Learning Today: The Genius Of Black English

If you are not aware of Ebonics, African American English can be easily dismissed as a lazy degeneration of 'proper' English. But Black English is not in any way wrong, indolent, malformed, or uninformed--it's merely different from the English found in newspapers and blogs.

And African American English can in many cases express itself more elegantly than standard English. Toni Morrison described it as having five present tenses:

He writin. He is writing.

He be writin. He is usually writing.

He be steady writin. He is usually writing intensely.

He's bin writin. He wrote at some earlier point, but probably not now.

He's BEEN writin. He has been writing for a long time, and still is.

Anyone complaining that speakers of African American English cannot express themselves obviously cannot appreciate the wealth of expression afforded by these five present tenses. They also have probably never been forced to read literary criticism, and seen what it really means for people to be unable to express themselves.

I learned about these five present tenses from Slate's new language podast, awkwardly named Lexicon Valley. (What is the main agricultural product of Lexicon Valley? Semicolons?)

To return to the point. All spoken dialects--from the jargon of the nuclear engineer to the text messages of a petulant teen--differ to some degree from our more stolid, slow-to-change written dialect.

When we write, we are participating in conversations that began long before we were born. We step to the lectern that Swift and Twain not long ago lefy; we gaze at an audience who has listened to Salinger, Hemingway and Hawthorne. We speak to these dead luminaries, who, if heaven is fair stand backstage, listening patiently to those now speaking. And since we speak to the past in writing, our language is stiller, only sometimes referring to the bubble and bluster of our wild spoken Englishes.

And a bonus fact for you: What cohort of people has the most up-to-date English?

It's low-middle-class teenage girls. Yes. When you pass by a gaggle of texting crimp-haired gossip-flingers what you hear is the English that will be. At least according to the book Not By Genes Alone.

Nostalgia

Right now I'm living in Canberra, where I went to high school. I left six or seven years ago. At the bars I crane my head around, looking for ghosts of people who knew me in high school, or who I used to know, and I often find them. Someone came up to me in the supermarket who used to buy my zines. People ask me when I cut off my dreadlocks (about eight years ago).

One of the questions people ask me is whether it's strange to be back, since so much has changed. The city center of Canberra, which is really the social heart of the city, and the only place that mattered to me as a kid, has changed dramatically. A mall has grown up around the edges of it, where once there were big thirsty parking-lots, and embraced the open square of Garema Place with a stone-face curtain of shops and movie theaters. That has changed, certainly. But the strange thing is more how everything has stayed the same. There still sits the same sleepy Vietnamese restaurant you never saw anyone eat in, that you were sure was about to go out of business, with the same faded plastic sign, the same sun-faded menu. The same streets and trees and the same faces. The same feeling of gentleness.

But for me this place is haunted. And each place has for me a memory. I remember driving by this empty lot nearing to the Braddon Club, heading up towards my home just a couple weeks ago. It was just gone autumn and the gutters were beginning to brim with leaves. And I remembered, so immediate that it hurt, walking down that very street, going home, in the cusp of autumn, with a beloved ex-girlfriend, just as we were beginning to court each other. The memory was so close, it was surprising that it was seven or eight years old. The fact that she wasn't next to me, that I couldn't call her, that our relationship had grown older, more complicated, and adult, just struck me for that brief moment as impossible--how could she not be waiting just outside of my vision, about to take my hand? how could it have changed. And yet I looked around and in the car were strangers, absolute strangers. (I had hitched a ride home with some acquaintances.) She wasn't there. Once I made it home I touched that place with my mind again, hoping to find her, but could taste only a dim memory, half-cold and unappetizing. For the twentieth of thirtieth time that day, I wished to go back in time, and wished at the very same moment to be right exactly where I was.

Something to chew on

Are we then not beasts to call the labor which makes us bestial?

...Perhaps we are right to condemn ourselves for giving birth to such an absurd thing as a man; right to call it an act of shame and the organs which seem to do it shameful.

--Montaigne, from On Some Lines Of Virgil

What's The Use In Talking?

So Thucydides is writing about the Spartans' debate about whether to go to war against the Athenians, treating us to pages and pages of arguments for and against, well-argued and cogent. Yet in the end the argument that wins the day is a quick paragraph so full of platitudinous cliches it makes a Hallmark Birthday card look like Winston Churchill. Thucydides says this:

The Spartans voted... that war should be declared, not so much because they were influenced by the speeches of their allies as because they were afraid of further growth of Athenian power....

This made me think of Lyndon Johnson, who in the position of Senate Majority Leader, saw the magnificence of public speaking much like the way you or I would look at a sledgehammer, that is, a blunt tool, to be used by someone else.

Eloquence on the floor of the Senate didn't matter because it was not eloquence that changed votes. It was Johnson with his promises, threats, and compromises. Even after hearing the most moving speech, a Johnson crony would still vote, not with his conscience, but with Johnson, for voting with Johnson was how people got things done. Johnson's early success as Majority Leader came by way of limiting debate on the floor: he made the entire Senate much more efficient by using a hitherto little-used parliamentary technology called a unanimous consent agreement, which forced the entire Senate to vote on particular bills at a particular time, clearing up the traditional speechifying logjam of Senates past. Indeed, the only real importance that speeches had on the floor of the Senate in those days was the threat of the filibuster, and comparing the filibuster to normal eloquence is like comparing a fancy dinner with a competitive eating championship.

This happens in the critical moment in the debate about the 1957 Civil Rights Bill:

Once, when Everett Dirkson of Illinois rose to support [House Minority Leader William] Knowland with his special brand of empty grandiloquence ('I have been thinking much of Runnymede'), Johnson half-yawned and lazily scratched his chest, in a magnificent gesture of casual confidence.

That was Stewart Alsop as quoted in Robert Caro's magnificent biography, Master of the Senate. Here's Caro's quick gloss on Alsop:

The speeches didn't matter; Johnson's every gesture made that clear. What mattered was the votes--and he had the votes.

And he had the votes not because of speeches, but because he appealed to practical things. Yet still I think rhetoric is important, speeches are important, eloquence is important. Why?

The Lost Years & Last Days Of David Foster Wallace

Finally printed in full on the internet, for all us slackers.

"He said when you're writing well, you establish a voice in your head, and it shuts up the other voices. The ones that are saying, 'You're not good enough, you're a fraud."

Perfect Sentence

Karl Rove, appearing as a convention panelist, was accosted on stage by a drunken hippie who tried to arrest him for treason.

The problem with anecdote

Anecdote is one of those things that we use to understand the world. But there's a problem, because while anecdote can help us understand stuff on the minor scale of our personal lives (to prove that a particular person is flighty, for example, we don't expect any more than one story of that person canceling a date*) anecdotes suck about things any larger than our own small circle of friends and relatives. There's always going to be an anecdote to prove both sides of any issue. More than that, it's just kinda an inane way of understanding the world when you get down to it, telling illustrative stories. Check out the latest Brooks column to see anecdote at its worst. The anecdote doesn't add any insight into the situation, and is, well, just kinda weird.

*We can believe something, of course, almost in spite of all evidence if we'd want to. Though we might decide a person's flighty after hearing a single story about them, it might take us three or four or ten or twenty instances of flightiness (or a whole three months' worth of flightiness) in our own experience to come to the same conclusion, because we are wedded to the idea that this particular person is much less than flighty, indeed that they are especially kind, we think, and very concerned about our well-being.

The Problem of Synecdoche

Poll question that popped up on my screen watching the MySpace coverage of the presidential debates (paraphrase):

Do you think that another 9/11 will happen on US soil?

I sure hope so. Every year, right after September 1oth.

Ponder this:

Why is it that when you're on a date, suddenly everything seems cheaper? Like two scoops of ice cream at Baskin Robbins is something like three bucks, which I'd never ever spend on my own. But suddenly I'm on a date and three bucks is nothing. Go wild! Put whipped cream and nuts on that shit if you want. I'll pick up the tab for everyone. Then when I'm alone again I will think long and hard about shelling out sixty cents for a candy bar.

David Foster Wallace Dead

As far as public figures go, this death feels personal to an embarrassing extent. Usually I am somewhat callous towards death, especially about the death of people who one does not actually know personally. But it's not just insensitivity to the public lamentations around Heath Ledger and Princes Di--barring it befalling close friends and family members, death fails to move me. Throw a friend in my lap, inconsolable that her sister's best friend died, and I'll look at them with the condescending incomprehension fitting the observation of forgotten and ecstatic religious rites of some minor deity of the Roman pantheon. But then I read that this author has died, David Foster Wallace--who I have never met and who I have had only the most tangential personal relationship with--I can't do anything but fall to my bed.

Enough of this personal stuff. Well, one more thing. In my senior year of college when I was worrying whether or not I should try to "make it as a writer" I wrote David Foster Wallace with a story of mine. I got a postcard back a couple months later, and he said that my style was "clear and unpretentious" (I can remember that) and he wished me luck in a way that I interpreted as meaning that he saw some promise in me. My number two most recurring fantasy about my novel (number one is having ex-girlfriends and -crushes call me and tell me how my they like me) is that I would get it published and sent it off to DFW and he'd read it and appreciate it and we could become friends.

Of course that's not going to happen.

But that brief brush with the man himself is not enough to warrant my feeling upset by his death. Even taking into account the place that DFW's writing held in my own personal story, his death is not enough to make me fall on my bed and not want to get up and, at a Korean Thanksgiving I was attending, invited by the Tae Bo teacher I have a ridiculous crush on, his death should not make me nearly sob over the tiggim that "My favorite author has just killed himself"--a sentence which elicited nothing but bemused glances from my dining companions, English- and non-English-speaking alike.

The thing that makes Wallace's death so poignant is that it shouldn't of happened. First, we all wanted more. Wallace's was the kind of writing that was perfectly compulsive. The loss of his voice, of the chance of another novel, that's baffling to me.

But there's more, and here's where we might have to get a bit more personal again. Wallace seemed to have struggled with the demons that come with being a smart, sensitive person in the world. And he'd seemed to really conquer them. An aside that will make sense further in this paragraph: You know how you can tell the difference between someone who gets Wallace and someone who doesn't? Someone who doesn't get him will talk about his verbal acuity (or, pretentiousness) those footnotes, that flair. Someone who gets him will talk about his observational acuity. How he seemed to be able to frankly talk about the dark corners of life with such off-putting, shocking accuracy. Like he just peered into your secret, crazy thoughts, described them just right, and told you what to do about it. And so he peered into those crazy thoughts, understood them, and didn't like what he saw.

Is it a cliche to say that the choice of our lives is whether to live or whether to off ourselves? It's something I've thought about. Does the periodic bed-bound wordless sadness that sometimes strikes me--is it worth sitting through to get to the other bits? To get to those times that rank with eating chocolate cake or hearing that your friend gets promoted or sitting at Korean Thanksgiving and having the Tae Bo instructor who may or may not want to date you hold your hand. Does the banal difficulty of life merit the pleasures? Now, sometimes I haven't dared think about that reckoning. But most times I think, pretty solidly, that the pleasures by far outweigh the indignities.

But Wallace, who I respect, who I understand, who I thought got this stuff better than most people out there--he thought otherwise. He thought that life was just too painful to keep going.

And so Wallace's suicide makes me afraid!

I'm not angry at him. I'm not going to throw around any pablum about how it's grossly selfish to kill yourself or anything like that and I'm not going to try to call him crazy for doing what he did. Because if you can't understand why he'd do it, then you're not trying hard enough. And even though those things are true, that suicide is selfish and never the right answer, just saying that doesn't make sense of his death, it doesn't give any sort of comfort.

The tough part is thinking that with all his sensitivity and intelligence, this was his answer. Not another book, no more courses teaching students, not even an easy life reading somewhere eating cake. A rope around his neck. That was his answer. And it's that answer which hurts. Like if you hiked up a huge mountain to meet an enlightened master and asked him what you should do with your life and he turned his eyes towards you and slowly, proudly, asked you what brand shoes you wore.

Wither?

I asked what he did for a living. He said he was a housepainter. He asked me the same question about myself.

“I manufacture opinions,” I said.

“Really?” he asked. “How do you know if you’re any good at that?”

“By the number of people who strongly agree or strongly disagree with me,” I said. “If a large number of strangers seem to think one of my opinions is especially true or wildly inaccurate, there is somehow a perception that I am being successful."

-via Fimoculous

Who is more dangerous? Bin Laden's driver? Or the guy on the corner smoking crack.

Today Osama bin Laden's driver was sentenced to spend the next five months in prison (he's already served about five years waiting for a trial.) Now this is big, front page news because it's a nice and tidy important judicial victory that comes tantalizingly close to global fear-or-ist number one himself. But one huge glooming thing stretches over this conviction for me. The man is being sentenced, really, for his proximity to bin Laden. The actual charge-this guy is now a war criminal for this-is "providing material support to a terrorist organization." This man was no terrorist mastermind, no idelogical firebrand. He was a driver.

But there's a double-take-worthy sort of twilight justice going on here. On the one hand, the courts declared this guy a war criminal. On the other hand, they don't see his war crimes as eliciting any more than five years in prison. Just to put that into perspective, that's the mandatory minimum sentence for the possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine. In fact, the average sentence for someone convicted of first-time trafficking of crack cocaine is ten years. So your local rock-slinger is TWICE as dangerous as Osama bin Laden's driver. Who is a war criminal. Isn't that a bit strange?

"Thought Experiment"

What if there was a gangster mystique about selling cookware instead of crack?

What Book Are You Ashamed Of Not Having Read?

A bunch of cultured Brits answer that question in this amusing video. How is it that while these people are proclaiming their ignorance about the classics of Western Thought I still feel like they are infinity more cultured, intelligent, and dinner-party-worthy than your current humble bog writer?

Why You Can't Ever Really Know Anybody - And Why That's Not So Bad, After All

We should be honest with one another, right? Because when we keep secrets from those closest to us, we create a rift: our intimates are being denied data they might otherwise use to understand us. So even when it’s awkward, or untimely, or it just plain hurts, we should be share the truth with our loved ones so that they can better understand who we really are.

Well. I don’t think so. I think that sometimes, some dishonesty can be really healthy in a relationship. Now, I don’t think that we should – in general – manipulate other people, if only for the simple reason that the pay-offs of manipulation (sex, attention, whatever) are outweighed by the distress of being a manipulator. But then again, sometimes hiding a part of yourself can be less about dishonesty and more about consciously crafting your public self.

To look at this, I’d point you in the direction of Jonathan Swift’s A Lady’s Dressing Room. In the poem a bumbling lover Stephon steals into the bathroom belonging to the girl he has a crush on, Celia. In there he finds a survey of disgusting things: her stained underwear, her dirty towels, and – worst of all – her chamber-pot. Stephon vows never to find another girl pretty ever again.

This poem is a staple of English classes. I was exposed to it countless times – burdened with ploughing through countless bumbling feminist analyses that marked Swift as a woman-hating demon. One prominent reading of the poem reckons Swift a misogynist (English professors, I suspect, use the poem to teach young undergrads the word misogynist). By focusing so much on Celia’s ugliness, Swift is saying that all women are ugly, he’s being a voyeur, he’s being bad, something.

But that’s a woeful misreading of the poem, I realize. In the last stanza, Swift writes that Stephon is actually an idiot. Now whenever he sees a woman, he thinks that they’re just ugly beasts instead of appreciating them as beautiful – even if they are ugly underneath their makeup, they are beautiful . Swift admonishes us instead to look at the conscious artifice of beauty, and appreciate it for the crafted thing it is:

Should I the Queen of Love refuse,
Because she rose from stinking Ooze?
To him that looks behind the Scene,
Satira's but some pocky Quean.
…
He soon would learn to think like me,
And bless his ravisht Sight to see
Such Order from Confusion sprung,
Such gaudy Tulips rais'd from Dung.

But what does this poem tell us about honesty? Well, Stephon does something that we modern 21st-century sensitive American types do: he tries to play archeologist to a person to discover their ‘true selves’. In loving someone, he wants to investigate. When he finds that what he loves is just an image, he reacts too strongly, and believes the lovely image to simply hide ugliness. When our friends keep secrets from us – especially those juicy secrets about betrayal, sex, pain, crime – we think that they are hiding important parts of their personalities, in the absence of which, we cannot understand their “true self”.

And thus we get a lot of clap-trap about coming clean, about talking things through.

Well, I don’t think that you need to talk everything in a relationship through. And I don’t think I need to know everything about a friend to stay friends with them. Instead, I think that the desire for knowledge about our friends’ secrets spring from no nobler source than a thirst for gossip and a hope for control. We have public, crafted selves. We reveal only parts of our personalities to the outside world. And rather than that being dishonest or slimy or wrong, I think it’s part of the essential part of being a person. But when we get close to someone, we may want to see their hidden side, thinking it somehow more special for being rarer.

Look, Celia’s private ugliness is accidental: she doesn’t mean for her dressing-room to be looked at. And yet her public beauty is conscious. And so Stephon makes a mistake by confusing Celia’s uncrafted accidental self with her crafted, public, intentioned self. Isn’t the consciously-crafted self more of a person than their accidental ugliness? If I am consciously kind, and yet, in a moment of drunken torpor, yell at a friend, you would forgive me, because I am in general a nice person – even if my natural reaction is nasty, and I display only a conscious, crafted niceness. We would not think that just because I put effort in to live well, that I am somehow nastily hiding a truer, albeit more vicious inner self.

This is why – by the way – it’s so embarrassing when people see you when you don’t expect them. When a co-worked walks by you when you are making fun of them, when your grandma accidentally stumbles across that video of you drunk that’s circulating around YouTube, when you send drunk e-mails.

Anyway.

One of the big problems with Stephon’s approach to Celia is that he sees the hidden Celia as her true self. He sees two descriptions of Celia: ugly Celia and pretty Celia. The ugly Celia is what’s ‘really real’. And similarly, when we demand honesty from our friends, we are imagining that getting all that juicy gossip will help us get to know our friends’ ‘true self’. But part of both Buddhist and (some) pragmatic epistemology is that descriptions of a thing are revisable and particular.

Let me unpack that. Buddhists think that all descriptions are impermanent and subjective. A person who we think is nice can be thought of as evil. A heavy rain might be a hassle for pedestrians, but great for farmers. Once we understand that the true nature of reality lacks human description, we are able to be more conscious with our description. Yeah, while we think that when a girl dumps us it sucks, we can also realize that it might not be the worst thing for everyone – the description is relative. Anyway – everything human, all description, is impermanent.

The pragmatic side of this is that all descriptions are revisable and particular. Whenever we describe something, we’re doing it from a particular angle, for a particular purpose, and we always leave open the option for changing our description. I describe a girl I see as beautiful, say – but then I see her face and, on closer inspection, she is actually a hag. Or: I think a girl is very charming and wonderful, then figure out that she is a girl that broke my friends’ heart, and suddenly her charm looks like artifice.

This doesn’t seem like too profound a thought on first blush. But, I think that it means something very important. For one, that we have no true self. There is no golden, unimpeachable, solid self: there is only a couple different selves under different descriptions. Look at the difference between Brendan as a cashier, Brendan as a journalist, Brendan as a roommate, and you can see how you can find at least three drastically different selves at play in a single person on a single day. This means, I think, that the process of trying to unearth our loved one’s true selves is wrong-headed. There is no true self to uncover. There are only various different manifestations of that self. And, if you want to have a self where you sit around and air your dirty laundry, then fine, but you should think over that: does it really help your loved ones understand you more? Is it useful? Or is it just another exercise, another act, one that’s just sloppier, and ugly?

Dispossession - A Draft

I began this essay a week or two ago. As it grew longer, I found it harder and harder to strain sense out of my sentences. I would write in furious bursts, in great metaphors, and then look over what I wrote to edit, and while I'd cut some sentences and re-write others, I found myself unable to come closer to any sort of point. My reasoning suddenly seemed cumbersome, my arguments stale when I thought them fresh, the ideas confused, when I thought them clear.

That being said, I think I'm onto something here. And while I'll be setting aside this topic for a while, I'm going to post this stump of an essay for you readers. Treat it as what it is: something raw, a bit of a beginning, a bit of a curiosity.

If you think I'm onto something, by all means - tell me. I'd like to know what it is.

*

This generation faces an uncharted wilderness of the mind. New technology has afforded us a terrible opportunity: the spoils may be rich, but the failures desperate. Will we be representatives of some new golden age? or citizens of a broken Diaspora?

All that’s certain is that we are a people without maps. We are lost. We have nowhere to go. We will find our way - but only in time.

*

It’s a tired fact, but true, that the same wealth of opportunity that makes our lives easier –cel phones, the internet, our relative ease – can make our lives feel impoverished. We have all wasted nights and days buffeted from website to website like a piece of trash caught in the wind until we notice that it’s three in the morning and our eyes hurt; we have all searched in the desert of cable TV for some El Dorado of satisfaction and in vain; we have all found our attention scattered between the conversation on the cel phone, the five open tabs on our internet browser, and the actual physical world that sits a couple feet in front of our computer screens. We have wealth, sure, and wealth which would have been unimaginable to our forbearers. But we find ourselves overwhelmed. We hide in our beds and never want to get up. We go to the gym. We feel stranded in a desert of the soul. We don’t know how to be the people we think we need to be.

Our wealth is hollow. It doesn’t give us happiness. That truth is an empty one, a sign that doesn’t point anywhere. But we don’t know what will make us happy. And so we continue deeper into the desert.

*

Our patience runs short. In a couple clicks we can land on another argument, another game, another song; so we have trouble devoting our attentions to any single thing. This is not a bad thing, within reason. In a way it makes us informational omnivores, with wide interests. Look at the epicurean vitality of websites like BoingBoing.net, modern day wonder-closets, collections of curiosities for the truly curious. But there is a point when this distraction, rather than feeding our creativity, shatters our attention, cracking the surface of our deeper thought. The people who do not learn to channel this distraction will find themselves living in an archipelago made up of tiny flat islands of understanding, surrounded by a dark unnavigable sea.

Plus it’s addicting. There is something immediately satisfying about the internet, but this makes it dangerous, because it’s so easy to access that satisfaction and much of it is hollow. We can foster the illusion that if we go to the next page of porn, something deeply rewarding will happen to us. That if we gain another level on WoW, we will possess some greater meaning to our lives. But when we are done, we find ourselves none the richer, just a little bit more tired, more distracted, sinking deeper into our computer screens.

*

In Japan there are young men called hikikomori . These young men hole themselves up in their rooms and don’t ever come out. The struggle of the outside world has become too much for them, perhaps, and so they creep back to the comfort of depression, of mediated experience. Filling their lives with comic books, computer games, and magazines, they are safe. And the are safe even if they cannot escape the familiar prison of their rooms nor their dramas the plotted fantasies of books and TVs. They can experience, but it will not hurt. They will feel, but they will not give up their control. They do not try – but neither do they fail. How do they get like this?

*

We spend our lives listening to songs other people sing, watching TV shows dealing with people we will have no commerce with, and reading stories that take place in far-away places we can neither effect nor change. We tend, as a generation, to critique more than we create, to watch more than we do. And this means that we suffer from an overactive critical sense, but an active life that is benumbed and abstract. What’s the big deal, though? The big deal is that we live a life surrounded by artificial lives, that no longer reflect the real struggles people tend to go through.

TV’s a great comfort. But while TV can comfort, more often than not it just numbs, putting our problems on hold by pausing our life. It makes our life a little bit more lonely. First, TV is too easy a comfort. We can press a single button, turn on the TV, and be safe. It’s far easier than, say, going to a café and trying to talk with someone you don’t know. But most friendships, most of the rewarding things in life, require us to put ourselves out there in some way, run a risk of looking stupid. We might be too shy, and stay at home watching TV.

The temptation to loose ourselves in this fantasy land are really great. Especially since, the more we slip into this comforting box of stories, the more impossible it seems to get back out. Because TV, in its non-stop interest, spins tales of people who are well-adjusted, active, funny, and engaging. If you’ve been sitting at home for the past month or two, ekeing out a life on the edges of society, then you can’t relate to the people you see on TV. You can’t relate to Ross and Monica, Rachel and Chandler. But the problem is – they’re become your good friends. That’s how you think people are meant to act like. And even though we all know that TV is fake, we lack the stories of people who are messed up, lazy, conflicted – television’s inability to communicate stories about loneliness and ennui trap some of us into a deeper cycle of loneliness and ennui, where we fail to recognize the sensibility of our problem.

*

OK – I’m going to outline this point:
Loneiness can be soothed with TV
But it makes you more lonely
- why? Because you don’t do anything with other people, it is easy to watch it (the initial costs are low)
the illusion of TV: it makes a world in which people do a lot
- but also, because of the temporal shortening (all the boring stuff is necessarily edited out to fit in the thirty to sixty minute window of time we have) we see no boredom
-- so we can escape into a world in which everything happens, but not to us. We think that we shouldn’t be bored.
The utter inability of TV to communicate a struggle against meaninglessness and eunnui in a meaningful way leads to us trapped in a cycle of meaninglessness and ennui because we fail to see that the problem actually exists.

The second problem is that TV spins an illusory world in which people are well-adjusted and active. Most of the human beings I meet are not like the people on TV. But the active, healthy people on TV are bad role models for the ranks of unhappy, broken people who find their solace and comfort of the television. A person might come home from a life alienated and unsatisfying, and watch an episode of the sit-com Friends. Let’s say they watch an hour of it a day. But that life on the screen is so very different . People on TV have friends, and they see their friends, and they work, and they are necessarily unbothered by the crippling existential angst that might lead a young person to withdraw from the world and watch the pleasant stories of people who do not withdraw from the world. We, who as a nation consume, consume stories about people who are far more active than anybody we ever see in our real flesh-and blood existences.

Where are the miscreants? The insomniacs? The alcoholics? The people in credit card debt? The idiots who hate their friends? Who have no friends? The compulsive masturbators? The guys who lie to get pretty girls in bed? The pretentious? The lonely? – we are all lonely. The people so bored they don’t know what to do? These marginal stories are now surrounded by a constant drone of normalcy. An exceptional normalcy – a life of event, carefully poltted and portioned in half an hour to hour dollops.

Growing Up

Before I had my first kiss, before I got drunk at my first party, before I’d ever made a meal from scratch or paid a bill or got a haircut I liked; when I was an awkward young boy who mostly just thought about the eruptions of pimples on his face and fostered a guilty suspicion that somehow I was different from everyone else, that I was weird, and I believed that this unspeakable weirdness irrevocably quarantined me from peers – back when I was twelve or thirteen and was slowly becoming me: I listened to Leonard Cohen and read Milan Kundera, artists who I only realize now were my initiation into the mysteries of adult life. I would memorize their stories of doomed love affairs and baffle myself at their philosophies. In childhood I had been able to parcel out the world into neat packages. There were the good guys and the bad guys, and the stories were simple, whole, and sweet. It would be underestimating Cohen and Kundera’s influence on me to say that it was from them that I realized how compromised and complicated the world really was; they did so much more, they introduced me to the visceral sort of human struggle I would spend the next ten years or so trying to come to terms with. In their stories people hurt each other not because they were evil, but because that’s what people did. Life hurt. And I was stunned by that realization.

I had only started to get the first aches of crushes: daydreaming about taking girls I’d barely spoken with on dates and kissing them and having sex (this fantasy all the more passionate for how unclear sex actually was to me) and I could already see that something was growing in me that I couldn’t contain or satisfy. I couldn’t stop thinking about girls. And I could get any girls. That middle ground of sexual frustration was, to me, an uncharted span on the map of life. I had read nothing about it, seen no movies about it, everyone on TV looked so assured and witty when they talked about love. I must be different, broken, wrong.

And then I started listening to Leonard Cohen. Cohen knew where it was at. Just look at these two stanzas from the song Take This Longing:

Your body like a searchlight
my poverty revealed,
I would like to try your charity
until you cry, "Now you must try my greed."
And everything depends upon
how near you sleep to me

Just take this longing from my tongue
all the lonely things my hands have done.
Let me see your beauty broken down
like you would do for one your love.

These words meant nothing to me at the time, but I could intimate that they were important. There was a clue to my frustration in the puzzle of Cohen’s love affairs. I knew that when I could understand them and feel a connection to them, then I would have somehow broken out of my childhood, although I couldn’t express it like this at the time – I just, to be fair, pretended to know what Cohen was on about, and left it at that. So I listened to the album over and over until I had memorized every line, every image. I can sing along to the whole thing, even today.

And underneath all this emotional longing, there lurked beneath Cohen the figure of the messianic prophet. That there was, beneath the texture of loss and love, a deeper love, a religiosity that as a purely secular young whelp I could only indulge in by not admitting what I was doing, by singing along, but not listening to the words that I sang.

Milan Kundera brought me into the same world of sex and mysticism, but he spoke in a learned lilt that I recognized immediately as a style, as cool. His stories were chock full of that same heady and opaque burble of sex and infidelity; but he also built his stories around people philosophizing, trying to crack the veneer of life to find some meaningful core. His characters, for all their emotional backstabbing, were not just petty players in an afternoon soap opera. I mean, they were that – but they also moved around a world of ideas. And while I was shocked by the ideas themselves, I was more shocked by the idea that you could think vigorously about how to live your life. That you could have ideas. I knew then that I would unlock that door to adulthood and the frustration, the confusion, and the compromise would be illuminated by something richer, something I could not have before expected: art.

Maybe a year or two after I first discovered Cohen and Kundera, after buying more albums and more books, I started writing myself. And looking back at my early attempts at fiction and poetry, while of course I feel the requisite embarrassment at everything you’re meant to be embarrassed about: the clumsy technique, the self-importance, the mawkish melodrama; I am more struck by how back when I somehow decided that I wanted to writ, I was speaking with a voice that I had cadged from Kundera and Cohen. In some ways, those early attempts at stories outshine a lot of the work that I did when, dizzied by drugs and adolescence, I fell in love with my own sonorous voice; or even worse – the stuff that I wrote in College that tried to tackle the Big Ideas which turned out as bad as you could expect. Those attempts at fiction failed because their intentions were impure. I wanted to write them to show how good a writer I was, to show how much intelligence I could bash against my emotional problems. My early work – and the work of Cohen and Kundera who inspired it – seem to me something purer, inspired by the love of the story, by the love of art.

I’m thinking about this now because a couple of weeks ago I stumbled on The Unbearable Lightness of Being in the library and picked it up. A week after that I was trolling through a friend’s music and picked up the first Leonard Cohen album I ever had. So there I was, here I am, reunited with the works that started it all. And it feels odd to look over my shoulder and see me ten years ago listening to the same music, reading the same books, and to feel a continuity, and a growth.

Following Your Dreams Through Editing

This afternoon I was working on a squib that I found especially cumbersome. Every sentence I wrote was wrong standing around in the wrong place, like a drunk frat boy trying to fraternize in a solemn church. The piece didn't have a thesis - but that hasn't really stopped me before, as kind readers of this blog will know. The problem was that I kept on rereading what I had written, rehashing it, refocusing it, twisting each paragraph into something new, something that would fit, and nothing seemed to fit; after a while, I couldn't even think of what I was trying to fit it into.

But after several hours of tweaking, I think I've gotten something that, while I can't be proud of it, I at least can show it to other human beings.

Later this afternoon, following the habit of Mr. Sam Clemens, I took a notebook into bed with me and, struggling against the heat, scribbled a couple pages of a short story I've been working on about a guy who finds a Diabolical Machine in his apartment building. Now, what struck me was that I just wrote, knowing that later I would come back and pare back what was extraneous, tighten the limp descriptions, polish the rough edges until they shone. But I was scared, actually - thinking this too languorous, too lazy.

Now, the difference between these two acts of writing is that for non-fiction writing, you have a thesis to argue, while with fiction, your point's more blunt. In writing non-fiction, I can edit while I'm writing because I know, before I'm finished, the general point I want to make, and I can tailor each sentence and each paragraph to lead up to that point. But in fiction, I can get no clear sense of what I'm trying to do until the entire sprawling mess is in front of me. And even then it's pretty hard.

But I felt a deeper fear. A fear of the edit. Imagine a lifetime of editing, a lifetime of work spent trying to get every word right, to sharpen my thoughts until they could cut. Now, this isn't too dire - if you understand from the outset that, given the sweat and the ink and the tweak you can come up with some sentences that have some bite to them; but if you're like me, a poor little slob with a couple blogs, some writerly airs, and an internship; you have no such guarantee. Think of how exciting, how wonderful, editing would be if you knew that the words you were editing would stand for a year or ten; and think of how disappointing, how dull, how self-conceited it would be to edit and think that those words would stand for no-one, no matter how sharp they were?

So That's What It Is!

Ahh, Internet. I love how I can sit down on the computer with no particular objective at all and sit up four hours later, having done nothing more than check my e-mail eighty ba-gillion times and find out a bunch of trivia I didn't know I needed to know.. Let's call it the wikipedia effect.

Neatorama explains the origins of my favorite typographical symbol, the ampersand (&):

This symbol is stylized et, Latin for "and." Although it was invented by the Roman scribe Marcus Tullius Tiro in the first century B.C., it didn’t get its strange name until centuries later. In the early 1800s, schoolchildren learned this symbol as the 27th letter of the alphabet: X, Y, Z, &. But the symbol had no name. So, they ended their ABCs with "and, per se, and" meaning "&, which means ‘and.’" This phrase was slurred into one garbled word that eventually caught on with everyone: ampersand.

Wow. Never knew that.

What I love about this factoid is that the ampersand went through about seventeen centuries completely nameless, as just that squiggly thing that means and, a member of those common, nameless objects like that dangley thing at the back of your throat and the feeling you get when you sleep too much that feels kinda like tiredness, but must not be tiredness. And then it gets named - not by the dictate of some denoter from above - but from schoolkids. Being lazy.

On Style.

Ben Weyl, that enterprising young scamp, has a good post up on Strunk and White's Elements of Style, the book that every self-respecting writer needs to read so they can make themselves feel bad about their various grammatical insufficiencies.

Now, towards the end of the post, Ben wonders why writing on the Blogospehere is so damned sloppy. My practical answer is that there is so little time between writing and publication in the blogosphere it discourages editing. With much writing, a writer has time to leave a piece in a drawer for a day or two - or an hour or two - and then return to it with a fresh mind to add new ideas and prune the old ones - in other words, to edit. It's hard to write well without taking this time.

With the Blogosphere, you can just slam out some words in ten minutes and then hit 'Publish Post" and there you are: You're a blogger.

The annals of blogging contain a huge number of sloppy fuck-ups. Check out the interminable Lee Siegel, who coined the term 'blogofacisim'. He argued that blogging was an essentially idiotic way to communicate, but then made a huge fool of himself when he was caught ghost-writing self-congratulatory comments for his blog posts. It was like he got caught masturbating. After preaching against the horrors of masturbation. Actually, he was caught masturbating.

Or, check out The New Republic's resident crazy-guy-with-too-much-power, and his grammatically challenged rants on the New Blog Order. And my alma mater.

Now, I'm super-guilty of being a bit, say, rough around the edges with these posts sometimes. Just ask my dad, who as the only reader of this blog sends me a weekly digest of all my grammatical stuff-ups.

But aha! there is hope: While blogging might tends towards sloppiness, I think with restraint it remains a wonderful tool to communicate. It lets people like me assume a pulpit of possibility - and even if our readerships never expand beyond our families and our close friends, we are still engaged in the act of writing. And that act of writing and editing, of setting out our thoughts into a more less wispy form, helps us think better. At least I think so.

And the great thing about blogging: you can do it even if you're not wearing pants.