Week 40 (5)

Missing a point.
Saturday, 14:16

But still—like King Canute, or Don Quixote, there’s something charming in the attempt. (They’ve got a manifesto and everything!) And it’s fun to build your own “hacked” porn page. And they’re generating lots of traffic over this stunt, I imagine. Though it is hard to believe they seriously think a) that horndogs would be converted—or even prompted to reflection—by stumbling over such pages, and b) that there is any such thing as a wholly innocent internet search for “Baby Spice.”

“We want the guys to get off the screen and meet real girls instead,” he [co-founder and creative director Calle Sjönell] said. “The campaign isn’t aimed at the ugly guys in their fifties, but at the young guys who are still able to hang out with the real thing.”

 

Kids these days.
Saturday, 00:41

Always odd working in someone else’s space, especially on a long-term deal like I am in the current Day Job. Trying to be careful not to disturb (overmuch) her personal feng shui, even as I can’t help setting up one of my own (being a Virgo, I am astrologically prone to scattering paper to the four winds and can find things much better in a chaotic pile rather than neatly, obsessively cross-referenced files). —I have already managed to knock the fake leis and the beanie baby off the computer monitor and behind the desk, which is separated from the window by maybe six inches, most of which is heating register; I have no idea how I’ll be rescuing that beanie baby.

But I haven’t for instance, erased her name from the whiteboard, written in that friendly hand associated with junior high students and elementary school teachers, where the terminal points of each letterform are tipped with happy dots. I haven’t removed the various homiletic entries ripped from those one-a-day calendars: “Being tame is what we’re taught. Put the crayons back, stay in line, don’t talk too loud, keep your knees together, nice girls don’t... As you might know, nice girls do”; “Growth means change: change your attitudes, perspectives, patterns and habits”; “If you can’t be right, be wrong at the top of your voice”; “Five things to be happy about: watching cats watch birds; hot spiced cider on a cold afternoon; poetry readings; a self-portrait that really looks like you; the North Star”; “Of course I don’t look busy, I did it right the first time.” At least the current calendar is trivia: How many pockets are there on a snooker table, that sort of thing. (Six, in case you were wondering.) —I haven’t removed the poster of the glum basset hounds, their ears billowing exaggeratedly in the breeze of a fan, or the card with Pooh wondering where his waist went (though I feel a little sociopathic whenever I catch that one out of the corner of my eye). I did hide the Dixie cup with Pooh and Piglet gazing down at a fluffy baby chick: “‘How exciting,’ said Pooh, ‘to be so brand new’” by stashing it in the cabinet above my head; there’s only so much I can take. She can retrieve it easily enough when she returns.

Nor have I removed the resignation from adulthood.

This is the one that claws at me. It’s a simple printout, no graphics, nothing fancy, no additional quotes from Leo Buscaglia et al.; I can go whole days without remembering that it’s there, taped over the in box (me and in boxes, we don’t get along). Then I catch it out of the corner of my eye, I read it, or at this point I just remember the damn thing, and I feel this—contempt? despondency? scorn? bathos—this warm, sticky, enervating wave of bathos that sloshes over me, seeps through my clothing, clogs my pores like glue.

What can you say to this impulse? What can you say to someone who thinks like this? Or who doesn’t necessarily think like this, but sees this as an ideal, as something to aspire to? Thanks, but I prefer my bourbon, my black coffee, my cigarettes, my bitter certainties; I’d rather have sex and dirty magazines and survived adolescence, and I want to read witty metafictional conspiracy theories translated from the Italian while listening to Glenn Branca and P.J. Harvey; I like pointing out how those posters with the kittens doing really cute things in those adorable little costumes, you know those posters, well, those kittens were dead and stuffed and mounted in those poses, there’s no other way they can shoot those; I like sniggering at mean jokes at your expense; I like knowing there are things I can do and do well that people will pay money for, and I like the feeling of a complex job well-done. I— I—

I have no response to that—

It’s not just the hollow, banal despair that doesn’t so much scream from every line as seep out, grey and lifeless, a little shrug and a twitch of the lips that’s not even rueful, well, what can you do? And back into one of those brown or grey Madeleine l’Engel houses with the eerily synchronized balls, gosh, the lawn needs mowing. It was the Classicist who first pointed out how easy it is to miss how depressing those Signals catalogs are; how cheerful they are about selling merchandise which all does not so much trumpet as meekly point out: my life sucks. I hate my shape. I hate my age. I hate what I do. I hate what I haven’t done. I’m happily pulling my weight, though. Yessir. Stiff-upper lip. No problem making fun of myself, eh? —Even my TV sucks. The British make better sitcoms, don’t you agree?

It’s not just that—it’s the dangerous utopian fiction of childhood presented. Kids are happy and innocent and full of wonder—remember? Remember? Kids don’t have anything to be afraid of or worry about. Remember? Kids live in a simple, just world, full of happy dreams and wondrous imagination. Remember? Hey—maybe yours and mine were horrible and nasty and traumatic and just plain grueling. But my kids? My kids are going to have happy, undisturbed, perfect childhoods. And God help anybody who gets in the way...

Brr.

I could, of course, be reading a bit much into this anonymous scrap of poetry (much more widely spread than I’d ever have thought possible). —Though she did, after all, just have a baby, which is why I’m there and she isn’t in the first place; hence the Pooh cups, to be sure. But slack can be cut. She’s a good editor, by all accounts. She gets her job done, despite her unrealizable desire to resign—or at least to post such a desire as some form of inspiration, to stop and smell the roses, every now and then; reminding her to be happy about something, this thing, that thing, every now and then. Or something.

—But what do I know? I had to pay $5 today (yesterday, now) for the right to wear jeans to work. And wear a lapel pin. And a little typed label letting all and sundry know that yes, I had indeed paid $5 so I could wear jeans.

“It’s like a fucking hall pass,” I said to the office manager, pinning the label to my vest.

She giggled.

 

What we’re fighting for.
Thursday, 23:07

The store: A cheap but serviceable Montepulciano d’Abruzzo. Green beans (fresh). Two tomatoes (hydroponically grown, not vine ripened). Milk; coffee. Mozarella fresca in salt water. Freshly baked olive ciabatta and a little kalamata spread. Blink at the idea of lemon and artichoke heart pesto. What the hell.

The kitchen: five cups of water and two tablespoons of vegetable boullion. Olive oil and half a sweet onion in the other pot. Arborio rice in the second pot. A cup of water and boullion poured over the rice. Repeat. And again. Green beans into the water; simmer. Another cup poured over the rice. And again. It’s all soaked up, so now some grated cheese (asiago, or anything suitably stinky), chopped tomato, some of that pesto (lemon and artichoke hearts; decadent, and thus very good). Bread; cheese; some leftover olives from the other night. Kalamata spread. (Yes. We like olives.)

The guest: in need of a haircut. Threadbare jacket, worn sweater. Highwater corduroys. We tease him about the sheer cliché of contemplating allowing oneself to fall for one’s dizzy, older French teacher, recently separated from her spouse. A bad movie waiting to happen. He is appreciative of the newly cleared backyard, and the newfound view (over there, past that tree, you can just make them out) of the west hills.

The tenant from downstairs: what the fuck. He’s hungry, and he draws, too.

The conversation: comics, natch. Dylan Horrocks, whom the guest (shockingly) hasn’t read. This will be rectified. Scott McCloud and Jeremy and what’s up with really good web comics, anyway? Why the grumpy boys at The Comics Journal tend to ignore Alison Bechdel. (No good reason.) Sketches are hauled out and looked at as the risotto cooks; Phil Foglio and various Hernandez Bros., that Weasel Patrol chick (whatever happened to her?), the old friend’s father, before he became a creep. S11, of course. Photos taken from Sandy Hook last October, and what it might have been like if the towers hadn’t fallen (which, if there hadn’t been a fire, they might not have done). The article from Salon. Why Friends is even more irrelevant (we already didn’t want to watch a series about aimless thirty-somethings able to afford amazing apartments in Greenwich Village with no visible means of support; now we have to watch people living in amazing apartments in Greenwich Village who don’t have to deal with the Zone). What a sitcom that tried to tackle the whole deal might well look like (ugly; then, ugly is not necessarily bad). Back to comics. Why the Spouse liked the X-men more than I did growing up, which is why maybe I can enjoy the new Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely stuff more than she can, now. —Though none of us is quite ready for Pete Milligan and Mike Allred, together again for the first time. Eyebeam . Why we miss Eyebeam. The problems with editors (some of them; in some contexts, most of them.) Momus; Steely Dan; St. Etienne; Jim White. Diplomacy, and why Italy is good for those who could use a spot of humiliation (apparently me).

The dog’s lonely, though, and the tenant has to tape ER for his wife, since she’s studying to be a nurse. The guest has to go (a strip to ready for tomorrow). A kiss for the spouse and a couple of hours of work on the Second Job, but first: the journal. The wind’s up. It may well rain tomorrow.

A good night, all told.

 

Wanted: one intrepid grad student.
Wednesday, 23:17

Among other things (Jeanette Winterson, David Poyer, E.R. Eddison [again]), I’m finally getting around to plowing through the Spouse’s recommended reading on fairytales, folklore and gender—namely, In Search of the Swan Maiden , by Barbara Fass Leavy, for what she’s got to say on the differences between færie brides and dæmon lovers, or, animal brides and animal grooms—but, of course, I’ve been distracted.

(The following should be taken with a grain or three of salt; it’s been gleaned from maybe 80 pages of the book and a crash course of twenty or thirty minutes of browsing with Google.)

There are (apparently) any of a number of classification systems for attempting to organize and structure the chaotic flux of fable and folklore and legend and myth. Among them are the Aarne-Thompson system, which searches for “motifs” that tales might have in common—an action, an item, a character, a relationship, a phrase—and categorizes tales according to the motifs they share; and the Proppean system, which considers tales to be constructed of basic functions, and classifies them according to the order in which these functions are performed, regardless of who performs them, or in what context.

Of course, there’s any of a number of readily apparent problems with trying to come up with a blanket system for structuring something as, well, big, as folklore; legend; myth: it ends up being simplistic and reductive; nuance eludes it; it tends to promote or privelege one reading at the expense of other possible readings; it’s a generalization, and, as we all know, generalizations are bad. —Then, a map that’s the same size and the same level of detail as the thing mapped is pretty useless, to say nothing of hard to fold. Maps have to be simple, reductive, clumsy, specialized; and yet we still find maps plenty useful. Trick is not to mistake the map as something more real, more true, more essential than the thing mapped. It’s just a tool to aid perception; nothing more.

So. There was a point in all that. Something to do with sex. Right—

I’m thinking there’s some interesting parallels between folklore, fable, myth, märchen, the oral tradition, and internet pornography. Specifically, text pieces written, traded, posted, and re-written since the first TRS-80s were dialed into the local smut BBS back in the, what, ’80s? (I only look like I’m dating myself.) —Not, mind you, that I am in any way suggesting that smut is the New Mythology, or the Oral Tradition of the Internet; hardly. But I think some of the same mechanisms are at work, with intriguing differences—stories that ring variations on basic themes: wife watching, mind control, body modification, BDSM, boy bands, Catholic schoolgirls; stories that—despite a sometimes obsessive need to assert individual ownership or control in an essentially uncontrollable publishing environment—freely borrow from, rewrite, and retell other stories; stories that are rarely written for any audience but the writer him- or herself, and yet—or because of this—frequently end up in a raw and immediate relationship between writer and audience, unmediated by marketing, or the need to construct or create for a generalized audience.

Whether you end up with a system that classifies tales numerically (“Amber, the Making of a Fuck Toy is a fascinating novel-length exposition of basic tale-type 314a, the naïve nymphomaniac, with episodes that utilize the structures of tale-types 512, 317, and 416a and b”) or a more mechanistic detailing of “functions” (“As you can see, 1999(a), with its BJ-C-M-A structure, is significantly different from 1999(d), which is C-BJ-M(mult.)-A”), doing the field work necessary to analyze what’s out there and coming up with a structure or three—surveying the current lay of the land, and drawing up some maps— Well. It’s something I’d be fascinated to see, at least.

Hence the need for the intrepid graduate student.

Anyone? Anyone?

 

Buffy (which one may skip, if one so chooses)
Wednesday, 23:02

While the program (in this correspondent’s opinion) has a history of weak season openers, and while last night’s two hours of Buffy goodness had more than their fair share of problems, the overall impact was one of, well, oomph. The only opener that tops it is season two’s “When She Was Bad,” which, given that that is one of the best episodes ever, isn’t surprising. Last night featured some of the scariest and creepiest images the show’s pulled out of its hat, including Buffy’s very visceral transformation from corpse to, well, un-corpse (and the subsequent digging-her-way-out-of-the-grave-with-her-bare-hands nastiness)—but, hands down, the creepiest moment was Willow sacrificing the fawn. An excellent—well, for television—depiction of the sacrifice generally considered necessary for any real magic (as, say, opposed to magick); and, unless I miss my guess, a hint of things to come.

Guarded optimism is still the watchword, but it’s a much happier optimism.

And yes. I’m obsessed. I don’t need your help, though, thank you. I can quit any time I want.

 

Talk amongst yourselves.
Tuesday, 22:33

What? Look, I was watching Buffy. I’ll catch you tomorrow. Okay?

Geeze.

 

Flotsam; jetsam.
Monday, 20:47

Item: a Bulwer-Lytton contest for erotica has been announced. Write the world’s worst first sentence for a piece of erotica. Send the resulting sentence to Jordan Shelbourne. You will win the momentary bemusement of hundreds. —Just don’t, whatever you do, finish the story. First sentence only, please.

Item: there are far fewer stiletto heels to be seen in New York City, according to one resident. Rather hard to run down many flights of steps in them, you see.

Item: Having finished Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, which, like Tam Lin, came to an end all too soon out of nowhere, and, like Tam Lin, is as much about the sorts of people who enjoy fantasy, whimsy, magic—and science—as it is about fantasy, whimsy, magic and science, and I’m not saying this at all terribly well because I’m not really giving it much thought, but there are few books written for an audience that take a good direct look at that audience as well, except, even as I write those words, I can think of dozens of examples, so never mind; still. There’s something odd and rare and delicate about how Dean does it, even if it doesn’t end up all that satisfying, in the end. Færie cakes. —Maybe it’s because she makes actual actual literary references, and not just smug inside jokes...

Item: The preceding item got lost midway through; it was supposed to segue into a note that I am now reading Gut Symmetries , by Jeanette Winterson, which, though it seems clever thus far, has played a wee bit fast and loose with the current cosmological theory it’s using as metaphor and underpinning. We’ll see. Snarky good fun, though.

Item: I think that’s about it for now, actually. The seventh chapter of James Sisters takes shape; the project which “Sex & Violence” was supposed to be procrastinating simmers; “Sex & Violence” itself has been relegated to the back burner. Titles chase themselves through my brain: “The Man Who Fell In Love With a Fnord.” “The Mother and Child Reunion.” —There was another, but I’ve forgotten it.

To say nothing of the Grand Tour, of which, at the moment, I’m saying nothing.

 

With all due respect, Mr. Lewis: fuck you.
Sunday, 00:04

Absolute favorite exchange read in the past few days:

(There’s a lot of reasons to like Narnia; The Last Battle ain’t one of ’em.
—Passage quoted, by the way, from Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, by Pamela Dean, the first 80-some-odd pages of which are quite good; reminiscent of her Tam Lin, except it’s junior high instead of college.

(Oh: having finished Your Name Written on Water, I can now highly recommend it in good conscience. As an interesting experiment, you might try reading it at the same time as A Mirror For Princes; they proved unexpectedly— complementary.)

 

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