I heard Tina Fey on Fresh Air today. She was talk­ing about a scene where her char­ac­ter Liz tries to con­vince a new writer, Abby, that she does­n’t have to use a baby voice to get ahead. “You can drop the sexy baby act. And you can use your real voice.”

“This is my real voice, and I this isn’t an act. I am sexy, baby. Get used to it.”

Tina goes on to to say, “That, to me, was what the sto­ry was about, that it’s just such a tan­gled-up issue, the way women present them­selves. Whether or not they choose to, you know, as I say, put their thumbs in their panties on the cov­er of Max­im. And the way women judge each oth­er back and forth for it. It’s a com­pli­cat­ed issue…”

She also men­tioned the dif­fi­cult reac­tion Olivia Munn had received for hav­ing sexy pub­lic­i­ty pho­tos tak­en for her work on The Dai­ly Show. “If she were kind of an aggres­sive, kind of heav­ier girl with a, you know, Le Tigre mus­tache, pos­ing in her under­pants, peo­ple would be like : That’s amaz­ing, good for you. But because she is very beau­ti­ful, peo­ple are like : That’s — you’re using that. It’s just a mess. We can’t fig­ure it out.”

This isn’t new. I’ve heard women com­plain for years about how their harsh­est crit­ics are oth­er women. My most recent ex-wife is beau­ti­ful in a strik­ing way, and more than once I’ve over­heard her friends swear at her under their breath when she walks in the room before giv­ing her a warm welcome.

Books have been writ­ten, stud­ies com­mis­sioned, class­es taught to explain this Janu­sian behav­ior in women. From the idea that some women have more testos­terone, which makes them more accept­ed by men and less tol­er­ant of a domes­tic life — and which makes them loathed by all the women who have more estro­gen — to the notion that the fem­i­nist rev­o­lu­tion was­n’t pow­er­ful enough to remain vital among women over time, which reminds me of col­lege lec­tures about how the Mex­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion petered out as it hit the jun­gles south of Oax­a­ca. What is in those jun­gles that makes it so hard for the ideals of fem­i­nism to take hold ? Shoe trees ? Rivers full of skin­ny water ? I nev­er real­ly bought these expla­na­tions, but I did­n’t have one of my own that was any better. 

But then the oth­er day I was catch­ing up with a friend who is a ter­rif­ic writer and a new mom. She was telling me about a younger male cowork­er who hits on her and who she believes needs help for his sex­u­al “addic­tion”. “It’s revolt­ing. He always talks about ‘bang­ing’ chicks. I always feel so bad for the girl in that equation.”

Absent­mind­ed­ly, I said some­thing like, “Unless she likes it, of course.”

“Non­sense. Any woman who claims to enjoy sex with­out hav­ing the goal of falling love is delu­sion­al and I can guar­an­tee you she was molested.”

I was pret­ty tak­en aback by that. There was­n’t much use in argu­ing the point since I’m not a woman and could­n’t prove to her sat­is­fac­tion that’s so wrong it’s com­i­cal. But lat­er that nigh it struck me how often my women friends explain their feel­ings about a sub­ject by speak­ing for all women.

“Hey do you want to go with me to the gun range and shoot some rounds,” I asked one of my women friends. She had nev­er done it before and had no inter­est, which was fine, but instead of say­ing no, she said, “I’m a girl. Girls don’t shoot guns for fun, David. That’s a part of the man-penis-indus­tri­al com­plex,” which I have to admit is a great line. 

Of course women shoot. Even some of her friends shoot, but she does­n’t real­ly acknowl­edge that, or she’ll make a qual­i­fi­ca­tion like, “Of course Kat­ri­na has a gun. She was car­jacked when she first moved to LA.” But that is an excep­tion that proves her rule. I could explain that the shoot­ing range is packed with women on their lunch break who like to let off a lit­tle steam, that shoot­ing a pis­tol is actu­al­ly ther­a­peu­tic and relax­ing. But there is no use in say­ing any­thing like that because there is noth­ing a man can say to con­vince a woman she does­n’t speak for all women.

When Oskar was a baby, I often took him with me on errands around town. I can’t remem­ber how many times I was stopped in the mar­ket or at the car wash by women who were con­vinced I was hold­ing him wrong or had swad­dled him incor­rect­ly. “How do you know?” I learned to ask, after hear­ing some­thing like that more than a dozen times.

“It’s a woman thing. We just know,” they’d say. Nev­er mind that I’ve been a father three times and have changed count­less dia­pers, can swad­dle in my sleep, and know how my sons like to be held so that they are calm and com­fort­able. Nev­er mind that I know many women who would find hold­ing an infant to be nerve wrack­ing and unpleasant.

I think why “it’s a com­pli­cat­ed issue” for women like Tina Fey is that women tend to assume all women are the same as they are.

Men don’t do that. A man will crit­i­cize oth­er men, but not because they aren’t like him. Instead, he’ll do it because he has an idea how all men should behave, includ­ing him­self ; more often than not, he’s hid­ing the fact that he isn’t liv­ing up that that ide­al. We aren’t sur­prised that the secret­ly gay Repub­li­can Con­gress­man is a man or that the abu­sive meth addict Priest is a man, because men are Janu­sian in a whole dif­fer­ent way.

What’s wrong with men is prob­a­bly far more tox­ic and dan­ger­ous than what’s wrong with women, but the fix is the same. Stop think­ing we know any­thing about any­body else oth­er than our own self. And even then don’t be too sure.

While Oskar was zoom­ing down the slopes this week­end, I spent a lot of time in the lodge. I am still wait­ing for a skin graft on the back of my left calf to heal, and until then, I can’t wear boots. So instead, I watched Oskar board, and when it got too cold I went into the lodge, and in the lodge I real­ized some things.The first thing is that ski­ing and snow­board­ing are a young man’s game. In three days I met a lot of peo­ple and the only per­son near my age was the 71 year old woman who worked in the Guest Rela­tions kiosk. Even the old­er non-ski­ing par­ents were younger than me by a decade. I’m not sure why. Yes, it’s an exer­tion to get up into the moun­tains, espe­cial­ly when you have to put chains on your car in 8° weath­er while your ten year old sits in the car and shiv­ers. Yes, it costs more mon­ey than you think. But there are maybe two or three times dur­ing a typ­i­cal day when the beau­ty and the qui­et of the world sneaks up on you. And that’s more than usu­al­ly hap­pens in a week back home. I can’t wait until next sea­son when I can be up there with my son and enjoy that frosty bliss.

The sec­ond thing is that noth­ing like that hap­pens in the lodge. Ever. Espe­cial­ly when there is a playlist of late 70s rock pumped every­where, indoors and out. I not­ed the fol­low­ing list of songs that played in one twen­ty minute stretch : ACD­C’s Back in Black, Athena by the Who, Heart­less by Heart, Freewill by Rush, and Stroke Me by Bil­ly Squier. Which is real­ly some­thing if you con­sid­er my first real­iza­tion above. None of the thou­sands of peo­ple on the moun­tain that day were around when that music was new or rel­e­vant. Why has that par­tic­u­lar era of sta­di­um rock ossi­fied into the sound­track of most ice sports ? But the lodge is a great place to drink bad cof­fee, to eat weird­ly deli­cious omelets, to lis­ten to pods of teenagers share sto­ries of sick rails and fucked up falls, and to read.

The last thing I real­ized is that I am sick of being lied to. What I read was Ben­jamin Schwarz’s “The Real Cuban Mis­sile Cri­sis” in The Atlantic Month­ly. I had heard some things over the years about how the truth was­n’t quite what we thought it is, but I nev­er thought it was seri­ous enough to war­rant a seri­ous look. I was wrong.

Schwarz’ arti­cle is a review of Shel­don Stern’s “The Cuban Mis­sile Cri­sis in Amer­i­can Mem­o­ry.” Stern has lis­tened to and stud­ied the Exec­u­tive Com­mit­tee tapes record­ed dur­ing the Cri­sis and he reveals that the cri­sis was as much a polit­i­cal cre­ation of the Kennedy broth­ers as it was a gen­uine threat from Khrushchev and the Sovi­ets. Khrushchev did­n’t decide to put ICBMs in Cuba out of the blue. The US had deployed Jupiter MRBMs in Turkey in 1961 aimed direct­ly at Moscow. We already had nuclear Thor mis­siles in Britain that could attack the Sovi­et Union. And in 1961, Kennedy launched the failed attempt to oust Cas­tro from Cuba known as the Bay of Pigs. The place­ment of the mis­siles in Cuba were a response to Kennedy’s aggres­sive pos­tures toward the Sovi­et Union and to our nuclear mis­siles in Turkey.

And while Kennedy’s Exec­u­tive Com­mit­tee under­stood this, we were made to see it much dif­fer­ent­ly. The Amer­i­can peo­ple were led to believe that Khrushchev act­ed spon­ta­neous­ly and uni­lat­er­al­ly in a way that threat­ened our coun­try and our exis­tence. While the mis­siles in Cuba looked bad, they were actu­al­ly less of a threat than the many SLBMs that the Sovi­ets had a hun­dred miles off our shores. And we had even more on our subs parked in the Atlantic and the Mediter­ranean. The mis­siles in Cuba would take hours to pre­pare to launch, while the sub-based mis­siles could be in the air and on their way to an Amer­i­can city before NORAD could respond.

Instead of nego­ti­at­ing a mis­sile trade (which Khrushchev him­self had sug­gest­ed, because he nev­er real­ly believed that his actions were any­thing more than a tit for tat move toward equi­lib­ri­um), Kennedy pre­sent­ed the Sovi­ets with an ulti­ma­tum that promised anni­hi­la­tion if the Cuban mis­siles were not removed.

I was born a few months before this all went down. I was a tiny Amer­i­can, voice­less and unaware that the world’s fate hung in the bal­ance. And I was­n’t the only one. Mil­lions of babies, chil­dren, and peo­ple all around the world were pawns in the hands of a hand­some mega­lo­ma­ni­ac and his less hand­some coun­ter­part. Great Britain, France, and oth­er coun­tries were dis­mayed that a nuclear show­down had occurred when it could have eas­i­ly been nego­ti­at­ed and resolved through nor­mal diplo­mat­ic channels.

Stern recounts how Kennedy even­tu­al­ly accept­ed the nego­ti­at­ed mis­sile trade, but he insist­ed it nev­er become pub­lic knowl­edge. His broth­er returned or destroyed all cor­re­spon­dence on the mat­ter in case it ever came back to bite him lat­er in his polit­i­cal career. Kennedy even kept it a secret from most of his cab­i­net and his Vice Pres­i­dent. He unnec­es­sar­i­ly drove us to the brink of nuclear war and then he cov­ered up his acqui­es­cence in order to appear like a bad ass — forc­ing the Sovi­ets to pull out or face destruction.

This is all bad enough, but Schwarz points out that this kind of blus­tery pos­tur­ing became the tem­plate for most of our impor­tant for­eign pol­i­cy over the next 50 years. Rea­gan and Bush espe­cial­ly are famous for their tough talk and unwill­ing­ness to nego­ti­ate for peace. It’s become axiomat­ic that in order for Amer­i­ca to be strong we have to be will­ing to go to the brink and nev­er back down. And that’s utter bull­shit. Kennedy did­n’t do that, but he nev­er allowed the truth to be revealed, and now his lies have put count­less more Amer­i­can lives either in dan­ger or in ear­ly graves.

When I was ten years old, the same age my son is now, I remem­ber my moth­er cry­ing as she watched Richard Nixon resign the Pres­i­den­cy in dis­grace. She was dis­traught because it was incon­ceiv­able to her that the Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States could be a liar. Let that sink in for a sec­ond. Thir­ty-eight years ago, peo­ple wept because they real­ized that the Pres­i­dent lied to them. That seems laugh­ably naïve now. But clear­ly I must have had a resid­ual flake of par­ti­san naiveté left some­where inside, because while I did­n’t cry, I def­i­nite­ly want­ed to yell and scream when I learned that our gold­en boy Pres­i­dent was just as impeach­able, if not more, than Tricky Dick Nixon.

I prob­a­bly should have yelled, because nobody would have heard me over the Tom Pet­ty song in the lodge.

I saw “Don’t Look Back” for the first time when I was going to school at Berke­ley. It was play­ing at the great old UC The­ater (the same place where Wern­er Her­zog ate his shoe) as a mid­night movie. I was liv­ing kind of far away from cam­pus (which can be said for every school I ever attend­ed) so I drove my car. I remem­ber leav­ing the the­ater with my nerves jan­gling and ideas fly­ing out of my eyes. I had seen ver­ité doc­u­men­taries before but noth­ing hit me like this one. And I loved the title, maybe even more than I loved the movie. Nico­las Roeg’s “Don’t Look Now” had a title that car­ried a dread­ful promise that the movie deliv­ered exquis­ite­ly. But “Don’t Look Back” was clean. Stop liv­ing in the past. There are no answers behind you. Just live. I could­n’t get those words out of my head. But why do I remem­ber this 25 years later ?

Well, because while dri­ving home after 2 in the morn­ing, I ran a red light and got a tick­et. This led to traf­fic school a month lat­er at the Sher­if­f’s sta­tion around the cor­ner from the the­ater on MLK Dri­ve. And I remem­ber that par­tic­u­lar monot­o­ny for two reasons.

First, I remem­ber the Sher­iff want­ed to kill time by ask­ing each of us what we did wrong to end up in traf­fic school and how each of the thir­ty or so peo­ple in the room made sure to explain that although they were cit­ed for this or that infrac­tion, they actu­al­ly did­n’t do it ; the Sher­iff did­n’t seem to find this hilar­i­ous, and when it was my turn, and I said “I ran a red light,” he asked me, “And.…?”

“That’s all. I did it.”

He rolled is eyes and said, “No shit.” I had thought he’d be impressed with my will­ing­ness to admit my guilt, but he clear­ly thought I was a dick for not play­ing the game. I did­n’t under­stand this at all then, but I can see his point now. After all my answer only burned 30 sec­onds of the 8 hour class. If I had lied and protest­ed my inno­cence it could have tak­en a full 3 min­utes — maybe more if some of my class­mates pre­tend­ed to not to under­stand my sto­ry and asked questions.

Sec­ond, a woman sit­ting next to me hand­ed me some home made brown­ies after the halfway break. Berke­ley. Brown­ies. You get it. I did­n’t, though, and by the end of the fifth hour, I was trip­ping balls. I kept try­ing to get her atten­tion to ask her what the hell ? But she had decid­ed to spend her wan­ing hours of san­i­ty doo­dling on the back of her hand. At that point I had nev­er tried any drug, and I’d been drunk exact­ly once. Now I was hal­lu­ci­nat­ing in the Sher­if­f’s Depart­ment. Plus I had to dri­ve home.…

I under­stand the con­tra­dic­tion here. I just wrote that I adopt­ed the phrase “Don’t look back” as a per­son­al cre­do, and here I am turned all the way around. But the truth is, I did­n’t real­ly adopt that idea so much as I real­ized I could use it to explain my already selec­tive memory.

I can remem­ber that film — Dylan putting up with and shut­ting down reporters, Dono­van, Baez, and syco­phants, Dylan tear­ing a hole through the silence at Roy­al Albert Hall — and I can remem­ber that late night tick­et and all that traf­fic school jazz. But I can­not remem­ber the names of any of the friends I made there, or the name of the kind and sad wid­ow who rent­ed a room to me. I can remem­ber spilling a buck­et of paint on her floor while prim­ing the trim. I can remem­ber watch­ing Mia­mi Vice with her one night when she was cry­ing, and I can remem­ber rid­ing in her Porsche as she raced through Oak­land where her hus­band used to work, but I can’t recall her name. I remem­ber my par­ents divorced that year, but I can’t remem­ber my reac­tion to the news. I remem­ber being crazy about a girl who did­n’t want to be with me any­more, but I can’t remem­ber why. And if I were to ask my fam­i­ly or friends (if I could recall their names) about that year, I’m sure they would have sto­ries of things I did or said that I will be news to me.

So it has always been easy to turn this strange mal­a­dy on its ear : “The past is done. The future is lat­er. What mat­ters is now.” Mem­o­ries are for chumps. Inter­nal­ize and get on with it. That kind of brag­gado­cio coa­lesced nice­ly with anoth­er cre­do I had grown fond of : bold­ness and igno­rance. You can slide through life pret­ty nice­ly like that for a few years, but soon­er or lat­er you will run up against some­thing clas­sic (betray­al, dis­ap­point­ment, fail­ure, loss, death, and so on )and just implode.

The thing is, Dylan nev­er said “Don’t look back,” in the film, nor did he ever, as far as I know, espouse liv­ing a life with­out ref­er­ence, all now and no then. In fact, I learned much lat­er that D.A. Pen­nebak­er took the title from base­ball leg­end Satchel Paige’s sixth rule for stay­ing young : “Don’t look back, because some­thing might be gain­ing on you.” The depen­dent clause will bite you in the ass every time.

And if you think about it, it’s bad advice. A very smart guy I know used to say that “it’s not enough to plan where you want to go. Check your mir­rors, because what you fear the most might not be ahead of you — it might be com­ing up from behind.”

That’s some­thing I’ve learned slow­ly, lat­er than I should have, but ear­ly enough to still do some good. Look back, I’d say, because some­thing is always gain­ing on you. At least that way, you stand a fight­ing chance of get­ting out of the way.

It’s the last few hours of 2012 here in Cal­i­for­nia, and I’ve got some res­o­lutin’ to do. I haven’t post­ed any­thing in over a month because I had begun to think of this as a port­fo­lio of (almost) fin­ished pieces. That is just intim­i­dat­ing enough to ensure I will nev­er write here again.

1. I resolve to treat this as the web hus­tle it deserves to be : good, bad, and hasty writ­ing will co-min­gle. Quan­ti­ty is qual­i­ty here at the dog.

2. I will bus­tle 3 times a week. Let’s see how quick­ly that goes south. But it might not. I have also been keep­ing a jour­nal, and late­ly my entries are ten to fif­teen pages each. I find that writ­ing is the best way to write more.

3. I resolve to be a work­ing writer again. It’s tak­en most of a year for my fac­ul­ties and my ener­gy to bub­ble up to the sur­face again after all my super fun crap­pums of the past decade. Five years ago, I was­n’t able to hold a thought long enough to write it down. A year ago, I was micro-nap­ping so furi­ous­ly that I could­n’t fin­ish a para­graph of even the most basic prose with­out hav­ing to come back to it sev­er­al times. Late­ly, I feel how I felt when I first began to real­ize I love to write : I’m myself. That’s the only way I’ve ever been able to tell that I am a writer, and that deeply grat­i­fy­ing sense of being where I belong has returned.

I am fifty years old and I am all promise and very lit­tle show to this point. It’s nasty to real­ize most peo­ple my age have either reached the zenith of their accom­plish­ments or are near­ly there. I can­not think about things like that if I want to do any­thing great. Don’t look back. But the truth is I am about to be seri­ous about my work for the first time in my life.

I am fifty years old, and I am fat. Not mid­dle-aged thick, not suck in your gut for pic­tures. I am Fat­ty d’Fat Fat, Lord Fatisi­mo of the Great and Wide Fat­ties. I am also male, most­ly white, most­ly Irish by way of the South, and I grew up a non-prac­tic­ing Epis­co­palian in the north­ern sub­urbs of Los Ange­les Coun­ty. Which makes me both obso­lete and redun­dant. I’m also part Venezue­lan, part Catholic, part Jew (how else can I explain my Irish Catholic pater­nal grand­moth­er’s maid­en name : Lowen­stein?), and part Mormon.

The Mor­mon part is of my own doing. I joined the Mor­mon church when I was 17, and I left the church 13 years lat­er. I say that I am still part Mor­mon not because of any ves­ti­gial beliefs I might be wag­ging behind me, but because my two sons Hunter and Noah were raised in the church. Hunter’s rejec­tion and Noah’s embrace of the faith are both part­ly results of my choic­es. When you are a father, no deci­sion you make can be unmade. I can play music mod­er­ate­ly well. I can­not whis­tle. I sing poor­ly, but I sing much bet­ter than I should because I have tried all my life. I wish I could sing bet­ter, but it’s a great plea­sure to hear Noah sing so well. Oskar sings too, and while Hunter nev­er sings in front of me, he whis­tles with a per­fect pitch and a gor­geous tone.

I love most sports but I cant play any oth­er than base­ball. I did not exer­cise what­so­ev­er until high school. As a result entropy and resis­tance to fit­ness are my nat­ur­al modes. But how­ev­er unlike­ly, I fell in love with bicy­cles when I was a kid. My first bike was a Peu­got 10 speed, some­thing like this :

My Scout troop went on a two day 100 mile ride, and inex­plic­a­bly, I smoked every­one else in my troop, includ­ing the adults. The sup­port truck had to find me and tell me to slow down. Con­tin­ue read­ing →

I hate every name that describes what I love. Cin­e­ma. Maybe it’s that final “ma” syl­la­ble (just like dra­ma) but I sound like a douche every time I try to use it seri­ous­ly. Plus it’s one of those names for inex­plic­a­ble things that comes through the util­i­ty door : the ear­li­est machines that both record­ed and pro­ject­ed the mov­ing images were called cin­e­matographs. Lat­er, the halls and the­aters where they were exhib­it­ed were referred to as cin­e­mas. And of course, the law of lin­guis­tic metas­ta­sis requires that even­tu­al­ly such a name will become the short­hand for the entire experience.

Film. Ugh. You can almost imag­ine where this one came from — “I loved watch­ing your mag­i­cal light show. But how did you con­jure it?”

“I ran a bunch of pho­tographs strung togeth­er fast enough to cre­ate the illu­sion of motion.”

“Hot shit. But how did you get it on the wall ? I thought pho­tographs were opaque.”

“Yup­pers. Instead of paper I used trans­par­ent cel­lu­loid with a thin film of sil­ver emul­sion that allows images to be pro­ject­ed with a light source.”

“What the…? You made mag­ic with a film?”

“Okay, sure.”

“Sick. Got any films with asso­cia­tive dialec­ti­cal mon­tages that resem­ble Marxist/Hegelian philoso­phies enough to claim a new rev­o­lu­tion­ary art form ? Or, if not, any films with naked girls?”

“I’ll check.”

Using the word film to describe the art form is like call­ing nov­els pages or paint­ings can­vas­es. And film­mak­er ? Even the teenagers mak­ing lattes at Star­bucks have cool­er names than that. Then there’s the word I use the most : movies. It’s corny and grace­less, and it cre­ates a false dif­fer­ence between films and movies. But the one thing it has going for it is accu­ra­cy. As Dieter said to Eddie Mun­ster on Sprock­ets, “Susan Son­tag said that cin­e­ma lies at 24 frames a sec­ond, Eddie. Any com­ments?” Movies are still images sep­a­rat­ed by dark­ness, mov­ing fast enough to fool the brain into per­ceiv­ing motion. Does it mat­ter ? Prob­a­bly not.

Except wait, it does. Con­tin­ue read­ing →

This is an essay I read years ago in Harper’s Mag­a­zine. It’s hard to find now, but I kept it online. Our cul­ture val­ues orga­ni­za­tion, effi­cien­cy, pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, and hard work. This essay speaks to that sad condition.

QUITTING THE PAINT FACTORY

On the virtues of idleness

By Mark Slouka

Harper’s Mag­a­zine – Novem­ber 2004 issue

I dis­trust the per­pet­u­al­ly busy ; always have. The fre­net­ic ones spin­ning in tight lit­tle cir­cles like poi­soned rats. The slow­er ones, grind­ing away their fourscore and ten in right­eous­ness and pain. They are the soul-eaters.

When I was young, my par­ents read me Aesop’s fable of “The Ant and the Grasshop­per,” where­in, as every­one knows, the grasshop­per spends the sum­mer mak­ing music in the sun while the ant toils with his fel­low formi­ci­dae. Inevitably, win­ter comes, as win­ters will, and the grasshop­per, who has­n’t planned ahead and who does­n’t know what a 401K is, has run out of luck. When he shows up at the ants’ door, car­ry­ing his fid­dle, the ant asks him what he was doing all year : “I was singing, if you please,” the grasshop­per replies, or some­thing to that effect. “You were singing?” says the ant. “Well, then, go and sing.” And per­haps because I sensed, even then, that fate would some­day find me hold­ing a vio­lin or a man­u­script at the door of the ants, my anten­nae frozen and my hills over­due, I con­found­ed both Aesop and my well-mean­ing par­ents, and bore away the wrong moral. That sum­mer, many a wind­blown grasshop­per was saved from the pond, and many an anthill inun­dat­ed under the gold­en rain of my pee.

I was right.

In the life­time that has passed since Calvin Coolidge gave his speech to the Amer­i­can Soci­ety of News­pa­per Edi­tors in which he famous­ly pro­claimed that “the chief busi­ness of the Amer­i­can peo­ple is busi­ness,” the domin­ion of the ants has grown enor­mous­ly. Look about : The busi­ness of busi­ness is every­where and inescapable ; the song of the buy­ers and the sell­ers nev­er stops ; the term “worka­holic” has been fold­ed up and put away. We have no time for our friends or our fam­i­lies, no time to think or to make a meal. We’re mov­ing prod­uct, while the soul drowns like a cat in a well. (“I think that there is far too much work done in the world,” Bertrand Rus­sell observed in his famous 1932 essay “In Praise of Idle­ness,” adding that he hoped to “start a cam­paign to induce good young men to do noth­ing.” He failed. A year lat­er, Nation­al Social­ism, with its cult of work [think of all those bronzed young men in Leni Riefen­stahl’s Tri­umph of the Will throw­ing cord­wood to each oth­er in the sun], flared in Ger­many.) Con­tin­ue read­ing →

When I first was thrown up against the the inter­net, I was in grad­u­ate school at USC in 1993. Stu­dents were giv­en elec­tron­ic mail accounts, though none of us actu­al­ly used them. I rarely sent nor­mal mail, and I could­n’t under­stand how doing it dig­i­tal­ly would make it any more palat­able. I for­get the par­tic­u­lars, but there was also a way to access an ear­ly ver­sion of the Mosa­ic brows­er, but again, I don’t remem­ber much that you could do with it oth­er than access the depart­men­t’s phone num­bers and office hours. The 300 baud modem I had attached to my Mac Plus did­n’t add any juice to the idea.

I’ve nev­er been a futur­ist, because I think nest­ed with­in that idea is a sort of unbri­dled opti­mism, and that’s some­thing I’m more sus­pi­cious of than prone to, but I could dim­ly under­stand the promise smarter peo­ple saw in the dis­sem­i­na­tion of inter­net access. Peo­ple like me, writ­ers, artists, musi­cians, would no longer have to cre­ate in iso­la­tion. We would be able to con­nect with each oth­er ; work could become com­mon to all of us, and each per­son would become an author of every work, a sort of rhi­zoid amanuensis.

I do remem­ber one of the first web­sites I stum­bled across though. It was a col­lec­tion of vorarephil­ia fic­tion and art called some­thing like Swal­lowed by a Whale. I read sev­er­al sto­ries that all cen­tered around the extreme plea­sure of either swal­low­ing some­one whole or being swal­lowed whole by anoth­er. My mem­o­ry is famous­ly spot­ty, so for these sto­ries to be still so vivid today indi­cates how deeply they were scarred into my cor­tex. I did­n’t real­ize it at the time, but that was already the begin­ning of the end of the promise of the inter­net and the begin­ning of some­thing much more famil­iar and disappointing.

Today, I write alone, in iso­la­tion, some­times by hand, some­times on an old type­writer, or some­times with the wi-fi turned off — a fire­wall between me and the world — and the idea of oth­ers tak­ing my work and turn­ing it into some­thing com­mon to all sounds like a shit­ty smart­phone com­mer­cial. I’m not nos­tal­gic, and I’m not opti­mistic. I am how­ev­er, deter­mined to make what­ev­er is left of the inter­net work for what I want to do. This is the beginning.