fling your date across a parking lot.

Finally, All Them are upset about this, which, yes, it’s bad, but it’s not like it’s an outrage particular to China. In the U.S., ability completely takes a backseat to attractiveness across the entertainment industry. Okay, so China was more blatant about it, choosing a pretty girl to lip-sync to a less-attractive girl’s singing. But in the U.S., we would have just had the pretty girl sing with her own crappy voice – the less-attractive good singer wouldn’t have gotten the job in any event.  What isn’t a beauty pageant, really?  America has absolutely no tolerance for the uglies – even off-camera civilians here are expected to look like movie stars.

In other (non-Olympics related) news, the UK courts decided that women who were raped while drunk deserve less compensation than those who were raped in all sobriety. Of course, there was a huge public outcry and the decision was reversed. I can’t comment on this any better than these two posts do (one and two), so everyone should just read them.

On a lighter note, how did I not know Hedy Lamarr was so cool? Apparently, she co-invented a torpedo-guiding device. She also said this:

“Any girl can be glamorous,” she said. “All she has to do is stand still and look stupid.”

Holla!

All Them* have been railing a lot about affirmative action lately. Frankly, I know nothing whatsoever about affirmative action, and I’ll leave it up to those who know more about it to speak to its efficacy or lack thereof.  But I have to admit, I make assumptions about people getting into colleges for reasons other than personal merit.  I admit it, it’s wrong of me, but . . . I think that Claire Danes probably got into Yale above many other, more qualified candidates just because she’s Claire Danes.  I assume that she wasn’t selected sheerly on the basis of her outstanding merit.  And when I hear that, say, Natalie Portman went to Harvard, I make assumptions about that.  Now, I’m not saying that Natalie Portman is a total dumbass, but I’m just saying I don’t think she deserved her spot more than other people, who maybe weren’t famous and wealthy.  And when I hear that George W. Bush went to Yale…well, I make some assumptions about possible considerations other than merit that may have gone into his admission, as well.

I know it’s unfair of me, since clearly, all selections for everything are entirely based on personal merit, except when the person selected is a minority.  I’ll try to correct my thinking. 

At any rate, here is a helpful little time line of affirmative action policies in the U.S. – if you read that, you now know as much about affirmative action as I do!

I took a race and ethnicity course in college, which basically consisted of an exasperated African professor explaining over and over again, day after day, to a classroom full of mystified young Southern Republicans that what we were discussing in class when we talked about ‘racism’ was institutional racism and not incidental racism. Trying to get this classroom full of students to grasp this concept was an impossible task. It just wasn’t going to happen. I really hope that professor has since transferred somewhere else; by the end of the course, I began to fear he was going to suffer a Jerry McGuire-style meltdown in front of everybody.

He couldn’t get across the concept that, while racial prejudice may be obnoxious and harmful on a small scale, it’s not nearly of as much concern as the fact that black people live in poverty at nearly twice the national rate, and that this poverty rate was in itself racist – that the racism of real concern was the racism built into our societal structure. He kept trying to talk about the economy, and they kept replying that no one in their families would ever use the n-word. One thing that I learned from this class is that before ‘diversity’ can ‘foster a dialogue,’ people have to stop being maddeningly obtuse.

All of this is discussed much more eloquently in this New York Magazine article on racism:

The tendency to turn the commitment to racial liberalism into sheer denial is strong. “I don’t see race” becomes “I don’t see racism.” . . .

Then there are the real-life, on-the-ground, disastrous statistical disparities that burden the lived experience of the majority of blacks, people of color, and the poor in this country: from the still-unrepaired wake of Hurricane Katrina, to the greater infant-mortality rate and lesser life span, to near double-digit rates of unemployment, to cuny professor Harry Levine’s study of stop-and-frisk statistics in New York City (blacks are eight times more likely than whites to be stopped for marijuana possession, for instance), to disproportionately high national rates of foreclosures and homelessness among blacks, Native Americans, and Latinos, to the almost complete resegregation of schools across the land, to a war on drugs so shockingly racialized and so aggressively executed that our rates of incarceration place us first in the world.

And man, if it’s hard to get people to admit we still have a problem with racism now, imagine how difficult it will be when we have our first black President. 

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*Frequently, when I’m composing blog posts, I write a sentence like this and want to say ‘everybody,’ and then realize I need to specify who I’m talking about when I say ‘people’ or ‘everybody.’ I mostly mean that, among all of the various blogs and news sites I read, skim, or glance at, bloggers, pundits, journalists, politicians and various media types seem to be frequently discussing whatever the issue is, in general, recently. This takes a long time to type. So from here on out, I am going to use the term ‘All Them’ to mean ‘people who speak from public platforms that I have been hearing a lot from lately, and that you may or may not also have read and/or watched.’

So, this weekend, a guy in Beijing stabbed a tourist to death, in public, in the middle of the day.

Also recently, a guy riding a Greyhound bus in Canada stabbed his seatmate to death, hacked his head off, and displayed it to the 37 other passengers who’d run screaming out of the bus.  Which…wow.  As if riding a Greyhound isn’t horror enough in itself.

And, while we’re talking murders, there’s a new book out on the 1924 Leopold & Loeb affair, which, if you’ll remember, involved two smart, young men carefully murdering a stranger for absolutely no reason:

Neither killer showed any remorse after being captured and indicted for murder. Kidnapping had been involved; they had sent a ransom note to their victim’s family. But money wasn’t their true motive. Perfection was. Leopold and Loeb dreamed of committing the perfect crime, and they found philosophical backing for their desire in Nietzsche’s notion of the Übermensch. Leopold wrote to Loeb: “A superman . . . is, on account of certain superior qualities inherent in him, exempted from the ordinary laws which govern men. He is not liable for anything he may do.”

You know, I ride the subway every day, and it is a constant source of wonder to me that very rarely does anybody shove anybody else out in front of an oncoming train.  Frankly, the rarity of this reaffirms my belief that, no matter what else you might be able to say for human beings, we’re at least far more likely to be passively harmless than actively malicious.  I have an overactive imagination, especially concerning possible physical pain and harm to my body, and as I wait for the train, I am forever anticipating a good firm shove in between my shoulder blades.  I imagine myself plummeting forward onto the tracks, surprised and remorseful, as the train barrels down upon me, and, like Anna Karenina, all my Earthly concerns are finally resolved.  I can imagine this vividly, with conviction, as if it had actually happened to me at some point in the past.  You might think, given these daily grim imaginings, that I would be forever looking back cagily over my shoulder, or hugging the wall far from the yawning chasm.  But I don’t.  And neither does anybody else.  We all teeter precariously near the brink of the train platform, peering impatiently into the black, yawning tunnel, and when the headlights of an oncoming train come charging up at us, preceded by a whoosh of stale air that blows our hair back on our heads, and followed quickly by a screaming, hurtling death machine shooting past not one foot from where we stand, we barely shift our weight ever so slightly back.   Nobody ever suspects the throngs of people pushing and jostling up against them on all sides.

Even if New Yorkers were not constantly possessed with a murderous rage towards anyone and everyone around them, and even if a good number of them weren’t stark mad and/or under the influence of everything under the sun, and even if the platforms weren’t dangerously overcrowded so that the slightest slip of a high-heeled power-walker could easily send everyone toppling over like dominoes…even if, in short, the Manhattan subway tunnels were filled with good-hearted, cheery, conscientious folk whistling happily on their way to work, following orderly and careful pedestrian traffic patterns, and granting each other a good margin of personal space to navigate in, it would still be a freaking miracle that everybody wasn’t forever being shoved in front of an oncoming train.  So, being that New Yorkers are indeed furious, crowded, impatient and insane, it is a ringing endorsement of the general non-murderousness of human beings that we all for the most part repeatedly survive our daily commute.

Of course, in addition to imagining someone might push me out in front of an oncoming train, I am also forever imagining that, in a moment of caprice, I might suddenly leap out in front of one on my own volition.  I’m pretty sure everybody thinks about this, just as whenever you are somewhere high, you fear you might decide to leap over whatever banister you’re peering down from.  Again, for the most part, we all resist such impulses, or rather, we manage not to ever forget to mind very carefully that we not accidentally leap to our deaths without giving the matter due consideration first.  If we do jump, we really mean it.

So, every day, I imagine being murdered, and I imagine murdering myself.  The third possibility, of course, is whether I might push somebody else in front of a train.  Lord knows, I’m not without cause.  However, oddly enough, I rarely vividly imagine pushing other people in front of a train.  When I was a kid, I used to have nightmares that I was driven by a sort of frenzied compulsion to murder dozens of strangers and bury them in our backyard.  At some point in the dream, one of my parents would discover this, and suddenly, my dreaming self would fully realize what sort of awful business I had been up to, and the full onslaught of this realization – of what a monstrous person I was, and of how much destruction I’d wrought, and of the guilt I would now have to bear – would come crashing down on me all at once, and my real-life self would wake up in a cold sweat, and it would be awhile before I could reassure myself I’d only dreamed it, and furthermore, that I wasn’t still guilty of any sort of latent murderous intent for even having merely dreamed it.

So, I used to worry a lot that I would at some point become a serial killer.  But that was when I was a kid.  As an adult, while I do constantly worry that others might suddenly be the death of me (whether by accident or intent), or that I might slip up and kill myself, I don’t have any real apprehension that I might suddenly start killing other people.  And I think I can count this as a personal virtue, because apparently, some people really do find themselves – suddenly, of an afternoon – hacking a stranger to death with a knife.  But this is a rare event, and if it makes you frightened about what might befall you out there amongst others, reassure yourself the way I do:  think about how seldom we nudge each other off train platforms (and this is certainly not because we like the people around us), despite how incredibly easy it would be to do so.

Should English be our official national language? My opinion is, who the hell cares? But some people care a whole, whole lot.

Here’s a good, detailed discussion of this at Language Log (this quote pretty much sums up what I think):

In short, English is already, for all practical purposes, the language of the nation (not to mention much of the world in many ways), and it’s going to take a heck of a lot more than a growing population of (mostly Spanish-speaking) immigrants – a population that has been shown in study after study to lose their heritage language and adopt English within three generations, as Jon Weinberg helpfully pointed out – to change that. If we make English official, there’s no telling how its currently exalted position would be affected.

. . . In my view, the move to make English official in the US is effectively a political move to disenfranchise minority or otherwise already disempowered groups along culturally-defined lines. Using language for this purpose is particularly insidious.

I am actually quite embarrassed that I only speak English. It was lazy of me never to really learn another language, and traveling made me all the more embarrassed of myself, because it seems like damn near everybody all over the world can muddle along in at least two languages – no matter how broke, rural and otherwise uneducated they are. And mostly what they speak is English (even though apparently it’s one of the most difficult languages to learn if you’re not a native speaker), which is so fortunate for me, because I don’t have to learn word one and still rarely have difficulty communicating anywhere I go. Obama thinks it’s embarrassing, too.

Many Americans, however, are not the least bit embarrassed for only speaking English. They are rather infuriated that anybody would set foot on American soil without speaking English in addition to whatever else they speak, or (if foreigners do speak it) for speaking it poorly, or with a thick accent.

These are people who often say, “I wouldn’t go to a country where I don’t speak the language, so I don’t see why ‘they’ come here.” Leaving aside the obvious stupidity in this statement (people come here because there is money here), what a limited, incurious perspective that statement reveals! Who are these people who wouldn’t go where they don’t speak the language? I’d hate to think that my possible living situations are limited to English-speaking countries. Not only would I happily go somewhere (for a short or long period of time) where I don’t speak the language, but I’d most likely be welcomed there. Speech isn’t the only way to communicate. If two people focus up, they can usually communicate across a language barrier without too much trouble, especially if one or both of them stands to profit from it.

I’ve actually talked to people who complain about having to push 1 for English. Here’s LL again on this:

I find the objection to “press 1 for English” incredibly curious. I would think that a large proportion of those who object would encourage businesses to act in their self-interest by whatever legal means necessary – and making multiple language options available for their (potential) customers is one easy, legal way to increase your business (even if you’ll lose some idiots who can’t bring themselves to press a simple button for their language).

It seems like, before anyone would actually complain about the time it takes them to press 1 for English, they might think for a beat about what life in general would be like to be somebody who has to press 2 for Spanish – talk about inconvenient! – and then count their blessings and shut the hell up.

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Speaking of language and stupidity, is Obama really a great speaker, or is it just that the level of our political oratory has been brought so low?

A major reason that Obama’s rhetoric seems to soar so high is that our expectations have sunk so low. In a new book, The Anti-Intellectual Presidency, Elvin T. Lim subjects all the words ever publicly intoned by American presidents to a thorough statistical analysis-and he finds, unsurprisingly, an alarmingly steady decline. A century ago, Lim writes, presidential speeches were pitched at a college reading level; today, they’re down to eighth grade, and if the trend continues, next century’s State of the Union addresses will be conducted at the level of “a comic strip or a fifth-grade textbook.”

(via 3QD)

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Psst.  Hey, English champs: do you know what a grawlix is?

What about mamihlapinatapai? Define that, suckaz! (Yeah, ok, so that one’s not English.)

Where to start?

In the U.S., Bush wants health care programs receiving federal aid to sign certificates promising they won’t refuse to hire health care workers who won’t provide or discuss abortion and/or birth control and other forms of contraception.

Meanwhile, birth control isn’t something McCain really cares to discuss. He’d rather keep it light, I guess.

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A pregnant illegal immigrant gave birth under custody, and then had her baby taken from her, because of local charges on driving without a license:

Weikal said the sheriff’s office knew the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency planned to release Villegas on her own recognizance because of the pregnancy, but she had to stay in jail until she had seen a judge on the local charges.

Villegas’ attorney, Elliott Ozment, said Villegas was still in jail awaiting a hearing on the driving charge when she went into labor on the night of July 5. She was taken to Nashville General Hospital at Meharry, where she was handcuffed to the bed by her right wrist and left ankle until shortly before the birth.

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Indian sanitation workers were invited to walk the catwalk by the UN:

Today Sharanya at the Indian feminist blog Ultra Violet has a post about a recent UN conference in which Indian sanitation workers walked the runway alongside professional models at a charity fashion show. (Sanitation workers, also called scavengers, are usually Dalit women whose job it is to remove the human and animal excrement from the homes of higher-class Indians.)

What a treat.

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This is amazing: some very young children in Yemen are standing up for themselves against the grown men their families have sold them off to:

Together, the two girls’ stories have helped spur a movement to put an end to child marriage, which is increasingly seen as a crucial part of the cycle of poverty in Yemen and other third world countries. Pulled out of school and forced to have children before their bodies are ready, many rural Yemeni women end up illiterate and with serious health problems. Their babies are often stunted, too.

The average age of marriage in Yemen’s rural areas is 12 to 13, a recent study by Sana University researchers found. The country, at the southern corner of the Arabian Peninsula, has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world.

(via Feministe)

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And we complain about taking our shoes off:

NPR covered a story about security in Baghdad’s Green Zone, which centered specifically on one woman’s protest against the type of body scanning used: it doesn’t see hair or clothing, but sees the body, (I’m assuming metal) jewelry, and any prospective weapons. The body is rendered essentially naked (pictured here; picture from NPR).

Farah al-Jaberi’s objections (which are shared by other female workers) are mainly to male guards seeing their bodies through the scanner, and the worry that “images of their bodies can be saved and viewed by anyone later.”

(There’s an image at the link of what the scans look like.)

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And, as always, to “rape” is not to “have sex with” – and the media should respect the distinction.

While America has become more and more casually potty-mouthed, newspapers and other publications continue to enforce fairly old-fashioned (if arbitrary) decency standards (not to mention television programs – RIP, George Carlin). Here’s a Times column on this matter, spurred by the inability of the major newspapers to quote Jesse Jackson when he said he wanted to cut Obama’s nuts off:

The Times on Thursday devoted a column of type to the ensuing controversy and Jackson’s apology for what the newspaper called his “critical and crude” remarks, which included the bitter charge that Obama was “talking down to black people.” But it left readers completely in the dark about the crude part. The Washington Post was slightly less squeamish. It said Jackson suggested “that he wanted to castrate the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.”

(via LL)

The column also summarizes the Times’ various decisions about such matters in the recent past. It’s surprising to me that a newspaper would be squeamish about direct-quoting expletives. Regular readers of this blog (and those who know me) will not be surprised to hear that I don’t put a great deal of effort into avoiding the swears. I feel like focus on nice language is a cosmetic fix to problematic thought. Words don’t offend people. People offend people.

For example:

At the 1988 Republican National Convention, when George H.W. Bush was running for president of the United States, future president George W. Bush was asked by a Hartford Courant reporter what he and his father talked about when they weren’t talking about politics.

Bush’s answer: “Pussy.”

And on the other hand, here are some entertaining examples of how you can make something totally innocuous seem nasty by censoring it.

The ability to be explicit is essential to getting at the real, objective truth:

. . . truth is far from empty, as Davidson claimed; and the theory of truth is not “a set of truisms,” as J.L. Austin said scornfully. Truth is rich, and the theory of truth complex. This is precisely what we might expect, as the nature of truth touches on what is most distinctive about us. Of all the creatures in the universe who experience what is the case, we are the only ones who make explicit what is the case, and assert that it is the case. We are explicit, or truth-bearing and falsehood-bearing animals, and to see truth truly is to see ourselves truly.

(via 3QD)

Language evolves along with what it’s describing – the world is continually changing, albeit gradually:

Sex before marriage. Bob and his boyfriend. Madame Speaker. Do those words make your hair stand on end or your eyes widen? Their flatness is the register of successful revolution. Many of the changes are so incremental that you adjust without realizing something has changed until suddenly one day you realize everything is different.

(via 3QD)

But really, when is everything not different? I don’t know where people come by their fixed standards for how life is supposed to be. I suppose most people think the way things were in their particular childhoods is some eternal truth for how the whole world ought to function throughout all time. And of course, what they’re remembering is not the world at all, but the peace of being a child.

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More things I don’t understand: on Jean-Luc Godard:

Richard Brody’s “Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard” is a story of transformation, a painstaking account of a lifelong artistic journey. Now we know how one of the greatest of all filmmakers – the man who so radically changed cinema in 1959 with his debut feature, “Breathless” – became an intolerable gasbag.

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been watching a lot of French films without comprehending anything about them, and I’ve heard film buffs scoff at the type of person who says they love Godard, but it turns out all they like is Breathless. So, um, well…the only Godard film I like is Breathless.

Apparently, the Brits are worried that they prefer dumb books:

At a Royal Society of Literature debate in March, Clare Alexander, president of the Association of Authors’ Agents, criticised a literary culture in which ghostwritten celebrity books, misery memoirs and Richard & Judy endorsements have “tainted publishers’ minds”. Contrasting the current British non-fiction bestseller charts with the more high-minded titles on the New York Times list, she said, “We have the stupidest bestseller list in the world at the moment.”

Wow. I can’t believe the U.S. actually made the U.K. feel insecure about its reading habits.

And to round out updates on the arts:

Canadian copyfighter Howard Knopf has suggested (presumably with tongue firmly planted in cheek) that recording artists whose music is played by torturers in Gitmo are owed performance royalties.

(via Majikthise)

Hang in there, Guns N Roses.

I am excited beyond belief to share with all of you, dear readers, a grand realization I had this past weekend. This was the sort of ‘aha!’ lightbulb moment after which the world is never the same again, but is a little wider, a little shinier, a little more bearable.

I realized that the best way not to be surrounded by obnoxious, loud people in public spaces in New York is to sit near a bunch of quiet people to begin with, rather than go sit off by yourself somewhere.

Here’s how I came to that realization: I bought a sandwich and went to consume it in a pretty, park-like area, and, as usual, went straight for a bench in the most deserted stretch of park. I was halfway through my sandwich when a couple of giggling teenagers came and sat right on top of me, despite the general emptiness of the area, and began to converse, in loud and squealing terms, about their burgeoning sex lives.

My entire life I have whined about how strangers seem to seek me out. I find the close proximity of other people repellent on a visceral level that most people do not feel for their fellow humans, which I realize is a personal shortcoming, but which I cannot help, because it is a kneejerk, gut-level reaction, cultivated in early childhood and continually reinforced by the fact that other people really do consistently suck out loud in every conceivable fashion. And yet, despite my extreme misanthropy, people gravitate towards me like metal filings. I need only install myself in a totally deserted area to make that area the most coveted spot in town. No matter where I am standing – even if it’s next to the only Port-a-Pot in a malarial swamp – five seconds after I have begun standing there, at least ten people will urgently need to stand right where I’m standing, usually with their dogs and babies and cameras and stereos and B.O. and inappropriately loud domestic fights and all.

I’d always assumed that this was a sort of karmic punishment for my disliking other humans’ close proximity so much – a sort of ‘who the hell do you think you are’ rebuke from the universe. Except that I don’t really believe in any sort of large-scale cosmic justice, so I kept looking for other reasons.

Anyway, back to this weekend, these teenagers were yapping on about their various forays into the wide world of sex, both homo- and hetero-style, and how they sometimes did so with hesitancy and sometimes with great enthusiasm, depending upon the other person involved, the amount of various intoxicants in their systems, and the suitability and romance of the atmosphere. And they were doing that thing where they were actually looking right at me and projecting in my direction while they ostensibly talked to each other. I provided an audience for them, which made the whole thing more interesting to them, I suppose. At some point, something so very ridiculous was lobbed so obviously in my direction that I audibly sighed, rolled my eyes, got up and packed up my sandwich and moved on.

I began looking for another deserted stretch of park, when suddenly, I had the inspiration to sit instead right smack between two older couples who were each murmuring quietly to each other while glaring at everyone passing by.

It was the best decision I ever made! I enjoyed my sandwich in peace and solitude, buffered on both sides by a cranky, old couple that didn’t want to look at me, or for me to overhear word one of their conversations. And it was at this point that I realized why people had always been coming to sit by me: they had been doing it on purpose precisely because I was quietly reading a book! They knew that they would be able to dominate the space, and that my presence would ensure against any louder people coming to sit next to them.

In New York, you never sit in an empty area, because no area is empty for very long. Rather, you pick the least offensive strangers, and then you scooch in right on top of them. That way, you have some control over your fate. I put this new theory into practice over the rest of the weekend, and I have to say, my quality of life has improved by leaps and bounds. I feel less angry, less hassled, happier and more well-inclined towards my fellow man. And I’m beginning to think that perhaps New York is somewhat livable after all, if you just learn how to work with it.

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Speaking of despicable haters, I have really taken note of the passing of Jesse Helms. I think that the worst possible thing that you can do with your life is live it in such a way that, five seconds after you’re in the ground, people everywhere burst forth with celebrations of your death and denunciations of everything you were. Scores of private assholes are despised posthumously by everyone who knew them, but it seems like, if you are going to be an asshole, at least do yourself the courtesy of limiting your own exposure. Because to be a hated asshole on such a very grand scale as the late Senator Helms seems to me to be far, far worse than spending your entire life in your room doing nothing and seeing no one. I really hope that, whatever I do or don’t do in life, I don’t do such a grandly awful job of it as to be remembered as the world now remembers Jesse Helms.

Of course, if I can’t be confident of the purity of my heart saving me from such a fate, at least I can rely on my lethargy and ineffectiveness.

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Related, what does make people so social? Mirror neurons:

Mirror neurons are the only brain cells we know of that seem specialized to code the actions of other people and also our own actions. They are obviously essential brain cells for social interactions. Without them, we would likely be blind to the actions, intentions and emotions of other people. The way mirror neurons likely let us understand others is by providing some kind of inner imitation of the actions of other people, which in turn leads us to “simulate” the intentions and emotions associated with those actions. When I see you smiling, my mirror neurons for smiling fire up, too, initiating a cascade of neural activity that evokes the feeling we typically associate with a smile. I don’t need to make any inference on what you are feeling, I experience immediately and effortlessly (in a milder form, of course) what you are experiencing.

(via 3QD)

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Here in America, even in our public parks, everybody thinks it’s their own, personal bench. Blame it on the Renaissance:

This focus on the individual, and its false equation with democracy, began back in the Renaissance. The Renaissance brought us wonderful innovations, such as perspective painting, scientific observation, and the printing press. But each of these innovations defined and celebrated individuality. Perspective painting celebrates the perspective of an individual on a scene. Scientific method showed how the real observations of an individual promote rational thought. The printing press gave individuals the opportunity to read, alone, and cogitate. Individuals formed perspectives, made observations, and formed opinions.

The individual we think of today was actually born in the Renaissance. The Vesuvian Man, Da Vinci’s great drawing of a man in a perfect square and circle-independent and self-sufficient. This is the Renaissance ideal.

It was the birth of this thinking, individuated person that led to the ethos underlying the Enlightenment. Once we understood ourselves as individuals, we understood ourselves as having rights. The Rights of Man. A right to property. The right to personal freedom.

(via 3QD)

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Briefly:

Kids make their parents miserable.

Noooooooo!!!!! 99% of my diet is soy!!! It was the one thing that was never bad! That’s it, screw it, I’m going back to living on microwave burritos and beer.

This is good stuff to know.