On Not Feeling the Bern

    As a youngish white liberal from a substantial coastal city, I can tell you for a fact that I am in a minority in my cohort in one very specific way: I do not, as they say, feel the Bern. If one were to look at my Facebook feed — as I do, every morning, whether I want to or not — one might be misled into believing that Bernie Sanders, a grouchy old socialist from the middle of nowhere, has created an overwhelming political following, one of the sort that will almost certainly sweep him to a titanic, Reagan-like victory in November. The feed is filled with selfies taken at Bernie rallies, articles about Bernie’s authenticity, screeds about his righteousness, and a general celebratory mood that matches Bernie’s rhetoric (if not his rhetorical style) about creating a political revloution in America that will sweep in a new paradigm of small banks, universal single-payer health care, union jobs for all who want them, an end to free trade, and a bunch of other stuff that strikes me as basically incoherent pap. Bernie Sanders, whitest liberal of the white liberals in Congress, has managed the trick of convincing many white liberals that they are at the spearhead of a revolution, largely by appealing to our common feeling that we know better than other people, and that if we just explained to [WORKING CLASS CONSERVATIVES / TECHNO-LIBERTARIANS / BLACK DEMOCRATS / SECOND GENERATION LATINOS] where their interests actually lie, and how Bernie Sanders would be the best for their interests, they would all get on board.

    The idea is absurd on its face, of course. No one has ever won an election by telling people that they shouldn’t (or worse, don’t actually) believe what they believe, and they never will. This isn’t even about “telling it like it is”; in some degree one can get away with that, so long as it’s a part of a successful political brand. This is about telling people that what they think it is is actually not what it is at all — that evangelicals’ social beliefs are not more important than their economic ones, for instance. That’s what Bernie’s alleged appeal is based on. But that appeal only actually appeals to people who already agree with him. In fact, Bernie panders as much as (if not more than) anybody else. There’s a large enough faction in the Democratic Party that already agrees with Bernie that he’s able to build a substantial coalition that might (but probably won’t) win him the party’s nomination. But in the general election, Sanders would be faced with one of two options: changing his view on almost everything, or spending months upon months condescending to people who don’t agree with him. Neither one of those is going to work.

    The main reason position-moderation is almost certain not to work is that Bernie’s brand — and make no mistake, it’s a brand — is built around his status as an avatar of all that is authentic and incorruptible and therefore has been chased out of our political process, largely by big money.* Irrespective of whether you think this brand’s going to sell (I don’t), it’s what Bernie has to offer, and if he changes it, he’s going to lose the base that fell in love with him in the first place. He can’t tack towards the center the way almost every politician ever has, because tacking towards the center would be an acknowledgement that he is what he is: just another fucking politician, trying to get elected.

*NB that the money thing is both accurate and not accurate at all. One of the major phenomena of 21st Century politics has been the emergence of the superdonor — the most notable being the Koch Bros, though the left has its own, minor-league version of this, as well. The thing about superdonors is that they give massive amounts of money, not just in the interests of their own businesses, but in the interest of doctrinaire ideological positions. Sure, the Kochs might benefit from some of the policies they advocate, but really they’re so fabulously wealthy that the material change to their bottom line available in this kind of transaction is fairly minor. What they have is the luxury to demand — and receive — fealty to their favorite nutty ideas. In the pre-superdonor days, what was then styled Big Money was, in fact, kind of Medium Money, given by corporations and individuals who wanted specific policy changes, some of which were liberal, some of which were conservative, but all of which benefitted the bottom line. Those people don’t matter anymore. But at the same time, the thing that Bernie has going for him, and that B Obama had going for him before, was an incredibly activated base of small donors. But who are those small donors? I put it to you that, like superdonors, small donors are disproportionately likely to be very ideological: you don’t give $250 to a candidate as a small donor unless you really, really believe in the political ideology they espouse. Transactional politicians, the ones who practice the gory business of actually making the country move, do not inspire this kind of money to come their way in quite the same way, because, honestly — if you’re trying to pay your bills and get your kids to school, are you really going to take $250 out of your budget to give to a politician who’s going to agree to things you don’t like and compromise with people you hate? Probably not. In short, a politics with nothing but small money in it looks a lot like a politics dominated largely by superdonors. h/t to E Klein on Vox’s The Weeds podcast for framing this in this particular way on last week’s episode.

    And let’s be clear here: Bernie Sanders is just another fucking politician, trying to get elected. This was exposed a few weeks ago when people started talking about Bernie’s record on gun control, which is not as far left as his other positions. Why? Sanders’ response is that he comes from Vermont, which is a rural state, and blah, blah, blah . . . this is Sanders trying to pull a bait-and-switch on the kind of politician he is, really. There’s a sort of ontological question that hangs around the edges of debates like these, viz, Is it the job of a politician to reflect the views of his/her constituents, or vote their conscience? Bernie sells himself as the man-of-all-conscience, the firebrand truthteller who won’t be cowed by banks or other interests (viz his constituents), the Last Honest Man in Washington. But do you really believe that Bernie Sanders, of all people, actually has a commitment to the right of the people to keep and bear arms? Or is that just some bullshit he smears on the electorate because he knows they might vote for the other guy if he doesn’t? Yeah, me neither.

    See, it’s very easy to be the most liberal member of Congress when your constituency has roughly the population of Portland, Oregon. The last time Sanders got elected, he did so — in a landslide — with a grand total of about 170,000 votes; these are the votes of lefty, white Vermonters, for whom the only real break with standard lefty politics is on guns. It’s not exactly a road of trials to get these people to vote for an old, white socialist. If Portland somehow seceded from the State of Oregon, what kind of Senators do you think it would elect? White socialists? Would those guys be viewed as avatars of all that is authentic and truth-telling in the world, or just two more hipsters from the People’s Republic of PDX?

*

    There are other reasons that I don’t feel the Bern in the way that so many of my friends do. The first is that I don’t buy the idea that Bernie is going to create some kind of political revolution in this country. I’ve already explained why I don’t think that’s going to happen — why, in fact, it’s extremely cynical and condescending to believe that’s even on the table — but I also think it wouldn’t be good. I think political history, at least recent political history, shows that revolution tends to be very, very bad for a country. Sudden, radical change almost always gives birth to violence — both between factions, and from the state. Despite the fact that it doesn’t inspire much excitement or loyalty, incrementalism is a value — not worth fighting for, but worth preventing fights with. Can you imagine the fallout of a true revolution in America? In the current political environment, with the level of outrage and lack of cross-communication between different sorts of people, I can’t help but think that a Reign of Terror would follow revolution as inevitably as a flood follows the breaching of a dam. Much though I have fantasized about slapping around a Supreme Court justice or two, I honestly think that organized political violence is probably the most dangerous force in human history, and that playing with that kind of fire is liable to burn our house down.

    But really, and much less speculatively, it’s just that I don’t trust people who only have one opinion. And Bernie really only has one opinion: that economic inequality is bad, and solving that will solve the world’s ills. While I agree that economic inequality is bad, I don’t agree with the second part of that statement. To truly believe it is to apply a rigid rubric to every problem, in order to stave off thought, and shut down alternatives. That’s a recipe for failure.

    Bernie’s been tripped up by this on the campaign trail a couple of times. Does he really have the mental flexibility to navigate the maze of racial oppresion? I’m not accusing him of being a racist, not at all. But I don’t think that’s a problem you just magically solve if you solve inequality. For one thing, inequality will never, ever go away, and to believe it will is to buy into the fantasy of a perfectable society: so, if you don’t acknowledge the role that race has played in American history — including recent American history — you run the risk of “solving” inequality while once again leaving people of color, especially black people, completely in the lurch. (This is the objection I have to the older white liberals who fetishize how awesome everything was under Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. First of all, no, it wasn’t, we were involved in a huge war that killed tens of thousands of Americans and millions of other humans. But second of all, sure, maybe it was awesome to be a white person in mid-century America. It wasn’t that awesome for anybody else, so stop pretending that the policies of the New Deal are a panacea for everything.) For another thing, there are persistent effects of racial inequality that have very little to do with economic inequality — like, for instance, the difference in how white people are policed versus how black people are policed. You can be the richest, wealthiest-seeming black dude around, and there’s a fundamental level on which the state has been built, not to protect you, but to accuse you of being a danger to others. (Just ask tennis player James Blake.) There is a class of people for whom the weapons of the state are always pointed at their heads. Will Bernie’s one opinion — that economic inequality is bad — have a solution for that? I don’t think so.

    I was going to wrap this all up and put a nice bow on it, but I’m incredibly hungry and I have a slice of pizza here burning a hole in its plate. I think you guys get what I’m talking about, even if you don’t agree. I hope so, anyhow. #failingtofeelthebernifthatsokaywitheverybody

Some Losses

1. Grief as Paranoia

    I flew down to Bend for my cousin’s wedding over the weekend. Flying to Bend is always a bit of an odd experience — the flight, which only covers 120 miles or so, usually takes about 25 minutes, so that getting to and from the airport is a bigger ordeal than being in the air. When I got down there, nobody was there to pick me up. Not a big deal — the Redmond-Bend airport is not much more than a glorified bus station, so there’s nothing arduous about getting in and out — but I wondered, sort of, if I’d been forgotten, so I called my mom to see if someone was on the way. She said my dad was, but he was running a little late.

    Then a weird thing happened. A couple of minutes later, I was still waiting, and she called me back. When I saw her name on the caller ID, I became convinced that she was calling to tell me that my dad had been in a wreck on the way to pick me up, and was dead. This is a completely ridiculous, irrational fear, but it was so strong that I almost didn’t answer the phone. When I did, she just wanted to say that she’d talked to him and he would be there any minute. Even as she did, I spotted his car pulling up to the curb. Everything was fine. Nobody had died. Of course nobody had died.

    When I was a kid, my dad hated answering the phone, and the explanation given was always that he associated unexpected phone calls with answering the call that informed him that my half-sister, his oldest child, had been killed in a car wreck. I sort of pretended to understand that — it made sense in an abstract way — but I never really did. It wasn’t until I got a similar call a couple of years ago that I started to understand. Now — now, my grief over that event has largely subsided to a background noise, something that’s always there but rarely all-consuming. It has, however, manifested as this very specific form of paranoia. If there’s a way for my brain to line up events in such a way that someone has died, it’ll do it. And though I know it’s ridiculous, I can’t help it. Every phone call is a disaster in the making.

2. Grief as Public Rite

    When David Bowie died, I was as surprised as anybody, I suppose. But what really surprised me, far more than the actual fact of his death, was the response to it. My Facebook feed erupted in a collective cri de coeur, one which roared for a full day but still hasn’t really petered out. Links to his videos, teary-sounding tributes, lots of agreeing, head shaking, and digital hugging went around. The rending of garments was elaborate.

    This surprised me because David Bowie meant exactly nothing to me. I don’t begrudge anybody else their fandom or their grief — God knows, most of them will all be mystified when a small minority of us are totally crushed by the inevitable death of, say, Stephen Fry — I just don’t understand it. I always found Bowie’s music to be a little bland; it always seemed to me that the theatrical aspect of his art rendered the music qua music not very interesting, much of the time. My favorite Bowie record is probably an Iggy Pop record. (The Idiot, btw.) My favorite Bowie song is probably a Queen song. (“Under Pressure”.) The only time I ever saw Bowie live, it was because he was touring with Nine Inch Nails, and I spent most of his set (he was in Thin White Duke mode that night) idly wondering when Trent Reznor was going to come out.

    And it’s funny, because in many ways Bowie seems to have stood foursquare against a lot of the things I despise: rote fetishization of the authentic; reflexive privileging of emotion over intellect; the idea of perfection in art. Bowie was weird and daring and sometimes sloppy. He took risks that didn’t always pay off. This is the kind of artist I usually love; it’s the kind I try to be. He stands with Neal Stephenson and Richard Linklater and Margaret Atwood in this way. And yet, somehow, I just never locked in with him. My failure to lock in caused me to have a blind spot as to his massive cultural significance.

    It’s weird to be reminded so viscerally of the ways in which you’re out-of-step with the zeitgeist. If Bob Dylan or Mick Jagger had died and this been the response, I would have been as all in as everybody else. But the death of David Bowie, even at the relatively young age of 69, did not rock my world. I kind of wish now that it had. I’m obviously missing out on something.

    The night Bowie died, I was walking up Clinton Street in the dark, and I saw a big crowd gathered around a firetruck and an ambulance. My first instinct was to take out my radio gear and see what was going on. But as I approached, I heard a boombox playing “Under Pressure”, and then “Rebel Rebel”, and I realized something public, important, but not necessarily newsworthy was going on here. It had something to do with David Bowie, though I couldn’t tell what. I never did figure out what the firetruck and ambulance were there for — nobody was hurt — and eventually I moved on. Really, I probably should have taken out my gear anyway and started asking around. I’m sure there was a story there. Maybe, though, I was not the person to tell it.

3. Grief as Public Rite 2: The Re-griefening

    But then Alan Rickman died. Rickman and Bowie were both English, both 69 years old, both died of cancer. I was actually shocked to find that Rickman was the same age as Bowie — his rise to fame came 15 years later, with his iconic performance as Hans Gruber in Die Hard. I think I would have pegged him at about 55, if you’d asked, though I don’t know why you’d ask me how old Alan Rickman was when you could just Google the guy. But it gave me a window into what other people were feeling about Bowie. A reminder, really; I’ve been getting bummed out by celebrity deaths since the suicide of Kurt Cobain at least. I don’t know that I’m gutted, the way some people seemed to be by Bowie’s death. But I’m not happy about it. It scares me — not least because Rickman was younger than my father and not much older than my mother. And it feels completely not real. Like, how is it possible that Alan Fucking Rickman is dead? Hans Gruber sure isn’t dead, even if he is. Severus Snape isn’t dead, even if he is. (Spoiler alert, Potter newbies.) How can the man who brought them to life be dead?

    A few years ago, I was poking through some website looking for an Adventure Time t-shirt, when I ran across something far better: a baseball undershirt with blue sleeves and, positioned smack in the middle, an airbrushed glamour shot of a young Alan Rickman, sandy-haired and, in his weird, beaky way, very handsome. I knew immediately that I had just found the greatest item of clothing ever made. I will admit that some of that was the seriously WTF nature of the person on its front — Rickman was famous (very, after his turn as Snape), and seriously talented, but he wasn’t a celebrity in the way that the people who get their faces on t-shirts usually are. His dalliances didn’t make the pages of People magazine. I have no idea where he lived. I’m actually not entirely sure whether he was straight or gay. Until he took the role of Snape, he had been a slightly-more-handsome-than-average character actor. Even after he took the role of Snape, he was still a character actor — it was just that he was probably the single most famous character actor in the world. Why was he on this shirt?

    But there was more to it for me. Rickman had always been one of those guys that I felt a little bit of ownership of. One of the things I used to do, back when I had a membership to a fabulous brick-and-mortar PDX movie rental shop called Movie Madness, was fall in love with an actor or actress and make a project of plowing through every movie on their IMDB page. The whims that took me could be capricious, weird — I watched every terrible movie that the terrible actress Jennifer Morrison (of the terrible TV show House) made, for instance. But one of the more rewarding ones of these projects was Rickman. I never finished — he’d been in over 40 movies and TV shows by the time I took it up, some of them quite hard to lay hands on (I never managed to find a copy of a BBC miniseries called The Barchester Chronicles, in which Rickman plays a reportedly very minor role, for instance). But you’d find Rickman doing solid work in the weirdest corners of cinema and television — as the title character in an HBO movie called Rasputin: Dark Servant of Destiny, for instance; or as the nasty Outback imperlalist Elliot Marston in the dopey Quigley Down Under. Though he was often typecast as the heavy, he could do just about anything, as attested by his comic turn as The Metatron in Kevin Smith’s Dogma, or his unexpectedly heart-throbbing Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility. When finally he was tapped to play the role that would make him a worldwide icon — Severus Snape in the Harry Potter franchise — it felt like there was no other actor on Earth who could breathe life into JK Rowling’s most complex, dangerous, and magnetic character.

    He was probably too old to play Snape, really; the Severus of the books is still a relatively young man (some rudimentary math would suggest that he’s in his early 30s by the time Harry and the gang show up at Hogwarts), but Rickman was 55 — old enough to be the father of the character he was playing, if you think about it. But still he seemed perfect. Rickman’s specialty was the character who was supercilious, hyper-intelligent, malevolent. Snape was all of those things. He was scary and mean and cruel. The thing is, a lot of people could do that. But the part called for someone who could play all of those things, and then make it convincing when he finally displayed something many never expected him to have — vulnerability. When the moment came, Rickman was more than up to the task. By that point, seven-and-a-half movies in, the Harry Potter franchise was not really featuring the acting skills of its players very much; the books were far too long and complex to be adapted into movies, especially when the movies made the mistake of concentrating on the action at the expense of the things that truly made the books special — the characters and the humor. Rickman was just about the only adult with a big moment to play in either of the final two films. Many other very fine actors — Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Gambon, etc — were reduced to little more than cackling villains or noble godheads by that point. But Rickman nailed it. Inasmuch as the bloated, overstuffed behemoths that were the last few Harry Potter movies had a heart, Rickman’s Snape was it. He pumped hot blood through a cold franchise almost single-handed.

    I still kind of can’t believe he’s gone. I no longer follow movies as avidly as once I did, but the idea that the upcoming flicks Eye in the Sky (a star-studded techno-thriller in which Rickman stars opposite Helen Mirren) and the certain-to-be-dreadful Alice in Wonderland sequel, in which he’ll voice the Catarpillar, will be his last? That just seems wrong. I re-watched Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban, and every time he was on the screen, I tried to convince myself that he was really dead. I never got there. Somehow it just doesn’t make sense.

We Could Be Heroes

    The holidays can be a rough time if someone you love has recently died. I don’t think this insight is really going to blow anybody’s mind, but I’d never really experienced it first-hand until last year, when Christmas marked the one year anniversary of the moment when I realized my foster brother, Jesse, was in the midst of a manic episode — a manic episode that was followed by a bottomless depression that resulted in his dying in a murder-suicide, in which he killed his five-year-old daughter, as well. Now, two years later, I’ve hashed through the events that followed so many times that I can type them without really feeling the whooosh that I’m sure you just felt when you saw the words “murder-suicide” on the page. It’s not okay — it will never be okay — but it has become normal, in its way. How I feel about it changes from day to day. Lately it’s been rage. The rage is omnidirectional and it’s been destructive to my personal relationships. I think it’s made me a harder, less forgiving person, which I don’t like but can’t change.

    Lately, I was deposed as part of a lawsuit stemming from Jesse’s death. I suppose I probably shouldn’t talk too, too much about that, because it’s still pending. But it was a destabilizing experience. To have a stranger ask you, again and again, for details about a friendship that you can barely bring yourself to think about (or stop thinking about), is disorienting. I said things aloud that I’d barely allowed myself to think before. I was legally required to say those things out loud, in a room full of people I neither knew nor trusted. Afterwards, I managed to contain my tears almost until I got on the elevator. For some reason it seemed really important that I not let any of the lawyers see me cry.

    I guess because it’s the holidays, and because of the deposition, I’ve been thinking about Jesse a lot lately. His final months have tended to color my memories of everything about him with a tinge of nihilism. I think about driving him home from school one day nineteen years ago, a gray Portland afternoon, the day we became friends, and it feels meaningless, ugly. I think about making a ceremonial bonfire of his old notebooks on a bridge over the Clackamas River, and then stomping it out in fits of laughter, and it feels meaningless, ugly. I think about his wedding day, the first Christmas after he moved into our house, and especially the day his daughter was born — meaningless, ugly. This is where the rage comes from, I think. I no longer feel sad, I no longer see the tragedy. I just see the pointlessness of our whole friendship, of the love I poured on him and his daughter, of the time we spent together, and it pisses me off.

    And so, because I do not wish to feel this way, I’m going to tell you a story about the two of us that, no matter what happened after, mattered. It’s not a big story, but it’s a true story. This is a Christmas gift to myself, to remember this.

    I can’t remember the year anymore, or even the month, though my memory is that it was the kind of cool, gray, but dry day that you only really get in like October or maybe April. Jesse and I were driving down a road on the west side of town, out towards Beaverton — much more his part of town than mine; before his father died and he moved in with us, he’d lived out close to the Portland-Beaverton line, while I had spent nearly my whole life in urban Southeast Portland. That side of town is ribbed with high green hills, which are in turn lined with winding busy roads that stream down toward the basin where Portland proper lies gridded over the flats. I can’t remember anymore what we were doing over there. I can’t remember what we were talking about. I can’t even remember which one of us was driving. I can remember, with vivid acuity, gazing through the windshield as we approached a curve in the road. Car after car glided left, around the curve — but the car in front of us didn’t. It just kept going straight, as though its driver had decided to release the wheel and see what would happen. What happened was that it disappeared over the lip of the road. I remember thinking to myself that the most remarkable thing was how unremarkable it was — it happened soundlessly, slowly, almost as if it were the most natural thing in the world for every tenth car around that curve to slip into oblivion beyond its edge.

    We pulled over, along with many people both in front and behind us. As I got out of the car, I took in the situation below: beyond the lip of the road lay a steep, ivied slope studded with Douglas firs; the car that had gone over had slid sideways down this slope and smacked into one of these trees with its passenger door, pinning the car’s frame heavily against the trunk and leaving the wheels spinning ineffectually at ground upon which they couldn’t quite gain purchase. Just visible through the driver’s side window was an elderly woman, who appeared to be helpless to shove the door open against the pull of gravity.

    I remember Jesse peeling off his jacket and saying to me, “Dial 911.”

    “What are you going to do?” I had been busy coming up with excuses not to go down there — the one I’d landed on was that she might have done something to her spine and it probably wasn’t a good idea to move her.

    But Jesse was already gone, sliding down the uneven slope on his huge feet. I watched him for a second, and then pulled out the little flip phone I had in those days. For the first time in my life, I called 911. It made me unaccountably nervous. When the operator answered, my voice quaked. I told her an old lady was down in a gully in her car and might need rescue. The operator asked me where we were. I couldn’t quite remember. I think I told her we were at 17th and Taylors Ferry Road. Once we had hung up, I went back to the lip of the road to watch what was happening.

    Jesse had reached the old lady’s car, pulled open the driver’s side door, and stood against it, propping it open with his back as he heaved the woman out of her seat. Then he hoisted her over his shoulder, more or less like a sack of potatoes, and began climbing up the slope toward the road. I could hear him apologizing for the indignity of it even as he did it.

    Before he reached the top, a siren sounded, and a firetruck appeared up toward the top of the hill — but then, before reaching us, it veered off onto a side street. I realized, suddenly and with complete certainty, that I had given them the wrong location. It would be a few minutes before they realized it too and followed a daisy chain of other 911 calls back to the actual scene of the accident.

    Before they got there, Jesse had hauled the old woman up to street level and set her down on the hood of our car. He was asking her a series of questions that I suspect were meant to test her for concussion — though he was by profession an operations manager for a mortgage company, Jesse had always had the aspect of a cop or a military person, and cultivated many of the skills needed for those professions. These included hand-to-hand combat skills and a strong grasp of human anatomy.

    They also included the instinct to approach disaster in an attempt to help. I have long held a theory about human beings, one that is crude but, I think, true. This theory posits that there are basically three types of people: people who run towards a fire, people who run away from a fire, and people who stand and watch a fire. Most people, for sound evolutionary and psychological reasons, fall in the latter two categories. I am, I have discovered repeatedly, of the stand-and-watch school, often of the stand-and-watch-and-try-to-remember-how-I’m-going-to-phrase-it-later school. But Jesse wasn’t one of us. Jesse was the sort of person who ran towards a disaster, to see if he could rescue anybody from it. The truth is that a lot of the actions Jesse took in his life fall under an aegis that we name heroism. He was proud of that.

    On bad days, I let that taint how I feel about heroism. I’m already cynical about such concepts, and if Jesse hadn’t been such a regular example — this was not the only time I saw him do this sort of thing, though it is the most dramatic — I probably wouldn’t believe it was a real thing. I already have a tendency to think that our ascription of moral virtue to the performance of heroic acts is a bit . . . generous. But then maybe I’m just resolving the cognitive dissonance involved in the fact that I am the protagonist of my own life, but certainly not the hero.

    I’ve been reading Amanda Ripley’s The Unthinkable, about how people respond in various disasters and why. Toward the end of the book she starts digging around in a database of heroes — the sorts of people who run toward a fire in hopes of helping. They have some things in common: they tend to be male; they tend to come from small towns; they tend to have good relationships with their parents; they tend to have friends from all walks of life. Jesse and I each had two of these things: we were both male; he had friends from all walks of life, and I have a good relationship with my parents. But there’s another variable that he had and I don’t: he believed that he could control what happened to him. He had a romantic, almost mystical image of himself as a powerful person — powerful physically, mentally. His childhood had been traumatic, and I think his adulthood was largely about wresting control away from those who held him captive as a kid. Me? I’ve been riding the waves my whole life, just trying not to drown. No one really hurt me as a child. But I also don’t really believe I can change anything. I believe in basically immutable systems.

    There are several facile readings of those alleged insights that could lead one to explain the manner of Jesse’s death. But that would be reading life like a novel, and if there’s one thing I believe above all others, it’s that life is not art and attempts to make it so are destructive. This is just a story about two young men, one of whom is dead now.

Why I Was Such a Pain in the Ass in Grad School

Below is the text of something I wrote in the winter of 2014, my last year in graduate school.

The Various Things, Internetual and Otherwise, I’ve Been Reading and/or Thinking about Lately

Under consideration: James Gleick’s The Information, Raymond Tallis on Jacques Lacan, John Gardner’s reactionary faff, Dana Spiotta’s collage novels, and some other stuff.

1. Because the digital world is lonely and deracinating and alienating, and also because beyond that I am an introvert and find face-to-face interactions with people exhausting, I spend a lot of time alone. Because I spend a lot of time alone and am an introvert and am alienated and deracinated and lonely, I have come to be a denizen of a variety of online “communities”, viz, websites whereat lonely, deracinated, alienated introverts can gather and discuss things without having to look one another in the eye; usually these begin as single-serving websites, focussed on something specific, and become broader: the one I have spent the most time at, in my life, is Baseball Think Factory, which was originally a gathering spot for data-minded baseball enthusiasts — sports “geeks”, we were, which seemed paradoxical in 2002 but now feels totally normal and intuitive, since the geeks have taken over the world — but has since become a freewheeling society of (almost exclusively) dudes, complete with friendships, rivalries, enemies, politics, and entertainments; though baseball is still the most-discussed subject there, the most riotous arguments always erupt over real-world politics, with the majority trending left-libertarian and a vocal minority standing athwart history shouting “STOP!”

2. I’m going to make a distinction here, and it’s going to be important in a minute, and I want it near the top so nobody will miss it: there is a big difference between “data” and “information”. The superhuman geek-god Nate Silver might call one “noise” and the other “the signal”; what I think it really means is that you can get a lot of input these days, but not all of it means what you think it means — or anything at all. The most dangerous mental bias in the data age is probably apophenia: the human tendency to detect patterns in random data. The classic example is how we perceive there to be a face in the geologic forms on the moon, though of course there isn’t: the data, in this case, is the image of the moon; the information the mind wants to find there is the shape of a face. The information that is actually there is the history of the galaxy — if you know how to read it. Anyway, the Man in the Moon is harmless enough, but apophenia becomes dangerous when we are presented with an overwhelming amount of data about the world and the universe and start drawing implausible conclusions: that 9/11 was an inside job, for instance, or that global climate change is a natural process unaided by human inputs (or simply doesn’t exist because it snowed yesterday).

3. An example: the word beautiful contains a very great deal of data, but essentially no information, because if a person says another person is beautiful, we really have no idea what they mean by it: do they like tall, dark and handsome? Rough and rugged? Do they have a ginger fetish? Pretty much anything you could call beautiful — a face, a body, a landscape, a sunset, a night sky, a dream, an idea — is going to present this problem.

4. Anyway, the reason I started off talking about the internet is because there is a common practice on internet forums when someone else elegantly expresses an opinion that you share but don’t feel up to articulating: you quote the entirety of what they have said, and then follow it up with a simple, one-word sentence fragment: “This.” When I sat down to write this little thing, I kind of wanted to quote the entirety of Jonathan Lethem’s essay on postmodernism and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and then type underneath: “This.”

5. It has become axiomatic, in this post-post-(post)-modernist age, that identity is composed and not innate and so on and so forth. I find this to be immensely troubling and ultimately kind of preposterous. It seems to me to be a kind of existential overreaction to the terrors of fascism & colonialism: because for so long the powerful presumed there was an innate quality in being white & Xian that gave them the right to do whatever they wanted to those who were not white &/or Xian, a lot of thinkers freaked out and decided that there was nothing innate about people at all and that the very concept of innateness was dangerous. And that’s understandable, because racialism or whatever you want to call it is a ridiculous and provably false set of ideas; equally, however, it is provably false that identity consists only of inputs. There is a unique processor somewhere in a human brain that causes similar inputs to output different people; it’s not that this is totally immutable or intractable — I am in a lather to assure you that I do not believe in the concept of a soul — but that there is a core to any person’s being that will cause them to compose themselves in a certain way, which has very little to do with culture or language, and may have something to do with genetics, though it’s of course important to note that the way this breaks down runs against the assumptions of race or class superiority that drove several generations of human thought. Pretending as though this isn’t true because it bothers us renders nobody a useful service. The British neuroscientist and philosopher Raymond Tallis writes in his crushing review of Jacques Lacan & co: a History of Psychoanalysis in France:

Future historians trying to account for the institutionalized fraud that goes under the name of ‘Theory’ will surely accord a central place to the influence of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. He is one of the fattest spiders at the heart of the web of muddled not-quite-thinkable-thoughts and evidence-free assertions of limitless scope which practitioners of theorrhoea have woven into their version of the humanities. Much of the dogma central to contemporary Theory came from him: that the signifier dominates over the signified; that the world of words creates the world of things; that the ‘I’ is a fiction based upon an Oedipalised negotiation of the transition from mirror to symbolic stages; and so on.

This.

6. There is something assaultive about living in the age of data. James Gleick’s magisterial The Information, which is sort of almost a biography of data, is subtitled, A History, a Theory, a Flood, and that feels right: god, there’s just so much of it. Climate data, the home / road offensive splits of the Seattle Mariners, the likely-voter adjustment in a Real Clear Media poll of Ohio voters, the live birth rate in Iran. Those are just the datastreams I, personally, have waded into over the last few days. It’s hard not to feel overwhelmed, and equally it’s hard to trust yourself to organize all of it, at least if you’re constantly aware of your own mental biases, which trend apopheniac.

The first “postmodernism” that requires a new name is our sense—I’m taking it for granted that you share it—that the world, as presently defined by the advent of global techno-capitalism, the McLuhanesque effects of electronic media, and the long historical postludes of the transformative theories, movements, and traumas of the twentieth century, isn’t a coherent or congenial home for human psyches. — Jonathan Lethem, “Postmodernism as Liberty Valance: Notes on an Execution”

This.

7. Have you ever stood in a swimming pool at such a depth that you had to tilt your head back and look at the sky in order to breathe, and even then water kept getting in your mouth and you found yourself wondering if this was a good idea and if maybe it was too late to pull the abort switch?

8. If one were to have an interest in watching a novelist grapple with the feeling that modern life overwhelms identities, it might be valuable to read Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document, which is about a woman who was once the sort of bullshit-hippie-idiot-terrorist that I’m glad ceased to be in vogue ten years before I was born: you know, the white children of privilege farting about with pseudo-Marxism and blowing people up in the name of something, though just what has never really been clear to me. I guess it’s because I’m a GenXer and was born jaded that I find this kind of thing hard to sympathize with, but it strikes me as dangerously stupid to assume that there’s an ideology that’s going to cure society’s ills, and even stupider to assume that Marxism is it, but then I’m getting off track and anyway the principle narrator of Eat the Document has gone underground and sold out or bought in or whatever ridiculous thoughtcrime growing up is meant to be, and her past comes back to haunt her. Unlike the Lethem essay or the Tallis review or whatever I cannot simply quote a passage of the book and say “this, I believe this,” because on some level the book buys into a concept of authenticity that I just don’t believe in, ie, it seems to me that people are what they do and the attitude they hold when they do it or the, I don’t know, cultural background of their upbringing or whatever other fundamentally irrelevant data you want to bring into the equation doesn’t really matter. On the back cover, in my notes on the book, I wrote, The fetishization of authenticity results from a pointed anxiety about one’s own lack of it. It’s a kind of conservatism. So that — that’s what I think about that, I guess.

9. And then I made the mistake of reading John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction, which, wow, what a piece of shit that book is. Some of this reaction has to do with the fact that Gardner was a small-time novelist taking arrogant pot-shots at people who were vastly superior writers (anyone who dismisses Kurt Vonnegut out of hand, especially when allegedly thinking about how to deal with morality in fiction, pretty much goes straight to the bottom of my shit list). But more it has to do with the intellectual straitjacket that Gardner tries to fit on society, dismissing postmodernists as glib and “commercial”, which I guess might have some merit, but then when he talks about what a book or work of art art or whatever is supposed to get up to, he makes these vast generalizations that stand on a foundation of pure hot air, to wit: “True art is by its nature moral. We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values.” Do I really have to explain why this is total faff? Aside from the fact that it’s reactionary and dangerously dismissive of what one might call the great polyphony of world tradition, it’s also the kind of big, baseless assertion that lies in the crumbly fundaments of religions (of which, by the way, Gardner was dismissive, somehow not quite seeing irony there). This is the kind of thing that sounds stern and brave but is really just an odiferous belch in the face of the challenges of modern life. It also precludes what I think of as the diagnostic role of some art in society: I once had a conversation with a woman I was dating about the state of the newspaper industry, which was then in the early stages of the death throes that continue to drag down a few papers a year; she wanted to know what I thought about, well, that, and I gave her my honest opinion: that the age of print media was basically over and in a few years we would live in a thunderous echo chamber made up mostly of tiny niche websites that would help us live in the self-organized feedback loops of corrupt data. She wanted to know, given such a dire prognosis, what I thought should be done about it. And I said, Nothing. It’s going to happen and we can’t stop it. This made her very angry and she said there was no point in having an opinion about something if you don’t have an opinion about how to change it for the better, which I find to be a completely ridiculous way of looking at the world, which I told her, and then I said, Sometimes the patient just has terminal cancer. She really didn’t like that. A few months later she moved to California and I didn’t go with her.

10. It is necessary these days to have one’s perimeter well-defended against bad data. There was recently a story that raced around social media among a certain stripe of conservative, which concerned a former Marine attending a college course taught by an atheistical professor who blasphemed loudly and demanded to know where God was to strike him down. The Marine then gets up, assaults his professor, and says, “God’s busy looking after our men and women who are out defending our freedoms, so I stood in for Him” [sic]. The sickly irony aside, this story is obviously a lie, and I suspect that many people who shared it around didn’t have any illusions as to its factuality. But it confirmed the way they thought about the world: professors and atheists bad; soldiers and Xians good. It may not have been factual, but it was true, as far as they were concerned. Encountering this on the Twitter and Facebook feeds of my more conservative relatives drove me crazy; but more pernicious by far, at least in the Life of Liberal Joseph, is the mirror image of that story, one in which the atheist is tolerant and triumphant, and the right-wing macho man is served justice. Such stories exist, I am certain of it. But I may be too blinded by my biases to properly ferret them out.

11. Liberals loved Nate Silver as long as he was was reassuring them that Mitt Romney wasn’t much of a threat to Barack Obama. Those feelings have become much more complex now that he seems to think the Senate will flip red this fall.

12. Change your passwords. They know.

13. Yeah, but who are they?

14. THE SYSTEM IS BLINKING RED THE SYSTEM IS BLINKING THE SYSTEM IS THE SYSTEM

15. What was I driving at? Oh, right — there does seem to be a semi-radical consensus going around that the way we live now is somehow difficult to take, in a way that it didn’t used to be. I’m not sure I find that particularly persuasive (living in the age of data is certainly not worse than living, for instance, in wartime Europe, or Soviet Russia during the famines, or really medieval anywhere), but does it seem to anybody else that we are all somehow far from home? I think I’m comfortable stipulating that the way we live is qualitatively difficult in a different way, in that there is a shattered, unfocussed, drowning quality to day-to-day life (combined with a stultifying unstimulated stillness of the body); but I’m not prepared to say that life is more difficult to tolerate than it used to be. I think the feeling I’m trying to describe, which is nebulous and which I don’t completely understand myself, comes from an intolerable clash between the fact that there is a core identity to each of us and it’s struggling to combat &/or process an oceanic amount of input in order to fashion a self. We live in postmodern times but do not possess a postmodern I, in the convenient, destabilized, meaningless, ultimately quite wrong way that Lacan and his many acolytes, students, scholars, fellow-travelers and dipshits would have us believe.

16. But what does this mean? Should you read The Information? Yes, I suppose you probably should, if my experience of it — that it was accessible, fascinating, and completely full of thoughts that seemed new to me — is one that can be generalized. Should you read Eat the Document? That’s a more complicated question. Eat the Document is about how the shredded remains of a life story cannot be completely disregarded or disposed of, though its execution sometimes seems more intellectually sound than — what’s the word? — oh, satisfying, that old critic’s saw. It’s a collage of voices and sorts of documents, which is interesting; but ultimately Spiotta fails properly to inhabit all the voices she’s telling her story in: a teenage boy writes in much the same way that his 40-something mother does, and it’s a problem. Her next novel, Stone Arabia, avoids this, sort of, by narrating itself in a weird amalgam of the first and third persons, so the voice makes more sense, but the book ends arbitrarily and is probably a hundred pages too short for its own good (not a common complaint in this day and age, but there you have it). Should you read On Moral Fiction? Yes, if you’re an aesthetic reactionary, or maybe if you’re participating in a bit of ancestor-slaying like what I’m doing here; otherwise, no, of course not, it’s a silly book, overfull of generalizations about what art is and what it’s for and why one should pursue it and . . . I don’t know, it didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Maybe if I annoy you, if after reading this little bit of post-post-(post)-modernist dithering you find everything I have to say stupid and silly and objectionable (an entirely reasonable reaction, if you ask me, as I am a bit of a pain in the ass), then it’s the book for you, and you should go off and buy it and read it and write modernist, realist, moralist fiction that my friends and I can sneer at and write dismissive reviews of and then send links to said reviews to one another via our Twitter accounts and then you guys can review what we write and poke fun and nobody will listen to anybody else and we’ll all just live as one big unhappy family in a choking atmosphere of self-arranged, self-reinforcing data that can mean whatever we want it to mean. I don’t know, guys. Who am I to tell you what to do?

Susan, Who Is Desperately Sought

    I decided to watch Desperately Seeking Susan because I listened to a couple of episodes of Karina Longworth’s You Must Remember This about Madonna’s early career, during the period when she was making elaborate, outlandish videos like “Vogue” and “Material Girl”, which traded directly on pomo rehash/remix of classic movies, from Metropolis to Diamonds Are Forever. You should listen to the episodes. Longworth’s skills as an editor have improved greatly in the two years she’s been doing the podcast — the levels are sometimes off, and her narration is somewhat artlessly Radiolab-y, which is often the sign of someone who hasn’t had much experience with ProTools or Hindenburg — but she has a passion for the subject borne of growing up in a media world that seemed, for almost a decade, to belong wholesale to the Material Girl. (Longworth and I are about the same age, which makes me feel incredibly unaccomplished and lazy.) Longworth’s thesis is that Madonna in some degree composed her fame of shifting, shifty images of female beauty, in order both to appeal to and subvert the wanton desires of pop culture. I have long been an advocate of Madonna, both as a songwriter and as a sort of auteur of the culture, and so I find myself in sympathy with Longworth’s arguments, even if I’m not all-in on the idea of Madonna-as-subversive. Longworth’s mastery of film history, though, combined with her obvious enthusiasm for the subject mattter (despite her dry delivery) helps her construct the argument far better than I ever could.

    I watched Desperately Seeking Susan in a mood of curiosity. The film came out before I was making my own moviegoing decisions — I was five in 1985 — and then, when I was in my serious film-buff phase, it didn’t have the kind of advertising that called out to me. I will admit that the teenaged me had not yet really put any critical thought into Madonna, either as a musician or a media phenomenon, and I mostly viewed her as an omnipresent, plastic non-factor, whose entire role in media was to appeal to male satyriasis in order to make money. (This was before I had realized that authenticity is a bullshit dump, and was still mostly in thrall to overwhelming male geniuses like Kurt Cobain and the young Van Morrison.) I also suspect that the film’s reputation was not high in those days. It certainly seemed to have been marketed as a fizzy, frivolous romp for the sister set, starring a pair of stylish young actresses whooping it up. I think I assumed that it was a sort of Thelma & Louise for nincompoops.

    It’s certainly not that. It’s not a truly great movie, really; it is, in fact, somewhat frivolous and fizzy. But it’s those things in a much cleverer way than I had ever before imagined. I think you could call it a postmodern farce, in the best sense of the word. 

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    I’m not really going to recap the plot here, because the plot qua the plot is not really the point of Desperately Seeking Susan. It centers around a series of mistaken identities, amnesiac events, and crime-caper MacGuffins that serve to set two characters — Rosanna Arquette’s timid housewife, Roberta; and Madonna’s impulsive party girl/con artist,* Susan — adrift in social environments to which they are not used: Roberta touring the seamy side of Manhattan on the arm of an extremely handsome film projectionist played by Aidan Quinn, and Susan lolling about in the lap of luxury in a suburban mansion in a tony New Jersey suburb. It’s a story of a young woman saving herself from the savage doldrums of a life defined by roles she didn’t invent. By becoming Susan — that’s one of the mistaken identities — Roberta comes to realize that there’s a lot more, not only to life, but to herself, than she had previously understood. It’s not a revolutionary plot, but it’s given a feminist spin that seems to have been lost on a lot of its contemporary reviewers, and certainly wasn’t hinted at in the ads.

*In fact, Susan reads, in the current pop-psychoanalytical environment, as a classic sociopath, not unlike Ferris Bueller, with whom she shares a lot of personality traits.

    You’ve heard of the Bechdel Test? It was invented by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, and it contains one simple criterion: a movie passes the Bechdel Test if it features two female characters who have a conversation about something — anything — other than a man. It doesn’t seem like it should be that hard a test to pass, but if you invest about 30 seconds’ thought in it you’ll find that not many movies do. The Godfather? Hell, no — I’m not even sure its three female characters are ever onscreen together. Pulp Fiction? Nope, there’s never a scene without a man in it. Boyhood? Not a chance. Not that a movie can’t be good without passing the Bechdel Test. It’s just something to think about.

    Desperately Seeking Susan casually and easily passes the Bechdel Test, despite the fact that its two main female characters don’t really meet until the film’s climax. It does this in a way that would seem simple, except that so many movies fail to do it: it gives its female characters identities and jobs and things like that. Madonna’s Susan is a hedonist, an unapologetic club kid, an opportunistic thief. When the last of these lands her in a pot of hot water, she goes to a female friend who works as a magician’s assistant in Manhattan for help. What do they talk about? What do you think? They talk about Susan’s crime and her friend’s crappy job. Then they go to the movies. The scene makes so much sense that it doesn’t stand out at all, until you begin to think about the movie with 30 years of cultural criticism in between you and the film’s release.

    Another subtle, but I imagine purposeful, sequence happens at the end of the film, when Susan’s misdeeds have started to catch up with her, and she’s abducted at gunpoint by a creepy bleached blond dude, who thinks she has a pair of earrings he wants. They creep along through a warren rooftops and fire escapes, hotly pursued by Susan’s sometime boyfriend. But when a blow comes to the bad guy’s skull, it’s not Susan’s boyfriend who delivers it, but Roberta, newly empowered and more assertive after a brief walk in Susan’s shoes. It’s not didactic — if I hadn’t been clued in by Longworth’s podcast that watching the movie through a feminist lens might be interesting, I almost certainly would have missed it — but it’s about the most spectacular way to pass the Bechdel Test there is. Two female characters save the day, all without talking about a man.

    Over and above its political aspects, the movie has one really big asset: Madonna, as Susan. Kind of famously, just about the only thing that Madonna ever set her sights on and didn’t get was movie stardom. She married a movie star (Sean Penn) and later a movie director (Guy Ritchie), and in between conducted a torrid affair with a rapidly-fading movie star (Warren Beatty). But despite several bids at stardom, it never quite happened — her Breathless Mahoney was alluring enough, but Dick Tracy was a fatuous vanity project, all surface and no depth. She was good but distinctly outshone by Rosie O’Donnell, Tom Hanks, and Lori Petty in a comedic turn in A League of Their Own. The closest she came was the starring role in Evita, for which she won some awards and good reviews, but the film was a fairly forgettable adaptation of a minor Andrew Lloyd Weber musical that (in my opinion) the world would have been just fine without. Desperately Seeking Susan would suggest, at least to me, that the reason Madonna never became a huge star was not because she wasn’t capable, but because she was miscast. Maybe she chose to be miscast; one of the signatures of Madonna’s career, once she hit her stride, is that she rarely did anything she didn’t want to do. But all the same — miscast.

    It’s tempting to assume that Madonna is playing a version of herself as Susan, not least because the overlap between Susan’s crucifixes-and-fishnet fashion sense and Madonna’s own was basically one-to-one. Who knows if that’s true, but somehow I doubt it. Susan could be a total cipher, with a lesser performance, or worse, a floozie — she’s almost nothing but self-interest and hedonism. But Madonna imbues Susan with a magnetism, a cynicism, an intelligence, and — yes — a lissomeness, that make her scenes hard to take your eyes off of, even when they’re sort of easy spoofery of upper-middle-class suburbanness that was fairly common in the 1980s.** When she dances in the club with an older man, mocking him for his squareness, his sobriety, his fundamental lack of life force, part of the reason it works so utterly is because she is completely the opposite. Madonna, whether or not she had the chops of Meryl Streep, was not to be ignored.

**One thing I hadn’t known, or perhaps had forgotten, was just how beautiful Madonna was when she first hit. I mean, of course, I was aware that she was an attractive woman, probably even before I began to understand what that really meant. But by the time of my own sexual awakening, Madonna had remade herself as an unapproachable blonde, a woman of complete glamour, which was the sort of thing that did not really appeal to me. The Madonna of Desperately Seeking Susan, punky and less calculated(-seeming), though, was a great, undeniable beauty.

    The film, of course, is not perfect, either aesthetically or politically. A lot of the stuff about Roberta’s buffoonish husband is cartoonish, and not in a particularly good way. Some of the storytelling choices seem hilariously — but not self-consciously — absurd. And, of course, this being a movie, Arquette’s Roberta somehow manages to go on a days-long adventure through Manhattan without ever meeting a person of color who isn’t a servant or a thug. (Hell, I’m not sure she meets anybody at all who isn’t either white or black, meaning the Manhattan of Desperately Seeking Susan has been largely flushed of its Chinese, Indian, and Puerto Rican populations, among others.) And it does belong, at least in its second half, to a genre of film that was popular in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, which I’m not always in love with: the city-as-hell movie. (Usually this hell is New York, though sometimes it’s Los Angeles. Has it been Chicago? I’d bet it has.) You know this movie: The Warriors, Escape from New York, New Jack City, Grand Canyon, Taxi Driver, etc, etc, etc. I’m not saying that these movies are all the same, or that they’re all bad. In fact, the list I just named has one stone classic, three cult classics, and one decent-if-pablumy offering on it. But I find the genre tiresome, after a while. Though I realize that America’s cities went through a distinct rough patch in the mid-late 20th century, with crime skyrocketing, white flight causing dereliction, and so forth, sometimes it seems to me that Hollywood processed what was happening in urban America entirely through the lens of white anxiety about black people. I mean, come on. R&B music was, for a long time, called urban. For a while, I was hoping that Desperately Seeking Susan would resist the meme that cities were scary and bad and plagued by dangerous black people — early in the film, Manhattan is a place of excitement and discovery for Roberta — but soon enough there were three black dudes leaning on a white guy’s car when he came out of the shop. And then Roberta was being chased through a weirdly abandoned SoHo, and the city-as-hell thing was in full swing.***

***Two key caveats here: (1) Manhattan really was a rough place in those days, as Madonna herself could attest — she was sexually assaulted at knife point in the early 80s, long before she was famous, outside her building in the East Village. (2) City-as-hell is not really completed in Desperately Seeking Susan — ultimately, Arquette’s Roberta elects to stay in Manhattan, preferring it to the suffocation of the suburbs. In most city-as-hell movies, the (almost always white) protagonists either escape the city, or are killed by it. Think about frequent Madonna collaborator David Fincher’s dreadful Seven, in which Gwyneth Paltrow complains bitterly about living the city with her cop husband, and is rewarded with decapitation.

    All in all, Desperately Seeking Susan left me lamenting a Madonna movie career that moved along more natural paths, playing to her strengths as a comedian. There’s no guarantee she would have become an world-bestriding movie star, but I think she had it in her. Maybe the mistake was in trying to do movie stardom in her pomo remix style — instead of following her strengths as an actor, trying to manufacture herself as Marilyn-style glamorous blonde. (Madonna was always far too cynical and knowing to play the Marilyn part. It’s part of her appeal.) Perhaps Madonna was always too much in control for the moment — maybe there was no way for a woman to be a movie star without relinquishing the driver's seat in those days. (Or these ones.) Who knows.

    Ah, well. The road not taken. Here, I’ll leave you a video of with her best song.

On Writer's Block / On Bad Writing Advice / Breakthroughs

1. On Writer’s Block

    For a long time I was the sort of person who said he didn’t believe in writer’s block. I know that I’m prone to saying provocative things mostly for the purpose of getting a rise out of people — one that always gets a doubletake from people is when I say that I don’t believe in authenticity — but this actually wasn’t that. From the age of maybe twelve until I graduated college, I never once had difficulty writing. I filled notebook upon notebook — all of them mercifully lost, now — with song lyrics, poems, personal observations. It wasn’t journaling. I don’t find journaling to be a very useful activity most of the time (it usually just devolves into complaining). I said I was emulating the poet William Stafford, who got up every morning and wrote a poem before starting the day, but I don’t think that was really accurate. On some level, I think it was just that I was a kid and was fairly sure most of my thoughts were really important, revolutionary thoughts that should be written down. It was also incredibly good practice. Though I can go through things I’ve written and find the style refining, warping based on the venue or the subject matter, a lot of the fundaments of how I write were formed long ago, in the crucible of little spiral notebooks that I spent hours and hours scribbling in. The discursiveness, the use (overuse?) of the M-dash, the high-low balancing act of poetry and dialect — those have all been there for a long time. I’m glad I wrote like that for all those years, just as I am glad I lost most of the shit I wrote back then. But it gave me unrealistic expectations.

    The poems dried up right after I graduated, when I was living in a little house with a couple of old friends from college. I wrote almost nothing at all for several years. I didn’t think of this as writer’s block at the time (in fact I thought of it as being a total failure), but I think that’s what it was. I tried to write a couple of novels, but I didn’t really have an idea for one. I tried submitting my poetry for publication, but after a while that started to seem phony and I quit. I didn’t really get back in the swing of things until the summer of 2005, when I finished Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince and then began penning a fanfic version of the seventh book that eventually sprawled to 90 pages. That uncorked something, and soon I was writing a novel of my own. It wasn’t very good, but it was writing. Within a few years I was publishing stories. After a while I got to grad school, and really developed what I think of as my adult style. I had a couple of realizations: I don’t have much interest in writing Literary Fiction of the sort that I was raised on — formless, muted stuff about people never quite saying what they mean. I don’t mind reading it (sometimes), but the fact is that writing it makes me sleepy. And so there will always be an element of science fiction, or crime, or weird adventure, to everything I write. I’m happy about that. I don’t want to be Raymond Carver anymore.

    But the bouts of block have come and gone ever since. I’ll go months in which the only things I write are blog posts and emails. (I am known as a sender of long emails. I dated a woman for a while who thought my long emails were an enormous pain in the ass, and frankly stated that she didn’t read them. No wonder we didn’t last.) Sometimes, I don’t even write that much. (To wit: the last month on this blog.) I’ve been trying to convince myself that these periods of not-writing are actually useful. There’s a sort of subconscious cognition going on, I think. After I finished the disastrous second draft of my second novel, I spent an entire summer mostly worrying that I wasn’t a writer anymore. Then, in two months, I vomited out about 50,000 words, and finished the thing. I had no sense during the long, uncertain summer that I was actually cutting the gordian knot of my novel. But not even an old bloviator like me can just make up the second half of a book he’s been working on for almost seven years on the spot. Something subconscious must have happened.

    So maybe I still don’t believe in writer’s block, now that I think about it. Maybe I’m always writing, in one sense. It’d be nice if I could avoid losing all confidence in myself and feeling like a fraud during the periods when I’m not actually putting pen to paper, though.

2. On Bad Writing Advice

    There’s a lot of bad writing advice in the world, but I think my least favorite was the kind I heard on the podcast A Way with Words this Monday. The hosts kept going on and on about how writing should be kept simple, and how they tell their kids that they should be aiming below the top of their register most of the time, blah blah blah, and I gotta say — this is bad advice. I mean, here on the bloggy pages, we’re mostly chatting, so I’m not digging about for my most complex sentences and recondite vocabulary. But I think that the emphasis on simplicity can be oppressive, and make a lot of writing dull and flat — in short, Strunk & White were not right. Their reign of terror must end. Unsheathe your semicolons, young writers of America. Be aware that the passive voice has uses on occasion. And, for the love of God, have some fucking fun. Writing should not feel like the act of pulling against a leash.

3. Breakthroughs

    I have felt for a while now that I was on the verge of turning into a new, better person than I’ve been for most of my adult life. This isn’t really in evidence in my actual life — I still get depressed, I still drink more than I probably should, I’m still short-tempered and confrontational sometimes, and I still flee from relationships the instant they threaten to turn complicated or serious — but I’ve had this feeling, like a stone in my stomach, that I was about to break through some kind of imaginary wall and find myself in a sunnier, warmer, more sweet-smelling world. I can’t tell you why. I think that part of it is just feeling prepared to actually do things differently. Try the metacognition necessary to understand why I have been the way I’ve been, what steps I can take to change the things that can actually be changed, and what I’m just going to have to accept about myself.

    This blog has been a part of that project, at least sometimes. One of the reasons I decided to lean into some of the uncomfortable stuff — especially the stuff about race that I was writing about over the summer — was that I had a sense that being honest about it was the only way to get it sorted out. I’ve had the experience of really stepping in shit on this front, almost entirely out of the cluelessness that’s born of growing up white in a mostly-white place like Portland. I felt like the only way to sort out my embarrassment, and try to move forward as a smarter, more mindful person, was to write about it. And in public. Because embarrassment and shame sometimes metastasizes into something altogether worse. Though I didn’t think I was in danger of turning into a reactionary, I wanted to see if talking about it out loud would somehow inoculate me against that. (Answer: the only way that’s going to work is to keep writing about it, whenever it comes up. There’s never a time when you’ve “cured” yourself of racism and bias.)

    But there are other ways in which it hasn’t been, not in the way I had hoped it would be. There are good reasons for some of that — I learned the hard way that you shouldn’t write about people you date casually in a place where they might find it — but a lot of it has been the old fear: of being known. I don’t want anybody to know me too well, because then they would understand just how awful I really am. I’ve already confessed to being entitled and motivated by fear and full of rage and judgement and sometimes pointlessly cruel. I wouldn’t want anybody to know the really bad stuff. And I wouldn’t want anybody to have a store of examples.

    But the breakthrough, if it’s going to happen, will have to be a process of becoming. I’m never actually going to bust down that wall and come over all rosy one night. And so here, at the bottom of this post, I’m going to start a new tradition: I will keep myself accountable, and in public. Maybe that will help.

Goals, short-term

Limit myself to two beers, except on special occasions

No smoking. Period. (I’ve been pretty good about this the last few weeks.)

Read for at least an hour every day.

Never have a day on which I don’t leave my apartment.

Goals, long-term

No more dating women I don’t really like.

Try not to feel like I’m too broken to stay with women I do like.

Try to monetize my writing better.

Jessica Jones & the Superhero Problem / The Dirty Secret about Master of None / Man in the High Castle's Great Lie

    It’s been a few weeks — I got discombobulated when the blog’s domain expired. I was told by Hover that I would have the opportunity to buy it back, but I’ve checked almost every day for a month and it seems that somebody, somewhere, has decided that my old website is a domain that they need to have and I don’t. This reminds me, more than anything, of the time I left my bike helmet clipped to my bike outside a supermarket, and some jerk stole it. What’s the point of stealing something with no value to anyone but its owner? To increase global chaos? To teach “society” a lesson? I don’t know.

    I’ve been watching a few shows that have entered the zeitgeist since we last spoke, dear reader. Each, in its own way, strikes me as being less than what its hype would lead one to believe. Two of them hold little interest for me at all.

    The best of these shows is the new Netflix outing, Jessica Jones, in which Krysten Ritter (of Breaking Bad and Veronica Mars almost-fame) plays a hard-bitten private dick doing battle with a creepy English sociopath named Kilgrave. Wait . . . did you notice what got left out of that summary? Two things, one not very interesting, the other more so:

    1. Everybody’s got superpowers.

    2. Kilgrave, played by The Internet’s Boyfriend, David Tennant, once used his superpower (mind control) to subject Ritter’s titular character to a form of sexual slavery.

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Krysten Ritter as Jessica Jones

    The show is based on a little-known-outside-the-comics-world Marvel book called Alias, and its tone is bleak, its affect blank and sarcastic, its cinematography artfully dark. Though the show is nominally a superhero offering, it does most of its stylistic cribbing, not from comics, but from film noir. This is a wise choice for a number of reasons, but chief among them is that the attitude of cynical gloom that infested noir well matches a protagonist who is a fairly recent survivor of sexual assault. The makers of Jessica Jones — possibly the author of the book on which it is based — intuited something: noir ethos is a rendering of PTSD.

    Think about your typical noir hero. He drinks too much, has trouble maintaining meaningful relationships, often works obsessively, is driven by demons that roil beneath the surface but are never coherently exposed. He has usually severed relationships with old partners, and now works alone, conducting most interactions as a form of hostage negotiation. Violence comes easily to him. Much of the time, he wears a trench coat.

    That trench coat might just seem like a tic, but it’s actually key to unlocking the hard-boiled detectives of noir film and dime novels all over the English-speaking world. Why? Because it hints at the big, unspoken Trouble that lurks behind all the small trouble that drives the story: he’s a veteran. Sam Spade, the ur-hard-boiled-detective, the trench-coat-wearer-in-chief, is almost certainly a veteran of the First World War, like his creator. I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that Spade’s literary career began in 1930, when a lot of people had suffered the privations of the First World War, and then blossomed after America joined the Second. For two generations, the world was full of hard-drinking, disjointed men who didn’t feel at home in the America they’d been raised to believe in. Detective fiction and the film noir embody that alienation, and make it beautiful.

    Jessica doesn’t appear to be a veteran of any war, but she is a veteran of sexual assault, which sometimes has very similar psychological impacts.* If one is going to aestheticize her world, especially in the pomo remix culture that dominates the discourse these days, it only makes sense to turn to the language of noir to do so. This is where the show most succeeds.

*I should make it clear here that I’m speaking entirely second-hand here. Though my life has not been untouched by tragedy, it’s been my good fortune never to witness the violence myself. I have known some people and read some books, that’s all.

    It’s less interesting in other areas, frankly. The superhero stuff feels rote and second-hand, very tired and standard. People were experimented on as kids, blah blah blah, they came out the other side with powers and feeling like freaks, blah blah blah. Rinse, repeat. There’s nothing insightful or interesting in most of this backstory, and frankly I found myself wondering about how the show would work if none of it were included — would Jessica Jones be worse if Kilgrave was simply a magnetic sociopath, Jessica a hard-drinking detective, and her various relationships not negotiated through the medium of her being vaguely super? I can’t imagine it would. The show would of course be different, but I’m not sure the difference would be for the worse. Almost all the superhero stuff is cliché by now. I get it, the normals are afraid of the supers. (I saw The Incredibles and X-Men.) Yes, having great power comes with great responsibility. (Superman.) Your powers are a metaphor for trauma. (Like every superhero movie or comic ever.) None of this illuminating or even very fun anymore. Can we move on?

    Of course, Jessica Jones wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for its superhero pedigree. It’s a part of something called the MCU, or Marvel Cinematic Universe, which encompasses several titanically popular movie franchises and a few less-popular TV ones — most notably The Avengers and all its offshoots. Suffice it to say I have a lot of what my friend Isaac would call “feeeeeeelliiiiiiiings” about the MCU, most of them not very positive. I find most of the movies samey and dull. I’m not allergic to a good action sequence, and even the occasional superhero movie can be fun (the Christopher Reeves Superman is a favorite), but the fact of the matter is that the MCU represents, at least to me, the triumph of the corporate over the individual, the engineered over the created, and the glib over the nuanced. The real problem with the MCU, at least at the film level, is that superheroes like Iron Man and Captain America and the Hulk lack specific psychology, almost by necessity: they are the creations of many hands, and can only be made so specific if they’re going to stick to their archetypes: a superhero is almost always basically one thing — RAGE!!! (Hulk), revenge (Batman), technology (Iron Man), etc. There’s only so much of that kind of shit I can take before I start to get bored. Couldn’t we quit blowing stuff up and have a conversation, man? Like, about a specific day in 1993 when a cute girl named Ciara laughed at a joke you made and for 22 years since then you’ve been trying to recapture that, to slip gently into the slippery glow of an adolescent boy who just realized he liked girls because he made a pretty girl laugh, and that’s why 99% of the things that come out of your mouth are meant, in one way or another, to be humorous?

    Jones, I think because the character is obscure, is less subject to the vicissitudes of mass manufacture — Jessica has been wronged in very specific ways, and has committed very specific wrongs of her own. While under Kilgrave’s spell, she punched a woman in the chest so hard that her heart stopped. The ramifications of this act compose some of the central tension of the show, which takes place about a year and a half after it happened: (1) She has allowed an innocent busdriver to take the rap for running over her victim (though he is not held legally responsible, he feels morally tortured), and (2) she grows morbidly obsessed with the dead woman’s widower, who she eventually falls into bed with.** This is pretty good stuff, allowing the show to explore the ways in which lack of culpability does not always lead to a lack of guilty feeling. But then, there’s all the stuff about how the people were experimented on as children, all of which should have been left on the cutting room floor.

** This character, Luke Cage (Mike Colter), is due to get his own Netflix show next year, following in the footsteps of both Jessica Jones and Daredevil, a show that has received outlandish critical praise and generally bored your humble correspondent shitless.

    There’s a lot to recommend Jessica Jones. Chief among these is the performance of Krysten Ritter,*** whose previous work has consisted mostly of comedy (Don’t Trust the B in Apartment 23, Veronica Mars) and minor character work (Breaking Bad). Ritter here combines notes she’s played before (disaffected, sarcastic) with ones she hasn’t: angry, conflicted, smart. Even in her best previous work, which is quite good, Ritter usually plays someting of a ditz or a flibertigibbet, a person who isn’t wholly engaged with the serious and ugly parts of life. Not so here. David Tennant is good, too, though his character eventually devolves into a cackling cliché without much more to say than, I’m gonna geeetttt youuuuu, Jessica Jones! Carrie-Ann Moss is strong as Jeri Hogarth, a high-powered lawyer embroiled in an ugly divorce from her do-gooder doctor wife.

*** I was once in a bar in New York City with a woman I was dating, and Ritter was there. I didn’t talk to her — I wouldn’t have had the nerve, even if she wasn’t famous, because she was, quite simply, the most beautiful human being I had ever been in a room with. It’s kind of hard to explain how beautiful she was. The television certainly doesn’t do her justice. There was just kind of an aura around her, one so powerful that it was hard not to stare in her direction. Other good-looking people looked plain in her presence. My girlfriend at the time had a harder time not staring than I did, and I had a pretty hard time.

    But it’s not without flaws, many of them embodied in the character of Robyn (Colby Minifie), Jessica’s notably weird upstairs neighbor. Through most of the show, Robyn is a sort of formless collection of eccentricities, many of them centered around her twin brother / roommate / possible fuck buddy, Reuben. The character is meant as comic relief, I think, but she’s basically a pain in the ass. And then, for reasons that are never made wholly clear, she becomes irrational, vindictive, and dangerous. The action is not totally unmotivated — Reuben dies, after all — but it’s not well-motivated, and Robyn rapidly becomes more of a cog in the plot than a character. Robyn, in short, sucks, and she’s not wholly unrepresentative of how supporting characters function in Jessica Jones. Luke Cage, for instance, remains kind of featureless and bland, defined mostly by being handsome, noble, and kind of super, powers-wise. The references to the MCU tend to be heavy-handed and silly. And there are, of course, plot holes you could drive a Mack truck through. But then it wouldn’t be a superhero show if there were none of those.

*

    The other, lesser shows I’ve watched — though neither in their entirety — are Master of None and The Man in the High Castle.

    Master of None is Aziz Ansari’s venture in the direction of Louie-like TV auteursim. Ansari co-wrote almost every episode, along with fellow Parks & Rec alum Alan Yang, and directed a few episodes, as well. The show is amusing, and kind of cute. But it’s also very self-congratulatory, and far more interested in making its viewer feel good than think very hard, which is probably the chief difference between it and Louie. Master of None has some Important Things to Say, and I’m glad it’s getting its day in the sun —  the truth is that Hollywood, like many (if not all) American industries, remains dismayingly white, and the world of entertainment has been allowed to get away with quota-ing and type-casting in ways that are insulting and destructive. But I also think the show has a problem: it’s not actually that good. It’s funny sometimes. It’s got some pretty warm vibes. But psychologically incisive it is not. It is, in fact, hopelessly didactic and dull. Though it says some stuff about race and the entertainment industry that needed to be said, in most respects it’s not challenging or complicated at all. And many of the performances are for shit.†

† Yes, I know those are Ansari’s actual parents. So the fuck what?

    The other is The Man in the High Castle, based on Philip K Dick’s 1962 novel about an America conquered and divided by Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. The show is amusing, but that’s about it, as far as I can tell. Almost all of the principal actors have transparently been cast for looks rather than ability (the only exception being Alexa Davalos, who is also, paradoxically, breathtakingly good-looking), and the formulation of the plot undermines the book’s key strength — a depiction of the many brutalities, large and small, of colonialism. Though the show isn’t terrible by any means, it does Hollywoodize the book in such a way as to turn it into a lie: by adding an American resistance, it injects a plot that is basically about the triumph of the good guys that in fact doesn’t track with the very concept of the show. The point of The Man in the High Castle — I would argue that the point of history — is that the powerful dominate and the efforts of the powerless to dislodge them are almost always fruitless. Power persists in part by creating a state of tactical apathy, a form of pandemic depression that helps the powerless deal, but also prevents uprising most of the time. The TV show, by seeding a resistance through this, perpetuates the lie that the good guys will win in the end. No, they won’t. Look at the world. Seriously. The bad guys almost always win. Love does not overpower fear. Honor does not defeat cynicism. Violence destroys pacifism. All the time.

    Of course, the real reason I’ve quit watching The Man in the High Castle is that it’s on Amazon Prime, which I don’t have, and the picture & sound on my illegal stream were so bad. So maybe there’s more to it that I will never learn about.

A new (hopefully temporary) home.

Hey hurrbody -- So the blog disappeared for a few days. Turns out I'm a dummy about keeping my records up-to-date, and Hover didn't have my current credit card info, so the old domain -- touchedwithfire.fm -- went dark. They're telling me I'm going to have to re-purchase it, and that it's going to be a few days before that's possible. Of course, that was a few days ago and I haven't been able to re-purchase shit, so who knows. Maybe that old site is just . . . gone. Hope not.

Anyway, we have a new home here at touchedwithfire.audio, which strikes me as a cheap knockoff domain compared to .fm, but maybe that's just because it's the second one I bought. The whole blog archive is here, as is the podcast, which appears to have gone to iTunes despite never having seen the light of web-day before now.

And so, onward and upward with the arts. I think I'm gonna go finish writing my novel now.

On Seeing a Shrink / The Problem of Over-Reading Television, Pt 2: The Leftovers and the Lost Effect

1. On Seeing a Shrink

    The first time I can remember going to a psychiatrist was sometime in my late teens. I had been fighting with my mom a lot, over stuff that now seems so picayune as to be obscure, and my parents (rightly) suspected that there was more to my attitude problems than being a teenager. I, of course, resented it. I don’t really remember what I would have been “right” about in those fights, but I was sure that I was right about whatever I was fighting with my mom about, and it felt to me that my parents were responding to my perfectly reasonable objections to their opinions and actions by trying to get me bunged up in the loony bin.

    I realize now that this wasn’t what was going on at all. Not to blow up anybody’s spot, but mental illness clearly runs in both sides of my family, to varying degrees. The family tree is liberally strewn with little black decorations: people who drank the pain away, others who grew known for being caustic and difficult, still more prone to black moods in which they saw conspiracy in every corner. My parents saw in me what they had seen in other people that they loved. But at the time it just pissed me off. I believe this period was the first time when I had a major depressive episode.

    I’ve always been chronically prone to dissatisfaction, and occasionally given over to dark moods, but it’s only happened two or three times that I became so depressed that I lost touch with reality. When I’m in these periods, they seem all-consuming, and obsessively, totally real. It’s not “sadness” — I can’t think of a less accurate word, actually; I’m very rarely sad — it’s something else. I am, quite literally, disturbed. I sink into paranoia and obsession, I have difficulty sleeping at night and difficulty doing anything else in the day. Total anhedonia is also a problem, which tends to lead to excessive drinking, which doesn’t help with the not-in-touch-with-reality thing. Now, when I’m just run-of-the-mill anxious and restless, I have a hard time getting inside that feeling. I can describe it for you, but it’s so faraway that I can’t conceptualize what it’s like any better than you can, probably.

    Anyway, I’ve covered that territory before. What I was going to say was that, when my parents sent me to that shink, I resented it. (Didn’t help that he was technically a child psychologist.) So I went to the library and looked up the symptoms of a disease I knew I didn’t have, and tricked the psychiatrist into thinking I had it. This was all part of a very shitty, adolescent superiority complex I had (which is in slightly — slightly — better check now), which largely manifested as a need to prove that I was smarter than everybody, mostly as a means of humilating them and making myself feel better. This shrink prescribed me some drugs, which I was smart enough not to take, thank God. Later, I went to another shrink, ostensibly to treat the mental illness I had convinced the first shrink I had, the mental illness which is not the mental illness I do have, and I decided to fool her, too. She was a little wilier, but after a few months I had proved to my own satisfaction that psychiatry was a scam and that these psychiatrists in particular were idiots. I took Zoloft for a while, but I never noticed it did anything other than make my dick malfunction. So I quit that.

    The next shrink I saw was a clinical psychiatrist who practiced in a big old building in one of the fanciest parts of Portland; I seem to remember sessions with him were outrageously expensive. Because I was young and chronically irresponsible, I (A) did not have health insurance, (B) tended to skip sessions, and (C) had a hard time remembering to pay the bills. Combine this with the fact that the guy I was seeing seemed to talk to me about basketball a lot, and my ongoing suspicion that the whole thing was some kind of confidence game, and not a lot got done in those sessions. I was put back on anti-depressants, this time Celexa, and again I didn’t notice much change — I was sweating more, that was basically it. At least he had correctly diagnosed me with clinical depression, instead of an array of things I didn’t have. Shortly after I moved out of town and quit seeing him, he lost his license because he’d been prescribing pills to his patients and then buying them back off of them. I don’t even remember his name. If you look up the archives of Willamette Week from 2003 or ’04, you’ll find a story about him. He was on the cover.

    Since then, I’ve kept psychiatry at arm’s length. When I was in graduate school I had another one of the really serious episodes, the ones where I lost track of reality and quit sleeping for a few months. I went to see a staff psychiatrist at the University of Minnesota. She put me on Zoloft again. Again, I gained weight and my sex life got screwed up. It was either a solution to a problem I didn’t have, or the wrong solution to a problem I did have. I’ve never really figured it out.

    The major difference is that by then I had a stronger sense that there was something wrong with me. I mean, I had always had a faint idea that I didn’t fit in, I wasn’t a real person, I wasn’t functioning how other people did. Things had been developing, however, and I’d come to feel genuinely broken. But when I tangled with the mental health system, it didn’t offer me what I needed — what, probably, those shrinks I had manipulated and fooled back when I was in college had been offering. I didn’t need a pill to stop me feeling bummed out. I needed help changing my habits. I needed to drink less, figure out how to sustain a real relationship, and quit feeling like a fraud at every adult endeavor I undertook. There’s no pill for that.

    So I’ve started seeing a shrink again. I’m hoping that coming at it honestly, really hoping to change some stuff, will make the process work better. Who knows, right?

2. The Problem of Over-Reading TV, pt 2: The Leftovers and the Lost Effect

    The other day I was on some internet forum on which people were talking about Damon Lindelhof & Tom Perotta’s televisual adaptation of Perotta’s Rapture-fest novel, The Leftovers. (See here for part one of this post.) Much of the discussion consisted of one of two things: people complaining about how the show was just going to fail to deliver on its promises, like Lost did; and people dissecting its alleged “mysteries” for clues as to how they would be resolved.

    Far be it from me to tell people how to enjoy the media they consume, but — holy shit, all of these people are watching the show wrong. The Leftovers is a show with some things in common with Lost: a head writer; an ensemble cast; an interesting mix of science fiction and naturalistic drama; a willingness to do weird shit largely for the purpose of fucking with its viewers’ heads. But The Leftovers also illustrates, at least to me, what Lindelhof appears to have learned from the Lost experience — how to use an air of portent and mystery without promising answers that are bound to be disappointing.

    I mean, the first clue here is right there at the heart of the show. I said in the last post that the premise of Lost was a question: “What is this island, and how did these people come to be on it?” That’s just not true of The Leftovers. The newer show does center around a troubling, mysterious event: one autumn evening, 2% of the world’s population vanishes — not dies, but vanishes, leaving behind no bodies or explanations. The thing is, The Leftovers only rarely asks the question, “Who were those people, and how did they disappear?” It only ever comes up when it’s organic that one of the characters or institutions involved in the show might be asking the quesiton. The show itself does not seem interested in that question. That’s the big difference between Lost and The Leftovers. It’s why The Leftovers is a more finely-crafted show. It may also be why the show lacks a little of its antecedent’s manic inventiveness, but these are the tradeoffs one makes in art.

    Illustrative of this is a character from The Leftovers’ first season: a bald, middle-aged guy who goes around killing dogs (Michael Gaston). The series’ protagonist, Kevin (Justin Thoreaux), keeps encountering him out at night. Sometimes they have offscreen encounters when Kevin is sleepwalking. The character is freaky and weird. There is also never any implication that he knows more or better than the viewer does. He’s somebody who has observed a phenomenon: after the Departure (the series’ name for the Rapture-like event at its start), some dogs appear to have become irretrievably feral. They’re dangerous, they need to be disposed of. Watching whatever happened drove them insane. Maybe most people don’t recognize it, but these dogs need to be gotten rid of. This is the kind of thing that the viewer, if she lived in the world of the show, could deduce for herself, if she had the bravery to.

    And that’s what’s really important: the character matters more as an allegory than as a mystery, and his mystery never really drives the story. He stands in for the understanding that a lot of people share, that it’s sometimes impossible to surpress — that disorder is a flinch away, and the only way to maintain a society and a coherent reality is to battle disorder with disorder. Kevin is a police chief; this man is a vigilante. Kevin has a choice: does he combat disorder with the tools provided to him by the law, or does he do it by any means necessary? This mirrors a choice he has to make about a cult called the Guilty Remnant, a cult which has absorbed his wife and is threatening order in the little town in which he is police chief. That he encounters the dog-killer character while sleepwalking is not a mystery, but instead a profoundly troubling question about the human psyche: are we who we are when we think, and make choices, or are we who we are when living out the unfiltered processes of our brains?

    On Lost, the dog-killer character would probably perform a much different role. The dogs would drive a couple of episodes. We’d worry about his motivations. He would still be functioning as an allegory — part of Lost’s genius was its ability to ask big, sometimes ugly questions about the nature of society — but he’d also be a plot point, in a way that he’s just not in The Leftovers.

    But some people will persist in reading The Leftovers as though it were Lost. I can’t tell you why, but I have some guesses. Probably chief among them is that Lindelhof himself is attached. It’s natural to expect his next show to be similar to his last show. (It is, actually, just not in this specific way.) And it’s true that strange things happen on The Leftovers. But I also think that part of what has happened is that the infinite combination of the internet and science fiction television has destroyed some people’s ability to appreciate TV as anything other than a series of of clues that lead to a solution: not just, What are the whispers in the jungle?, but Will Lorelai choose Christopher or Luke? And I’m just not sure that’s a very good way to watch most shows, even if it’s kinda Damon Lindlhof’s own damn fault that you’re watching The Leftovers in this way.

    So what does it mean that the country of Australia keeps coming up in The Leftovers? (Kevin’s father claims to be interested in moving there; a nutty prophet-type who lives on top of a pillar in the show’s second season appears to be corrosponding with someone there.) I saw a certain amount of dissection of this question on the above-mentioned internet message board. You know what I think it means? I think it means two things:

    (1) Damon Lindelhof is having a little fun with his fans, who remember that Oceanic Flight 815 departed from Sydney, Australia before crashing on the Island.

    (2) There is somewhere very far away, and though it, too, has been affected by the same disaster, it seems like a clean slate to people who have never been there before. It is clean, and unmarked by the memories of the departed here in America. It’s about a common grief fantasy: escape.

    Anyhow, what I’m saying is that reading The Leftovers for clues and mysteries is a boring, and liable to be unrewarding, exercise. It’s a show that really does reward close reading in a different way: the characters and themes that course through it. What does it mean that a woman who lost her whole family might hire a prostitute to shoot her while she wears Kevlar? What happens to teenage culture when its already foreshoretened view of consequences is complicated by an event that emphasizes mass mortality? How do you love after loss? Raise children? Move on? That’s the stuff you should read closely.

    (Note: the first season of The Leftovers is very grim stuff. That’s probably a different post, if I get around to writing it. The second season is brighter and more colorful, in more ways than one.)

Bummed Out

    You may have noticed that my output on this blog has been a little spotty the last few days. Or, who knows, maybe you didn’t — maybe there’s no you at all, here, maybe this is just me writing bullshit and putting it on the internet, where it will disappear like a drop of water sliding into an ocean. Maybe you is, ultimately, me. That’s a depressing thought.

    Anyway. The reason my output here has tapered is because I’ve been spiralling ever since I hurt my ankle. Maybe it’s more accurate to say I’ve been spiralling for years, and as a result I don’t cope very well with adversity. Maybe not. The problem, in the short term anyway, is that not being able to run has affected my happiness — already tenuous — very seriously. There’s a fair body of research that indicates serious exercise is as effective as antidepressants in lifting one’s mood. For me it’s been more effective. Antidepressants have never helped me one whit, as far as I can tell, but running helps me stay thin, it gives me a sense of accomplishment, and I’m convinced it positively changes the chemistry of my brain. It makes me happier. Not running makes me less happy. I haven’t been able to run in eight days.

    I’m realizing, too, that I had placed a lot of weight on running this upcoming marathon that it really couldn’t — or shouldn’t — bear. I last ran a marathon before I went to graduate school. In graduate school I was deeply unhappy, in a way I hadn’t been in a long time. I gained a lot of weight, I became very socially isolated, and I think it’s fair to say I barely scraped through at the end, when I was so depressed I had difficulty getting out of bed and going to class. Then, at the end of that experience — just days before my oral exams — my life was interrupted by a grisly tragedy that felt sort of like my fault. I left, and was given a degree basically because people felt bad for me. I moved back to Oregon, and started piecing my life back together. I think I had placed all my hopes and expectations — hopes of returning to normal, of making friends, of learning how to be in a committed relationship, of drinking less, of finishing my novel, of getting a real job, etc — on getting back into marathon shape. If I could just traverse those 26 miles outside Tucson, everything would be fine. No, it wouldn’t bring my neice or my foster brother back to life. No, it wouldn’t get me hired by NPR. No, it wouldn’t win me a National Book Award. But maybe I could stop feeling like shit about that stuff all the time, the way I have for a while now. Maybe I could look at myself in the mirror without thinking, What the fuck is wrong with you? Or something.

    All of this was probably unwise, of course, for a lot of reasons — not least of which was that this, injury, was always possible. It’s become clear to me now that I’m not going to be able to run a marathon in two months. I’m not able to run across the parking lot without severe pain, and if you can’t train, you can’t race. This is the third straight time that injury or illness has arrived at almost exactly the same moment, when I’m getting into the serious distance training, to derail my plans. I’ve now failed to run more marathons than I’ve succeeded in running. And the let down — the let down is terrible, not least because of how freighted this marathon training had become for me. I’ve had surging feelings of anger and grief over the last week or so, feelings that seem unrelated to a bad ankle sprain, but which I think kind of are. Not only do I not have the good brain chemistry mojo going right now, I also have this overwhelming feeling that I’m failing at my life. I’m never going to get any of it sorted out. I’ve screwed it all up forever. That’s what it feels like.

    When I hurt myself, I knew this was possible. I was jogging down Burnside listening to The Gist on my headphones, when my foot landed sideways and I brought down the entirety of my weight on my turned ankle. I felt a grinding, and then heard an audible pop, so loud it penetrated the podcast. I collapsed into the dirt. The first coherent thought I remember having was, I’m not going to be able to run this marathon. It’s all over.

    And so here I am. I am on edge all the time now. When people are loud in a bar I am disturbed, and then angry. When my cat wants to sit on my lap I just want her to go away. When I try to read a book by James Salter I think, I hate all these fucking white people. When Bernie Sanders comes up in conversation it pisses me off that idealists like him so much. Last night I dreamt I challenged Donald Trump to a fistfight. I am so fucking sick of the overtanned hippies in this town. I just wish that I could be someone else. Someone happier and thinner and less afraid. Someone less angry. Or, at the very least, someone whose ankles were stronger.

Lost, The Leftovers, and the Problem of Over-Reading Television, pt 1: The Beautiful Failure

    In some degree, Damon Lindelof kinda has it coming with The Leftovers. If you don’t recall, Lindelof was one of the minds behind Lost, which appears to be, despite its status as a failure, the most influential TV show of the last many years. In fact, it seems likely that it was Lindelof’s interests that chiefly drove the show’s interests — JJ Abrams directed the pilot and then noped out, the way he would do later with one of Lost’s progeny, Fringe; the other executive producer was Carlton Cuse, a more experienced TV producer whose previous (and subsequent) work lacks the tinge of mad genius that made Lost what it was. When it was announced that Lindelof was teaming up with Tom Perotta (author of Election and Little Children, among other pop-literary bestsellers) to turn Perotta’ s rapture riff, The Leftovers, into a TV show, I was both excited and skeptical. I hadn’t read The Leftovers — still haven’t — but I’d enjoyed some of Perotta’s other books, which tend to be satirical tales about class in white suburbia. They’re a little old-fashioned, but they don’t apologize for that fact. And Lindelof — well. I had loved Lost, and I had hated Lost, as one can only hate something one actually loves at bottom.

    The results have been interesting, if not exactly great all the time. The show has been polarizing; it’s been criticized for being boring, or depressing, or overly focused on upper-middle-class white people, all of which were to some extent true of its first season — but if one assumes good faith and supposes that it’s depressing because it’s about depression, it takes on that tinge of genius that Lost also had, at least sort of. Another criticism of the show that I’ve seen more than once is that it’s too much like Lost, in that there are too many mysteries, and they’ll never get solved in the 30-40 hours of storytelling time the show has. And I think that’s off base — but I also think it’s kinda Lindelof’s fault that he’s receiving this criticsm. Because Lost taught us to watch TV like this. Lost was liberally sprinkled with mystery, and a lot of its MO seemed to be to keep us guessing about what the answers to those mysteries would be. That was its major mistake, if you ask me. It used the mysteries too often as the engines of narrative, leading us to expect answers to questions that were fundamentally unanswerable. While The Leftrovers has done a lot of work to avoid this pitfall, people who followed Lindelof over from Lost are primed to read it the way they read Lost. And that’s fundamentally the wrong way to watch the show. The mysteries here are set-dressing, metaphors — what fantasy enthusiasts call world-building. Leaving aside what Lindelof and Perotta have said publicly about the show, I think the evidence is there in what’s onscreen.

The Beautiful Failure

    Here’s the thing about Lost: not only is it basically a failure, it was also a great TV show. It is, in fact, the only show I can think of wherein this was possible, at least up until the point at which it was released. How can a TV show fail and still be great?

    I can tell you how it failed. After six seasons, Lost fundamentally failed to deliver on a lot of its promises. Not refused, but failed. The fundamental premise of the show is a question: what is this island, and why did these people come to be on it? Waves of portent crashed across the characters, as they are told over and over again things such as “the island wants you to come back”. There’s a foreshortening of free will on the island. Magical things happen there — people go mad, pregnancies end disastrously (except when they don’t!), the dead appear to the living in spectral form, polar bears wander the tropics, people travel through time — the island travels through time! TIME TRAVEL IS KILLING CHARLOTTE! TIME TRAVEL IS KILLING US ALL!!!! The show heavily implies that it’s going to tell us how and / or why this state of affairs came to be, not least by occasionally answering a question about such matters. It told us who the mysterious Others, who haunted the first season, were, even if it did ask several questions in answering one. It solved the riddles in the backstories of secretive characters, like the con-man Sawyer, or the fugitive Kate. And so it was natural, I think, for the viewer to expect answers. And the show just ran out of time to give them. I think on some level it never had answers for some of the questions.

    I think the most emblematic of its failures is the character of Walt. In the first season, Walt is a 10-year-old boy who has the misfortune of being stranded on the island in the care of his estranged father. Like every character, his backstory is rife with complexity and secrecy, mostly centered around the custody battle his mother and father waged over him. But throughout, it’s heavily implied that there is some extremely bad mojo swirling around poor Walt. It appears that animals have a tendency to commit suicide around him. His stepfather gladly releases custody when his mother dies, and it seems that he’s as much spooked by the kid as he is unwilling to take on the burden of single fatherhood. The bad mojo around Walt would appear to be plugged into the bat mojo that is sort of ambient around the island. Walt is, the first couple of seasons heavily imply, Important. He might be The Key to Everything.

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Malcolm David Kelley as Walt

    But the show had a problem: the kid who was playing Walt was aging way faster than the character was. One of Lost’s many innovations was its telescoped timeline: over the course of its first three seasons or so, only a few months pass, as the Lostaways (as we used to call them in the chatty rooms) grapple with the many challenges of being not only marooned, but marooned on an island that may or may not be evil and is certainly populated by malevlolent forces.* That was all fine as long as your actors were adults — a little bit of makeup, a certain suspension of disbelief, and it was always possible to buy the idea that Kate was 25, Hurley was 30, Jack was 40, and Locke was 50, no matter how much real-world time had passed. But Malcolm David Kelley, who played Walt, hit puberty hard, and had visibly grown several inches and become much less cute by the the end of the second season. The idea that he was 10 years old was preposterous on its face. And the show had no answer for this dilemma, really. The only real solution was to write him off, and then pretend that pretty much none of his storyline had ever happened. What do you mean, there was a kid who was supposed to be at the center of this whole narrative? His father remained an intermittent player (until being spectacularly greased), but Walt was shipped off to the mainland to live a fairly normal, bird-suicide-free life.

* This was one of the ways in which the show taught us to watch television. I remember when I was watching early seasons being baffled by the glacial pace at which time seemed to be moving in the narrative. In some measure this was thematic — Lost was always about time and its vicissitudes — but in another it was simply a compression tactic, meant to create claustrophobia. Many shows, notably Breaking Bad, would employ this tactic in ensuing years. Other than stunt productions like 24, TV to that point had usually either existed in a suspended land of no-time (eg any sitcom you ever watched) or generally tracked with real-world time, meaning that there would be an Xmas episode around Xmas, and Buffy’s birthday is in the dead of winter, etc.

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Malcolm David Kelley as Taller Ghost Walt, not that long later.

    But still, the show was addictive, compelling watching, in part because it was doing stuff that no TV show had really dared to do before. I still remember when I was watching the first season — which I did on DVD, back when that was how people binge-watched stuff — and I realized, Hey, this is kind of a sci-fi show. Of course that seems absurd now, as the show really leaned into its sci-fi trappings as it went along, but it was actually possible to miss that for its first several episodes, as it mostly seemed to be a sort of high-class soap opera with arty film-school trappings and a shipwreck narrative. Its genre bending can seem a little bloated in retrospect, that that was part of what was so cool about the show when it started back. Its unusual structure (now so common as to be almost conventional), with present action stitched through with flashback, allowed it to be a slightly different show every week, if it wanted. When Hurley was the focus, it was a delirious dramedy about a man on the edge of sanity. With Sawyer it was often a funny crime story with a certain Butch-and-Sundance flair (with the gifted Josh Holloway playing both Butch and Sundance). Kate’s stories were cat-and-mouse fugitive stuff. Charlie’s were rock-n-roll redemption. Sun and Jin were a mob drama. Claire and Jack — perhaps fittingly, given that they turned out to be siblings — were basically soap opera. In fact, all of them were soap opera, really, but they had spooky, thrilling trappings.

    And the show boasted whole, huge characters — an overabundance of them, really, such that one of its main sins was to rob its viewer of time with one character by spending too much time with another. It knew these characters well enough that hilarity could be milked by pairing opposites, as win Korean mobster Jin and Mexican-American lottery winner Hurley end up in a sort of Marx brothers routine after Hurley steps on a sea anenome. It dropped these characters into roles where they would be expected to act strangely, just to see what they would do. Unlike a lot of sci-fi shows, which often feel like they’re struggling to stuff actors into scenarios without coming up with characters first, Lost teemed with compelling stories about interesting people.

    But its failures seemed to be part-and-parcel with its strengths. You couldn’t just divorce the drama from the trappings; part of the show’s genius was the way it used a sort of waxing sense of threat from the past as a way of creating its atmosphere. On some fundamental level, Lost plugged into a force that you would call nostalgic if it weren’t, you know, destructive: existential nuclear angst. Much of the show’s drama takes place in concrete bunkers, buildings that recall 60s suburbs, and quasi-military testing facilities. Once it really engages in its core mythology, there’s always the possibility that some ill-understood force will be unleashed and kill everybody. There is, in fact, a nuclear bomb, which plays a critical role in the show’s best season, its fourth.* The lapse in time between the construction of these structures and the show’s current timeline, which took place mostly in 2004, was also the source of a lot of the mystery. That 20-year lacuna between the show’s Cold War past and its Millenial present is both its most potent weapon, atmospherically speaking, and one of those many mysteries that never quite got solved.

* Not coincidentally, I think, this was also its shortest season, interrupted as it was by the writers’ strike.

    And so Lost was a beautiful failure. But it it also asked us to watch TV in a certain way, a way that was also highly symbiotic with the internet age, when people had a space to come together and obsess over its minutiae.

See this space tomorrow for pt 2, about LIndelof's new show, The Leftovers

An Actual Bag of Turds

    I was out on my bike today and I found an actual bag of turds. It felt sort of like a metaphor for my entire week.

    I was tooling along the Springwater Corridor, which runs eastwards along a former train right-of-way out past Gresham, and is home to a lot of Portland’s homeless population. The homeless people who live out along the Corridor tend to be older than the ones you find downtown — they’re middle-aged or older, a lot of them evidently Vietnam vets, and they tend to collect around the picnic benches and in camps back behind the blackberry brambles, where I assume they can feel a semblance of privacy. For the most part they’re just there, no more a nuisance than the teenyboppers who tend to ride tiny BMXes very slowly near the Gresham City Park, or the careless drivers who tend to miss the stopsigns near the rural road crossings. But now and again, you find an actual bag of turds in the middle of the pavement. That’s what happened today. I saw a plastic bag, spilled over, and some stuff coming out of it. As I approached it became clear that the stuff had some kind of human smell. And as I rode by the bag, I understood that the smell was that of shit. Let there be no more graphic description than that. It smelled bad. There were flies.

    It seemed a fitting way to cap off a week in which I injured myself while out running, came down with a runny nose and a fever, had my car broken into for the second time in the last six months, and came home late three straight nights to find that my neighbors had parked so poorly that I couldn’t fit my car in the parking lot out in front of my building, necessitating a grueling, 30-step climb up vertiginous stairs from the alley behind. Oh, and my deductible on my car insurance is $500, meaning that I’ll be paying for all but $90 of the repair, thank you very much. For the second straight time, the assholes couldn’t find anything to steal.* They might as well have mugged me, forced me to withdraw $500 from an ATM, and then set the money on fire as I watched.

*UPDATE: My brother tells me that this was part of a window-smashing spree by an unhinged local vandal. The cops caught him, I’m told. So at least there’s that. Not that that makes any real difference to me.

    Meanwhile, all the wrong teams lost in the baseball playoffs, I grew increasingly lame in my right arm and leg from walking with a cane, I suffered several indignities as a result of not being very good with said cane (viz stubbed toes, barked shins, pitying looks from strangers), and my mood has swooned because it’s hard to exercise. I finally got out on the bike today because the ankle isn’t as bad as it was (still swollen, though) and the doctor said low-impact stuff should be okay. That was how I came to be riding my bike down the Springwater Corridor when I found the actual bag of turds.

    Now it’s raining. I’m worried about the pending winter. Winters in Portland are generally grim, with days that last less than 8 hours at their shortest and often feel nonexistent, because the sun is hidden behind miles of dark cloudcover.

    Maybe I should move to Australia. I hear it’s nice there.

Joseph Agonistes

    I’ve always been kinda proud of the various little injuries I’ve sustained from athletics. Jammed thumbs, broken toes, swollen joints, pulled muscles — these are the battle scars of the first world, of safe societies where we no longer fight literal battles. Maybe this is because nothing truly terrible has ever befallen me. I’ve never broken anything bigger than a toe. The gouges that have left scars on my knees and hands have been, in the long run, not much more than owies.

    For a few minutes yesterday, I was worried that my run of good luck had come to an end. I was jogging down a gentle slope on E Burnside toward 39th when, for no reason I can figure out, I planted my left foot on its side and brought down the entirety of my weight on it. The foot rolled inward. Hard. The popping noise it made was so loud that it penetrated my headphones. I collapsed onto the sidewalk, and crawled into the dirt, screaming so loud that I roused some guys from across the street, who wandered out to see what was going on. I told them I was fine. I wasn’t sure it was true for sure, but I just didn’t want them to look at me while I was in pain. I had a sense that this wasn’t going to be one of those dings that I felt proud of later. I was just plain hurt.

    I think I was yelling so loudly in part because I knew right away that this marathon I’ve been training for was in jeopardy. I didn’t know yet if the ankle was broken, but it was at least badly sprained. I’m 9 weeks out. If I don’t get to run this marathon, it’ll be the third in a row that I’ve missed because I hurt myself or got sick with about 2 months of training left. I kind of couldn’t believe it. There wasn’t a pothole or a rock or anything — just an awkward step, on what was supposed to be an easy, 4-mile jog, and everything was in danger of falling apart.

    My emotional responses remained all out of whack for a while. I limped to a nearby park and called an Uber to take me home, and as I was sitting there on the curb, I started to cry. Not because I was in pain — the ankle was swollen but basically painless, at least at first — but because running this marathon had been something I’d pinned a lot of hopes on, without even quite realizing it. It was giving me purpose, the training was helping with my weight, and I was even enjoying it, painful though it sometimes was. But more than that, if I could run this marathon, it would mean I had returned to normal, after several years of not-normal, of bad, of depression and grief and feeling lost. And that might be gone.

    A day later I have a better perspective. The sprain is bad — I’ve been on crutches — but the fact is, if I can’t run this marathon, I’ll run one in February or March instead. It’s going to be okay.

    Now it’s mostly about the embarrassment and hassle of getting around injured. People look at you differently when you’re on crutches. Some people seem to feel pity, which is bad enough — but worse are the ones whose instinct is to shy away, as though whatever you did to yourself might be catching. Now, I seem to have come down with a cold, so I do have something that is catching. But the injured leg is distinctly non-communicable. Don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt you.

    The apartment has got messy, because cleaning sucks when you can’t really walk. It makes simple things more complicated — forgetting your wallet, say, or trying to decide whether to put on fresh pants after a shower. I’ve discovered that I own a lot of hot sauce — at least six varieties, all of which I appear to have put on stuff over the last couple of days, but couldn’t bring myself to haul back to the fridge. (Problem: how do you carry stuff on crutches? Solution: in your teeth, a lot of the time.) I ran out of plates this afternoon. How many plates can one person use in 36 hours? Do I not own enough plates? It’s always felt like I owned too many plates, at least to me. Now it would be nice to have an infinite supply.

    Anyway. I’m going to finish watching this Pirates - Cubs game, and spend the next two days icing my ankle. Should be boring, but whatever.

Some Complaints

Physical

Ankle, dull consistent pain, as of a tendon

Foot, left, numbness when running in new shoes

Foot, right, purple toenails tending toward falling off

Back, left, soreness, as of a bruise, but no bruise visible

    Sub-complaint: absence of wings

Eyes, both, vision noticably worse than just a few years ago

Hair, too gray, too long

    Sub-complaint: I don’t like going to the barber but I met a cute girl the other day and she         told me she was a barber at one of the local hip places but I can’t remember which one              and I risk going to the barber and leaving with only a haircut

Weight, too high as always

Political

Congress, intractability of

    Sub-complaint: the inexorable tendency of national parties to radicalize

    Sub-complaint: the untenability of nationalized party system without a parliamentary                 system in which it can work

    Sub-complaint: the heavily Republican character of my congressional district

President, current, imperfectly liberal on foreign policy

    Sub-complaint: reflexive assumption of liberals that free trade is evil

    Sub-complaint: radical militarism of said President’s opponents

President, future, lack of interesting candidates for

    Sub-complaint: Hillary Clinton seems like a perfectly competent person who would probably     do a reasonably workmanlike job as President, but her visceral distaste for the campaign trail     will probably cost her any election in which her opponent is not Donald Trump or Ted Cruz

    Sub-complaint: Bernie Sanders is a classic lefty stalking horse but his internet fans seem             to think there’s a conspiracy against him

        Sub-sub-complaint: being President is not about having perfect ideas

    Sub-complaint: Worry that Marco Rubio will be the last man standing on the Republican side     and will trounce Hillary Clinton in the general

    Sub-complaint: Donald Trump’s ascendancy says worrying things about white people

    Sub-complaint: Ben Carson’s ascendancy says worrying things about white people

    Sub-complaint: etc, etc, etc about white people

Gen X, conservatism of

Baby Boomers, conservatism of

Internet, tendency of to exaggerate offense and privilege outrage

    Sub-complaint: tendency of young internet commentators to demand ideological orthodoxy     (see also: Aesthetic complaints)

Aesthetic

Novel, mine, lack of faith in ability to complete

Jonathan Franzen, continuing outsized fame

State of criticism, its consisting mostly of political fault-finding and condescending Stalinism         masquarading as liberalism

The Bugle Podcast, declining quality / possible cancellation

Harmontown, extreme decline in quality

The Americans, not currently airing

Superheroes, their vapidity and omnipresence

Geeks, their fetishization

Austism, its fetishization

Classic rock, its continuing domination of airwaves and restaurant playlists

Sporting

Oregon Ducks football, terribleness

Seattle Mariners, terribleness

    Sub-complaint: unwillingness of some M’s fans to admit this

Boston Red Sox, terribleness

    Sub-complaint: ditto

Tennis, no more majors until January

Tennis, domination of Novak Djokovic

    Sub-complaint: Andy Murray’s inability to break out completely

    Sub-complaint: Rafa’s injury woes

    Sub-complaint: Roger’s inability to beat the Djoker

Tennis, racism in

Cricket, my inability to buy a baggy green hat

Basketball, how much less interesting it is to watch than play

Arsenal, ongoing futility

Personal

Impermanence, insistent feeling of

Singleness, persistence of for the last few months

    Sub-complaint: Inability to stay with one person for more than a few months. I swear to             God, I am not your garden-variety committophobe. Or am I? I actually don’t know.

Boredom, consistent

    Sub-complaint: embarrassment over feeling bored

Social anxiety

Existential

I AM GOING TO DIE ONE DAY

Some Failures

    I probably ought to be seeing a shrink. This has been apparent to me for a long time, but the fact of the matter is that I’ve had bad experiences with shrinks over the years and I’m not deeply motivated to repeat those. I also don’t want to go on antidepressants, because in the past they’ve made me fat, caused trouble with my sleep, and screwed up my sex life — all without seeming to do much for my mood. Three different times I’ve been put on one SSRI or another, each for about a year, and the only thing I have to show for any of those experiences was weight gain.

    But I’ve got habits that need modification, and I’ve come to the conclusion that trying to do it on my own, having not worked yet, is not likely to suddenly start working now. These habits include (but are not limited to): eating too much, drinking too much, never quite quitting smoking, talking myself out of pitching radio stories, getting angry in the supermarket, and being a dick to people on the internet. I’m told that this new-fangled cognitive behavioral therapy can be useful for these sorts of things. I’d like to give it a shot.

    But part of the problem with having difficulty with motivation, social anxiety, and depression is that these things make it hard to take the necessary steps to get help. I just really, really don’t want to call a shrink to make an appointment, to the point that I will put such a thing on a to do list, and eventually hide the to do list so that I don’t have to see that item on the list.

    That’s it. I would go on, but you’ve heard it — and probably felt it — before. Plus I might have exhausted my writerly gas tank by pushing through that too-long tangent I was talking about the other day. It’s finally done, at about 10,000 words, which is about 8500 words longer than it should be. But the only way out was through; now we’re through. Now I have to go back to writing the real book. Which I’m feeling a little bummed out by.

    My feet hurt in a really specifically familiar way. I’m worried I’m not going to be able to run this marathon.

    I’ve been obsessing about things that make me unhappy.

    I just remembered that I was going to write about Livewire in this post. Oh, well. Maybe I’ll remember tomorrow.

L’esprit du jogging

    In attempting to remember some other French, I just encountered a fact that I had once known but since forgotten: French for “jogging” is jogging, pronounced with the soft J. I believe — correct me if I’m wrong — that the verb form is faire du jogging. Meaning, “I go jogging” would be rendered, Je fais du jogging. I don’t know why this tickles me so much, but it does. France is sort of officially butt-hurt about its language's loss of stature in the post-WWI period; once the language of diplomacy, it has been thoroughly displaced by English.* There’s a cadre of old white dudes who gather in a room somewhere in Paris to issue official directives about what is and what isn’t the French language. One of the things these guys get hot-and-bothered about are loanwords. I’m not hot-and-bothered about them at all, but I do find them hilarious, especially in contexts like this, in which a resolutely ugly English word has been Frenched up a little bit. It also has to do with faire’s status as an all-purpose verb that means something like “do”, but also means “make”, and a bunch of other stuff — anyway, a transliteration of Je fais du jogging might be, I make some jogging. Which . . . anyway, you get it.

*Here I’ll plug Helen Zaltzmann’s podcast, “The Allusionist”, especially the episode “The Fix (part 2)”, which is about the bizarre pidgin spoken by EU bureaucrats.

    There were a lot of reasons I was looking this up, but one of them is is that I often have really good ideas for this blog when I’m out running, and one of two things happens: they leak out of my head, or when I get home it turns out they’re actually pretty stupid ideas. For obvious reasons I can’t give you any examples of the former. The latter usually boil down to dyspeptic screeds that lack much substance. The one I was thinking about today was an incident this morning at the store. I had hot food in my hand, and got in the shortest checkout line. Only two people. I figured I was fine. Instead, the checker spent several minutes having a conversation with the person she was supposed to be checking out. I have this thought often when simple tasks are going undone due to lack of efficiency or dilligence on the part of people who do things like operate cash registers for a living: Yes, I realize we’re all very stupid here, but this is beyond the pale. I had been thinking that for a while before I realized — this cashier wasn’t too stupid to operate her register. She just didn’t care to. I stood there burning my hands because she was just having a fine ol’ time with somebody else.

    See, what’s the value in that, other than to further my ongoing project of making sure my loyal reader doesn’t think too highly of me? There is none. But there you have it. This is the kind of thing that seems like a good story when I’m out running.

    I assume you’re seeing what I’m seeing here: if the ideas I do remember are so bad, what are the odds that the ones I don’t remember are any better? And rationally, I’m with you. But there’s something tantalizing about those esprits du jogging that wink out of existence as soon as I’ve had them. I can’t help but think that there’s great work just leaking out of my ears a lot of the time, leaving me with hostile drivel like the cashier story. When I was younger I carried notebooks with me all the time, and wrote down my every stray thought. Sometimes this seems like a terribly self-centered practice, to assume that your every errant thought is worth writing down. At other times, it seems like simple good practices for a writer. Maybe I should be doing that again.

    Anyway. Here’s a list of podcast episodes I’ve listened to this week: Love + Radio — “The Red Dot”; Fangraphs Audio — “Dave Cameron Extends a Metaphor”; TBTL — 2.5 episodes; Home of the Brave — 4 episodes, including the first two of “A Tour of Burned Churches”, which I highly recommend; Vulture TV Podcast; You Must Remeber This — “MGM Stories, Part 3: Buster Keaton’s Biggest Mistake”; A Way with Words — “Burn Bag”; The Allusionist — “The Fix (part 2)” (good), “Dancing about Architecture” (boring); Criminal — “No Place Like Home”; The Gist — 3 episodes; On the Media — “Pope-ular Opinion”; Freakonomics Radio — “How Did the Belt Win?”; This American Life — “Return to the Scene of the Crime” (parts — I skipped Dan Savage because sometimes he annoys me)

Detours

1.

    I had sworn to myself that I was going to finish this draft of the novel — something close to the final one — by the end of this month. That gives me tomorrow and the next day to wrap it up. It’s not going to happen, I tell you what. Not because I haven’t put in the work — I pumped out 64 manuscript pages this month, which amounts to about 80 pages in printed form, which would bring the book in for a landing at about 390 pages, which is about what I was shooting for.

    Unfortunately, those 64 manuscript pages include a still-unconcluded detour in the plot that I assume will be cut out on revision, but which I don’t think I can move on from until it’s finished. The novel is ostensibly about a 32-year-old former investment banker trying to get over a bad breakup, and it’s told in a florid, keyed-up first person that I landed on in an attempt to simulated the kind of anxiety that I experience a lot of the time. The problem, in no uncertain terms, is the first person aspect of it. I’ve never really liked writing the first person very well, the evidence of this blog aside; I find it limiting and tiresome after a while. I’ve been working on the book for five — almost six — years, and I’m heartily sick of my main character’s voice. So when he sat down across a table from someone else and began to hear their story, I knew I was probably going to wander off track for a bit. I just didn’t expect the wandering to go on for 8000 words, and a week and a half of work. Now, instead of writing the final scenes of the book, which were finally starting to seem inexorable, I’m following another character, a minor character, for page upon page upon page. I can’t decide if I should worry about this. The fact of the matter is that I’m no longer in a place where writing at all is a surprise. I need to be finishing this thing. Ugh.

2.

    When you run a long distance it pays to map out your route so that you finish close to your front door, or at least close to an easy way to get back to your front door. I failed to do that yesterday, and it was . . . well, it was awful.

    I had it plotted out, I thought, so that I would hit mile 15 somewhere around the intersection of SE 26th and Clinton, about six blocks from my apartment, which would leave me a brief walk up a gentle slope to cool down before I collapsed in a heap of sweaty clothes and sore muscles. Instead, I got sidetracked somewhere in northeast Portland, and found myself huffing to a conclusion at the base of a bridge more than a mile from home. This is an awkward distance. I can’t bring myself to call a cab to take me such a short distance, and catching a bus would probably only prolong the journey. So I had to walk it, limping, grimacing, and swearing the whole way.

    I’m trying to remember if the long distances were this awful when I last was doing serious running. Yesterday I spent the last two miles exhorting myself out loud, “C’mon, goddamn it, you can do this, fuck, do it, come on, you’re going to make it,” over and over again, as I shuffled a couple of 11+ minute miles. I don’t remember hitting that point until I was going much further than 15 miles before. But then again, I don’t know if I would be doing this if I actually remembered what it was like to do it before. I remember being thin and having a lot of energy and feeling good about myself and dating a lot. I think it’s possible that I simply forgot how fucking hard it is to run a marathon. And it is. Hard.

    Then again, maybe yesterday was just one of those days. By mile five my left ankle was bothering me. By mile seven this muscle that’s been bothering me for weeks — the tensor fasciae latae — was really starting to burn. This muscle is near the hip, and it’s obscure enough that I’d never heard of it before it started hurting me, but I sure as hell know what it’s called now.  By mile 11 my pace had seriously slackened. As I was coming over the river, still 2.5 miles go, I’d reached the point where it felt like I was running in slow motion. Even if my pace was off, how is it that those last 2.5 miles took more time than some years of my life seem to have? I was checking my watch and the GPS on my phone every few steps. And sometimes you just have those days. Last week I felt pretty good for the whole long run.

    I don’t really have much else to say about that, except that I feel better today than I did last Monday, despite the run itself having been far worse. Who knows, man.

Dos and Don'ts, Week of 25 September

Do:

Watch Mad Max: Fury Road

Tell a story at The Moth

Listen to Reply All's "Flower Child"

Listen to Dr John's "I Walk on Guilded Splinters"

Follow the fascinating NL pennant race

Don't:

I dunno, guys. Don't vote Trump? I guess that's what I've got for Don'ts this week.

Purity and the Puritanical

    This isn’t going to be an in-depth review of Jonathan Franzen’s Purity; honestly, I think it would need to be a more important book than it is to warrant that kind of engagement. It’s also not meant to be a takedown of the sort that I launched at Friends a little while ago. The fact of the matter is that I find Franzen to be a perfectly serviceable, easily readable, sometimes amusing writer. He’s also somehow managed to trick people into thinking that his work matters more than that of other middlebrow purveyors of Literary Fiction. This is the mystery to me. It’s not that Franzen is bad at what he does. It’s that he garners so much attention for it.

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The cover of Jonathan Franzen's aggressively okay novel, Purity.

    Purity purports to be about “the battle between the sexes” (a phrase Franzen himself used in an interview), which seems to be a weirdly antiquated prism through which to view the world, but okay. It centers around a series of relationships featuring major power imbalances — sometimes one partner is famous, other times rich, other times simply much older than the other. All of the relationships are uncomplicatedly heterosexual, which isn’t really a huge sin, as most relationships are fairly uncomplicatedly heterosexual, passé though it may be to admit it. Nearly all of them are full of histrionics — but, as Franzen rightly pointed out on Fresh Air a few weeks ago, he’s not the kind of writer whose books are meant to be a simulacrum of reality, but a comically heightened representation of some stuff that happens in reality. It’s an open question as to whether Franzen’s diagnosis of the disease of reality is accurate — parts of it are, parts of it aren’t — but that’s clearly what he’s doing.

    He’s come under a hail of criticism from mostly younger reviewers who think his insistence on writing almost entirely about white people, and depicting sexual encounters that live in a hazy zone between consenting and not, amounts to some kind of reactionary political stance. That all strikes me as fairly preposterous — the idea that Franzen “depicts a world in which rape is the natural consequence” of heterosexual relationships, as one Goodreads reviewer contends, seems so out of touch with the book itself that it’s hard to take very seriously — but it is true that Franzen resides fairly squarely in a world in which white people weren’t often asked to confront questions of racial representation and white supremacy. Old dogs, new tricks, I guess. A lot of people who attack the book from a political perspective (a reviewing tactic I find mostly useless, by the way) seem to miss its central thesis, which is that people of Franzen’s generation (X, if you’re wondering) have really put the torch to the world they’re leaving behind for subsequent ones.

    But what really mystifies me about Purity’s notability — just as it did about Franzen’s previous overlong tome, Freedom — is that a lot of people seem to behave as though Franzen is the only person on the literary scene doing this kind of work anymore. (Even if that were true, is that a reason to pour so much attention on him? It could be that the Dickensian social novel just doesn’t speak to the modern moment.) In truth, I would guess that a supermajority of books in the English language resemble Franzen’s, at least aesthetically, in many respects. Realism is still the dominant mode in English language literature, and has been for a long time. The fetishization of Franzen sometimes feels like a reactionary yearning for a time when middle-aged white guys doing comic naturalism — your Roths, your Bellows, your Mailers — dominated the bestseller lists and sold enough books that people actually put them on television. That era is over, for better or worse. There are ways in which it is better — more women and people of color joining the discourse everyday; the legitimization of sci-fi and other “genre” works — and ways in which it is worse — nobody fucking reads anymore. The continued need for the establishment to find a Great White Hope feels like the death rattle of an era, at least to this under-40 fictioneer.

    Look, like I said, it’s not like Franzen’s bad at what he does. His books are compulsively readable, which is a relief in an era when much of what is accounted Literary Fiction is wilfully difficult for reasons that have never really been ennumerated to me. (I have no problem with difficult books. I have a problem with books that hide their mediocrity by being hard to read, or that seem to be about how hard they are to read. Ahem, Ben Marcus.) He excells at attention to the details of plots, so that his books fit together tightly and there’s often a satisfying a-ha! as you push deeper into the book and figure out how the threads connect. The comic backstory is a gift of his. He appears to be decent at research. And his books are, oftentimes, legitimately funny.

    But he leaves a lot to be desired as a stylist, in which field he is exceeded, not only by giants like Didion and Baxter and Lethem, but even by gifted nobodies like (arrogance alert) your humble correspondent. The first-person passages of his books tend to be told in the same workmanlike, nice-enough language as the third-person passages (one of the major flaws of Purity is that there’s a 150-page section told in the first person in which the style is indistinguishable from the book's 400 other pages). From book to book, the tone is the same. It’s one thing to find your voice, and another never to modulate it.

    And it’s true, he’s not a deep thinker on matters of race, sexuality, or gender, which — well, given that he appears to have been anointed the Very Serious Important Novelist of Our Times, it puts him far out of touch with the most salient ideas of the 21st century, or at least this part of it. That “battle of the sexes” quotation: really? Haven’t we* outgrown, as a society, the idea that what is going on between men and women constitutes a battle? In many respects I find the Millenial emphasis on euphony and consensus to be tiresome and in some respects destructive, but surely it isn’t accurate to paint the state of gender as a battle, any more than it is to frame race on this planet as a matter of “white v black” or “white v color”, not least because all these categories are fuzzy  — but also because the metaphor of battle implies that there are going to be winners and losers, as though this is a debate as opposed to, like, a discussion, man.

*caveats, caveats, caveats about what “we” means: I think you can write them yourselves; it’s almost 7 o’clock and I haven’t eaten yet: let us say that broadly “we” is “Anglophonie”, and you guys can fill in the details about the various factions, unions, and disjunctions in what that is

    Of course, there’s this other level on which there’s an irony at play. In the film Trainspotting, our narrator, Mark Renton, says (paraphrasing the book upon which the movie is based), “1000 years from now there will be no guys and no girls, just wankers. Sounds great to me.” This is meant to be the perspective espoused by the young and liberal and hey-man-it’s-all-cool folks, among whom I sort of number, who criticize Franzen’s take on feminism and his failure to represent any people of color who aren’t (A) literally retarded or (B) literally servants. And yet there is not a lot of acceptance or bonhomie in this crowd; instead we are fractious and judgemental, and we spend a lot of our time trying our best to beat one another with various ideological cudgels — cudgels built largley out of identity, but also out of orthodoxy. That’s the irony I’m talking about: Franzen, for all his flaws, seems to have perceived something that strangely sort of anticipates the criticism he’s getting.* He titles the book Purity, and its most prominent character is a young Millenial whose very name is Purity. And it seems to me that purity is something that a lot of young people with allegedly progressive ideas are demanding these days: perfection of agreement, adherence to orthodoxy; every failure to agree is accounted a failure, period. That, of course, is not only a huge bummer but an extremely destructive way of evaluating art, politics, or anything else in society.

* by the way, I find his depiction of “feminism” per se unfair, but I suspect it’s also meant to be unfair — not least because it doesn’t seem to acknowledge the reality that there is no “feminism” but instead “feminisms”

    Anyhoozy, this all puts me in mind of a question I’ve been pondering a lot of late: if we see the broad societal collapse that a lot of people seem to be expecting in the (relatively) near future, what happens to all this movement toward acceptance of difference? I suspect, just based on history, that almost all of it vanishes in a puff of smoke. I’m not asserting that bare survival necessarily trumps the ongoing project of social justice; I’m suggesting that the ongoing project of social justice is a project dependent on a functioning society, and in a society of pandemic disorder, old evils will begin to assert themselves: patriarchy, vicious ethnic conflict, etc. Not that those things aren’t extant now, but they may become the ruling ideologies in an anarchic world. (Look for my book, 101 Reasons Anarchists Are Idiots, due out any minute now.) In a violent world, violence organizes itself against the other.

    Holy shit, that got dark quickly.

Short and Stupid: My other blog

Hey y'all -- realize I've been a ball-dropping bitch on the subject of this blog the last coupla days. I was gonna write one called "The Agony of the Feet" today, about the vicissitudes of running, but I just don't have it in me today.

Instead, I'm going to link you to my other blog: Politicians Giving the Thumbs Up.

A while ago, I realized that politicians, as a class of people, give the thumbs up way more often than any other class of people on earth. I almost never give anyone thumbs up; it's just not a gesture in my physical vocabulary. It's not in many people's, really. But politicians do it all the time. In fact, since starting the thumbs-up blog, I've discovered that that was more true than I had ever before understood.

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The Governator with his thumb.

There do seem to be certain politicians for whom the move isn't natural -- notably, I haven't been able to find anybody from Idaho or Nevada -- but the thumbs up appears to cross most cultural bounds. It's endemic among American and British politicians for sure (the two thumbsie-upsiest politicians in the world appear to be UK Prime Minister David Cameron and US Vice President Joe Biden), and it appears to be common throughout the English-speaking world: there are plenty of Canadian and Australian politicians who have been photographed giving the gesture as well.

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Mark Rutte, PM of the Netherlands, giving the international sign for "I am positive, trustworthy, and happy. You should vote for me."

But it transcends national boundaries. Now and again I've decided I need to find a politician from a non-US/Commonwealth country giving the thumbs up, and it has rarely been a challenge. The Presidents of Argentina and Brazil flash it often. The PM of the Netherlands is an enthusiast of the gesture. So is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Edrogan.

So far, the world's two largest countries have evaded my attempts. It may be that India and China lack a culture of the thumbs-up -- I'm sure that's true in many places. But it may also be that I haven't looked hard enough yet.