Fragny

From the Depths

2009-05-18T11:01:00.000-07:00

Bikini Bottom is also an effortlessly postmodern place, a baby-blue void in which all manner of cultural bric-a-brac drifts and combines. Neptune might pop by, or the Flying Dutchman, or even David Hasselhoff: the climactic scene in The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie features SpongeBob and Patrick clinging, amid live-action waves, to the Baywatch star’s hairy legs. It even has its own pair of Watchmen-style deconstructed superheroes: Mermaid Man, shuffling in peevish slippers toward senility, and his long-suffering sidekick, Barnacle Boy. In Atlantis SquarePantis, SpongeBob and the gang are magically transported to the lost undersea city of Atlantis, whose Lord Royal Highness, red-lipped and stack-heeled like a Blue Meanie, has the same initials as L. Ron Hubbard (“My friends call me LRH!”). Various masterpieces hang in the great Atlantean halls, and Squidward is thrilled to discover that he can enter them bodily; he climbs into Van Gogh’s crooked bed, and drapes his proboscis alongside the fondant clocks in Dalí’s Persistence of Memory. “Ask your Mama or your Dada,” he sings, perched inside Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal, “to tell you about the schism between Minimalism and Cubism.”

After fifteen weeks of looking at visual art and pondering how it influences literary art, after finding fascinating convergences between artifice and nature, after becoming entranced by postmodern installation art, after questioning what is high art and lesser art, this story in The Atlantic appeared on my doorstep as the perfect coda. With the above paragraph particularly, James Parker has extended a marvelously appropriate bridge from my visual binge back to thoughts on postmodernism and this unwieldy condition I’ve been calling Empty Self-hood ("Empty" for short). What could be Emptier than SpongeBob Squarepants, the totally ridiculous, raucously yellow dude designed to entrance kids and sell mass-produced crap? What a revelation when, thanks to Parker, I realized that he’s not all that Empty at all. Or rather, he’s Empty like Frisky Dingo is Empty, like the best parts of South Park are Empty. There’s more than a little bit that is obnoxious about these shows, but there is also a little bit more at play than what meets the eye. If the creators of SpongeBob can make Baywatch and Greek mythology and Dada and Duchamp and Dianetics swim together in the same fish bowl, then I’m interested. The paragraph above calls to mind your favorite postmodern form and mine (pastiche) so well that Parker cannot help but win points for SpongeBob the show.

Parker also makes an engaging case for considering SpongeBob iconic instead of iconoclastic. He quotes Greg Rowland, the titular brand analyst from Greg Rowland Semiotics (N.B.: the concept of brand analysis and the thought that I might work for a company with the term capital-S “Semiotics” in the title is why I have decided not to pursue a career in marketing. G-d bless you, Mr. Rowland, but my soul winces at your line of work.):

“SpongeBob is one of the greatest believers in the American dream in all of children’s entertainment. He’s courageous, he’s optimistic, he’s representing everything that Mickey Mouse should have represented but never did. There’s even something Jesus-like about him—a 9-year-old Jesus after 15 packets of Junior Mints.”

As a role model for kids, SpongeBob has it all over Jesus. While I am sure that Jesus action
figures (and backpacks and lunchboxes and beach towels, perhaps, though not inflatable pool toys…consider how hyper-appropriate Jesus floaties would be… ) abound,* SpongeBob is far more ubiquitous. His advantages are that he is secular and approachable. Not only does SpongeBob pull off the “aww, shucks” everyman thing with aplomb, he’s a lot more huggable than Jesus. His spongy texture alone invites a squeeze and a giggle. Furthermore, SpongeBob is imperfect. He tries hard and makes mistakes. He has friends and foes, but it never seems like the fate of the world or his soul (or the soul of the world) is hanging in the balance. His short-term happiness or productivity or friendships are at stake, but never hellfire. As all cartoons would have it, SpongeBob makes it out of every scrape. This kind of simple cause-and-effect optimism and wild hope reaches children in a way that the infinitely mysterious resurrection story doesn’t. In addition to optimism, the show subtly encourages children to work hard (SpongeBob dearly loves his gig at the Krusty Krab fast food shack), to be loyal (Patrick is SpongeBob’s brother from another mother, most definitely), and to express their true selves (in a deliciously postmodern moment, SpongeBob goes all over town weeping unabashedly to everyone about his broken meat spatula—crying even to his shrink).

Neither Jesus nor Mickey is as wonderfully manic (Parker’s perfect word, as used in this video at theAtlantic.com) and free-spirited and sincere as SpongeBob. I admit and cannot ignore that there is something insidious about the huge interactive SpongeBob “Happy Place” displays debuting at Wal-Mart this spring. But there’s still something catchy about SpongeBob that fills up the Empty with a feeling that we adults don’t seek enough: glee.

*The only Jesus action figure I have ever seen was sold in the toy and novelty section at Urban Outfitters, and I can assure you that the store’s general snarky tone prevailed. On the other hand, I do believe that elsewhere in Christendom there are Jesus action figures for sale. Sincere ones. Just down the aisle from the Veggie Tales** plush toys.

**Speaking of clever cartoons like SpongeBob Squarepants and Frisky Dingo, Veggie Tales is also delightful and sharp and quite good in guilt-free way. Make no mistake that Veggie Tales has a Christian agenda—but a self-conscious and accessible one.

Lynch knows Empty

2009-02-27T13:38:00.000-08:00

Ten Takes on Mike Lynch

1. To my ear, Mike Lynch is a simple name. Anglo. Blunt. Unassuming and glamourless. The sound of it makes me trust his intentions as a realist. Mike Lynch is a workman’s name.

2. Mike Lynch knows he is an artist because of the work he does, like swinging an ax or frying an egg. Reminds me of the way Hugh Akston grills burgers in Atlas Shrugged.

3. Mike Lynch makes objects considered aesthetically vulgar (in the traditional sense) attractive. Never has an electric beer sign illuminated human truth like it does in Lynch’s work.

4. With Lynch, gray is a specific sensory world all its own. Mike Lynch shapes “not just cars and trucks,” writes Thomas Sullivan, “but an ’83 Mustang under a Duluth streetlight.”

5. Writer Jon Hassler referred to himself as a “Sunday painter.” What is Mike Lynch’s Sunday diversion? By his journal entries, I might guess cartographer or type designer.

6. The absence of humans in Mike Lynch’s work makes them seem hyper-present; one hardly notices that they are gone.

7. When one observes Mike Lynch’s work, the night-time traffic light is an intimate experience between the artist, the observer, and the light itself. As in real life, a traffic light cuts the loneliest of lonely feelings, lending acknowledgement and guidance to an empty moment and lending a twinkling of color to a Lynch.

8. Stunning opposites: Lynch’s electrical towers and grain elevators reach perfectly skyward while his railroad tracks glisten straight and horizontal into the night.

9. Mike Lynch signs his work in simple capital letters: LYNCH. No cursive, no serifs. No flourish.

10. In his journal, Mike Lynch suggests that the birth, the launch of the work matters more than finality. We can only give our work a firm push into the universe, letting our nightwork find closure by light of day.

These images can be accessed in a PDF from the McKnight Foundation.

Tag-ny #3

2009-02-03T12:05:00.000-08:00

3. I adore the J. Peterman catalog.

A subtle crackling in the air, undetectable to ordinary ears.
The little black dresses are circling the room, carving out spheres of influence; you’ll need a few more tricks than usual this evening.
This item will do the job without messy potions or complicated Latin incantations.
The subtle Italian styling makes any figure spellbinding. It operates at long distance, too; no one else will have that sheer soufflé of a collar.
And as for the sleeveless cut, well, any necromantic knows that the merest brush against a witch’s bare arm is ensnaring (see Kramer and Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum, 1496).
New Black Magic Dress (No. 2213), a sensuous wisp of silk originally found in Florence. Silk chiffon collar. Gathers at neck and elasticized waist. Flirty side slits. No buttons or zippers, just slip on and off.
Leave out extra treats for Pyewacket, you may not get home tonight.
Sizes: 4 through 16. Color: Black.

This is not shopping—this is poetry. Honestly, I could take clothes or leave them. (As mainstream social norms would have it, I must take them.) I’m not willing to browse and stalk and embark on a hero’s quest to find quality clothing that no one else will recognize and say, “OMG! We’re wearing the same sweater! From Express, right??” But I don’t want clothing to date me, pigeonhole me, or otherwise label me as anything but “dressed,” either. Except…that’s not entirely true.

As we discussed many a time in Empty Selves, everyone dresses to convey a certain impression— even if the intended impression is “I could care less about clothes.” I am no exception. I want my outfit to send a message, but a precise one—one that won’t overpower my personality or expose me as a big-time poser. And I want my outfit to do all of this in less than $30 per piece.

J. Peterman doesn’t carry much that satisfies my budget, but it does carry a ton of really wonderful, stop-em-on-the-street kind of stuff. (Granted, you may be stopped on the street because someone thinks you’re a street actor doing a period piece, but that’s still attention…) You have to have guts to wear some of J. Peterman’s stuff. And I appreciate that.

I also appreciate that the J. Peterman catalog is an homage to nostalgia, that omnipresent force in history—history of the civilized world and an individual’s personal history—that can keep one from embracing new technology, deleting 3-year-old text messages, or throwing out old sneakers. And yet, sometimes old stuff done well is worth holding onto. Not to mention the sumptuous descriptions. Sure, they were endlessly mocked on Seinfeld, but reading the descriptions in the catalog is like taking a big whiff of warm Death By Chocolate but knowing you won’t eat a bite: Pleasurable, yes, but also unfathomable and ridiculous to those less taken by sweets.

J. Peterman is also an homage to having a few things of great worth and high quality instead of a closet full of H&M or Gap.* Perhaps you’re naturally drawn in by popular models in turtlenecks. Or maybe you find more allure in a style of nightgown that Marie Antoinette wore while belittling her subjects. If nothing else, J. Peterman knows its audience.

Until recently, I didn’t know that the J.Peterman Company went bankrupt in 1999. According to this MSNBC story, it sounds like devotion to nostalgia came back to bite Peterman (wouldn’t you know, J. Peterman is actually a person: John Peterman, a major league prospect** drafted by the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1963). When the catalog took off, he opened actual stores around the country instead of keeping things mail-order only (with a website, say), and soon he didn’t have enough cash to sustain the company’s growth. In its second iteration—thanks to financial help from John O’Hurley, the actor who played mythic, mysterious Peterman on Seinfeld—the J. Peterman Company is with the times, on its own quirky terms: online store galore and Peterman’s Eye, the blog that reads like the best Farmer’s Almanac ever.

I’ve purchased only three things from J. Peterman: an innocent, red flower-splashed summer dress, a snappy black trench (had to return it), and a simple gray men’s t-shirt that now lives in Hell's Kitchen. I regret none of those purchases. Not even the trench. Had it been lined (for the 7-month Chicago winter), it would’ve made Ingrid Bergman—or Carrie Bradshaw, for that matter—seethe with envy.

*While I’m busy appreciating things, allow me to appreciate David Spade’s performances in the Saturday Night Live “Gap Girls” sketches: “No joke! I'm so sick of that place! The next customer that comes in, I'm gonna go, ‘Hi! Welcome to the Gap! Can I sell you some crap?’”

**Let it be known, as an unofficial Tag-ny fact, that baseball players are my Waterloo. (Kenny Lofton, whenever you’re ready, I’ve got a white gown all picked out.)

Tag-ny #2a: Looking the Part

2009-02-02T08:08:00.000-08:00

Although the unlit cigarette did very little for my development as a writer, there is something to be said for looking the part. It is why we show up to job interviews in suits. I like to think that looking the part helps explain why baseball managers and coaches wear uniforms like players.*

The subversion of looking the part is the bread-and-butter of subculture movements. Consider Goths and hipsters. Both groups have gone out of their way to NOT look the part of mainstream culture. At the same time, however, in order to differentiate, they are choosing to look the part of a “Goth” or “hipster.” It’s a simultaneous subversion of and adherence to the principle of looking the part.

I admire the good-natured subversions of my friend, MQ. When he is required to look the part of a professional at a suit-and-tie kind of affair, he often wears a tiger-striped tie to refuse to take himself seriously. Similarly, he taught me to keep a Superball (you know, the bouncy things you can get from gumball machines in grocery stores) in my pocket during important meetings and interviews. No matter how heavy and crucial things seem, there’s still a silly toy in my pocket. Looking the part is only appearing to fit the role—not necessarily inhabiting the identity.

Often it’s not enough just to look the part, but sometimes looking the part is quite enough.

*I’m aware of the tradition of player-coaches in baseball, but I like the idea that uniforms somehow contribute to strategic-thinking and help a coach call upon his own prowess as a former player.

Tag-ny #2

2009-02-02T07:38:00.000-08:00

2. Menthol cigarettes and I go way back.

I kissed my first girl and smoked my first cigarette on the same day.
I haven't had time for tobacco since. –Arturo Toscanini

Whether a sign of my infinite squareness (not unlikely) or evidence of growing up with a smoker and myriad allergies (very likely), I have never smoked a cigarette. I went through a phase in late high school and early college when I was eager to assert my post-feminist power by smoking very large, very bad cigars, but in my mind, cigarettes were not the same thing. I might have saved myself from that furry tongue, cavern-of-rot feeling in my mouth many mornings if I had taken to the occasional cigarette instead. But for me, cigarettes belonged to three entities: scary women like Cruella de Vil, Miss Scarlet (in the conservatory, with the candlestick), Sylvia Plath, et al.; the cast of Grease; my mother.

My mother says she stopped smoking each time she was pregnant (three times). While I believe her and resist the urge to blame my brother’s, sister’s, and my own character flaws on prenatal smoking, I doubt that she gave much thought to how her smoking would affect us after we were born. It was a different time in American dread culture, certainly, and mothers weren’t worrying themselves sick over potentially-toxic bisphenol-a in plastic bottles, lead levels in toys from China, or the risk of autism from vaccinations. On one hand, I’m grateful that my mother let me pick up germs, gnaw on my toys, and get my booster shots. On the other hand, I wish she would’ve started the Mr. Yuck campaign earlier.

When I was about three years old—probably too young to have understood and been deterred by the neon green x-eyed stickers anyway—I ate most of a pack of my mother’s Silva Thins Menthol cigarettes. I found the package on some low-lying surface and loved the minty smell so much that I took a pinch of them with my small fingers, as if they were French fries or something, and chowed down. My mother found me mid-binge and panicked appropriately, calling Poison Control, scraping the tobacco out of my mouth, and dumping ipecac syrup down my throat.

Let it be said that I don’t remember this incident at all. Maybe I tasted the cigarettes one at a time—delicately, like a fine cheese on the lips of a gourmand—or maybe I was helping myself to small fistfuls; it’s hard to say. I have heard the story so many times from my mother, my father, and the aunt who got the frantic call from my mother after she had wrestled the cigarettes from my maw and before the ipecac kicked in, that the truth of the actual incident has been forever lost to memory.

I had another rendezvous with menthol cigarettes during my late college years. I had decided to think of myself as a fiction writer, struggling against the page (screen) to produce spare yet moving short stories, in the manner of Cheever or Carver or another New England chap who seemed to do prose well. I read somewhere that to be a writer, one had to do whatever it took to create the illusion of literary prowess. Simply, one had to feel like a writer. For someone (Hugh Heffner?), it might be wearing a silk robe to the typewriter. For another, a secluded study with ambient classical music; a bottle of Jameson and a pocket knife as paperweights; a grimy coffee shop and cup after cup of mud. I convinced myself that my writerly habit was sucking on an unlit menthol cigarette. I chose Virgina Slims because Silva Thins had gone extinct. I enjoyed the cool tingle on my lips and enjoyed even more the idea that I might look like James Dean or someone else young and talented and fond of risk.

The best parts of my menthol habit were 1) walking into a drugstore and asking for a pack, all nonchalant (but geez louise, were they expensive!), and 2) the way the cigarettes made my desk drawer smell. (Ah, that siren song that brought menthol and me together in the first place…)

Despite the tingle, I never became addicted to Virginia Slims. The habit passed after one summer with—surprise—nothing like Cheever, Carver, or Plath to show for it. I’m still sort of fascinated by cigarettes and smoking and how such small amounts of tobacco and nicotine can —with repeated, soothing use (that’s the key, I suppose)—enslave so many. I understand the kinetic appeal of the cigarette, the holding between two fingers (either a leggy “v” or a crab-claw pinch), the oral dragging and drawing, and the possibility for a social experience. And I understand the basic science of chemical addiction. Still (here's the tag! finally!), these don’t seem like a good substitute. They can’t be as satisfying as the act of having a smoke, and they seem about as kinetically sexy as a cough drop. Don’t underestimate sex appeal—ad execs certainly never do. Just as a toddler would do something ridiculous (like eat cigarettes) based on her senses, so do adult consumers.

Updike knew Empty

2009-01-27T20:11:00.000-08:00

Approaching eighty I sometimes see myself from a little distance, as a man I know but not intimately. Normally I have no use for introspection. My employment for thirty years, refinishing wood floors...has conditioned me against digging too deep. Balancing in a crouch on the last dry boards like a Mohawk steel walker has taught me the value of the superficial, of that wet second coat glistening from baseboard to baseboard. All it needs and asks is twenty-four undisturbed hours to dry in. ...

But, now that I am retired—the sawdust gets to your lungs, and the fumes get to you and eat away your sinuses, even through a paper mask—I watch myself with a keener attention, as you'd keep an eye on a stranger who might start to go to pieces any minute. Some of my recently acquired habits strike me as curious. At night, having brushed my teeth and flossed and done the eyedrops and about the take my pills, I like to have the water glass already full. The rational explanation might be that, with a left hand clutching my pills, I don't want to fumble at the faucet and simultaneously try to hold the glass with the right. Still, it's more than a matter of convenience. There is a small but distinct pleasure, in a life with most pleasures levelled out of it, in having the full glass there on the white marble sink-top waiting for me.

from "The Full Glass," The New Yorker, May 26, 2008

R.I.P., sir.

Tag-ny: 2009

2009-01-22T14:28:00.000-08:00

Fragny began in autumn ‘08 as an academic assignment, but now I want her to live on. As the writer at the helm, I guarantee nothing: not frequency nor robustness; not insight nor entertainment. Call me a nihilist (that I own artwork by Brian Andreas totally discounts this possibility, nevermind that I hold dear certain pop culture artifacts like Maya Angelou’s poetry and Top Gun), but I’m not sure that Fragny serves any greater purpose in the vast universe of web content. This question of purpose will return, sometimes in disguise at o’dark thirty and other times in broad daylight, naked as a jay. It’s the central problem that allows our middle class American sense of empty selfhood to exist: How do I fit in this changing landscape of culture/language/technology/identity? And: do I matter?

For now, she (i.e., Fragny, this blog) is (1) the continuation of an experiment on riding the media wave, and (2) a forum for reflecting on uncertainties, unknowables, and the postmodern condition. (What’s the postmodern condition? Great question. My brother knows.)

Today I begin with a challenge issued by paulo, a friend and crazyman who plays indoor soccer six nights a week. He will implore you to read everything by David James Duncan and suggest that you give up beef in honor of an ethereal waitress in Worthington, Ohio. He would be justified in doing so.

The challenge: because paulo tagged Fragny on his site, I must now tag seven others and reveal seven things that most readers don’t know about me. (Reflect on myself? You’ll need to twist my arm, paulo…)

And so I begin, stretching the challenge over 7 days:

1. I was in the school-wide spelling bee every year from first grade through eighth grade.

I used to know all the words I missed. (Alas, I never won. I was runner-up to a smug boy with a stud in his ear in sixth grade and again to a seventh-grade violin prodigy and resident vestal virgin in eighth grade. I might envy her and her perfect posture still.) I have forgotten a few of the words I flubbed, but I am certain that I missed “giant” in first grade. I knew how to spell it, but I was so nervous about being the very first speller in the competition and the shoulder brace I wore to repair my broken right collarbone* itched so much that I froze and forgot the “a”: “Giant. G-I-N-T. Giant.” Sure, excuses are like asses (everybody’s got 'em and they stink), but I was seven….and sufficiently humiliated when the librarian said, “I’m sorry, that is incorrect.” The pain was apparent in her voice, and she smiled a warm, heartbroken smile, but I heard, “No, I’m sorry—sorry that you’re dumber than a paste-eater.”

Here are six of the eight words that I will never misspell again: giant, entrance, constellation, definitely, condolences, souvenir.

*It was a freak mushball accident. Ask for the gory details, if you must.

Sublime

2009-01-18T17:11:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it's cold here in Minnesota. Like last week.

But cold does not mean that there is no fun to be had. We asked ourselves,"What happens when boiling water hits -20 degree (Fahrenheit) air?"

Murakami knows Empty

2009-01-13T07:30:00.000-08:00

"It doesn't matter," I said. "It's the same whether we eat margarine or don't. Dull translation jobs or fraudulent copy, it's basically the same. Sure we're tossing out fluff, but tell me, where does anyone deal in words with substance? C'mon now, there's no honest work anywhere. Just like there's no honest breathing or honest pissing."

from A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami

Saddles on Dinosaurs Revisited: A Letter

2008-11-12T21:24:00.000-08:00

Dear Adam,

Because last night’s conversation about ignorance and self-reliance was so compelling, you are the lucky virtual recipient of my musing on another facet of Empty Selfhood. This is an to attempt to define postmodernism in letter format. I figure that this is a fair move because Lemert, the author of Postmodernism Is Not What You Think, includes a letter to a long-lost friend (maybe lover for a brief time?) to demonstrate that self-reference is inherent in postmodern media. As if the sharing of personal correspondence in a “serious” academic essay is not postmodern enough, a personal letter in a personal blog might make you short-circuit. I know that you hate blogs: they’re mindless drivel, they’re narcissistic. They’re postmodern. And you’re not. You are a modernist through and through, which is to say that if postmodernism actually exists, you are not embracing it very well at all.

So here is your crash course on what postmodernism is, in three illustrated examples:

1. Postmodernism is believing that nothing can be proven, which means that everything is open to argument. And yet stable arguments don’t hold up but “truth-claims” do.

Example: The Creation Museum

I first heard about this place from two of my friends who made the trip to Kentucky for the Grand Opening in 2007. They couldn’t believe that such a place actually existed, so they had to see it for themselves. I encountered the museum again after I read a story in Esquire titled "Greetings from Idiot America." I was struck by the writer's description of a dinosaur saddle on display. Like, an apparatus that humans put on dinosaurs to ride them because, you know, dinosaurs and humans were alive in the same era once upon a time... And then I hear about the saddle thing again when GOP VP pick Sarah Palin was alleged to believe in a similar timeline.

Here’s the trouble with these truth-claims: they are not at all based in science and they are irrefutable given the halo of Truth—capital “T,” book of Genesis, Truth—around them. If you don’t believe that humans threw a saddle and bit on a triceratops a la Seabiscuit, then you don’t believe in God. End of story. For much of the fundamental Christian right, the question of God is not open to argument, rational argument, that is, without emotion and citations from a book purportedly written by the being-in-question. Just ask Bill Maher. (Or don't. He'll be overly snarky and interrupt you when you speak.)

Faith—the alpha and the omega of the God question—seems like a very postmodern idea today because it is belief without needing proof. The unquestionable veneration of science and objective evidence in the modern era is SO fiefs and vassals.

2. Postmodernism is realizing that the traditional keepers of knowledge have lost their power.

Examples: charter schools, young investment bankers

No longer are America’s public schools thought of as the bastions of education and citizenship. They were known as the traditional keepers and dispensers of knowledge (and thus disciplinary power), but now private groups have come along to prove they can do it better. In many instances, they have.

Recently, a friend who is a dedicated first grade teacher at a charter school in Chicago (the same friend who went to the Creation Museum’s Grand Opening, incidentally) attended a seminar on the Singapore method for teaching math. Not only would a public school never fly one of its teachers across the country to attend a seminar, it would not consult a perceived lesser-developed nation for pedagogical advice. Give double postmodernism points to this charter school for taking advantage of the “It’s a Small World After All” intellectual global marketplace that postmodernity allegedly provides.

The next example is close to your heart, Adam, and thank you for the link I will introduce in a few sentences (that’s another postmodernist trope: intruding on the narrative with a meta detail about the piece itself). Over the last twenty years, the trend on Wall Street has been to hire early twenty-something college graduates to mange vast amounts of other people’s virtual money. And then to pay those kids a lot of real money. According to the firms’ payscales and the social value imbued in investment banking jobs, it would appear that the inexperienced, hardly qualified kids are the ones who know what is going on. They have become the keepers of the knowledge, and because of all that disposable income which used to be reserved for real experts, they have the most purchasing power. (Given recent events in the financial sector, however, the young guns may not be the keepers of the knowledge for much longer.)

But who cares about knowledge anyway? We children of postmodernism have learned that no matter what our librarians or LeVar Burton have told us, knowledge is not as powerful as money. And you can publish what knowledge you have on the Internet any old day, no degree or well-weathered expertise necessary. (May the God of saddled stegosauruses bless Wikipedia.)

3. Postmodernism may or may not explain the current era—but we won’t know for sure for another hundred years or maybe longer.

Example: My Empty Selves classmates and I suspect that the modern world has changed in some profound way, and we think that growing up now is different than it was for the Boomers or the Boomers’ parents. We think this has something to do with media. Likewise, Lemert might be onto something with his thoughts about decolonization and the lack of a center power or a presumptive world culture, but we’re not really sure. While we wait for the fragmented pieces of our thoughts to reassemble themselves sometime down the road of a future fraught with indetermination (will we be wiped out by a nuke?), we’ll read The Onion.

Hope the weather’s nice in New York,

C.

Greens

2008-11-05T13:36:00.000-08:00

The summer I was nine years old, my parents pushed me to take group golf lessons at the country club we had just joined. The club’s culture of convertibles, collared shirts, and kids who talked back to their parents was foreign to my family and me. My dad nicknamed us the Simpsons for the comparatively ragtag way we dressed and the way we didn’t seem to know how to comport ourselves in the formal dining room. We made a mess or made a scene now and then, but we enjoyed the swimming pool and snack bar and Belgian waffles at Sunday brunch without complaint or major incident.

If we were the Simpsons, then I was Lisa: nerdy, introverted, and somewhat out of touch. Though I wasn’t bad at baseball or other sports that required gross motor skills, I was bad at golf. Bad. So every morning during that week of group lessons, I worked myself into an anxious frenzy on the ride over to the clubhouse. I spent every lesson chopping away at the ball on the tee, the ball in the grass, the ball on the green until the lesson was over.

The lessons were run by George, the club’s golf professional. Even though I was only nine and quite well behaved compared to the other children, I could tell that teaching kids golf—teaching kids anything, maybe—was not George’s strong suit. Frankly, I was terrified of George. He was brusque and loud and his nose was a map of red and purple veins. When on the rare occasion he came over to bark at me and correct my form, his breath overpowered me like the garbage disposal in our kitchen sink.

I didn’t have the language for it back then, but George was an alcoholic. Some of the older, more outgoing kids must have known because they usually spent the morning taunting him: “Georgie, hey Georgie! My dad says you like to hit the sauce!” This would only make George brusquer and louder, calling the boys “little shitheads.” I pretended not to hear these things.

At the end of the week-long program, I was no better at golf than I was at the beginning. I could grip a golf club somewhat well, but that was it. For my efforts, George handed me—and everyone else—the most beautifully detailed trophy I had ever seen. It was a decent-sized golden statuette of a girl—a girl! with a skirt and a ponytail, even!—at the height of a perfect backswing. The club in the golden girl's hands was even removable! Despite the misspelling of my first name, the trophy was absolutely the best (and heaviest) reward I had ever received in athletics or academics.

But herein lies my problem with Boomers: they make sure everybody is a winner. Especially children. I was the worst golfer in the program, and I still received a dazzling reward. The boy who won MVP was given a gift certificate to the pro shop, which was hardly the beacon of outstanding performance that a trophy was. And so the trend went at school and at home. Even if you were the first contestant in the spelling bee and you misspelled “giant” like I did in first grade, you were still told that you were a winner. You still received a gold-embossed participation certificate. Likewise, even if your brother and sister had birthdays within a week of each other in the summer and your birthday was not until November like mine was, you still received a small birthday gift.

I recognize that the “everybody is a winner” mentality is the Boomer way of making sure that no one is disappointed or unrecognized for the innate star that he or she is. But it has taken its toll. The childhood experiences of the people of my generation (very late Gen-X, very early Gen-Y) are rife with examples of being set up for disappointment by being sheltered from disappointment. The college application process is one example. The idea that a “fall-back” choice might still be in the Ivy League or similarly nearly-impossible-to-get-into is absurd. Likewise, kids develop an inflated sense of their own importance when they keep winning at everything and losing at nothing. Just wait for the subsequent deflation and backlash when, in the “real world,” a puffed up child learns that s/he is actually profoundly expendable...

Adults are not immune from the “everybody is a winner” mentality. A famous example is Oprah’s “Everybody Gets a Car!” stunt. While it was pretty amazing that Oprah was giving away these big-ticket items for seemingly no reason, many of the recipients (the “winners”) did not think past their deserving of the reward and were saddled with taxes they couldn’t afford. While this example speaks to a whole other issue about consumption and materialism, it is one piece of evidence that Boomers drink their own Kool-Aid about participation being equal to victory.

Ken Wilber’s Ken Wilber in Boomeritis realizes that the lack of hierarchy that both his mother and father (both Boomers) espouse is actually a symptom of being in the green meme. The Boomers, green meme dwellers par excellence, adhere to flatland thinking, which is “the insane notion that nothing is higher or better than anything else.” (295) Fictional IC academicians Joan Hazelton et al. have a point: at some level, the “everybody is a winner” belief breaks down because not everybody actually does win. It is in fact important to have losers. According to Hazelton, the coexistence and integration of winning and losing is not only good but necessary if modern humankind is going to make it to the next level of consciousness. Just ask any kid, who is beige or orange (at best) but is at least not entrenched in green: who seems to be more upset and worried about self-esteem implications if she strikes out—the kid or her mom?

And that point exactly is why, in hindsight, I respect and appreciate George. George was of the generation before the Boomers. He was not worried about making sure we felt like winners; he was worried about teaching us golf. (Well, not really, but when he seemed interested at all, he seemed interested in helping us do things correctly. At the very least, he told the absolute truth, not a relative one.)

Near the end of the week of lessons, we were let loose on the driving range. I watched George watch a girl whiff three consecutive times over a hot-pink ball set up on the tee. Barely audibly, he muttered, “You really suck.” The girl straightened up, looked at him, and said, “Well you suck as a teacher.” I almost cried from fear and anxiety just witnessing this, but George laughed: “You still suck worse than I do.” He was too old to care, and she was too young to know better.

Don't Tell Mom My Childhood is Dead -or- In Defense of the Jocks

2008-10-30T10:39:00.000-07:00

I was not sold on Paul Goodman’s idea that society fails to give young people a culture to grow up in. But after reading Donna Gaines’s Teenage Wasteland, I am more convinced. Gaines’s extensive empathy for “kids” makes sense when she explains the sociological plight of kids today. Adults waste their breath complaining about kids’ laziness, lack of motivation, and general surliness. According to Gaines, however, kids’ refusal to comply is not an innate urge toward disruption and trouble. Instead, those with all the power and resources in society—the adults—have created kids’ crippling boredom and lack of usefulness (Goodman calls this “meaningful work”):

In reality, [writes Gaines], it was adult organization of young people’s social reality of the last few hundred years that created this miserable situation: one’s youth as wasted years. Being wasted and getting wasted. Adults often wasted kids’ time with meaningless activities, warehousing them in school. (86)

In America in the years immediately following World War II, the formula for usefulness was easy: get a job (there were many), get married, and have some kids—a largely inner-directed formula. It had worked for a person’s parents and grandparents and generations prior, and the “work” involved was inherently meaningful (as dictated by inner-direction). As people became increasingly outer-directed, variations on the formula emerged.

But variation causes complication and frustration. The perceived ideal model of “doing life right” is still the formula from the 1950s, Gaines claims. American cultural expectations remain rooted in inner-directedness, and yet people—kids especially—take their cues and gather information from their peers. For kids, who naturally have less life experience than adults, growing up in this paradox has become extremely confusing and frustrating.

What’s a kid who embraces variation, who defies convention, who feels like an outsider to do? S/he withdraws. S/he shuts down. S/he gets in trouble with the people who want her to cooperate. S/he feels useless and empty. S/he turns to things that make her feel meaningful, or at the very least, make her feel better. Sometimes, these things are incredibly unhealthy. Gaines spends much of her book describing what can happen to kids who feel that they don’t have a way to vent and let go of their anxiety: they destroy themselves through substance abuse, sexual abuse, self-mutilation, and sometimes suicide. But many kids, Gaines says, find comfort and escape or even justification in an alternative social scene. Becoming a metal or a skin or Goodman’s beatnik is not acceptable to adults. They see destruction and evil and a big “fuck you”—not vindication and relief—when kids find an alternative to the mainstream.

In the chapter “The Degradation of Sport” in The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch echoes what Gaines says throughout Teenage Wasteland: what’s so wrong with an opiate that isn’t literally an opiate? Left-wing critics of sport, as Lasch calls them, claim that “sports serve as an ‘opiate’ of the people, diverting the masses from their real problems with a ‘dream world’ of glamour and excitement.” Why is this bad? Lasch, Gaines, and I wonder. If kids can lay off the real opiates and opt for safer alternatives like music, fashion, hanging out, or in Lasch’s case, sports, isn’t that better? I would encourage kids to dabble in Ozzy, Grand Theft Auto III, and lacrosse at Duke University* instead of drug use any day.

In a slightly different context (and extrapolating “the masses” to mean “the youth”), Lasch seems to say what Gaines is saying: kids want to do something useful, so let them do it. And if they can’t be socially or economically useful, allow them to invest themselves in an activity that means something to them. For Gaines’s kids, it’s the devotion to music. For Lasch’s masses, the devotion is to sport. While the cultural radicals with whom Lasch argues claim that sports are brain-washing the people who enjoy them (“perpetuating the ‘false consciousness’”), Lasch believes that they are not giving sports a fair shake:

Although athletics do reflect social values, they can never be completely assimilated to those values. Indeed they resist assimilation more effectively than many other activities, since games learned in youth exert their own demands and inspire loyalty to the game itself, rather than to the programs ideologues seek to impose onto them. (115)

This argument echoes what Gaines says—and what kids, she claims, already know—about the burnout metal culture and its derivatives so well: the music doesn’t make the kids violent, stupid! Give the kids more credit. They know what they’re listening to, and they’re not buying into the meaning that outsiders project onto it. As long as society doesn't have meaningful things for kids to do while they move toward adulthood, at least let them create their own meaning.

*Ok, that was a self-indulgent cheap-shot. The lacrosse program at Duke is infinitely vulnerable to criticism because of their “boys-behaving-badly” scandal in March 2006—even if every player was acquitted. A topic for a completely different essay might be the dark side of sports teams. Indeed, a sinister trend has emerged:** where many jockstraps or sports bras convene, individual, humane judgment has often failed, resulting in hazing and violence and unspoken codes of behavior. Is this a product of the fraternal (gender-neutral meaning here) nature of sports teams and their twisted loyalty? Or is it about power and the abused becoming the abusers while good ol’ American pride in sports obscures what is really going on? Here is my first attempt at the topic but certainly not my last.

**Colon count: 10, if you count the two in this footnote. Semi-colon count: 0

Alone on the Face of the Earth

2008-10-28T08:54:00.000-07:00

from The Dehumanization of Art by José Ortega y Gasset:

The acute dissociation between past and present is the sign of our times, a generic factor of the epoch, and with it arises a suspicion, more or less vague, which engenders the restlessness peculiar to life in our times. Present day man feels alone on the face of the earth, and suspects that the dead did not die "in jest but in earnest," not ritually but factually, and can no longer help us. The remnants of the traditional spirit have evaporated. Norms, models, standards are of no further use. We must solve our problems without the active collaboration of the past totally confined to the present—whether our problems be in art, science, or politics. Modern man find himself alone, without any living shadow at his side.

Do the technologies that aid communication help assuage this sense of isolation from the past? Is it enough to be virtual friends with hundreds of people the world over on Facebook and to follow their lives on Twitter? Does this fill the historical hole in the lives of modern people?

Nostalgia != “Likes It”

2008-10-23T20:34:00.000-07:00

Ideas from Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media continue to roll around in my brain, and now he has me ready to give up an old, cozy stand-by: nostalgia. I haven’t wanted to fear the changes wrought by the Information Age (relationships mediated by the Web, paperless books, Second Lives), but nostalgia for what has worked and what has been around has kept me from seeing what could be. For example, nostalgia for the old brand of celebrity has kept me from understanding Paris Hilton as a concept. What, I have whined many a time, has she done to deserve such celebrity? Certainly, her star has cooled in the last couple years (compared to three or four years ago when she changed the way we said and thought of that squirt-of-an-adjective “hot”), but she’s still only wealthy and trendy, right? Some say that she is an entrepreneur, a performer, a brand, a socialite whose purpose simply conforms to the party-crowd demand. Fine. I can give her those “doings” if she wants them—but only because of a philosophical disagreement between McLuhan and historian Daniel Boorstin (god bless ‘em both).

In Understanding Media, McLuhan writes: “[Boorstin] was scandalized by the fact that celebrity in our information age was not due to a person’s having done anything but simply to his being known for being well known.” McLuhan seems to believe this without question even though this very idea has driven poor Boorstin and me batty. Boorstin and I have clung to the tenets of a nostalgic, outmoded mode: the Protestant ethic. An extrapolation of the ethic is that one deserves to be a celebrity only if one has put in the time and has shown superiority in the thing s/he does or produces. “Does” and “produces” suggest action, not “being.” McLuhan thinks differently: in modern American society and because of the way media has evolved “positional warfare is finished…There is no ‘ahead’ in a world that is an echo chamber of instantaneous celebrity.” Celebrity comes, celebrity goes. One day, you’re a YouTube or blogosphere hit, the next, people forget the site on which they first found you. The model of the self-made celebrity, the one that involved hard work and getting a big break, is no longer the story we tell ourselves about fame. Instead, celebrities are often created from nothing or just a spark of something, a glimmer bright enough to catch the public’s eye and stop us in our oversaturated tracks. “Give the woman what she wants” is still at-play; it just may not be a rags-to-riches success story or the person who is best at doing what s/he does. It is whatever is “hot” at the moment.

Another reason I can no longer begrudge Paris: Dustin Hoffman likes her. Actually, I don’t care who Dustin Hoffman supports or defends in this world (though I was praying silently that he wouldn’t hurt Robin Williams’s kids or Smee in Hook), I am grateful for the reminder he provided in a June 2008 interview in Reader’s Digest (of all places). Remember that celebrities are real people somewhere in their worlds, he seems to say, in other, more eloquent words:

Q. How do you feel about the famous-for-being famous trend these days? For instance, Paris Hilton.

A. My family knows her. We used to vacation in Maui at Christmastime, and she hung out with my kids there. I’ve seen her recently, and she’s just as sweet and polite as she was then. My kids say there’s not a bad bone in her body. I don’t know what crimes she has committed. The problem doesn’t lie with her; it lies with us.

It lies with us, Mr. Boorstin. I will agree with McLuhan and Hoffman on this one: in the name modernity, let’s give Paris a chance.

Significance, Others

2008-10-15T13:11:00.001-07:00

The dark, angst-laden musings of Jack Gladney in White Noise reminded me so much of Bob Slocum in Something Happened that I was convinced Jack’s son would be flattened by a speeding semi when he crossed the highway. Convinced. Luckily he wasn’t, but the reader is led to believe that something about the climate of Jack’s world, something about what just happened (shooting Mink and making a mess of it) made Wilder walk across the highway. Or maybe it was simply a moment of poetic parallelism in which DeLillo wanted to show us the depth of Jack’s obsession with death vis-à-vis (I dislike that term, but it fits here) Wilder’s chance immortality. Whichever way DeLillo intended it, I was ready for Jack to find his son safe on the other side of the highway only to squeeze the life out of him.

But he doesn’t. Echoing the final pages of Something Happened, White Noise ends with paragraphs of summary that look harmless but feel eerie. The tentative resolutions of both novels seem to say, “See? Things are normal now. Yeah, really normal…” with emphasis on the haunting ellipsis. Jack and Bob spend much of their respective stories inwardly wringing their hands about their lives, their potential, their wives, their children, their careers, and the state of the world. They worry about disasters: big, billowing toxic ones, domestic ones, internal physical ones. They both wait for something to happen in their daily lives, and things eventually do happen because of their obsessions and anxieties.

The nuances of their anxieties differ, but the fear and uncertainty boil down to one question: do I matter? This question is even more frightening than the prospect of death. Death, both Jack and Bob realize, is absolutely inevitable. This is unsettling, but on top of that is the pressure of the finite. They are middle-aged people who have been responsible enough by doing work and providing for their families, but what else have I done? they ask themselves. Does it really matter that I have existed? Do I matter enough to be remembered after my inevitable end? Death becomes much more frightening when life has no significance.

Both Jack and Bob suffer from feeling (and being, in their opinions) insignificant. Jack is the premiere Hitler scholar of his time, but he admits that he has only tap-danced his way into the reputation. He can’t even speak German. Jack’s colleague, Murray, points out the way that Jack has attached himself to Hitler’s life and legend to overcome the terror of insignificance: “It’s totally obvious,” Murray says. “On one level you wanted to conceal yourself in Hitler and his work. On another level you wanted to use him to grow in significance and strength.” (287) Similarly, Bob Slocum initially was not interested in moving up and becoming more visible in his company, and yet he felt that the work he did was useless. After Bob relieved himself of the high stakes, he was able to take the promotion and gain visibility.

Since neither man had fame or a body of work that would survive them, their death obsessions were projected onto their children. Their children were their master works and their only source of immortality. Bob’s realization that his boy was the only thing he cared about drove him to crush (literally) the vessel of his immortality. The stakes were so high that Bob removed himself from the game by removing his son. Jack also lends his children dangerous importance without admitting it. He and Babette treasure the innocence of Wilder, a child who does not resemble themselves or their other children in his development. Wilder holds all the hope for them, and his fateful stroll across the highway is proof of how fleeting the thing they’ve hung their fragile hopes on really is.

Related to a different theme, I am suddenly aware that I named a female character (Babette) 571 words into this essay. This realization illuminates my other major takeaway from the genre of stories like White Noise and Something Happened: where are the women? Are the modern/postmodern narrators who obsess about personal significance, death, and the barely perceptible insidious buzzings of our culture only men? Where can I find female Bob Slocums and Jack Gladneys? Do they even exist? Bob and Jack are their own versions of anxious, and theirs is certainly a male anxiety, but I am certain that women of this time are anxious too. Are they as apt to be first-person narrators, I wonder? That is the female protagonist I am looking for. Babette almost satisfies this criteria, but she is not the central character in White Noise and she is not narrating. If the Dylar is any evidence, she would have quite a story to tell.

Brother Knows Best

2008-10-14T20:07:00.000-07:00

My older brother, Zak, and I have always had our own brand of intellectual conversations. (For those of you in Empty Selves, he's the brother I made paper hats for while he completed Final Fantasy [IV?]. No doubt we discussed the exchange rate of rupees at some point.) The last time we had a deep talk, we discussed the nature of addictions and addictive behavior. Before that, our topic was the fluidity of gender and sexuality, and apparently I came out to him without realizing it. When he pointed out what I had just done (or what it seemed like I did), I tried to explain that I had nothing to come out about, and it turned into a "Who's On First?" moment that we have since chuckled about. (He's still not entirely convinced about my sexual orientation. No biggie.)

When I was trying to explain to Zak what Empty Selves is all about, I used the term "postmodernism." I had no authority to use it or even pretend to know what postmodernism is (this was weeks before we discussed it in class), but I thought it sounded appropriately complicated and full of despair—thus a fitting reflection of the kinds of things we address in class. Zak had heard the term before and didn't have the foggiest about what it meant, and when I couldn't come up with a good definition, he took on the project himself. Below is a loose transcription of the emails that zipped between us:

***
to: Carlee
from: Zak
date: Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 4:36 PM

Hey Car!
After you were telling me about your postmodernism class [dang it, did I really say it was a whole class on it??], i remembered that there's this rant/narrative on the very first track of this jungle album i have by DJ Moose. And it's about postmodernism! I'm not sure where he sampled it from, or if it's fictional, or if the person talking is a real person at all, but it's still kinda interesting/weird/deep. I'm not even sure if the info presented is accurate at all (not sure based on the way you described PM to me). Anyway, couldn't find the lyrics online... so here's my reiteration:

In the Modern Era, man sought to exhaust the possibility of novel expression as the means to accessing the future. As time went on, the basis of verifying reality became its objectification, and the Aristotelian atomization of all quanta became the manner in which we gained our understanding of the world. Definition and differentiation into Cartesian cells of logic progressed throughout the Modern Era, until something very different happened...
The 'real' became a prison.
The linear approach of science and history served to estrange humanity from its source, turning authoritarian reason to an isolated God-cage from which humanity gazed forth at the alien landscape it had created within itself. Postmodernism was born as a rejection of this set of ideas, and it sought to quickly replace the sovereign individual with an anonymous collective. Diversity became the testament of authenticity, and the barriers of religion and art crumbled beneath the eclectic tsunami of the hyper-real. The collage became true art, and the era of tearing things apart gave way to that of putting things together.

That's it. By the way, 'Putting Things Together' is the name of the album... came out around 2001. Anyway, I emailed DJMoose to see if he could tell me who/what that is. i'm gonna try to attach the track to this email... hopefully it works...

Z

***

to: Zak
from: Carlee
date: Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 4:18 PM

Z-
This is wild stuff. There are a lot of big words in that rant, some of which were put together more for effect than meaning, I think, but some of it makes sense. Especially in light of the definition of PM I found on wikipedia [I am SUCH an innovative researcher...], which suggests that PM is so convoluted and unanchored that it often cannot be told apart from something making fun of PM. In other words, using big words as gobbledygook is both a mockery of PM and possibly PM itself. Here's wikipedia's definition:

"Postmodernism was originally a reaction to modernism Largely influenced by the Western European disillusionment induced by WW II, postmodernism tends to refer to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, interconnectedness or interreferentiality, in a way that is often indistinguishable from a parody of itself."

Not that wikipedia has the last word on any subject, but PM is so abstract that a definition is hard to come by. I got a little tangled in the stuff about Modernism in the DJ Moose rant, but I think he's onto something. It's a rant, that's for sure. Oof.

Just so you know, my class isn't totally about PM, but we talk about the underlying anxiety and lack of rootedness in our culture. Check out our class blog if you have a minute. And make sure you let me know if DJ Moose ever gets back to you. Thanks for the track!

C

***

to: Carlee
from: Zak
date: Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 9:13 PM

Sweet!
Yeah, so DJmoose did write back to me.... but his response was not what I expected, nor do i really believe him. Here's the exact response:

It was written and spoken by a good friend of mine, Grampa. I recorded it. Gramps, any input? moose

I suppose it could have actually been his grandpa speaking, but he also CCed someone named "josh" with an email of ---@-----.com. I doubt that his grandfather has an email address like that! Or, maybe his friend's nickname is "Grampa" or something. Or maybe he just doesn't want to tell me where he got it and he's just fucking with me. Oh well, regardless, interesting/confusing stuff this postmodernism is! I'll check out those class blogs sometime. Well, gotta get my mind back on the "real" work in front of me... Dammit.

Z.

Michel Foucault on Midmorning

2008-10-08T21:44:00.000-07:00

In a shocking turn of events, the host of Minnesota Public Radio’s Midmorning show, Kerri Miller, has replaced Senator Joe Biden as Barack Obama’s running mate. When asked about the unexpected move, an Obama insider explained: “Senator Biden served our cause with great loyalty, but we feel he just can’t get the job done. After reviewing the tapes of the debate, we realize that we need to fight woman with woman. We admire Ms. Miller’s intellectual stamina, and quite frankly, we think she could rip Palin a new one.”

As a result, I have taken over as host of MPR’s Midmorning. This morning I was honored to have Michel Foucault, French philosopher, historian, and sociologist, as my first guest. You can read the full transcript of my conversation with Dr. Foucault below:

CT: Dr. Foucault, welcome to Midmorning. Thanks for joining us.

MF: The pleasure is mine, Mademoiselle.

CT: We certainly do appreciate that you have come all the way from the grave to speak with us this morning.

MF: It is nothing, really. Death is the only real freedom.

CT: Actually, that’s a good place to start, Dr. Foucault. May I call you “Michel”?

MF: Non.

CT: Right…. So, Dr. Foucault: you say death is the only real freedom. Freedom from what? Especially now, the American middle class seems to have more freedom than we can shake a stick at. How are we not free?

MF: Already you are using language that suggests compliance and the threat of punishment. This figurative stick… is it a switch? A paddle? Another instrument for making others conform? The social structure is full of watchdogs ready to attack.

CT: Sure, there was that uproar over wire tapping in the name of national security, and we all hate that Big Brother feels more real every day, but our government is not worse than many others.

MF: The government should not be your main concern. Classic total institutions (hospitals, prisons, schools) are alive and well, but electronic means have brought my panopticon model to new heights. Consider the ubiquity of cameras on mobile devices, security cameras on public transportation, and benevolent forces like Google recording a person’s every move. Any illusion of freedom will only speed the decline.

CT: But wouldn’t you say that the new generation does have a real sense of freedom because they have such widespread access to information and do not have to be tied to one physical place for social contact or livelihood?

MF: They might think they do, but they do not. Already the new electronic penal code is in place. They monitor each other and have their electric eyeballs (cameras, of course) at the ready to judge and prosecute without trial. Even their smallest transgressions can be broadcast to a wide audience. Tell me, how is this different than the public square? I will tell you—it is worse! YouTube and Facebook are far more merciless than drawing and quartering because the “perpetrator” must live to face the humiliation.

CT: So are you saying, Dr. Foucault, that it is more difficult to grow up now than in any other time in history?

MF: I am saying that it has always been difficult to “grow up.” There have always been stiff penalties for anyone outside the disciplinary authority. However, the new multimedia format of the panopticon adds a greater sense of insidiousness, if not actually more eyes making sure that people conform. It is the anxiety that keeps individuals in line. One could steal the valise from the old woman on the bus, but the security camera may be "on" and recording as the posted placard suggests. Or it is not on, but who is to know for sure?

CT: Likewise, I think young people can become confused when they see celebrities, government officials, and those with economic clout get “bailed out” so to speak when they are caught acting against authority. Are young people developing a skewed sense of justice?

MF: Yes. They are wrong to think that they could get away with anything— unless of course they are the authority. The cult of celebrity is different than the culture of the common man. Those in power—or in some cases of celebrity, those with money—decide who are free from punishment. But those are only a few. The tower is only so big. And even then a power dynamic is still at work.

CT: An example that vexes me is Paris Hilton: has everyone forgotten that she made a raunchy sex tape which her ex-boyfriend distributed to all his closest friends and undiscriminating consumers?

MF: I have not. But that is an examination of power for another day.

CT: No freedom in sexual liberation either, huh?

MF: What an illusion! Her money owns her sensations and pleasures, just as the cult of celebrity owns the public’s. Always the slave, never the master.

CT: Well, Dr. Foucault, that’s all the time we have today, but thank you sincerely for taking time to join us. I would choose to be stuck in your iron cage of human nullities any day.

MF: You and Monsieur Berman both.

CT: ?

MF: Just joking.

CT: Ha! He’s not masochistic enough.

MF: Pity.

Miracle Gro Madness: Greener-Scorcht Syndrome

2008-10-01T22:33:00.000-07:00

Named for the groundbreaking research done by Dr. Pamela Greener-Scorcht, preeminent psychologist at the University of Chicago, Greener-Scorcht Syndrome is a psychosocial disorder that affects a hefty majority of people in the U.S., regardless of age or economic class. Like many psychological disorders, Greener-Scorcht Syndrome (“The Syndrome,” hereafter) is not a new phenomenon, but it has not been identified as a psychological condition until recently.

At its essence, The Syndrome is the pathological rationalizing and decision-making that results from excessive imagining of alternate possibilities; that is, a patient wonders obsessively if the grass is indeed greener on the other side of the fence. For example, a patient case study—let us call the subject Anna O.—must make a decision that will have some degree of consequence in her life. She weighs her options carefully and decides to take one course of action. Shortly after she makes her decision (or often immediately before), Anna O. changes her course of action to satisfy the curiosity and quell the anxiety of the road not taken. Anna O. cannot bear to miss out on what she could have had or what she might have experienced from making another choice.

For people who experience The Syndrome as Anna O. does, no decision is too grave or too trivial to result in a change of course. For example, Anna may begin to pour Tropicana from the carton and then catch herself mid-pour so she can have Ocean Spray Cran-Apple instead; the thought of what she might be missing by forgoing the Cran-Apple is too much for her to bear.

Changing one’s mind about breakfast juice may seem harmless enough, but the effects of The Syndrome have serious implications and may alter the course of a person’s life irreparably. For instance, our case study, Anna O., ended up thrice marrying and divorcing because she could not permit herself to pass up an opportunity to see what the forgone option was. [Not-so-clinical side note: In her case, the forgone options were a coworker, a minor league baseball player, and the baseball player’s brother.]

In early studies, Anna O.’s situation and others like hers, patients presenting with symptoms of The Syndrome were thought to be suffering from analysis paralysis; that is, the state of post-modern society in the U.S. (which included extraordinary opulence and liberty, compared with the rest of the world) left individuals with a staggering number of choices and seemingly no way to eliminate reasonable options. This tall task of making a choice nearly every moment of the day drove individuals to make decisions detrimental to their health, wealth, or well-being—or they would make no decision at all.

Psychologist Dr. Barry Schwartz published a tome of great import in 2005 which claimed that more choice is not always better; indeed, having more choices—at a certain level—actually diminishes satisfaction. upon further study, Dr. Greener-Scorcht and her team found that not only did choice diminish satisfaction, it also drove individuals into a near frenzy when they imagined what they could gain from such a variety of possibilities. In a society so wealthy, wired, and cavalier, individuals began to believe that one could have anything, as far as money could buy it or the human body withstand it, without fatal repercussions.

Except that fatal repercussions are inevitable. In fact, when The Syndrome has progressed to a certain point, patients become so obsessed with and tantalized by the idea that the grass could be greener elsewhere, that they start to question the limits of possibility. When an individual reasons far enough, she realizes that the logical upper bound of choice is actually death. In essence, a sufferer of The Syndrome reaches the conclusion that the grass is greener… or the grass is scorched. Dead. Worse than dead: useless. Indefinitely. A sufferer of The Syndrome believes that it is useless to stay in one’s current course of action because the benefits of one’s choice will fizzle out or become unsatisfying at some point, at which point the other option(s) not taken will torture the individual indefinitely. In this case, the torture of regret is believed to be far worse than death. On the other hand, a sufferer of The Syndrome accepts that the grass on the other side of the fence could be scorched already, rendering a change of course a fatal mistake as well. This is analysis paralysis, par excellence. Such a situation renders an individual anxious, apathetic, and fearful.

At this point, there is no treatment for Greener-Scorcht Syndrome without major side effects, though religious practice, civic involvement, and electronic social networking are often prescribed.

[Note to readers who are not ES co-investigators: Pamela Greener-Scorcht is a fictional character; Dr. Barry Schwartz is not. The Syndrome is fictional, but you may not be immune to it.]

It's not you, it's me[dia]

2008-09-17T21:22:00.000-07:00

No one likes being dumped. The act of dumping isn’t usually pleasant either. The end of a romantic relationship often means considerable pain for both (all—?) parties involved. I have been on both sides of the break-up dynamic; that is, I have been the dumper and the dumped. Because of my extensive experience with both roles, I believe that, with Marshall McLuhan’s help, I can further elucidate the influence of media on the romantic ritual of break-ups. [1—3]

While often confused and confusing, the concept of hot and cold media is an excellent tool for analyzing break-ups and how they are executed. In an informal poll, 97% of people say that they would prefer that their partners dump them via Face-to-Face Conversation. [4] In this continuum of media, the spoken word is the hottest. The dumper lays it all out for the dumped and leaves little to his or her imagination. One might argue that participation is inherent in this kind of media (i.e., the dumped would have a chance to react and sound off as well), but if done well and if the delivery is hotted up enough, the dumped will be so hypnotized that he will not know what to say.

If the dumper doesn’t quite have the gumption (or the time, let’s be real—life is busy) to have the Face-to-Face Conversation, the dumper may use alternate media. One method is the break-up letter. Such a missive is often referred to as a “Dear John” Letter (or John Deere, if you’re a Dumb and Dumber devotee), in which the dumper gives a page and a half of reasons why the dumped is so great (or so terrible) followed by the bad news. The letter is a cooler medium than the Face-to-Face Conversation.

The less classy cousin of the letter—the Heartfelt Email—is cooler still. The benefit of dumping someone over email is that he gets the message quickly, even instantly; there is no waiting period for the break-up to take hold. One might argue that with how quickly communication can happen in the electronic age, why wait? On the other hand, while the Heartfelt Email can be respectful and well written, consider that the medium IS the message: if your beloved was too busy to tell you in person, then she was just not that into you. [5]

And finally, the coolest media along the break-up continuum: the Apocalyptic Text Message (ATM). The dumper essentially drops a bomb on her beloved out of the clear blue, ending his world as he knows it. This medium requires quite a bit of participation from the dumped. Not only is it comprised of written words and sent electronically, it requires the dumped to decode what was actually meant. For example: “U R != my bf N E mor. C U l8tr u jrk! :-*P” [6] For some, receiving this message would be as cool as an avant-garde film in a foreign language with no subtitles. The upside of employing the ATM is that you’re showing your former beloved some mercy, Band-Aid style: the pain for the dumped may be sudden and intense, but it is soon forgotten once he has gotten his wind back.

If the previous media are just not cool enough for your target, if the one you used to love is not hallucinating from the coolness of the medium yet, consider employing the coolest of them all: Facebook, the ultimate electronic extension of man. (Move over, Narcissus.)

[1] For this treatment of the subject, “romantic relationship” does not necessarily mean “marriage.” I have no experience with marriage or its equivalents, and I fear making assumptions about it. Therefore, “romantic relationship” is limited to non-married romantic partnerships. For clarity’s sake, it might help you, dear reader, to know that I am a heterosexual woman in my twenties and a veritable rookie at making things work.

[2] I am choosing to focus on the role of the dumper throughout because a) it is a far less depressing position to be in, and b) I have committed and readily admit to committing myriad dumping faux pas (sorry, Gini: I don’t know how to pluralize that French expression)…which is to say that maybe I will learn something from my own musing.

[3] The footnotes are an homage to David Foster Wallace, may he rest in peace. Real peace.

[4] That statistic is entirely fabricated. However, my own sensibilities make me assume that a direct, honest dumping trumps other methods. Naturally, no one wants to be dumped at all, but if it has to happen, it might as well be done with courage and clarity. Still, I am sure there are people out there who abhor confrontation so much that they would rather by dumped through other media. This essay will explore these other methods.

[5] This hard-nosed chick-lit line was borrowed from He’s Just Not That Into You: The No Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys (New Expanded Edition) by Greg Behrendt, Liz Tuccillo, and Lauren Monchik. Simon & Schuster, 2006.

[6] Literal translation: “You are not my boyfriend anymore. See you later, you jerk!” (I never have understood the petulant-yet-crying emoticon…)

Sideways Baseball Cap: Goodman on Hazing

2008-09-10T22:08:00.000-07:00

If society becomes too tightly integrated and pre-empts all the available space, materials, and methods, then it is failing to provide for just the margin of formlessness, real risk, novelty, spontaneity, that makes growth possible.
—Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd, 1960

Mothers of two of the alleged victims say their sons were beaten and had objects forced into their rectums. The alleged sexual assault took place while the boys still had their uniform pants on.”
—Espn.com, “Wilson High hazing charges reduced to ‘an appropriate misdemeanor,’” August 28, 2008

Hazing is a subset of delinquent behavior that has always horrified and fascinated me at the same time. There are so many sociological and psychological layers at work in hazing, whether the participants are boys or girls: rites of passage and coming of age; power struggles; the abused becoming abusers; feigned ignorance from authorities; humiliation and spectacle; peer pressure. The list of forces and -isms is long and twisted.

At the time of posting this essay, I have read most of Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd, and I am interested in what Goodman would say about physically violent hazing among adolescent boys. In light of his claims about the roots of juvenile delinquency, I want to examine how hazing might be explained—or explained away—by Goodman’s theories.

Hazing is not at all a new phenomenon. However, with the sharing of information becoming broader and faster, including the advent of that ubiquitous watchdog, YouTube, incidents of hazing among adolescents are being exposed more now than ever before. Reams of legislation have been drawn up to eradicate hazing from institutions notorious for hazing, like the collegiate Greek system and athletic teams in public school districts. In a society of people so accustomed to witnessing violence (fictional and real), it is not shocking that hazing is still a widespread practice.

The voluntary nature of tightly knit group activities, like fraternities and sororities or sports teams, compounds the problem. The party line is, “If you don’t like it, leave. No one is forcing you to be here.” The trouble is, the groups serve as surrogate societies for young people. Teams are structures that satisfy many of Goodman’s criteria for growing up well. Being on the high school baseball team, for instance, provides meaningful work, an opportunity to be useful, instant community, and an appropriate outlet for ardor. When an adolescent feels that he is among “his people” and they care what he can contribute far more than “society” does, his loyalty to the team is bound to be firmer than his adherence to the organized system’s rules. This loyalty allows hazing rituals to stay rock solid; no one wants to be an outsider or a snitch when he has only just begun to feel accepted and empowered.

Hazing is also a dangerous delinquent behavior because it satisfies the need for the “margin of formlessness” that Goodman discusses on page 129. It is just risky enough, just wild enough, and just different enough from the organized system’s usual mores that boys are interested. Nowhere else can they inflict physical violence and humiliation with an authority nearby (and probably privy to what’s going on) and get away with it. It’s the getting-away-with-the-forbidden part that Goodman cites as so appealing (130). And even if they get chastised for beating up one of their younger baseball teammates, for example, at least the boys have gotten the attention of the authority (the coach).

The question that is often tossed around, especially among those who have been hazed and lived to tell the tale without too much trauma, is: how harmful is a little rough-housing, anyway? According to Goodman’s theories, hazing might not be a tremendous problem because it doesn’t appear to affect a boy’s overall contribution to society. Maybe, one might argue, there are bigger fish to fry. Beats, hipsters, gang members, or other larger movements are of more concern because the movements involve the adoption of a "destructive" lifestyle.

On the other hand, consider this: when speaking about his client—a teenager who allegedly sexually assaulted a younger baseball teammate (see epigraph above)—a defense attorney said, "My client, he's extremely likable. He's got a naïveté about him. He's a genuine person, not some kind of thug wearing a baseball cap sideways. He's a nice kid, and I want to see it work out for him." There are a couple illuminating aspects in this statement. First, a boy is doing no real harm if he is known as a nice kid. And he’s probably harmless if he looks harmless, too—if he’s clean-cut, if he wears a baseball cap “normally,” if he doesn’t sag his pants, maybe. Secondly, a tilted baseball cap wearing “thug” is the teenager we should look out for—not a small-town shortstop. Here again is the danger of presumption: delinquent behavior can be overlooked or dismissed if it does not occur in the context of a larger, more recognizable anti-establishment movement.

I draw the line at any kind of hazing that involves violence, but I put up an electric fence at sexual assault as hazing. The incident involving members of the Wilson High School (NY) baseball team as reported by ESPN.com put the horror of hazing back on my radar. Indeed, as Goodman suggests, the sexual messages in the organized system are all wrong. If society is sending a message that it is somehow acceptable—even in a “team” situation—to sodomize a child with a body part or object, then something is profoundly wrong. Nevermind Angry Young Men, hipsters, and Beatniks—somehow delinquency jumps to the next level of grave and horrible when peers are traumatically harming each other for fun.

[Click here for the original online article about the Wilson High hazing incident.]

Keep up with the Joneses—or else

2008-09-03T09:04:00.000-07:00

At first, I was uncertain about who were considered “ordinary” people and who were considered the “others.” When I made it a few pages into The Lonely Crowd, I was clear again (not in the L. Ron Hubbard sense; rather, I was no longer confused). In my mind initially, the “others” were the people who were NOT swept up in the movement toward conformity. The “others,” were the heroes who got away from the parasites and lemmings. My line of thinking was probably influenced by my recent reading of that other skinny Rand volume, Atlas Shrugged. One knows from the very beginning of AS who the bad guys are and who the good guys are. The good guys (and gal, like Dagny, who is one of the fictional muses of my blog) are attractive and intelligent and value the rational mind above all else. They are exceptional and loners—essentially clones of Roark from Fountainhead (no surprise there, but also one of the primary reasons that Rand’s novels don’t do so well as novels—the characters are FLAT). Though they have a broader grasp of the situation they are facing than the people around them, Rand’s extraordinary “ordinary” people are not as likable or human as Miles, the “ordinary” hero of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Riesman’s explanation set me straight about what “others” actually means. Indeed, “other” in this case does not mean those who are exceptional; other refers to other-directed. Other-directed people or characters experience pressure to conform from peers instead of from tradition or the inner moral compass (“gyroscope”) instilled by their parents. Those who do not succumb to the conformity, the people called “ordinary” in this argument, have good reason to be anxious. Miles has every right to scream and run, and to some degree, Roark has every right to burn stuff down and look coolly at the jury and call them parasites.

The ordinary protagonists of these two works recognize the power of what Emile Durkheim called collective effervescence. In his book, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim explains how the fanatical energy generated by crowds moves people to belief and conformity. He used the idea to explain why religion works and why myths are perpetuated and believed. Likewise, a trend in behavior—such as allowing one’s self to be consumed by pods from space—is not dangerous until a lot of people start doing it and riling each other into a fervor about it.

Life becomes dangerous for the nonconformists. The other-directed crowd, which is inevitably whipped into a frenzy by collective effervescence (chasing Miles through the Hollywood hills, putting Roark on trial: Roark v. Everybody Else), becomes impossible to reason with. This is especially difficult for the heroes and heroines in Rand’s novels because they rely so heavily on rationality. The momentum of the change in thinking and behavior is especially well illustrated in Invasion of the BS. When Miles gets to the next town, no one believes what he has experienced. To be one person trying to refute the crowd and expose a dire trend is a tough spot. The ordinary person is likely to become the loony one. There are a few ways to handle the tough spot: like Miles, one can explain the situation and breathlessly beg to be believed until evidence surfaces, or like Roark and the titans of Atlas Shrugged, the heroes can withdraw and wait for the parasites and other-directed folks to destroy each other. Trying to make other people see the impending doom is especially difficult when the others and the ordinary look the same—as in Invasion of the BS. Unless they look threatening, the others might not be perceived as a real danger.

The greatest anxiety at play, however, is what if they win? What if the other-directed mob really does take over? Then what? What does the world look like? Do we become automatons, or worse—Communists? If Riesman is right about modern American culture becoming increasingly other-directed, implying that we’re directed by our peers and the media, then why do we care so much about preserving the self? What good does the self do when it is not the final authority on how we behave, anyway? Maybe we all secretly desire to be the heroes—Miles, Roark, Dagny—the only ones to see what is really going on.