Katrina, Katrina

Everyone in Buffalo must have been rooting for The Saints. And everyone in Buffalo must have felt cheated when New Orleans got to win its Super Bowl. We couldn't ever do it even with four chances almost in a row. We saw our projection; the underdog. But the one who played us up on the big screen was so much better looking. Which might be flattering, except that you have to live with yourself in real life.

Our politics are just as corrupt! Our schools are just as bad! We suffer natural disasters too, except that ours are laughable. Something to make contemptuous jokes about. And although we don't generally show our tits, we get just as drunk in public on St. Patrick's day, say, or at the Bills games.

What we lack is cool, and so, although we were once as big, and came on our falling short the old fashioned way - we earned it over time - we don't even deserve anything other than contempt for our bombed out condition. Hell, we never got it together enough to put a roof over our stadium in the first place, and it would make a lot more sense here than there. And our roofs hardly ever blow off, although they might from the blasting of our crowds.

Everyone knows the story of the frog in the kettle who never knows enough to jump out until it's just too late. Until it's too late, it just feels nice, and sunny, and like a hot-tub, maybe, and then somewhere along the line your energy's been robbed, and still it gets hotter and hotter, and somewhere in there you lose all sense at all.

I guess, looking at that frog, you can just feel contempt that he didn't have the sense to jump out when he could, just like most of the talented people who grew up in Buffalo have always done. And then you just wanna say something like die, sucka, die. So you can eat the frog's legs? Shouldn't you have killed him off ahead of time? Or is Buffalo like a lobster, without an advanced enough nervous system to register pain. Yeah, that's it. We're just too stupid.

And everybody down in Haiti now is looking for that silver lining, like all those people had to die before the centuries-long tragedy could be turned about. As though it will be now? As though somehow if you get the chance to know what being made an object feels like, then at least you will never do it to some other? Or never do it again? Or will you just write a check and be on your way?

If you are raped, you have been made an object. If you are a slave. If you are taken for your beauty only. Or for your intelligence. Or your money. If your life is not worth paying any attention, then you have been made an object. And if you live, then all that you have left is your humanity. And right there, as David Foster Wallace reminds us that Victor Frankel reminded us, is the only choice you've ever had in your life. To be human or not to be. It's a choice and not a grant.

But so much of the time we only know how to do back unto others as they have done to us. Not because we're mean, but because we never really did understand that we were being made into an object ourselves. So, we celebrate getting ours back even before the Mardi Gras, even to something more extreme than the party that will happen the day before we must begin our pretense of mourning. Because today we are alive, even though tomorrow that asteroid might hit, as they made such good fun of in those SuperBowl ads.

Well, we're still here in Buffalo. We're still human, what's left of us. We're not looking forward to some disaster larger than the laughable ones, which still kill lots of people if you want to really know. Walking around in circles snowblind, or maybe dropping from the sky because we won't stand for unions, or just on the streets from guns since all the money has skittered out to the suburbs where they eat each others' children just to get their own into the most Ivys.

Grim? Even the Bills are probably not about to stay around these parts. Our stadium looks like the WalMart edition, and Toronto has one with a flip top right around the corner. In the same dense market, only cooler. Way cooler.

The real test is what you do for the one who's losing consciousness slowly. The real test is what you do to your neighbor, even though he stinks. The real test is how much looting you're already doing, in slow motion, from the wide open stores of the once great now dying cities, happy that you can win by airconditioned wild west absence of civic anything, and nevermind virtue, bringing in the outsourced quality, and paying something under half of the wages of dignity. Because people are willing, at least, to have something rather than nothing.

Well, shame on you America, shame on you. You never pay attention until it can make you look good. And you know, I do feel a bit of pity for the ones who are loved only for their wealth and beauty and intelligence. But more sorry that you have to take it out on the rest of the world, as if there were no other choice.

Super Bowl Capacitance

In electronics, I believe, a capacitor in elementary form is a pair of conductive plates held apart at some precise and calibrated distance. So that a charge may be built up across the gap, without allowing its discharge - a leap across the gap - which would eventually be inevitable if there were some promontory or spike across the surface, or if the plates were allowed to come too close toward touch. Little bits of charge can trickle in relatively slowly, and build up a massive potential difference across those plates. It's like magic really. The voltage is defined by the surface of the plates and not by the distance between them, so that quantity can get changed in the instant to oomph.

In real life, capacitors, I believe, once their capacitance is large enough, are built of foil interleaved with insulating paper, and spiraled into a tube. They act like a battery of sorts, storing charge, but are capable of near instantaneous discharge which would explode a battery, were you to attempt it with a battery. Shorting out a battery makes a bomb, almost. Shorting out a capacitor, I hear, can throw you across a room if you're not careful, working inside a TV set, say. Even the new flatscreens, if they're at all like the laptop screen I once touched in the wrong place, have capacitors capable to burn a hole right through your skin down to the very bone. It's a bit of a rude surprise, and hurts for days and days, although there's absolutely no blood.

This was my first HD SuperBowl, for which I had to provide the rabbit ears (I couldn't afford the flatscreen) since the particular satellite network my friends use hasn't caught up with HD for local stations (How can they keep their subscribers, underwriters, you and me??). I'm always shocked, no really truly, I always am, by what I catch when watching these games. The voltage is amped up so amazingly high (in a battery where rate and quantity of input remains roughly equivalent to output, it's regulated and limited; in a capacitor, it can go nearly through the roof).

I don't want to make all that much of this or any other metaphor stolen from real life, but it was hard not to notice all the adverted suggestions of a big party at the end of time, promises of revelations of nakedness which might knock your socks off, interleaved with quietly funny parades of nearly naked people looking more like you or me. If we're gonna die in an instant, then surely it would be alright to climb right into that hottub with someone you hardly know and get it on, baby, get it on.

Right? Yeah, right . . . .

I was still more shocked by the absolute count of announcers, each one literally shouting into his mike, holding poses, and barely containing expressions of such furious concentration that were they not superannuated athletes themselves - were they you or I - they surely would have burst some vessel.

The shouting was, of course, unnecessary, but it did simulate the noise at the stadium, by omission, and it was brought into relief by somewhat martial drumming music to keep the hype going. And what about those superannuated WHO! at halftime? No matter how much electricity got pumped into the context for their show, replete with fireworks inside and out, they still looked a bit behind the curve of the energy they wanted to be projecting.

Can't they get someone younger to do it for what they must be paying? Or am I now the mainline demographic, wanting still to pretend that I could get it up that high? I thought Sringsteen and Bono pulled it off alright, but these guys were simply calling the question. Some edge got crossed last night. Some edge go lost?

Sure, I'm as susceptible as you are to the emotion of the anthems (the pretty one and the official one) of necessity mostly a-Capella now. Even the hyper-jetted flyover gets me going. Reminded during commercial breaks that it's been television for my generation which has defined the enduring moments of our lives, and we can have one in the palm of our hand, for whatever might be happening, even if our significant other has ripped out our spine to make us do something other than watch football. Imagine, television in the palm of our hand. Whoever would have thunk it? Or that cars would remain our only sanctioned masculine outlet.

Well, except that the idea is not exactly new. It's all about which channels you can get to what reliability and at what definition. I want the virtual reality goggles, man, jacked in twenty four and seven, three hundred sixty degrees of global longitude. With definition I can almost reach out and touch.

We are the television generation, the mediated generation, the find ourselves narcissistically in our projections generation, the ones who fell in love with JFK and then that B-Grade Bonzo actor dude, because they were so easy on the eyes and ears, because they made it so easy to believe in ourselves.

I just realized today, and you won't believe this either - that it wasn't premeditated, cynically, for some particular meaning - that the photo I choose for myself is the very opposite of the ones authors, for instance, usually prefer. I am extremely uncomfortable with any attempt to project cool. Look on the dustjackets of any book, and you'll know what I'm talking about. That particular angle, that intellectual scowl, that secret hotness which will be hinted at through words.

I should keep this to myself, but it has been my pledge to you that I won't by coy like that. Anyhow, I guess I like the picture, first of all because it was taken by a near-professional photographer down at the News. (I don't mean to demean by the "near" part, but that's how he introduced himself, since I was hardly important enough to merit the real thing, and so they let him indulge his hobby for the "my view" opinion column walk-ins - and I hope this doesn't constitute evidence of theft right here) Second of all because it just looks like me being me at the very best of times. I don't think it hints at anything at all.

Anyhow, the charge built up across the flat plates - ever increasingly flat and ever increasingly sharp - has, I believe, grown dangerous. I say that advisedly, not being an end of the world chicken little type, by both disposition and decision, but I think the charge between me and my projection has reached rather too high a voltage. Even to make a spark in an engine, if it's not diesel, requires only a step-up coil, and not some massive super-shock like you might need to shoot someone to the moon!

The entire Republican party must, for instance, retain the very same game face during the President's speech, or lose touch with the battery-storage base of their power. You really don't want to stand out as the one who liked something the other party's president said. And the other side of the aisle is even worse. Cheering to beat the crowd. I'm sure I wasn't the only one to feel the delicacy of each moment for Obama, having to contain the certainties, having to modulate the tone in a chamber not used to shouting. I thought he performed brilliantly, frankly, myself.

Especially in a political context where any single mis-cue can bring you down in an instant. Can you imagine the news coverage if somehow the plug got pulled while the WHO! was performing? There must have been armies of vigilant protectors, and legions of redundancy mirroring the literal hoard which had to bring on the set and strike it. Talk about a precision marching band!!

Veto power has all the power now, where if you can be lured into bed inappropriately, that will be all that is needed to end your career, at some moment of the terrorist's choosing. All it takes is a single spark, and the entire capacitor is discharged. Acorn. Spitzer. That guy who went to South America. Never mind Edwards, who never could find the right time to discharge the truth.

Because it is a kind of terrorism, right? That the NSA, now fully aligned with Google, can know literally more about yourself than you can. The marketers know which brochures to send you through the mail, and can peg you as Republican even when you're not, based simply on your inhabitation and style preferences. Do you want to stand out from the crowd, now do you?

Their margin for error approaches nil. The odd thing is that the cost to send you these brochures quickly exceeds, in aggregate, anything you could possibly spend in return, except in aggregate, where someone who isn't you must be spending millions. Or is that why the economy requires a massive reset every once in a while, to effect a transfer of the little-guy's wealth (as if we have any) over to the guys with enough money to know where to send the brochures? A capacitor recharge on massive scale.

I know my retirement fund has remained precisely flat since before the year 2000. I think that constitutes a kind of theft. But we're talking on top of $10K max, which is almost laughable. Until you add it up. But somebody not me was making an awful lot of money during that time, and lots of it got stored away, no matter what we're meant to believe about evaporated bubble wealth.

It's kind of fun to hear the rich people (people not me who get mistaken for Republicans - no one makes that mistake with me) add up their monthly fees for phone and cable and Internet and to realize that what I spend for mobility and no cable - no TV - is about double what they consider fair for the massive package of stuff I never could afford. You know, the HBO, Cinemax HD sports collection at a download speed of infinity, with unlimited talk to the world, presented at something well beyond forty two inches diagonal.

Is that my cost to remain unlocated? Up in the air? Although you can pin me precisely with a simple "whois" query from the command line.

I really should get a clue. I suppose if you add in their cellular bill, the aggregate might approach me. But still.

Alright, so I'm not an investment grade mathematical whiz. But, believe it or not, I do have a pretty good mathematical mind. What do they call those guys on Wall St. who game our system. Quants, I think. I'm not a quant, for sure, but I get the math. I never did want to win at the roulette wheel or blackjack. I'm more like you - I've always wanted honest work, and feel free to take that "want" in punny style if you need to. 'Cause I can't say myself if I've ever had it - honest work, although I used to be a bicycle mechanic, and that at least felt like honest work.

So anyhow, mobs behave differently from individuals, as we all know, and at a certain point if you're a part of a big enough mob, you're going to act approximately as beastly as those Bills fans do at a drunken contest. Where, thank goodness, it doesn't make any real difference, and probably even does a lot of good, to exercise that mobliness a bit right out in public. I can get into it, short of F-words and facepaint, right along with the best (or worst) of them. Almost. Kind of. If only I gave a damn for the game itself.

Here I go again, but I might be the only leftie who actually agreed with Sam Alito when he made theater of the theater of the State of the Union address. He broke the expected necessity for those wearing robes to remain impassive. But the President also veered a bit too far toward demagoguery, as if corporate money weren't already all over the game of politics. And in a game of lowest common denominator veto power, at least Alito broke ranks with keeping rank. At least he was willing to show his hand.

And in the end, an honest decision made according to principle will at least require that money be played right on the table. So that we can all decide as Obama urged us to if we really want to regard the collective mob-mentality resulting from subservience to who it is that pays you as equivalent to an individual with heart and mind and unique DNA, with regard to freedom. We might and likely should be horrified at what gets perpetrated in our name, if only we could see it. And it's not likely to get shown up on TV, where only the beautiful get rewarded.

I guess it sucks for dear sweet pit-bull cheerleading Sarah Palin that she comes along at the endtimes for Televised reality. She'll fit in right there alongside that shameful and diminutive Focus on the Family anti-abortion ad, which, who knows, might have pre-empted the spot for a gay dating service. Overwhelmed by ads for wanton nakedness, partying at the endtimes. I am the only one who sees the irony in all this? I rather doubt it.

Reading the World

Good writing gets celebrated a lot, and it should. Good writing can take readers to places they never could have reached alone.

Good reading, on the other hand [I had to insert that gratuitous phrase, because you might have thought I was still talking about writing] is almost never celebrated, any more than being part of an audience is ever anything all that special. We all know it's important, but it's nothing to celebrate.

I guess in the ethereal reaches of wine tasting, maybe, there's room to celebrate the truly discerning palatte, and maybe even the tasters, in this one case, get to tell the makers what of their production is really really good. So very unlike the work of critics in the world of literature or art. Which is often at so much odds with the reading public, who are the ones who really get to decide, right?

The critics need to be out front, and not just at some peak, like wine snobs can be. There is still a presumption of ever changingness toward progress, ahem, which would define an avante garde. Wine, on quite another hand, is presumed to reflect something permanent, something which would be great for any time, or at worst subject to the winds of fashion, with an undergirding of just plain quality.

One goes to art school to learn to paint, to writing school to learn to write, because one must learn the context; to be taken seriously, you must know what came before so you can find you spot along the trajectory toward what it might yet become. There is no great imitative art, they say, and none that doesn't imitate either. How tiresome when some hypertalented naif just makes the whole game, well, unnecessary. When the art just shows up on the street, before the gallery snobs ever even had a chance to notice, much less call it.

Reading, as an act, gets problematized so unnecessarily by schooling, though. Refined audiences for refined productions, sure, but I'm talking here simply about the act of using the written word.

I know that it gets needlessly problematized in as many ways since Sunday as there can be to know, but I'll tell you about a few of the ways that I do know this, and try really hard not to bore you with my real-life wine-tasting story.

Kids (and adults) can and do and will learn to read effortlessly and even joyfully if there's some simple connection between their reading and real life. And it almost goes without saying that they will have no problem writing either, so long as they're not trying for the refined sort. Mass literacy was the result of the printing press, plain and simple, and had almost absolutely nothing to do with school. School is there to keep the ignorant ignorant, duh. We'd have something dangerous like socialism without churches otherwise. Please! Heaven forfend!

It is the job and the purpose of schooling to problematize these things, pretty much in the same way that it is the job of wine tasters to elevate the really good stuff from the dross that you and I might be happy enough to drink if we didn't know any better. And we're glad when they do it, because it keeps the pricing somewhat honest too - as honest as it can be in a universe of naked emperors and so very many labels which can't possibly be remembered store to store and visit to visit.

Very helpfully now, the wine stores have started to score the labels, pretty much the way they do at Olympic competitions, or at Harvard, where it's just presumed that everyone's an A, and the real nuanced distinctions come in the smaller endzone decimal points. In a way that ordinary people can't even remotely make sense of. And also in a way that you can't really quite trust the judges about. Can you even imagine someone buying a bottle of wine for more than $10 which had a score below 80, which is still enough in school to make you president!? So, there's at least that much honesty in the scoring of wines.

Kids at school learn pretty early on that there must be something really tricky about reading, especially about reading aloud, and that they really shouldn't even bother to try to write. Special rules proliferate to guide the new learner toward understanding language in the way it gets used in the socially well capitalized households, which are usually pretty well aligned with the financially well capitalized households. And "aligned with" here isn't precisely the same as correleated with. Because you can be not-so-rich and pretty well aligned.

But let's say that language skills are between the youngster and something real. Then they learn pretty quickly, and pretty much in the manner of txting, even make up their own nongrammatical ways to get what they need across. To make the tools of reading and writing work for them.

School stands in the way of that just as much as it could ever facilitate it, just simply by disempowering the ones who don't score so highly, even though if you don't score the kids at all they know precisely where they stand vis-a-vis one another, and with regard to the teachers.

And even though the scoring just encourages gaming of the system, such that, especially with rules for objectivity, the kids know how to get high enough scores if they want to which still won't make any difference at all for getting into the really good next level school for instance, where all sorts of new tests meant to be non-proxies for social capitalization will purport to peer right into your very essence and tell how well you really know how to read and write.

And of course these tests are almost perfect proxies for social capitalization, once you control for intelligence, which was the chimerical object in the first place, or was it just belief that you had to start with? But kids know who's smart and who's not, so you could just start with asking them. A kind of peer review instead of instrumental peering, which is the only reliable test for truth in the first place, the peer review, but let's hold off on that a minute.

Believing that they are something other from what you can know from the outside - using IQ metrics, say - is a pretty good way to do something evil, and rank order the humanity of human beings. Which should never be done in the first place, or the last place either come to think of it. You could just control for social capitalization in the first place, going in, but then you'd be pretty much undermining the belief in the first place that you could measure intellectual energy without at the same time measuring want and need and drive and motivation, and the rest of it. Humans are so full of pre-judging! They can't be trusted . . . .

But there are groups of students who demonstrably do have a hard time learning to read and write. We used to call these kids dyslexic, but since that term sounds too much like a medical diagnosis for a condition which just has way too many factors - not all of them very well aligned either - underneath it, it's fallen out of favor in favor of the more generic term of "learning disabilities." If I were speaking, I'd use both hands, two fingers each, to demonstrate my contempt for the term by bracketing it in gesticulated quotation marks.

They (whoever they are) should really do the same thing with IQ that they did with dyslexia, because there are just simply too many underlying factors to call it - that single score - a read of anything at all like intelligence. At worst it's a proxy for all that social capitalization again, while at best it's a way to correct the improper scoring of teachers and other authority figures, which, if you just asked the kids directly, they could have done for you instantly and saved a lot of time and money and bother in the process. They know who's smart and who's not. Their lives depend on it most of the time.

But it's not always the ones the teacher thinks are smart, you know, and so it's not necessarily a bad idea to have these tests. And with the learning disabilities too, which at best are just an indication of some disparity among subtests against the overall score (which I'm pretty sure is a good working definition for what gets meant by "learning disability" in the first place) but at worst might be just another proxy for someone not doing as well as his social capitalization indicates he should be doing (it's usually he in these cases). And so if you're rich, or if you attend a well-capitalized school district, you can get some special schooling designed to remediate these difficulties. Smooth out the unevenness of the subtests. Wear down the jagged edginess.

I worked at one such private school for the very rich, or the well-funded by the Canadian government where they are more enlightened about these things, who had demonstrable problems with reading, at some odds with the evident intelligence of these kids. You could watch them struggling to make out even simple words, and the school, quite sensibly, and having built its longish tradition on the method, would drill these kids on phonics. Endlessly.

Every single faculty member, myself included, and I was supposed to be rather more exalted than that, but I did and had to endorse my own comeuppance, had to master this method of drilling and not question it all all, pretty much the way that you would never question your sergeant if you were stupid enough to sign your life away to the military, and then once there didn't want to be among the very first to die. Which was rough for me, because it was evident to me that there were huge disparities among the kids according to which of them really couldn't sound the words out, and which had no trouble at all with that, but couldn't sequence them, or couldn't organize them, the words.

And so we would be, some of the time, drilling-in a kind of cynicism; both in the kids and in the teachers, based ultimately on the difficulty really expensive private schools have, unless they have a waiting list, in saying no to parents with the cash and the desperate hope in their eyes.

But still it's interesting that this primitive kind of phonic drilling now, more recently than could have done any good for me, has been shown to encourage the flourishing and elaboration of the newly-recognized-as-critical white matter of the brain. It's as if these kids with the smarts without the reading ability were fully equipped with powerful CPUs, but lacked the networking to make them work togther [which is a really really lousy metaphor which I would hate it for you to latch onto, which I'll hope to demonstrate the why about later on]. And the phonic drilling elaborates and exercises the interconnections until, like training wheels on bicycles, the kids learn how to read on their own (some people would object that training wheels just enable dependence, and you should throw them in the pool, to mix a few more metaphors into the cocktail).

It really does work, I've seen it with my own eyes, and then you should see these kids - the ones who haven't been made cynical - take right off on the power of self-esteem and do things in other subjects they never thought they could do. And then they go off to college and the rest is history.

But of course, as a teacher of Chinese myself, where phonics has precisely no utility for the teaching of reading, it still was hard for me to credit this theorizing overly much, since first of all I knew that readers in English do rather more the same thing as readers in China do, than they do something elaborately different.

Readers in English, after a while, just see the words at a glance, and only "sound them out" if they're unfamiliar, and even that will only help if they're familiar with the word already, in its spoken form, or maybe if they recognize some roots, which we also drilled into those kids. But half the time the unfamiliar words are words that rarely do get spoken, and if you do dare to speak them you're pretty likely to embarrass yourself with the way that they come out, compared to educated listeners who might be listening.

Can you see where I'm going with this? I'd be really surprised if you could. I'd be shocked and awed and amazed, to tell you the truth, because I don't think I'm going where you're likely to think I'm going, about which I refer you back to my title.

In China absolutely everyone has to drill to learn to read, see, and it's not anything at all to do with phonics. If we didn't pretend in English - the least phonetic of the alphabetic languages, I'm pretty sure - that there was some arcane encoding whose mastery would provide the key to reading. If we were simply to drill the whole words as shapes, in other words, to everyone, then there wouldn't be any more dyslexia proper over here than there can be in China.

Of course, some would catch on more quickly than others, and all of them would be inventing little private rules to remember how to distinguish this shape from that, and learning roots - root shapes which show up in lots of words -  would help, just as in Chinese, and learning the phonetic history of subcomponents of the overall written word would also provide clues to which word is which, according to familiar sounds from the spoken language, just like in Chinese. And some students would get it more quickly than others, but all of them would likely learn to read, especially if learning to manipulate these symbols could make an actual difference in actual life.

Which might be almost but not completely enough to convince you that all the elaboration of schooling can possibly do is to disempower the learner from making the important discoveries on his own in a way to make them memorable and perhaps permanently useful, which might also be enough, but likely not, to convince you that analytic approaches to understanding, in school, can only get in the way of real usages out in life, where, if you're me anyhow, it's really hard to reverse predict, according to how well they do, how well people did in school.

Yeah, sure, like with Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Einstein, it's easy to imagine that they could have done well if they'd had to, somehow, stick it out like the rest of us, or maybe if the schools were more enlightened about not alienating the geniuses, while still pretty much figuring that that whole equation doesn't count for the rest of us, except why not? Why doesn't it count for the rest of us?

The people I've worked with side by side can't be distinguished on the basis of their performance on the job according to how they might have done in school. In fact it's often the school-smart ones - and this can be evident not least because of the psychological chips they carry, which come off pretty much like a burden in the way of good performance - it's often the school-smart ones who sometimes get nearly nothing done at all in the way of "real world" production (I'm not being quite so hard on the term this time with my gesticulated quotes, although I probably should be).

So here's the other thing. The school I headed, which was a school for "gifted kids" (full on cynicism in the case of the finger gestures here, you might almost watch me flipping the bird toward and with and by those quotes) was probably the only properly vocational school on the planet; a planet where, I hardly need to elaborate, all schooling should and must and still could be if we were to give it half a chance, vocational. Which is simply another way to say that school should be more a part of life, and not so apart from life, if you catch my drift.

Because this school for the gifted was training kids who belonged in, and for the most part ended up in, the academy itself, which is bizarrely how we've let the rest of our schools get distorted almost beyond recognition, as if everyone should be going off to college in the first place. Or in the last place, come to think about it.

While we've meanwhile outsourced all non-academic jobs with dignity right out from under the kids and then expect them to want to go to school as if it could make a damned bit of difference for their non-intellectual work in some demeaning service-sector role, when what they're good at, manifestly, is working with their hands and making those connections between what is real and what is, until realized, something like "in the head" (another really bad metaphor I'm hoping to disabuse you of before eternity escapes us here).

I'm getting there, but I have a ways to go yet. Bear with me, if at all possible.

Now among the things that we pull out from under kids is that whatever they have been able to figure out for themselves is useless. That's the adult as authority, dessicated and sterile critic role of teachers in school. The wing-clipping, soul snuffing, grammarian bad-behavior chastising Miss Appropriate branch of schooling. Not to mention what they can do with their hands. Keep them where I can see them mutha fucka.

And, in school as in life, that action is justified because it's premised on a nice progressive pyramid of life and living, where middle school is higher than elementary (seems like by definition right there) and all the rest and then there are all sorts of gradations of quality. So, if kids are going to "get somewhere" pretty much on the model whereby art and science, unlike wine remember, have to keep moving from pre to post all the livelong time. Which is what graduation is all about, if you get the pun embedded there.

But there manifestly are some teachers who meet kids where they're at, and encourage them to build on what they already know for themselves in the first place, which is always at nearly the same level of elaboration, at each stage of development for each and every person who gets to be called a human no matter how elaborated you might want to make the distinctions between them. You know, in the range from 90, say, to 100.

There are only differences in nearness or distance from what gets sanctioned, and according to what needs to be unlearned, because it's naive, before the good stuff can fill it in. That's a powerful theory out there in the field of education, in case you didn't know, called something like, well, maybe "naive theory." No one's a blank slate, alas or hallelujah depending on your point of view.

Now sure some kids don't have a very elaborated world view, and some have crazy notions in their heads, just like some adults do, and I would mention Sarah Palin just for a good example, but we'll come back to her later, I promise, if not here then in some subsequent diatribe still to come.

Some just haven't been exposed to very much at all. Some might be limited, but I would say that if you can carry on a conversation at all, you get to count as having a world view of, almost by definition, approximately the same level of elaboration as the next guy's. No matter what the predictors might be of the next guys getting farther ahead than you will, and there's a whole range of predictors only a few of which are related to intellectual energy. Some of which are even related to such morally repugnant things as ability to believe a lie right to your very own face. The way politicians and lawyers and corporate shills seem so good at, but I don't want to digress in that particualar direction, and no I'm not saying Sarah Palin's a psychopath. Far from it.

But anyhow, let's say the schools were to do simpler things, like drilling, and posing interesting problems for the students to solve, together or in some groups, and didn't worry so very much at all about over-elaborating before the students literally asked for it. And let's say we made the workplace safe, as we should be able to do, and let the kids get real-world rewards and not just grades for what they were able to contribute to the world of work, even if it were only filing or sorting, or doing things with their hands or bodies which adults were maybe less good at.

And lets also say that the adults might be encouraged to get back to school, so to speak, whenever they want, for the elaboration which analysis in school might be able to provide, and that there weren't such incredibly lopsided rewards for the rare talents of showmanship, hoodwinking, gaming, tricking, and other psychopathologies so well rewarded in the marketplace right now. This might actually happen if kids were empowered to read critically and not just to assume that someone writing and talking at them knows more than they do, you know, if school were reintegrated with life just a little bit more.

OK, so now here comes the fun part. I studied Chinese poetry in college - no really! - classical Chinese poetry for which I received a score, as is mandatory now, somewhere above 90, just like the cheap wine I afford myself. So, I learned not just how to read, and about how to read, but I also learned a few things about what reading means in Chinese, where poetry was rather more central to what gets meant by not just intellectual energy, but also political energy and even philosophical energy, using poesis here in the same sense that virtual shares a root if not a route with virtuous. Frigging political appointments were made on the basis of poetical prowess, which is not exactly something we'd ever consider. Round these parts.

Which really meant you had to be able to demonstrate not just your ability to read and to write, but your mastery, largely by rote, of the entire canon of literature before you, which included history, philosophy and all the rectified - I'm being literal here - words which had come tumbling down across the years toward you. The ones which had survived, as it were, the test of not just time, but something more like what it is they score when they score the wine bottle.

And, in Chinese poetics, the ability to read is the ability to know, and therefore what a reader reads for, in a great writer, is that writer's ability, you know, actually to read the world, which is based on having read all the other great words which came before. The world is not apart from the word, would be another way to say it. That's why they're always, these Chinese, writing directly on the face of the earth, even to the point of damning (sic) the three gorges, which we would never do. We would just foul them with graffiti and big box stores.

Which doesn't mean something metaphorical the way that you and I might mean it. It means literally to learn to see, in a way without which it's all noise. Talk about problematizing the process of learning to read!!

They're almost saying almost no-one sub-elite really knows how to freaking even see, never mind how to decipher symbols. The symbols are the easy part in other words, and it's the making sense of reality that really counts, but not making sense the way we mean making sense, analytically, by tearing things down to their constituent senses, so that we can control them, manipulate them, bring them to submission, which come to think of it is what we want in our politicians too. Not to mention scientists, and well, even writers, intentional fallacy be damned. Authors are supposed to be authorities, whereas, and I'm pretty sure I still have this right, the authority in the case of China is the handed down tradition itself, vetted, almost peer-review style, by the arrived body of scholars who judge the supplicants' - during the course of grueling examinations - ability to read. Which gets demonstrated by ability to write.

Now here's the really fun part, where I'm going to lose you altogether, and you'll likely think that I'm just crazy, nuts, in loco non-mentis, but if you can learn to read, then the result is just like having actual authorial power over the world, the way you might if you're a hands-on engineer, descended from scientist descended from theorist, descended from God, which is a great chain of being so obvious that one shouldn't have to rehearse it so much all the time.

But, we're not so surprised, are we, when people who have deciphered the world can manipulate it also by what would seem magic were you not aware that there are actual principles according to which airplanes can fly, and coal can burn, and cars can go really really fast?

But we would be shocked and overwhelmed a bit if it were to turn out that the reality around us, once we learn to read, will actually afford us meaning as if it were conspiring, sort of, to make sense just for us, by virtue, poetic virtue if you will, or actual poesis, of what it is that we choose to attend to among all the noise.

Like, you know, it won't work at all for you to try to move a whole car with a two-by-four, nor to light a block of ice on fire. That would be just plain stupid. And it won't do, at all, to try to read numbers right off the face of things, and then add them up, which might make you a kind of numerologist charlatan, but isn't going to tell you a thing at all about how the world is ordered. And interpreting absolutely everything as though it were meant, by some sort of platonic-ideal-incarnate God, to mean something, just for you, perhaps in a world where nothing at all is just a plain co-incidence, well that would be just nuts.

It's you, the reader, rather, who creates the sense. I'll try to show you a few examples now, of how one might read the world, and you can decide if this is truth or fiction. If I'm making things up outright, or maybe just foregrounding some stuff and backgrounding other stuff, which might be different from the way you would do it, but that's just precisely the point now, isn't it?

OK, so at about this point, it starts getting too hard. Beyond me. Out of my reach, even though my reach exceeds my grasp by a long shot (or what's a meta for?). So I have to start telling stories, but they're, you know, true stories. You can actually read about them in the News if you want.

Like the time that the local wine and food society, which was hosted by my little school for gifted kids, decided to have a scotch taste, somewhat in my honor, since I was young and powerful (for my age) and probably affected a taste for scotch, which is embarrassing even to think about now, no to mention, literally, distasteful, like the way I used to smoke a pipe when I looked like kids who I see now out on the street who you'd just want to almost beat up if they were to affect something so affected. I lucked out. As Dad says, "I'm still alive." (I ain't touching those quotes)

But anyhow, these wine-tasters had palates far too well educated to risk destroying with something so rude as scotch, and so I took home practically a whole case of really really expensive single-malt, which would probably get me put in jail these days for graft or something.

That's not the funny part. The funny part was when the presenter, who for this group gets a speaker's podium, and is really nervous about saying something uninformed in front of this critical group. And I do mean critical, as in they will call one another horse's asses right to each other's face if one says "hint of chocolate" where there is no such thing.

This presenter explained how scotch must be mellowed, by law, for something like 12 years, and so when the world was all behaving like me, affecting a taste for scotch as a way in to power, on wall street or wherever, the big scotch labels had to gear up way ahead of time, and then suddenly (well not that suddenly) everyone started drinking wine as the way to show discernment, probably influenced by Orson Welles who turned out to be a loser anyhow, ironically enough.

So they had an oversupply of the ingredients - the single-malts - long thought to be too crude to drink alone, which were carefully blended to make the smooth stuff which bore the label and the high price. You can do this experiment at home if you're filthy rich or just lucky enough to have a charitable organization at your disposal for the rich to dispose of their disposable income on at the expense of the taxpayer, but we did it right there in school at that, supposed, wine tasting. Phew! We mixed the single-malts and proved to our ample satisfaction that no one of them, alone, was near so good as they were when brought together. Right there on deck we were concocting fool's gold which should have, but couldn't, sell for way way way more than each ingredient separately.

Which, apart from being a pretty good truing of the Emperor's New Clothes closet story, also makes a pretty good tale out of school about what's wrong in it. 

You might not see it yet, but then you probably mixed up the vehicle and the tenor when you watched Avatar too. You probably thought it was the cliched and hackneyed story which mattered, the Christ story, the Pocahontas story, the step into your coffin to come fully alive story. When it was only the "special" (FUCK YOU!) effects which you really had to read in the first place.

You probably missed that even though it was literally pounded into your head (I didn't say drilled, because only an idiot author would dis his audience, and I didn't want you to think I was talking dirty either). The point of that story was that it made the impossible real-seeming, so that you could go on participating in Empire, even though in your heart now, leaving the movie, you're practically dead set against it, Empire. Joke's on us.

You have to be able to read to be able to see stuff, and I'm afraid I mean that literally.

Then there was the fact, last night at a church auction, that I ran into the guy who took over that school for dyslexics, now retired, who looked like a private school head from central casting, which I never did, which is why I failed, or maybe, who knows? Maybe I did look like central casting sent me, which is why I was promoted to that top spot at which I was so freaking fraudulent that it would make anyone want or need to drink if he were put in that position.

Drink being - and this is a near perfect analogy which I very much would like you to hang on to - the flywheel which gets us from one percussive realization that we are not quite vacant at our centers to the next (I could have that one just inside out and backwards). Just precisely as there are no "real" (fuckme stiletto quotes again) particles in the physics we now believe in (so desperately, if you want to know the truth), so there is no there there at our center, and if we didn't have the drink with which we've, and again I'm being literal here, genetically co-evolved, we really wouldn't be able to make it over the pain of being outed as nothing but an object in the first place. It can be very functional, alcohol.

Which distinguishes it from drugs, for instance, which are meant to disappear the pain altogether, which is not the same as bridging the gap now is it, or pot which makes the intervals (although how would I know?) just expand to near infinity, in imitation of that thing we need to close our eyes and take a stiff drink to get over, like marriage, for instance; that thing which diminishes infinitely or infinitesimally, depending on how you want to look at it, down to near but not quite exactly, zero. Zeno. Newton, but then he was outright daft.

Anyhow, after the auction, we moved over to a restaurant a few doors down, and I'm not making this up, but it was in the same vicinity as that hostage situation a few days ago in Buffalo which you might have heard about. Where a guy left his bulletproof vest behind so that he could be shot by the police who he would shoot if they didn't shoot him. And they shot him, for which he must have been grateful since he couldn't do it for himself.

But anyhow, this was also the restaurant where a very, apparently, nice dishwasher about my age but not my description pulled a gun on the sous-chef, whose father, who I guess also worked there, thus and likely without even thinking leapt between the shooter and his son, and then, far more tragically for the father than the son, lived through four bullets and still couldn't prevent one from going right through him and killing his son.

OK, and so here's the thing, quite apart from the fact that you quite evidently really can't ever quite protect your very own children, you should recognize that what terror really is. A nullifying of that nothing which is at your center. And once you recognize it, the thing to do is just get over it, alright? I mean, you're not all that special. We all have that nothing at our center, and falling for some guy - and it really is always a guy - trying to convince you that he can show you the way to salvation from that nothing, to some super uber ommmmmmm state of transcendance if only you get the rote recitations right, is just giving over truth to power, and you should just tell him as well to get over himself. I mean if he's not holding a gun at you, in which case, if you get a chance, kick him really hard in the nuts and he might start paying attention to something else for long enough that you can run like hell.

But anyhow, back to the restaurant, and I don't feel very good about saying this out loud an in public, but it's pretty much all in the news anyhow, but I know the people, glancingly, who run the place, or rather I know their parents, who are well enough off, and I'm pretty sure would do anything this side of hell to protect their four children, three of whom are now working in that same place where the shooting happened.

Where we lingered, my after church-auction crowd, to watch a comedian recruited, and likely paid, to provide the draw for a benefit for some non-profit called "Stop the Violence" I think, and so how could we leave, really, when we were the bulk of the audience.

So up on stage came these gang-bangers, is how they identified themselves, and here we were this gang of whitebreads, all except me with their proper molls (which that gang-banger wouldn't know what I'm talking about although he got on by me talking about running trains with his dad, and I was thinking Lionel in the basement), and there was plenty of laughter, and frankly gratitude that we were there, because otherwise this one poor and really actually quite good comic would have been talking pretty much to himself and to the wait staff, which was not literally true, since there were a few other tables of black folk (OK, like one, plus a friend of the performer, who the performer said didn't count), but we were making all the noise, which was almost embarrassing and almost threw the guy off his rhythm, which I could feel and was worrying about, and apparently so were a few other people, but it never did erupt into violence, which right there is a cause for something approaching hope. And I've really got to hand it to the guy, both hands clapping, that he was able to keep up a show in the face of this. This diminutive almost non-existent crowd of mostly white folk.

There's lots more to tell, and you can draw your own conclusions. I had to fake out my friends, pretending that I was going to my car, so that I could walk home through the terrifying night, but they did a drive-by in the big crossover SUV pickup combination, which by itself is not evil, and so I got a lift after all. In the end.

Virtuous Reality

There's been a lot both in and on the news lately, about how virtual reality gets mixed in the mind, in memory, with what's really real. Those guys out in the American desert who fly the drones which cause the collateral damage in Pakistan, say, they get PTSD too. And we were all afraid that they were killing with impunity. I was.

There's also stuff about how brain scans reveal some cognitive response in some patients who had been thought virtually dead. Who had been supposed to be existing in a "persistent vegetative state" PVS gomers I think they must call them. And I can just hear the pro-lifers now spouting all sorts of I told you so-isms, for what is more likely an analog to the harmonic vibrations which can be generated one guitar to another.

Don't you think your interlocutor depends on you to raise the stakes of her being? Did you think that you could be conscious and alive all on your own? Are you that righteous?

The Intentional Fallacy, from back in the day when my teachers were studying literature, is when you suppose that the author, of a book, say, but you could as easily call it a life, has some point to make, some conclusion she's leading you toward, some accomplished state of mind that he would lead you to, also. As if the author weren't there reading along with you, rehearsing words which if they could take you they'd take him also, to that place of something seeming higher than where you'd started.

I've never talked with God, and I'm pretty sure I'd beg for the same good drugs they use over in Iraq to keep our soldiers killing if I ever heard him talking back. That would just flip me right out. Seriously.

God doesn't make nearly so good an interlocutor as you do, and you don't even exist (either?), but you know what I mean. It's just crazy to talk to God and expect an answer. Unless you know where and how to look, of course. But that would be like opening your mind or something, not exactly the strong suit of most religionists.

It's pretty scary to open your mind. Really. I've tried, and failed in every which way direction since Sunday. But I haven't given up yet. Just today, as I was perusing the front page of The Buffalo News on my phone as I am wont to do, there was this young seeming thug (not sure which part the seemingness belongs to) who had bragged about all his crimes up on Facebook. And the cops were crowing about how stupid he was and how easy he made their job. And the commentators were piling on. At least we're smarter and prettier than that guy.

And nobody can see that this guy was just crying out for love? It's scary, really to think that the whole world is not made up of sociopaths, psycho-killers, and that maybe nothing really terrible would happen if we were to leave our doors open, like the used to up in Canada, if you want to believe Michael Moore. I do. This guy didn't want to be so alone.

We can find virtual love on our phones, and virtual friends on Facebook, and can make the claim that shoot-em-ups in virtual reality don't do a bit of damage to our minds. And we can even keep ourselves virtual when in real touch with human beings who we just take advantage of for our pleasures. Ain't nothin' like the real thing, baby. As if the logo-wear could make us authentic?

I think I told you, right, that I went out - yeah it's pathetic, there was me and maybe one other person in the theater - to see Up in the Air the other day? I would have taken you, but I had other things on my mind. Anyhow, there's gorgeous and single (even I can see it) George Clooney whose Dad used to broadcast the news here in Buffalo, non sequitur, but I couldn't resist, playing himself down to the core. And there's this scared and snotty Cornellian (that's Ivy, right?) top of her class chick who's going to save the company all this money by replacing face to faces with telepresence. You know, telepresence, that better than reality you find yourself in on reality TV?

Of course, nobody's allowed to look even nearly as hot as George Clooney (even I can see that), who we envy mainly because he's such a whistle-while-you-work kind of guy even though he has absolutely nothing going on for him in real life. He fires people for a living, and they project all their hatred onto him. And still he goes on whistling, saving up the frequent flyer miles, hating when he has to be home, alone, in his vacant apartment.

I have a cousin who is severely schizophrenic (he won't be reading this, so it's OK) who calls me maybe once a week so we can recite a prayer together. I've got him in my friends and family list so I don't have to think about the minutes to the Verizon evil gods of communication gaming my limits. He was at the ice-breaking moment for drug remedies for schizophrenia, even written up in the New York Times in an article about his Ivy league savior. But I love my cousin, and don't mind saying the prayer with him, even though I've never been able to memorize it. It's nuts, you know one of those ". . . and for the sake of his sorrowful passion" things which can make you numb to any sense at all of what Jesus really might have been.

I have no idea if I do it for him or for me, you know, to assuage my guilt for not being there, presently, in his life. I confess that I have to keep my distance from crazy talkers, because they start to make sense to me, and then I get sucked a little bit into their paranoia, you know, whether it's about the Federal Reserve, the drugs that were administered to keep the secrets about the missing Kennedy or Nixon tapes, the Trade Towers being doped, the don't-walk-on-cracks metronymic mantras which have to be repeated or you'll lose your mind.

My cousin walks all over town - you've probably even seen him in your town - pretty deliberately, eyes ahead, almost no matter the weather. Yesterday I walked all the way downtown msyelf, probably looking like some crazy, all alone through the slush and I didn't even have proper footware. I don't have proper footware. I eschew proper footware. I think Nike's pretty evil.

But you know, it makes me happy, to see things that I never notice driving by; I like to experience the architecture from the ground as a real person might, and to get a sense of neighborhood. Of course, I'm utterly alone in this, which does make me a little strange, and if I were to do it every day, people might start to notice. I had a goal, though. I wanted to score some of that Sumatra they roast right there in the shop downtown. I was too embarrassed to tell them I walked the whole way for my pound of beans. I wasn't sure I'd make it back. But here I am. Fresh coffee is worth the walk. They sure don't have it in Starbucks, where they brag about "only three months". Give me a break!

The really sad part is that as you approach the center of Buffalo, you can't avoid the sense that you are in some ghost town. There are new buildings going up, but not so fast as grand older ones get mothballed. This area can have the highest hotel occupancy rate in the country because of cross-border shopping when the Canadian dollar buys so much more here than there, but even still the central hotels can't stay in business??!! Even while they're building new ones just a couple of streets over? Footsteps echo on the pedestrian mall. Stores are shuttered. It feels sad. It feels exactly like that ghost-town in Nevada somewhere that I found on my motorcycle running out of gas, which made it a pretty stupid diversion from the main road. I spent the night there, alone, not sure if I'd have to walk the long way back out in the morning along the dirt road to literally nowhere. Sorry, I didn't have to tell you about that. It just makes me sound weird.

And yet, if you follow the cars, which it seems don't even know how to stop anymore, which is a funny pun about Toyota I got right off the news, there's plenty of life and commerce all around. Just not at the center. Anymore.

I guess the problem now is that our cars just drive-by-wire, and so there's no real direct connection between your touch and what the car thinks you want it to do. All the other companies are doing emergency pre-emptive software "downloads" now to their drive-by-wire cars, to be sure that they don't get embarrassed the way that Toyota has been. And they talk of the electronic "content" of cars soon approaching something like 40% of what will be their costs. And we don't want to ride trains, where the cars are in physical contact with one another???? Because, what, we're afraid they might go off the rails every once in a while and kill some tiny fraction of what the cars do? Or that the engineer might be sexting?

We seem pretty math challenged in this country. Not understanding that if you multiply points of failure, failure pretty much becomes inevitable, ubiquitous, and certain. You could, instead, multiply the points of success, you know, by hanging back from taking advantage, by not always looking for that hundred dollar bill dropped from God, the way my cousin once found one.

Think of how much they (whoever they is) have to pay people now to sell their soul. I know you think it's just criminal how much more CEOs get paid now than the labor whose productivity has gone right through the roof. I know you think it's criminal how much more those Blackwater thugs get paid than our patriotic soldiers. I know you think its a travesty that some trailer trash might get rich on the Lottery and then just make his life worse because he doesn't know how to handle it. But consider how much value this all places on the soul that you haven't yet sold out yourself. The one in touch and real and undermedicated and not even thinking you ever could hear God's voice, even if you wanted to. I'm using "soul" metaphorically, in case you couldn't tell.

I think it's ours to turn around any which way we want to. The economy has finally caught up with reality. Virtually.

Oh, Hi There!

I almost forgot all about you. Sorry, but really as if I could! A Single Man has finally come to Buffalo, and yesterday I watched Up in the Air, and so I find myself a little bit busy, gentle anonymous reader. All these stories where I might find myself. Well, except for the gay, well dressed, and really good looking part.

But otherwise, they're all stories about my life, which is a pretty nifty thing for a filmmaker to be able to do, don't you think? To screen stories which can contain, however barely, for each and every person in their audience some essence of himself, projected.

Except for Avatar, but who wouldn't want to be able to live out the life of young and whole virility by virtue of jacked in feedback loops to something that much larger than your life? Who wouldn't want to enter that kind of Matrix, and live life as in a dream, instead of someplace where you, if you're not even from here, can't even quite imagine that life gets really lived.

We are that city, as metaphor inverted, Avatar made real, where the wordless part can be pointed at directly, and the words come more easily than the truth can be looked at; which can lead you near to understanding what it must be like to be the fat, say, or smelly person not even capable of love's pain, so buried is it, that pain, underneath worse pain. Because that capacity is reserved for beautiful people who graduated Ivy, poised, and who still credit those owners of copyright on their mind with opening it?

You branded me, and I shall never betray you, but who, in fact, is trapped beneath layers of authenticity? I long for you, anonymous lover, would that you were real. Thank goodness that I'm a non-sequitur man, and not burdened at all to be authentically me.

OK, gotta run. Sorry. I'll be back. I'm pretty sure.

Goodreads Review of Consider the Lobster

Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
As with other collections of this wondrous writer's essays, here we get a chance to watch as a supremely gifted writer and thinker works out the colossal conundrums of our time; and indeed of all time. These conundrums are colossal because, by definition therefore, they require some colossus to work them out. What right does David Foster Wallace have even to attempt it!? And what right did he have to take his own life? I'm asking the question seriously.

He self-consciously attempts things which are the province of more accomplished professionals in their fields. Literary criticism, political journalism, gourmet-level food evaluation, and most prominently for me, athletic accomplishment. Even while he may claim better credentials than you or me, he doesn't claim them as any basis for his writing.

His essay on athletic accomplishment inquires about the vacancy - one might call it vapidity, and I think he calls it something like that - of athletes writing about themselves. In this case, child tennis starlet Tracy Austin. He at once dismisses the notion that athletes might not have strong minds, as well as the notion that some ability to comment on their own experience of their accomplishment is any indication of its value.

DFW was himself an accomplished tennis player, but he confesses here that he never could achieve that emptiness of mind which allows his performance to be solid in the presence of an inhibiting crowd. It is precisely this ability to perform in the face of an adoring and thus defining crowd which is what is meant by a great athlete.

So, I said, advisedly, that we get to "watch" DFW work these conundrums out, which is, of course precisely what we're not allowed to do. We must, in fact, move right along with him as he leads us to the very spot which poses him the most trouble, and then we must do it right along with him, whatever it is he's doing. That right there is the performance art of writing.

He forces you to stumble among quirky footnotes, clumsy abbreviations, and idiosyncratic seeming-colloquialisms, which might just as well be DFW-isms at least half the time. And it is his genius to allow you to achieve such heights as you would be scared away from were you to even try to follow the more professional language of those authors whose fields he trespasses.

He seems to have mastered their language for you, and then he does precisely what Tracy Austin could never do; he translates the experience not into language which you can relate to. No, he actually takes you there yourself, as some sort of guide, and you feel that you never did have to read Tracy Austin's ghost-written memoir for instance, because you got to read it as she would have written it were she able to write.

Which means, of course, that you also got to read the literary critic if he knew how to write, which is a pretty funny thing to say, but still true. Or the gourmand, or the activist PETA crusader. I also did read DFW's recitation of the life of abstraction, in the guise of a short history of infinity, just in case you don't think he really can take you right to the heights, in that case, of mathematical thinking. Which he also, DFW, was pretty darned accomplished with, or at, or in, or by, himself.

I suppose that what he couldn't do, then, was to do for himself - in the same way that Tracy Austin couldn't do it for herself - that thing which gives us a glimpse of what it must be like to be David Foster Wallace. And, he didn't have the fulsome sense of self as did, say John Malkovich, being him. But it still pisses me off that he didn't ask my - the readers' - permission before, well, you know.

I think he thinks - thought - he could have used a little bit more of what Tracy Austin did have. Which is being OK with vapidity. Which, well, in the end, I guess he actually was. Let's be clear. It's our loss. And I think we should have read him better. Though there may have been nothing we could have done. As he himself tells us about the lobster. Whose pain we cannot know, explain it away though we will.

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Downsizing Fallacies

Youth, they say, is wasted on the young. I'm pretty sure that's why Viagra is one of the best selling products of all time. Is there data out there about if it's the men or the women who really want and demand the stuff? I mean for the men to use, since I guess women find it useful on themselves too, off label. Anyhow, it, sort of, levels the playing field between old and young, right?

And, well, the trouble with level playing fields is that they presume some such thing as fair competition. The desire for a level playing field pretty much presumes your outrage - you the fandom - if someone on the field is doping. But they handicap sailboat races, to rule out the hardware differences, so that the skills and talents of the sailors are the thing that gets tested.

As far as I can tell from the comments I get here, the only people who read this, or likely any other thing up on the web are the folks who would pander Viagra, Cialis, porn, internet ponzi schemes, that kind of thing. Or are they just bots? Yeah, I guess they are just automated commentator machines, pretty much like the talking heads on TV now that I think about it. There doesn't really need to be any intelligence behind them, because we'd be shocked right off our butts if they were to say something unexpected. Anyhow, it's a pain in the butt every day to have to remove them all. Like barnacles growing on my hull, these comments keep appearing.

For lots of sports, if we were to handicap the players according to past performance, that might eliminate the outrage about the doping, but the trouble is that for most contests, it's both the physical conditioning and the ability to drive that body which is in the game.

Of course, who's doing the driving anyhow? Can you drive you? Physical conditioning presumes a kind of dedication that you and I don't have. We wouldn't even get started if we didn't have the skill. So, there's a kind of feedback loop which goes way back to some start, and in the end we, the fans, enjoy watching contests among the very best. Handicapping them would make the whole thing really frustrating to watch, don't you think?

Wednesday afternoon sailboat races among handicapped boats are probably more fun for the racers, who pretty much know where they stand, than they would be for any audience. Audiences require some clear and present contest, and not one in their mind. You need to be able to see, like in a Nascar race, which car is ahead of which. And it just blows the whole thing if it turns out that one of the cars was hiding some secret supercharger. Some horse had gotten an injection. Some stone was stuck into the horseshoe. Or some Madoff was, you know, making off.

So, we apply these terms to the economy, guessing, I guess, that we've borrowed them from the way that evolution works - survival of the fittest. It's capitalism's best apology. But as everybody knows who's ever watched some apes (Have you ever watched apes? I sure haven't, but I've read about such things), while the alpha male is pounding his chest, the rest of the guys are acting, well, depressed. Kind of like the way that school kids act once they learn that they're out of the contest.

There's this really hot woman driver now in Nascar, who I only know about because she's the spokesmodel for the company which sold me my domain name, Catalytic Narrative. She's an anomaly, right, since, generally speaking, we're used to seeing men behind those wheels. But how hot is that now, to see some woman driving the fastest cars, and I've gotta say, she's really truly hot. Hot wheels.

Kinda gets your motor going. But we wouldn't expect to see her driving her actual body against the men in, say football. Or to be even a little bit less grotesque, we'd be awfully surprised to see her playing soccer, or even running against the men, and if we did, she'd pretty much look like a man, and then we'd accuse her of secretly being a man. You know the drill. She'd only get to be hot metaphorically.

Now, at the deepest level of the secrets we may hide - and you've gotta admit that this is interesting at least metaphorically - is our DNA. Our genes. As if those might be the only proof of whether or not we are cheating. It's how rapists prove they didn't do it, but also how competitors of any kind can prove their gender. And it's that same secret code which drives the survival of the fittest.

Of course, it turns out that on the fringes (and you know I'm really only intersted in the fringes) things are never quite as clear as you'd wish. There are children born with ambiguous genitalia, and even if they aren't there is the subjective experience of being a man, say, or more likely a woman when you're genetically not, and all sorts of experiences in between. I guess the fandom hopes that these folks will just stay out of the competition, so that things can remain black and white and simple. But then there are those people who combine two complete and distinct set of genes within a single body. A kind of milkshake twin, which divided and then recombined during gestation, so that the person could, you know if he were to want to, get away with murder, say. Or skip a paternity rap.

My equipment doesn't work so well as it once did. You know, I have to jot more things down, take my time, eat differently and all the rest if I don't want to accentuate more than necessary the comparative consequences of getting old. The hair, well forget about the hair, and pretty much forget about athletic competitions, unless it's in some "master's" group. I won't even mention the unmentionable stuff.

But at least my body's no longer driving me. Well, OK, that's just not true, since every once in a while my body seems to take me to the emergency room for something I could easily have gotten away with in my youth. But in my youth, I was only focused, you know, on that one big charge of taking things right to the edge, and still it was never good enough.

OK, sure I still like to take things right to the edge. I live on the edge, right? In that liminal zone where all the evolution actually does take place. Except that I'm white and well capitalized, socially if not financially, and still have pretty good job prospects, which kind of eliminates any edginess to me.

See, that's the thing. Most people focus their attention on what they're afraid to lose. After twenty-something, you've lost the contest for the alpha spot, and so you settle on some specialty where you can shine a bit, or you set your sights within your rank and you compete for self-esteem right there where you, well, belong.

I do have to wonder, though, if there's a different kind of contest possible. No, I mean I really have to. I'm not getting any younger, after all, and there must come a point where the Viagra or pump implants or whatever people do just hurt way more than they would be worth. Like that guy who looks like an old head photoshopped to a younger body, but apparently isn't, except that why would he want to torture himself like that? I just wonder. Is he still cruising bars at his age? Would he be welcome among the competition?

At a certain point, you turn away from the game toward other pursuits. Your contest might be with yourself, for instance, so that when things come at you from directions you might not necessarily approve of, you test, first, your ego, to see if you might be blocking out whole aspects of reality. You might learn to try things on, what they call "ideas" (a ridiculous notion if ever there was one), for instance, to see if they might work better than the old habits you've grown used to.

Young people supposedly have the advantage here too, right? They can be more frivolous, fun-loving, experimental, and have so much less to lose. Which is funny when you think about it, since the old guy has already, by definition, lost. So, why not get a little frivolous? It's not like you've got any genes in the game anymore.  You've lost your energy to raise kids anyhow. I mean it's no mistake that they're handing out the food in Haiti to the women now, since the men all want to fight about it, taking care of their loved ones. But age can be as big a cure as gender.

So, what could it be then, to replace the dog-eat-dog competition which drives our marketplace? What could be the compensation in old age, for what you had in youth? Especially if you've jettisoned all the fruits of youthful competitive winnings. No wife, the kids live with their Mom, no retirement account. Some insurance against the ever-increasing likelihood of death, disease and accident. You were at least that careful. That careful, at least.

Apart from facility with words, which even there, is a contest which goes to youth. Because they're the only ones without a big investment in the contest as it used to be played, and so they can innovate, and push the novel, say to new limits. Do surprising things with words. No one ever wrote anything great who didn't accomplish it before, say, 28. No one ever made any great discoveries after that.

Which is a pretty broad kind of generalization, but it holds about as well as the mainstream against the fringes of sexual orientation, say, or the liklihood of women taking over football or even the sport of Nascar racing. It could happen, but the drive to compete seems to be a male dominated thing, no matter what the sports entitlement laws might try to do in recompense.

Or, wait, is that the thing then? That women want to compete just as badly as men do, but have always been knocked out of the competition because of man-made expectations? Could be!

We're only ever watching for the point. The winner. The one out front. The conclusion (I'll bet you just can't wait!). But there's an awful lot which must go on in the pit, at the training table, strategically jockeying for position in advance of the final sprint; the final charge to the finish.

And most of these contests still require some sort of stimulus-response. There is no audience. There is only one another, and mostly you're glad to be out of the limelight, since there's so damned much pressure there. So much expectation to perform. I doubt a watchmaker wants to do his work on a deadline. I doubt a painter does either.

And even in the field of evolution, I still wonder if we're paying attention to the wrong thing. Since it's the matings on the fringes which really change the game for eternity. The ones which cross the species boundary, for instance, or push the limits of what might be attractive. That's what Alfred Kinsey was exploring, taking a detour from his study of wasps. Having made his case there that there're no such things as "Ideal Types". The ones in the center supposedly duking it out for point.

I guess what that might mean is that the ones in the center, fighting for reproductive prominence (that's the fact, after all), get to champion the species as it is but have almost nothing to say about the species as it will become. As it will evolve. That gets accomplished on the fringes, metaphorically, or analogically, or whatever, the way that the geeks and nerds have suddenly moved into reproductive advantage once they could buy their Porsches just like the hardbodies always could. Or, well, you get rich, and then you get the Porsche and it won't matter how hard you are. You get the idea.

And there's even expensive stylin' wardrobes, you know, glasses and bling, designed to move the erstwhile geek to center stage. Some of it even celebrates what once got called "gay." Which might even have some influence, in the end, over what gets to be called an epithet. Driving home a point here.

So, the pit crew moves in a different direction now than it once did, and style defines a different alpha. But you know, I'm just not that certain that the contests which count are the ones which generate the most enthusiasm. (Did I really miss the Super Bowl again?! I hate to miss those commercials). The contests which count might always be the ones which take place on the fringes, off to the side, away from everybody's spotlight.

And I'm just not sure it's the apes we want to, um, ape, you know? Why should we make them our model, especially since it seems we never really did "descend" from them. They're modern too, just on a different, parallel, path. What are those other human-like species, Jane Goodall? You know, the ones where love is shared. The Bonobos!

These guys are genetically closer to humans, and they engage in all that behavior we'd like to keep in our closet. A matriarchal society, there's lots of girl on girl, promiscuity, sex for resolving conflicts if not for having fun. I guess these guys are out of the closet enough now that you can name a pants company after them. Maybe Banana Republic - you know that place where I'm afraid to shop because it's so, well, um, gay . But I do, and there's nothing wrong with that - Maybe Banana Republic paved the way. OK, I'm probably too old for Banana Republic, sorry.

Bonobos in captivity act a lot like other apes, and a lot like humans. When humans are being inhuman. The males become aggressive and even kill one another. But even when they're not in captivity, the males can be aggressive to outsiders to protect their own community.

I'm no Bonobo expert, but it does seem that here's another metaphor. And I'm not advocating free love, quite, you know the way it gets practiced by the decadent nerds and geeks among us (slipping in a little slander there to distinguish myself as a proper mensch here). But it might be nice if we could come down a bit off the extremist competitions we stage for ourselves. The winner take all kind of stuff, which just accentuate who you're not when you're a loser.

That's the kind where even if you're really really Brangolina hot (did I spell that right?), you're still going to get old or at least go out of style, fat lips, and then you too could be made into an object, as if you weren't already, and be among the most unlikely to find abiding love. It's all about abiding love here, right? Well, at least between parent and child it is. Anyhow, I'm certainly not suggesting we should ape any apes, no matter how much nicer they are than we are.

It's just that we could stand to back off a bit about the ownership thing; the sex as mortally serious all the time thing, the performance thing, the hotter is always better thing. I get so tired of seeing lives ruined by people who get treated as objects. The real contest is not always the one with the biggest audience is all.

OK, that's pretty self-serving, but you know what I mean, right? There are other ways to organize our economy. Downsize this, make my day, because, you know, I never really did pin my identity on your logo. There! I feel better now.