Lennon Sisters Magazine Covers

auteur mouths war lovers again son squier

I do take note of the important events of the day, to an extent. I find it hard to get very overheated about them, when so many other people have already taken it upon themselves to be so.

This question answers itself.

Ukraine-- it is and has been since its independence an unusually weak and unstable state, large, almost unbelievably poor, its population in free fall; in short, it seems to have very little going for it. I did think, for a fleeting moment or two, in the early 1990s when the Soviet Union broke up that Ukraine and Belarus especially becoming and remaining independent countries for any substantial length of time seemed odd. As a child I had little sense of Ukrainians having a national identity separate from Russians, because as in the case of Serbs and Croatians, or Czechs and Slovaks, I don't think the differences were emphasized as being particularly important in those days, if the people I grew up around were even aware of them.

In late 1966 and early 1967, the theme of the Lennon sisters having a lot to teach President Johnson's daughters about romance achieved popularity in this type of media.

I am now aware that Ukraine has had, going back to the 1800s at least, active nationalist leaders and inclinations, though the effectiveness of these does not seem to have ever been very strong. That is to say, there has never been much of a sense afoot in the world that the Ukrainians were a coming people. They certainly do not give that impression now. My whole point is, that Ukraine strikes me as an unusually vulnerable state to begin with (though for that matter, so does Russia, at least as regards its sparsely populated far eastern territories bordering China).

I probably did give some passing thought, while watching The Battleship Potemkin or reading some reference to Chekhov's dacha in Yalta, that the Crimea, and most of the Black Sea coast, for that matter, not being part of Russia any longer and that nation's acceding to this seemed odd, but I probably assumed that the two countries must have a relation similar to that of the United States and Canada, in which I tend to assume that Canadian ports and water are essentially 'open' to American commerce and military needs, especially in the event of emergency. Perhaps this is not the case either, and I can look forward to some abuse from offended Canadians, but I note my idea as an instance of how the uninformed mind tends to fill in the blanks of its knowledge. I am a little surprised that our intelligence agencies and governmental leaders do not appear as if they had a plan of response in place in anticipation of Russia moving into the Crimea or other parts of Ukraine, which surely must have seemed a possibility or even a likelihood by experts in these matters. Of course I am sure there must have been something of the kind; our reactions to most of these international crises in the last twenty years do unfold as though we had never made any contingency for them however.

The supposed excessive fertility of the Lennon sisters was an endless object of fascination for television magazines in the 1960s, an era in which I thought the average family consisted of 3-4 children across the population. While Peggy did have 6 children, I am pretty sure the other three only had around five more between them, which does not seem extreme. I guess one or another, and sometimes two, of the sisters were pregnant continually for a few years there, and it was kind of part of their personae, so the impression stuck.

Lots of celebrities in the 1950s and 60s had a fairly large number of children (though normal for the time). Elizabeth Taylor for example I believe had four children, though no one ever thinks of her as especially fertile or maternal, for that matter.

I make note of the lack of contingency for the Ukraine situation because I note that a lot of important people in America seem rather angry about the development, saying that it affects business and trade, etc, and is basically irresponsible. So I am surprised that they don't have a devastating plan of some kind that they can coldly implement and send a forceful message to Putin to control himself going forward. But of course they probably do.

I would actually be interested to know the contents of this discussion.

Why the fascination with plane crashes? Does it have to do with the fact that upper middle class and
even higher people fly a great deal as passengers, and that that period when the plane is off the ground is one of the few times in their lives when they cannot feel that they are the absolute masters of their situations and that this in itself causes them anxiety. Or is the idea to continue to cultivate the seeds of fear in the duller middle orders, as has been done so expertly in the cases of school and workplace shootings, and compel them to submit to ever increasing security measures and so forth.

Who is the sexiest? We all know that I love Dianne, but objectively, the sexiest, or the one who most had it in her to be an animal in bed in general, was probably Kathy. As far as who was most likely to be an animal in bed with me, that is a different story, and the most likely answer is no one, though if I had to pick, I would say Janet. But that's only because I like her the least of the four (though still enough) and that seems to inspire excitement in women. The smartest? Dianne fer sherr, though Kathy may be the shrewdest in terms of cold business sense. Peggy is undeniably the sweetest, and I think she was also quite smart. She looks so to me, and I consider myself to be a good judge in this matter, at least in cases where it is not an absolutely dominant or obvious feature (I find these types of women the most lovable, when I can find them). Her husbands, a musician and a doctor, were presumably intelligent, which is in most instances a good advertisement for being so oneself.

I want to make a few comments on Roger Angell's story in the New Yorker about being 93.

I was taken aback in this story by how much emphasis there was on the desire for sex and trolling Match.com for romantic partners even among the extremely aged. I always thought, maybe even hoped, that if I should make it to that age that I would not be oppressed by those kinds of thoughts anymore. They seem increasingly ridiculous now, at age forty-four. That I should still be grasping at them deep into old age, when they can only ever more and more come to nothing, seems almost unbearable.

Roger Angell was my age in 1965. There are not many people left who were my age now before I was born.

Yes, cut it out with the babies already.

Roger Angell is famous for his baseball writing. I have of course read some of it over the years, and thought it was generally good, in a New Yorkerish way certainly, but the pieces usually captured something about the way baseball connected to and fit in with other aspects of life. This is a staple of New York and New England-based baseball writing that is often ridiculed by less self-consciously cerebral and more jockish types, but the genre developed for a reason, because one has the sensation in New York City and most of the better places in New England that there are a lot of interesting things going on, of which flow baseball, and the baseball season, are a part, at times a bigger part than others, but never in the kind of relative mental isolation in which it seems possible for even sensitive writer types to experience sports seasons in other places. I remember in the famous book Moneyball a passage about organized baseball's acceptance and even celebration of these pastoral, elegiac chroniclers of the sport, who posed no threat to its powers, which has come in the last generation with the statistical revolution spearheaded by Bill James (a writer for whom I actually have a great deal of esteem) and the more recent crop of completely hard-headed and rather pitiless analysts of data, of which Nate Silver, who has been in the news recently, is representative. I don't really like these new books very much either, and I will try to explain why, aside from the complaint that I must be too stupid to understand the math and the objective realities that they reveal, because I think at times there really is more to the matter than that, or at least I certainly hope there is.

Now we're talking. I will take odds that none of the Lennon sisters ever asked their husbands the question this magazine claims they asked them every night, however.

Yes, so the problem with the Nate Silver school of baseball writers even leaving them in the realm of pure statistical analysis is a tendency to 1) overstate their case, both in its conclusions and its ultimate importance, which is a problem across the contemporary intellectual spectrum; 2) write as if the primary, maybe even the only interest in baseball is in demonstrating one is smarter than everyone else at interpreting statistics. The atmosphere of these books is depressingly airless. This obviously speaks to the nature of elite education nowadays, that data somehow speaks for itself, and is not merely the support of thought, but in most instances serves as thought...

I am sure I will post on this again, if more thoughts on this subject occur to me. I am out of time for the week and I still have no computer at home. Maybe this weekend I will get one.

Reminiscences

I am going to tell some moldy Prague stories today. Why this has been on my mind lately, I don't know. Perhaps because I have turned 40, and it reminds me of a time when my mind was more attuned to the world around me and the actual things I was trying to do than has been the case in the last few years. Besides, reader traffic is as slow as ever.

As you can probably guess, I am always a latecomer, and usually a somewhat unwilling one even then, to technology, only adapting when necessity dictates, i.e., it has become difficult to do things in the ways I have always done them because everybody else has moved one to the newer way. I had the fortune, perhaps for ill but in some ways, admittedly not easily perceivable, I think probably for good, to spend the formative years of my 20s in a couple of places that were just enough years behind the computerization of all aspects of daily existence that I managed to make it to around age 27 or 28 without spending any appreciable amount of time using those infernal machines. I have written elsewhere on this site that I must surely be one of the last people to go all the way through college without having, or really needing, a computer that had any capacity beyond word processing; I was in college from 1990-94, a period in which at other schools I am quite certain developments in computing were followed, and encouraged, with much more interest than they were at my school, where, as far as I could tell, any anticipation of the nature and scope of the coming revolution was kept under the hat of the anticipator (but lest you think I am mocking, I would not personally have wanted it any other way. I cannot fathom how different going to school must be now with all the popular kids having 1200 friends on Facebook and never being out of texting or cell phone range. How could someone like me even hope to compete for anybody's attention in such an environment?). A couple of years after finishing school, I went to Prague for a year in '96-'97, in which I must have been one of the last people to have the quintessential 20th century experience of spending a year in Europe blithely unaware of the Internet and all that that entails; e-mail, the ability to make reservations and buy tickets for trains and museums ahead of time, in English, if you are good-looking and cool arrange incredible social hookups, with a few taps of the keys and without having to speak to anybody (I know the Internet was going strong in '96-97, but honestly I knew nothing of it, and if anybody I knew was using it, whatever advantages they were deriving from it made no impression on me). One of the biggest differences the Internet brings to the Anglophone staying for an extended time in a non-English speaking country is in bringing to any computer user pretty much an unlimited supply of reading material in English where a genuine paucity existed just 13 and 14 years ago.

I mention this because it sounds funny now to think about how precious any printed matter in English we could get our hands on was to us. You have to know that besides not having the Internet we did not have any television either. It is not that there was no reading material available. Of course the major newspapers and magazines were sold at the main train station and in tourist areas, but even the USA Today or International Herald Tribune would have been quite expensive to buy everyday on Czech wages, and these didn't amount to more than 15-20 minutes of reading total, maybe 35-40 if you read every article including the Business section, perhaps an hour if you did the crossword puzzle too. Every couple of weeks a tourist would leave one of these papers on the subway and I would be able to scavenge it. There were a couple of bookstores that stocked English language books (also expensive), one of which was a real hangout where you could sit and read for several hours if you wanted, drink coffee, scope girls, etc, and I did go there a couple of times a week--though between walking to the metro, changing trains once and then walking again on the other end it was a 45-60 minute trip each way from my apartment. I had brought some books with me, Volume I of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, of which I actually read quite a lot (I still had at that time some vague idea of maybe going to graduate school when I returned home), various travel guidebooks which I must have read backwards and forwards 20 times apiece, several novels, I remember reading Great Expectations and David Copperfield, Slaughterhouse-Five, 1984 (a great conversation starter in that part of the world), and The French Lieutenant's Woman there, along with some Kafka and Hrabal and a few other stories of local interest. One of the students worked for the Prague Post, which was the weekly English language newspaper specializing in Czech and European news, events calendars, bar and restaurant reviews, movie listings, gossip and other matters of expat interest, and would bring us a free one every Tuesday or Wednesday, whichever was the day it came out. That was a big night; I would crack upon a few 1-liter pilseners and fire up some Marlboros (I forget what was wrong with the Czech cigarettes, but nobody who belonged even tangentially to the postmodern world smoked them, even the very coolest people--it literally marked you as a member of the Communist party or something) and spend a couple of hours reading the Post, even though they rejected several articles I submitted to them myself. I realize now that it was a semi-professional operation, run by people who had worked in real newspapers in their various countries of origin, had gone to journalism school, and so on. I put the word out to all my Czech acquaintances that if they ever came across any reading material in English that nobody wanted I would be grateful for it. One guy brought me a copy of Robert Fulghum's All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten ("This looks like some good adwices" he said) and I even read that, or some of it anyway.

One thing I should add, to explain this inexhaustible craving for reading material, is that while we went out and did things in the evening 3 or 4, occasionally perhaps even 5, nights a week, we couldn't afford to go out every night, nor would we even probably have desired it; even when we did go out I always usually needed to wind down for an hour or two before going to bed unless I had had a very great deal to drink and needed simply to collapse, which didn't happen very often (the night at the Lucerna ballroom may have been such a night, though most of that damage would have been done after the dance was over). I also did not work but intermittently; looking back, I should have recognized this difficulty in getting on in comparison with pretty much every other foreigner in town as a sign that I was probably in serious trouble as far as my long term career prospects went, and I did worry a little, but at that time I was still deceiving myself that I had talent and that talent would, indeed must, find its way. The point is, I had a lot of downtime to wander around, ride the trams, drink beer, which only cost about a quarter a pint at most taverns outside of the main squares downtown, but also to read and write. Those are the sorts of things I do in my free time, or did before I had children and lots of possessions and cars and other things to organize.

Another thing I took away from my time in the Czech Republic and the old Soviet bloc generally, though it hasn't served me terribly well in the United States of the 1997-2010 period, is that being intelligent, curious, and decently educated really does have existence, and even value, when separated from wealth, which to be honest it can at times be hard to believe in this country. I know there are many intelligent people in the United States who are poor, who are marginalized, who do not have friends or a respected place in society, and in the back of your mind, almost as if automatic, the thought is either that they in fact must not be smart or, that something is wrong with them, they are diseased. I have developed the same instinct when considering my own case. In the former Eastern bloc there are, or I guess were, since the ambitious have options to better their material condition now, lots of pretty intelligent people who didn't have much money, but they did and talked about the kinds of things and had the kinds of interests and sensibilities that made them pleasant to be with. Most of these people probably would have been successful if unleashed in youth into a system like ours, being smart, well-adjusted, capable on the whole, but some of them would not have been. Perhaps they would still have been happier, if less happy than their more naturally winning comrades. I don't know. I wish I could believe either that attaining money is truly the greatest good both for the individual and the society around him, or that depriving people of most of their wealth would be their own as well as the collective group. I can't believe either, and I can't figure out where exactly the balance needs to be set. Not where it is now, I am pretty certain of that.

Subjects I Meant to Write About Two Weeks Ago But am Only Getting Around to Now

They're really important too.

I am craving grapefruit at the moment. This is not one of the things I had mean to write about, but I have neither had nor craved grapefruit in many years, and suddenly a sensation of the taste of it just rose up in my memory.

There was a passage in this New Yorker article about Laura Ingalls Wilder that perturbed me. Wilder, who politically seems to have been something of a libertarian, stated during the 1930s, comparing the policies of the New Deal to her own upbringing, that "what we accomplished was without help of any kind, from anyone", on which the author of the article (whose name is Judith Thurman) commented with the following:

"The Wilders had, in fact, received unacknowledged help from their families, and the Ingallses, like all pioneers, were dependent, to some degree, on the railroads; on taxpayer-financed schools (Mary's tuition at a college for the blind, Hill points out, was paid for by the Dakota Territory); on credit--which is to say, the savings of their fellow citizens; on 'boughten' supplies they couldn't make or grow, and, most of all, on the federal government, which had cleared their land of its previous owners."

I thought this was a most unfair, misleading, politically motivated, and all around foolish critique. The evident purpose of writing it is to delegitimize the mythology of the self-reliance of the old pioneers as well as, with the clearing the lands reference, the very origins of the nation, or at least that part of it which regards this period of settlement and expansion as one of the heroic and formative episodes in our history. Whether this end is as desirable as many people appear to think it is, and most importantly, is grounded in a truth any more accurate overall than that which it would overthrow, is a question to which I am not at all confident that the answer is really aye, but in any event this is getting into psychic territory that would have been completely foreign to Laura Ingalls Wilder, and which would have availed her little in her life on the frontier if it had not been. Whatever one thinks of the quality or veracity of the Little House books, I think it is reasonable to surmise that anyone living in South Dakota in the 1870s and 80s was by contemporary standards pretty darn self-reliant where the basic material necessities of life were concerned. Whatever assistance the organization of the society of the time afforded to ordinary people, reaping the benefits of it were still almost wholly dependent on the recipient's own effort and work. It is insulting for a writer at a prestigious magazine in 2009, who I think we can be pretty sure leads an existence defined by comfort, plenty, leisure and educational opportunities of such as which Laura Ingalls Wilder, who even if she did not write the stories attributed to her was by all appearances more worthy of such rewards, if they be awards, than most of the people currently enjoying them, would have known nothing, to infer that the Ingallses were freeloading off the state and the machinery of private enterprise in any practical way comparable to what nearly everyone could be said to do now.

That is probably enough on that subject, but I want to do a few quick bullet points as well:

1. The building of the railroads across the country, which used anyway to be celebrated as one of the great achievements of this nation's history, presented many opportunities for enterprising people, but they were not built, nor conceived, as an entitlement for the common people as a great but unavoidable drain on the public purse, but as a spur to the wealth of private interests.

2. The local schools which are presented in the books are about as do-it-yourself affairs as it is possible to conceive. If the people of the village hadn't cared earnestly about having them, they would not have existed. When there was a discipline problem they didn't call in the district's behavioral psychologists and conflict resolution specialists to handle the problem. A couple of respected local men came in from the fields, gave everyone in the room a stern look and reminded everyone what was expected of them, with very clear implications as to what would happen if those standards were not met. The teachers were not infrequently teenagers who could pass a qualifying exam--Laura was one herself when she was about fifteen. These schools would not be considered as much academically, but they had an incredible sense of themselves as footholds of civilization in these remote and isolated frontier communities, and as such performing a function of the highest seriousness. Would that some of our modern schools had such a intense conviction of their mission.

3. The scholarship for the blind that Mary got from the state is another opportunity that the family took advantage of because it existed and they qualified for it; I doubt that they would have viewed it as an entitlement regardless of merit or the interests and needs of the state, which I take to be the point under discussion here. Being self-reliant doesn't require one to turn down opportunities or assistance that is freely offered, especially when it is clearly being offered for the perceived mutual good of both parties. The problem, as Laura Ingalls Wilder would see it, is in having the expectation that one is owed such favors, especially without having to undertake any kind of arduous effort to demonstrate one's worthiness to receive them.

4. Invoking the availability of credit as an argument against self-reliance is simply odd. I'm quite sure anybody who took out a loan was expected to pay it back in full. Indeed, the burden of paying back these debts is a constant theme throughout the series.

5. With regard to the government clearing out the Indians, experience in New England and other of the early settlements indicates the pioneers, or mercenaries of the railroad companies, probably could have accomplished that job themselves too without the aid of the U.S. Army if they had really wanted to...cheekiness aside however, this goes back to the question many people seem to puzzle over of whether the origins of the American nation are really legitimate because of what happened to the Indians. Here is the secret: peoples and states only gain legitimacy of the sort under discussion here by so constantly and insistently asserting that they are so, so as to make themselves--their language, customs, racial line--appear as inseparable from the place they occupy as those people who inconveniently preceded them. Americans, or their intellectual class, used to embrace this mission with somewhat more gusto than they do now, where many of them give off an air of diffidence about identifying too strongly with any totem of greater nationhood, let alone arguing for the historical legitimacy of the United States as traditionally conceived. This is not to suggest that what happened to the Indians was not appalling, especially at the time; however as it cannot practically be undone, and we all return to our pre-1492, or even pre-1700 conditions, I do not see any good which can come from wholly delegitimizing what followed, namely the development and rise of the United States as probably the most dynamic society on the planet for much of the last 150 years at least. Be conscious of the history and the atrocities, attempt to atone for them in a manly fashion, but do not wallow in them and suck all manner of positive vitality out of yourself and the society around you.

I don't want to give the impression that I am a great lover of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books by the way, although there is an optimistic spirit about them, born no doubt of that general civilizational naivete and which accounts for the charm of so much popular American art, that I admire when I see it. I read a couple of them as a boy. My father, perhaps surprisingly, encouraged me to read them. He thought they had historical value, and, laziness being identified early on as the flaw most likely to hold me back in life, he seemed to think that reading about children, especially girls, whose lives consisted of almost nothing but endless hard work and discipline, which they performed cheerfully and competently and without any complaining, would help alert me to the necessity and value of a healthy work ethic. Unfortunately, this intended effect did not take hold; I found the prospect of a life of such dreary and onerous compulsion horrifying rather than inspiring (My father also thought feminism would have the effect of lighting a fire under the asses of the boys of my generation, whose animal instinct he supposed would not allow able to sit back and just let the girls beat them out for honors, fellowships, prestigious jobs, etc, without putting up some kind of fight. Obviously he was wrong about this too.)

Laura Ingalls Wilder's racial sensitivity was unfortunately not very well developed. The article refers to a passage in one of the books that originally appeared as "There were no people on the prairie. Only Indians lived there" which caused outrage even in the 1930s and resulted in "people" being changed to "settlers" in subsequent editions. I remember another story where Pa, who is for the most part all business all the time and not much given to frivolities, cut loose on one of the holidays by putting on blackface and performing a minstrel show with a group of his friends which I have to say I was not prepared for even as a kid, as indeed I still recall the shock of it now.

Arm Injuries in 12-Year Old Pitchers

There was a story on this in the New York Times magazine a few weeks ago. Some of these injuries are so serious as to require the talent of Dr James Andrews himself (he is the big arm surgery specialist for the pros) to try to set them right. As a consequence of this burgeoning epidemic, Little League and all the other amateur baseball organizations now have mandated pitch counts too, as has de facto happened in the professional game for at least the last 10 years, maybe fifteen now. I hate this trend, of course. Organization and parental overinvolvement at young ages are already killing the game in this country, of course. This just makes it that much worse. Why are 12-year old pitchers suddenly ruining their arms in degrees never seen before? Because the adults managing their development are morons, most likely. The injured tend to exclusively come from the ranks of "serious" players, those who are pretty much at the top of their age group, who play on increasingly elite teams which draw talent from and travel to vastly disparate areas of the country. I think this is obviously idiotic, especially as I don't see any evidence that this specialized training is contributing to a noticeable improvement in the quality of play at the professional level. It certainly isn't doing much for developing the arm strength of pitchers, who at age 12 would probably be better served throwing the ball against the barn wall a few hundred thousand times--Bob Feller and Nolan Ryan both followed this training method--it has been proven to work--than flying around the country with an entourage of know it all and aggressive parent and coaches. After all, kids have only been playing baseball, and frequently lots more of it than they do now, since about 1850 without destroying their arms before puberty. But what does that signify? The world is different now.

I used to pitch occasionally in Little League--I wasn't a serious player, it is true, though the pitch count rule seems to apply to serious and non-serious alike. I would almost always pitch a complete game, though the score was usually 18-11 or something (and that was when I won). I don't know how my pitch counts were--I certainly walked or hit a few guys every now and then, and outs were, as anyone who has ever played ordinary Little League knows, not always easy to procure. I don't remember that my arm was ever in any pain however, probably because I was conscious, even as a twelve year old, of not putting any greater strain on it than I felt it could bear. I would have liked to have been able to throw harder, of course, but mainly I was just trying to throw strikes and hope the fielders could catch the ball once in a while. Such a mediocre career as mine is not acceptable to these superparents, I know, but putting your kid in a position to damage his arm before he even gets to high school for the sake of these evil and stupid travel teams and tournaments is delusional and just wrong. In every way.

I got to finish this post. I wanted to go on about how stupid the pitch count system is at the big league level, and how teams really need to find a way for their top pitchers at least to comfortably go 135 pitches or so. I would like to see the return of four man rotations too, or at least four and a half men, where you skip the fifth guy if there is an off day. The difference in quality between the starters and the top relievers and the rest of the staff on most teams is dramatic, yet more and more games hinge on these inferior spot starters and middle relievers. Pitch count information isn't always readily available for games pre-1995 or so, but you can sometimes find it. There were two Steve Carlton games I thought were interesting. The first was the 1969 game where he struck out 19 batters (and lost 4-3). The story on the game in this old book that I have noted that he threw 152 pitches, which I am guessing they noted because it was considered a lot, though it was presented more in the attitude of "he battled tough all afternoon" than in any suggestion that he should have been taken out of the game. He was 24 years old at the time too, which nowadays pitchers under 25 almost uniformly are not allowed to exceed 110 pitches under any circumstances; mainly, as far as I can tell because Mark Prior threw 131 one day when he was 24 and was never the same again (Carlton of course went to throw 200+ innings in each of the next 14 years after the 1969 game and win 4 Cy Young Awards, but that signifies nothing). The other Carlton game was one of the games of the 1980 World Series, which was being replayed on ESPN Classic one night. I tuned in for a few minutes during the eighth inning. A couple of guys got on base for Kansas City, and the announcer observed that Carlton had thrown 159 pitches to that point and "might be tiring" (they did take him out after that inning, which he got out of, so I guess there was some limit even back in the day if a guy appeared to be laboring). There are many more such examples, of guys throwing enormous numbers of pitches and innings and getting hurt no more frequently that people do today, but I have got to put the kibosh on this post.

Bourgeois Surrender Hot(t) Links

Because psychologically I need to keep the site as up to date as possible and bulk up my post totals. To convince myself that I exist. Don't expect much. The more stuff that gets put on the internet, the harder it is to find anything good.

On the theme of people who organize their lives, and their blogs, around completing lists, this guy is reading the entire set of Harvard classics, and, of course, writing about his experience. Considering that he is an editor at Harper's Magazine, and even scored a book deal out of his project, his blog entries don't really strike me as that much more spectacular than my own are, but maybe he saved his A-material for the book, or memoir, as it is billed. His page shows many highly flattering reviews, including one from Heidi Julavits, who was the golden girl of my high school (she graduated two years ahead of me) and was rather always swimming far above the level of such an obviously low life form as myself, so I have even further cause to be jealous of him.

As far as I can tell, no one is stepping up to take on the entire Britannica Great Books set (Syntopicon included), or if they are they are not keeping a blog about it. There are a few people however who at least write about how much they enjoy seeing the set taking up prime real estate on their booksehelves. This guy seems to have even read Plutarch. all the way through. Wait! I found a site that specializes in comments on readings from the series, though it looks like they are picking and choosing choice nuggets rather than barrelling right through from Volume 1 to 54. They are serious though. One of the posts referred to a DVD available featuring "3 hours with Mortimer Adler"; and the author sounds excited at the prospect.

I am pretty sure I am glad that there was no internet for the masses when I was eighteen and nineteen. For people who aren't getting any girls or are in an unfortunate social position where they are hardly allowed even to be near any, the temptation to spend all one's time online trying to find one, or watch intimate videos of ones you'll never be able to get but in former ages would have had no psychic access to must be overwhelming. One of the subgenres I have (completely accidentally, by the way) stumbled upon in this vein is that of girls smoking cigarettes, usually in a bedroom, while wearing lingerie or a bikini, smoking being so bad now that the viewer is more astonished at the brazen puffing than that someone is posting video of themselves in a state of undress that formerly required binoculars and a good hiding spot for most people to ever see, if they ever saw such a thing at all, for all the world free of charge. The mistake most of these videos make is to have the girl start talking, or worse, have the voice of some swarmy guy offscreen asking them lascivious questions about their preferences, bra size, etc, which destroys the illusion that they are possessed of even average intelligence or human sensibility, without which a life wallowing in such vice offers little that is appealing. I do kind of have a crush on this girl though. She is so good at being bad, she really does kind of become good again. It is my firm belief that every properly developed man must, in the course of his youth, be capable of having fairly involved dealings with a creature like this, and of coming through psychologically intact whatever course he chooses to take with her, if he is to attain that completeness of mature manhood that we so admire when we see it, and so lament the lack of in other men.

Still, for all the necessity of our last adventure, one cannot help feeling perhaps a little dirty afterwards. Time to wash off some of that musky afterstench by calling up some less tainted and sweeter friend, such as one of the Lennon sisters from The Lawrence Welk show perhaps. Especially if it's Christmas time.

Due to the unfortunate demise of my local video store, I have become dependent on the library, which doesn't have much that I haven't already seen, and occasional mail order for my classic movie viewing. Consequently I haven't seen much lately. The last thing I saw was the African Queen, which I had always been kind of ambivalent about seeing, even though I like Humphrey Bogart, and Katharine Hepburn is starting to grow on me now that my adherence to a list is forcing me to see some of her movies, which I had avoided before because I thought I didn't like her; however, I was still not sure I wanted to see them together. However, it wasn't bad, well made, a good-looking movie, less grating than I had feared. The danger in it was fairly tame, until the very end, and then the way that was resolved was kind of silly, but...it is certainly better than 95% of the stuff that gets put out, though putting it on lists of the top 100 movies of all time, where I have seen it show up on several occasions, is either wishful or sentimentally blinkered thinking.

Disappearing New Stories, Bourgeois Paranoia, or Am I Simply Losing My Mind?

I am not the kind of guy who goes around looking for conspiracies. Indeed, today's subject is more the result of my taking everything I read in the papers or hear from official new outlets too seriously.

A couple of years ago I read, or thought I read, a news item in my local paper about a guy who lived about 1/4 to a half a mile down the road from me who had ordered a guillotine kit on the internet, assembled it and used it on himself; when someone noticed that he had not been seen in a few months the police, the account said, were dispatched to the house, found the guillotine, the head on the floor, etc, etc. Naturally I thought the story was shocking, but I remembered that there was a house in the neighborhood where all the shades had been pulled down and the lawn overgrown for some time, and I was certain I had read it in the paper I thought, well, why not? When I began repeating the story to other people however no one had seen this item, or anything like it. My wife, who really should be a detective or something, so impossible is it to sneak any B.S. past her whatsoever, immediately dismissed it by pointing out that "You can't order a guillotine over the internet". But I say, would I--could I--make this story up? I swear I read it in the paper. Another instance that happened just a couple of months ago was that one day around noon I was listening to the radio, and the CNN hourly report or one of those things came on the station I had on, and the lead story was that North Korea had massed its army along the border with the South, that the latter nation was on full war alert, and that some military conflict was considered imminent. This being alarming news, I assumed that the story would be followed up immediately and throughout the day. Nothing followed. I went to the internet. Nothing. Nothing at all. What was this story I heard? Does CNN already have recordings of potential lead news stories on file and someone just popped in the wrong tape? If so, or if you reported a false story, why not acknowledge the error and provide a retraction? To definitely hear something like that and then have it disappear from the information pipeline without any acknowledgement that it ever happened is not reassuring to me.

I guess my credibility as a listener and reader is already suspect, so I shouldn't even bother with the 3rd and most obvious instance of disappearing news stories (obvious because for once I am not the only person who noticed it) that I am thinking of, but it involves the plane on September 11, 2001 that crashed in Pennsylvania that it is said a bunch of passengers said "Let's roll" and took it over in a struggle with the terrorists before crashing. This scenario never rang true to me for a number of reasons, and I was really kind of astounded by how far pretty much everyone seemed to go along with it, but I remember the day it happened several local witnesses saying on television that they had seen a second plane or some other large object in proximity with the plane that crashed before it went down. Again, when the other version of what happened came out, there was no attempt to address or explain what these earlier recordings of witnesses thought they saw; they were just expunged from any archive as if they had never happened, and I'm sure it was denied that they had ever happened. But I am quite certain that they did happen.

In Which I Continue to Generate Much Buzz For Myself and My Career

Summer is not traditionally my most dominating time of the year. I am inevitably afflicted by impressions and thoughts somewhat less than completely joyous and positive at some juncture during this easy season, and whatever more desirable presentation I have been working so hard (or so assiduously, if you can endure this word) to cultivate is swept quite away. I have not myself been on a school schedule for many years, but the damp, the humidity, the bugs, the flowers, the grass that grows too fast, the roar of motorcycles, call up the old feeling of school being out, and my being temporarily lost as a result; of many long hours passed sitting in my room or wandering over the empty, wiltingly hot streets and dusty ballfields of my old town. This is because I experience life as a stream of events in which everything that occurs, especially if it is in some way disappointing, is directly correlated with everything else that has previously occurred, even if these events ought properly to have nothing to do with the present. I would be much better off if I could experience life as a series of actions, each one unrelated to the one before it and a fresh opportunity to make a positive mark. I never am able to do so, however.

Frequently I attempt to compensate for being depressed by thinking cruel thoughts about other people from whom I would be especially solicitous to distance myself. There was a story in the New York Times last week about the serious medical problems morbidly obese women, some up to 500-600 pounds, face during pregnancy. The story was uninteresting because it neglected too fastidiously to explore the real story that suggested itself, indeed almost burst with the desire to scream itself out, which was of course to identify who is going around impregnating 600 pound women, and what goes on in the minds of people who do so--perhaps they see a 600 pound woman as the equivalent of having 4 or 5 normal sized girls--who knows? This was not an instance that called for either subtlety or restraint. This was a freak show posing as a medical issue. Now I know as well as anyone that the dating scene out there can be brutal for the weak and inferior, and that loneliness and frustration for months or even years on end grow unbearable in a very short time. Indeed I am sympathetic, far too much so indeed, I know, to almost all variety of lovers. But come on.

Then I have some idea of talking about the younger generation--not my children, but the immediate younger generation, the people who are in their twenties now. I mostly only know about them, or at least the educated, or perhaps it is better to say highly self-aware part of them, through the Internet, since almost no one of this type in this age group lives where I do. I do see a bit of this crowd in Brattleboro, which for some reason has managed to attract a decent-sized coterie of young people who have had some kind of intense relation with the idea of college even if only in rejecting it, enjoy free love, super left-wing politics, stores where everything is used, and hanging out in bars and cafes where the customers, to paraphrase what was said of Bernini, provide the photographs, paint the pictures, write the poetry, grow the food, and play the music. My beautiful wife Sabrina claims to find these people annoying, and I can't say that they are exactly my ideal either--they aren't terribly witty, they are a little overly health-conscious, et al, for my taste--but at this point I am so desperate to hang out with anybody who is remotely interested in anything I am interested in, that I have come to rather look forward to seeing them about, dropping into their haunts for a couple of minutes if I have the chance, and eavesdropping on their conversations.

But my purpose is not really to talk about this particular scene. I was watching the internet "TV series" We Need Girlfriends, which chronicles the romantic shortcomings and modest triumphs of a trio of nice, introspective Jewish boys and recent graduates in New York in a series of 11 short (6-14 minute) episodes over the last couple of days. The show was an internet hit of sorts and was even picked up by CBS to develop a pilot (I don't see the realist ethos that makes the Internet show mildly interesting transferring to a network production though). I admit there were some things in it that amused me. I like the expression "You scammed my squirrel" quite a lot, and wish I had invented it myself--actually I think I did invent it myself, at least I went through a period where I employed the word squirrel when thinking of certain girls I liked. The naturalistic filming on location on the streets of Astoria, Queens (home by the way of the only Czech restaurant and beerhall I have been able to find on the East Coast--alas the beer is still "Import" and has the fizzy, cold-pasteurized American taste) was a welcome departure from the usual rather sterile cinematic depictions of New York. Several of the squirrels were pretty cute, too cute for me, but then far too cute for the geeky characters in the show as well. Their general inferiority as men, when the writers chose to address it, was rather convincingly and even painfully portrayed (though I thought the show should properly have ended with them all utterly alone and realizing in horror how inferior they were and contemplating suicide, in reality most schmucks really do find some decent girl to take them on if that's all they want; still I wish the cutie-pie blonde whose pathetic boyfriend suggested he didn't deserve her and that she ought to find someone better had taken him up on the offer). Still, I don't want to give the impression that it was actually good. I was interested mostly in seeing how the kids that age live now, what their world is like. I don't think the kinds of guys in this show are going to like being 38 very much, because most of them almost certainly won't have done anything that amounts to much in their mind, or anyone else's, and by the time you're 38 that's all anyone cares about, and by extension it becomes all that you care about. But a few other quick observations:

1. Computers, cell phones, etc. These have obviously changed life as a twentysomething a lot--I didn't discover the Internet until I was already married and far away from any kind of youth culture, and I still don't have or see any necessity for a cell phone. My car broke down about a month ago between two interstate exits fairly late at night and I simply did what I would have done in 1990. I walked 2 and a half miles back to a gas station that had a phone booth and called a tow truck, which walk I should add was very restorative to my spirits. Granted, it could have been winter, but I have walked long distances in temperatures as low as 10 degrees when I lived in Maine and felt quite robust at the end of it. But as regards the present generation I cannot see myself getting in on all the cellphone fun the kids have, with their messaging and calling each other incessantly. I have gotten maybe 10--maybe 20--social phone calls in my entire life, and this is spread out over a 25 year period. The level of connectedness is something I can't really imagine. Also I had imagined that the Internet would have been a great aid in my attempt to find some girl to go out with me when I was a teenager and no one at my high school was giving any signs of being interested, but apparently the opposite effect has happened--the girls have had exposure to more cool guys now than they had before and are even less willing to go out with normal people than they were before.

I am going to end this post here. There were other points, but they aren't really worth the time it takes to go into them. Plus there is a lightning storm outside my window and my computer is about to get blown up.

The Shortage of Good People That is Afflicting Various Professions

I don't listen to National Public Radio very much. In the state where I live, the programming on the NPR station, besides the standard shows which everyone gets, is 100% politics, usually of an excruciatingly boring and technical nature. (People in this state, it must be acknowledged, take their civic duties seriously. Something like one out of every 200 adult residents has held some kind of political office at one time or another. The state legislature has 285 seats and is frequently claimed to be the fourth largest legislative body in the world.) This is mixed in with heavy doses of contentious and snotty libertarian-tinged conservatism. Harangues about the necessity of public garbage collection or whether non self-reliant people who require to be rescued by a helicopter at taxpayer expense while hiking in the mountains ought to be billed for the services can carry on for weeks. I actually find it invigorating when I visit my relatives in Philadelphia and see the mayor announce on TV that taxes are being raised and services cut immediately because the city can't pay its bills, and no one seems to be terribly upset about it. Though I live in a small state, I happen to be right in the center of it, so that when I am around home my car radio does not quite pick up the much better public broadcasting that is available in the surrounding states. If I drive a half-hour to the east I can get Maine PR, which has some enjoyable music and documentary programs of the "here are the top 20 songs from August 1937" variety; the same distance to the south I get the Boston station, which has all the objections about them one might expect (i.e. pretentiousness and smugness) but I like their classical music selections, which are perfectly pitched at an audience of Europhiles who don't know really anything about music but like to fantasize that they do (and the ads for the gourmet wine shops almost make the station worth listening to just by themselves); likewise a short drive west and I can pick up the Vermont station, which besides doing a lot of low production cost local and forgotten music shows as well, has programs like the International Workers News Report that are much more enlivening listening than the blow by blow accounts of town hall school budget debates which we get in my state. If I have to listen to someone boiling over with political rage, give me an indignant 25 year old woman railing against the global sex trade and corporate skullduggery than an obnoxious 43 year old white guy who thinks the mininum wage is too high any day. (I confess that unshaven, frequently braless, socialist Vermont girls are like catnip to me). If I drive an hour north I can even pick up some French stations from Quebec, which is also better than listening to libertarians even if I can't really make what they're angry about, and the music selection is different too. And their women... But this is turning into a whole other article. Let it suffice to say that I don't listen to NPR very much.

However, it happened last week that I came upon an interview on one of the national NPR shows that caught my attention for a few minutes. A journalist was talking about the program of fortress-style embassy construction that the United States government has undertaken all over the world, especially the one going up in Baghdad, which is the most notorious and symbolic of these new embassies for myriad reasons that are not difficult to discern. The topic led to a discussion of whether the old 19th and 20th century Game of Nations style diplomacy represented by the maintenance of embassies and their staffs was outdated in the age of the internet, cell phones, hotlines to Indian call centers, cheap international flights, mass immigration, long term employment in distant countries, and so on, especially if the diplomats who are supposed to be our voice in as well as main source of reliable information about these foreign countries have to spend all their time confined in the embassy-fortress. This interesting question was unfortunately not resolved, though the journalist did make the observation that "the foreign service is just not attracting the same high quality of people as it did in the past." As someone who probably could not get a sniff of being ever hired by the foreign service myself, my first instinct of course is to ponder what quality of person that must make me, if the people who are getting hired are not even considered to be as good as we would desire them to be. My second is to note that a decline in the quality of people--by which it is implied that intelligence is the attribute that is in short supply, rather than character or educational credentials, if not actual education--going into a profession has been remarked upon in other areas as well. Teachers and government workers in general are often said to be not of the caliber they once were either (to say nothing of writers). The usual reason given is that smart people have so many lucrative opportunities in the private sector now that no one of any ability can be expected to work for such pathetic salaries as the state offers (though the same salaries are considered exorbitant when the positions fall to mediocrities because there were no worthy people willing to take them). This always sets me to wondering, "Who was, and who is now, this race of high-quality people that the private sector so covets, and the state flails about so wretchedly without the services of? What are their secrets? What is it that they understand that the rest of us do not? Why now, for the first time in recorded history, are there no brilliant people unseduced by the crooning call of money? Were three thousand years of philosophy and religious teaching just lies that we only have managed to kill for good since 1989?"

This set me in mind of another incident, not exactly related, but in the same vein. Recently at the organization where I am an employee, a major figure, director of a department, retired. I inquired of someone upon this event, in my innocent 1950s mode, whether X who had been a prominent underling in the department for a long time was being considered for promotion to the director's job. The person I asked this question of looked at me like I was insane. "Oh, no," he said. "They're flying in people from all over the country to interview for this position." I know I am way behind the times, and that this is a common practice, but something about this struck me as rather excessive. This organization is a small to midsized regional hospital in a thinly populated area. Being an administrator at such a place is not a job a monkey could do, I am sure, but at the same time, it is a job that tens of thousands of people, most of whom are not geniuses or otherwise notably gifted, have and perform capably in this country every day (This position requires no specific medical training as far as I know). I mean ultimately, how hard can it possibly be? How much unique training can it possibly require? I admit I have never really gotten the whole thing about building resumes and advancing careers and promoting oneself and all of that--just based on my experience playing sports I know that people can make themselves look like much more serious athletes than their results would indicate they actually are by getting up at 5 am to train, having private coaches, going to camps, etc--but I can't believe this particular position is so uniquely difficult that one has to go to Oregon and Kansas to find people capable of doing it. I think it is bad for the psyche of a community (as, on a larger scale, it is bad for the psyche of the entire nation) when the message is continually sent that no one on hand in a place is smart/good enough to do work that someone ought reasonably to be able to do. Not one of the administrators in this organization, which is the largest employer in town besides the government, has any connection even to the state dating before they were well into adulthood (well, one guy did go to Dartmouth for college). Yet the minute they arrive they are regarded leaders in the community to a certain extent. The same goes for the editor and most of the writers on the local paper, the radio talk show hosts, and the city council (the last guy on it who grew up in town die last year). I am not from here myself, but I don't like the idea that none of the people who are running things has any idea what the town was like in 1980, let alone 1950; that they didn't go to the local school or church or hang out at the malt shop back when it was open; that they don't have any deep personal connection with anybody or any institution in town that dates back to their formative years. When one arrives in a place for the first time as a fully-formed adult, he can never have the same sense of its character or personality and is forever comparing it, usually inaccurately and unfavorably, with what he does know. People used, I think, to have a better understanding of this, and have some humility when settling in a strange city largely occupied by people who had been there, and whose families had been there, for a long time. But perhaps they didn't.

But to get back to the idea that today's teachers or foreign service workers aren't on the same level of quality as those in the past, as I know I am often guilty of similar insinuations myself. As one gets older, and the imposing authority figures of one's youth, in certain non-scienctific/ technical occupations, with their educations, manners, experiences, etc, peculiar to their own time, fall away and are replaced with one's own contemporaries, or even younger people, it is difficult to imagine that anything has been gained to replace what has been lost, since one feels there is little the contemporary can know that he does know, which was not the relationship he had with the older authorities. It is remarkable how many prominent people, many of them of obvious intelligence (Gore Vidal and Camille Paglia are two examples who come to mind, though many other people--Harold and Allan Bloom, Philip Roth, etc, have similar symptoms) have a blind spot in this area. They write and talk as if they sincerely and unironically believe that the last great flowering of culture, art, intellect, etc, remarkably, was in the very place they happened to be when they were 18-25 years old, and that nothing--nothing--of lasting significance has happened since. With the dreadful baby boomer generation rapidly approaching their dotage, I only expect this kind of attitude to become more prevalent rather than less.

I got to post this and move on to something else. This is not a PhD dissertation.

The Primary: Part 1

Some philosophers--Aristotle and Mill come to mind--seemed to view politics, in its proper form, as a fitting and ennobling activity for a civilized man. Others--Sartre and Machiavelli being examples--regarded it, with some positivity, as a blood sport in which the ideologically or strategically superior combatants would be exalted and the inferior degraded. Still others, such as Hobbes, generally shared this view, only with the difference that all of the combatants, indeed the whole of the civic population, emerged degraded from the process. I increasingly find myself in sympathy with this last view; certainly whatever the mass of the American citizenry feels about the courses its government has taken in the last few years under its nominal authority, however stridently individual members of it may have reveled in the machinations of the authorities, or doggedly protested or resisted the same, I think that deep down the sentient part of it cannot but feel some sense of personal humiliation and collective shame at the extent to which it has lost control, especially intellectually, over so many aspects of its fate. Perceptive people now regard the American electorate in the same light as formerly they were wont to regard that of politically hopeless countries such as Belarus or Libya; as so fundamentally ignorant, childlike, and overmastered that they can no longer really be held entirely accountable for their rulers. It is not infrequent to hear people around the world claim that while they hate the American government, they do not hate the people; the people should not interpret this as a compliment however.


Having said this, it happens that I live in the state where the first presidential primary is held, and I thought I ought to write something about it.

Often when I go somewhere out of New England and encounter residents of other states who inquire where I live, these will upon finding out launch into a mini tirade about the Primary. All the objections they raise about it are from any standpoint of pure reason probably indefensible, and I do not attempt to defend them. I am not a native of the state nor a local journalist or party activist who has acquired a status disproportionate to my actual position due to my proximity to the action, and as such do not have any emotional attachment to the Primary. It is unfair, as well as nonsensical, that if we are to have this kind of system, that New Hampshire should always go first; that it supposedly does a better job of scrutinizing the candidates than another state would do, or be able to do, is not a legitimate argument. To go on, any geographical entity that has a population that is 98% white in this day and age is offensive almost by virtue of existing, and exponentially so when it is entrusted with deciding matters of the utmost importance to nonwhite people who are excluded from the process (though I suspect a major reason most efforts by the major parties to diminish the influence of Iowa and New Hampshire in the nominating process are so tepid is that the Controlling Powers Behind the Scenes really don't want blacks and Hispanics with multitudes of complaints being able to influence national elections to the extent one can in a small state primary). In a sense the absurd continuation of this anachronism has become the great beauty of it. One lady from the Mid-Atlantic region who had once covered the primary as a journalist told me, in a tone that insinuated that in her eyes I carried some of the stench of the whole process myself, that the way we elected presidents in this country was disgusting. What could I do but agree? What can I now? Unfortunately she didn't elaborate on what was so disgusting to her, or what she would have preferred. I would have liked to have known, as she was a very feisty lady. She also asked if the town where I live was still "the city in a coma." I had to reply that it was, and indeed it is. As I didn't grow up there or have any real friends other than Mrs Surrender this line of questioning did not hurt my feelings so much, though I think it is rather rude to ask someone where they live and then launch into an attack on it; after all, the town's being hopelessly dull still reflects on my inability to bring any life to it, as I could presume she contiunally did for whatever town it was she lived in.

Acknowledging all this, I will not be celebrating when the day comes--and surely it must be coming--when the Primary is no more. It is the closest thing to real excitement that ever makes its way up here. Most of our towns are either sober, prosperous burgs full of professionals and retirees who never loiter during the day or leave their houses after dark, or depressed former mill towns full of people who like to operate loud machines. There are few young people, no music, no arts 'scene'--though a lot of established artists and writers live here, they came because they wanted to be left alone, not to hold court at the local coffehouse--only a couple of college towns. The lakes and beaches are increasingly dividing into refuges for the extrmely wealthy or gathering spots for a fairly crass and uncharming proletarian contigent. The offices and refrigerators of many modestly succesful people--teachers, bank managers, family restaurant owners--are plastered with photos of themselves locked in embraces with the likes of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, George Bush I and II, Pat Buchanan and other political luminaries, and certainly there would be a collective minor depression during the first couple of missed primary cycles which, especially as it would come in the winter, would be scarcely endurable. And of course it is amusing to see the International Herald-Tribune or CNN reporting on General Wesley Clark's slicing meat at Sully's market or Al Gore's trying to determine whether he would come across more as a man of the people by having lunch at the Puritan Backroom or at Veano's Italian Kitchen. It is also a relief in a sense to have all of these deathly important and influential people, including the media, where one can see them at close range, and be reminded that they are actually just human beings, often (though not always) extremely disciplined ones, but in most cases not really that palpably superior to various excellent people of one's own past or present acquaintance. When I used to live near Washington D.C. and was around that environment of high-I.Q./think tank/lawyer/government/top secret-knowing people they seemed to me at least much less imposing than they are when one merely reads about them from afar and can only imagine them as inhabiting an intellectual and social plane that no longer has any common ground with one's own.

I hate to break this up into 2 posts but I am going to. I still have at least as much to write as I have already, and that is without the inevitable unforeseen digressions I always go off on.

White Male Novelists--Having Macho Sex?

For those who missed it, the NY Times Book Review did a piece last Sunday on the memoirs of one Alice Denham, with whose name I had been previously unfamiliar. Ms Denham, accompanied with a 1962 photo of her handsome self in a negligee with a open-lipped, closed teeth come-hither sort of expression is mainly noteworthy, it appears, for having been very hot and having slept with a lot of literary figures in the 50s and 60s, nearly all, as far as I can tell, white American males (though I am not certain about Anatole Broyard). This last fact was made an especially big deal of by the reviewer (Stacey D'Erasmo--don't know her) as if the very idea of straight white American male writers being taken seriously or as artists, toughs, arrogant egomaniacs, desirable sexual partners or anything slightly dangerous in general were too ludicrous to conceive of. The opening sentence of the review is "Ah, for the days when the Big White Guy Writers roamed the streets of Manhattan, swooping down on comely maidens in the Cedar Tavern and carrying them off to their lairs for a bit of ravishing in between reciting lines from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Why not? It sounds like a far more enjoyable way to pass an evening than anything likely to happen there now. But in a world where even prominent and sexy authors such as Mr D.F. Wallace denigrate writers of these earlier times on the basis that his "female friends" find them revolting, it would almost be in bad taste for a wafflng, confused, half-educated gentleman to demur from the judgement of a strong, intelligent, well-educated woman, as ones suspects Ms. S D'Erasmo must be. However I am going to follow my instinct and do so for the sake of practice.

The immediate impression that is made however is that a certain class of male author has lost a serious amount of esteem over the past 25 or so years with its particular female type, which has the adverse effect of further lowering its status among society in general. To put it another way: athletes, fraternity studs, cocky businessmen, doctors, Australian adventurers, etc, besides acting in ways desirable to many women, maintain a standard of quality and an expectation that association with them must quickly come to a crisis of sexual decision that women submit to in a proportion of numbers highly favorable to the limited number of males in these positions. Many male writers, apparently, have surrendered any such expectations or demands, which, if the desire to be such a bastard is not quenched with it, is going to result in some very pitiful and lifeless art regardless of medium. This is not the same as repression or frustration, and it is certainly not an indifference to sexual matters but an acquiescence in one's own sexual irrelevance, a voluntary castration, in exchange for...what in exchange for actually? Comfort? The hollow title of Writer, stripped of all its power? Where men become thus etiolated that they cannot assume any privilege for themselves in their dealings with women their work will be stillborn regardless of the endeavor. I cringe to say it myself, lest some pretty lady writer get infuriated and unleash her condemnation on me; but I have deferred to the lady writers for too long and only received contempt from them anyway. There is no future, I am afraid, in playing pleasantly.

I am not actually a particular fan of most of the writers named in the article, though I have always retained a soft spot for Goodbye, Columbus. (Phil Roth, by the way, was rated "on fire" as a lover. I bet he was!) I certainly could done without knowing that James Jones had an abnormally small penis (what does that mean anyway? Length? Circumference? Mass? The girl really regrets taking you on?). Like most modern writers, myself included, they probably thought and wrote about sex too much. Indeed, they probably had sex too much, and certainly invested it with too much intellectualized egoism to be healthy for clear-headed artistic work. This attitude has got much of literature on the whole into a bind which it seems not to know its way out of anymore. Everything is reduced to a question of the author's personal sexual success, or more often his failure, and everything else in the world must answer to this single struggle.