Last week, a website that was brilliant in its simplicity made the rounds of a ton of my facebook friends, Shit Harper Did. Next to a coal sketch of Stephen Harper smiling creepily while cradling a freaked out kitten, is a generator of summaries of news articles describing the destructive, polarizing, alienating, and anti-democratic activities of the Harper Government™. Among the terrible things that appear is Harper sabotaging international talks on carbon emission reductions and climate change, cutting funding for scientific research while muzzling the ability of government-employed scientists to speak to the media about their work independently of party-controlled public relations officials. He has also doubled annual spending on prisons in a country with falling crime rates. His handling of the G8 and G20 meetings in summer 2010 was needlessly provocative, grossly expensive in direct spending and lost revenue, and ridiculously handled.
I was glad that after I posted this site, the number of reposts among my friends skyrocketed. To see the popularity of anti-Harper propaganda like this at first made me hopeful that he would be out of power within a few weeks. Then I thought about who my friends were.
That phrase is usually trotted out to disparage a group of people, but I mean it in a more literal sense. My friends were already against Stephen Harper. They never voted Conservative in the first place, and they certainly weren’t about to now. Apart from a few exceptions, my social circles tend to involve people who are already left-leaning. We’re academics in the humanities, artists, journalists, activists for unions and marijuana legalization, young people in the technology industries. We’re people who live in the centre of cities, many of us don’t own cars unless we have to for work purposes, and few of my friends have work that requires cars. Even most of the lawyers I know are most interested in labour, criminal, entertainment, and contract, or else they went to law school and decided never to be a lawyer. We are not the demographic that votes Stephen Harper.
This idea first started making sense to me when Rob Ford was elected mayor of Toronto. All my friends were amazed that Ford won with the massive share of the vote that he did. But when I looked at the district-by-district breakdown, it was plain what had happened: the centre of the city, split among several diverse and dynamic candidates, went in their various directions indicated by their diverse and dynamic personalities. All the suburbs went Ford. None of my friends knew anyone in the suburbs. Neither do I, apart from some of my students, who commute to school from their suburban homes. We ask ourselves questions like "How could anyone vote for Stephen Harper?" and expect to hear only confused rage and disgust, because we only ask it around our friends who never consider voting for Stephen Harper. The most productive way to ask this question is with genuine curiosity and respect towards someone who enthusiastically votes for Stephen Harper.
There’s no way our venting anger on the alleys of facebook or in Toronto’s gay district is ever going to change a single Conservative vote. And that’s a shame, because voicing rage against the stupid and bigoted activities of the Harper Government™ and receiving adulation and praise in return feels so wonderful. What will be utterly painful and wretched is to go out to ridings that are in close contests and campaign against the Conservative party in places like Ajax, Orleans in Ottawa, or Mississauga. You’ll have doors slammed in your face, Conservative party activists hurl abuse at you, and go home feeling demoralized and dejected every day. But if you want to change minds and actually achieve political goals, a requirement is talking articulately with people who don’t already agree with you.
I, meanwhile, will just write this blog post that I’ll link on facebook and entertain my friends who hate Stephen Harper and like to complain about him.
Showing posts with label Culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Culture. Show all posts
Monday, April 18, 2011
Friday, January 28, 2011
Universally Rejected
One element of what I love about the internet is that random pieces of hilarity like this show up, The Journal of Universal Rejection. It perfectly illustrates one of the silliest paradoxes of academic culture, while working on multiple levels, especially given the weird philosophy I’ve been working on.
So the first interpretation I’ll explore is the simple satire. Academic journals have a way of measuring their relative prestige that I find remarkably strange. A journal gains prestige based on how many submissions they reject. Now, there are other criteria of prestige, like the age of the journal, the number of articles it has published that became pivotal in the evolution of its field, the reputations of its editors or regular contributors. But the shorthand prestige marker is the sheer statistical likelihood (or lack thereof) of actually having your submitted essay accepted for publication. If a PhD candidate like me gets an essay published in a journal with a 75% rejection rate, an established (if snobbish) professor or colleague may dismiss it as a relatively unimportant venue. “Oh, you had a one in four chance. Anyone could have made that!” But if you make it into a journal with a 95% rejection rate, that garners much more prestige.
Of course, anyone who actually knows how statistics works knows that this reduction of a peer evaluation, editing, and selection process to a fraction (1/4, 1/20) is a hideous oversimplification of an extremely complex process. But in most conversation, even among the supposedly most educated members of the human population, this little number is all that matters.
Academics themselves often take the criteria of a high rejection rate for granted, I think just because they’ve been acculturated to the idea for so long. Like the best satire, the Journal of Universal Rejection takes this simple principle and carries it to its logical extreme, so we can see how stupid it really is for measuring the worthiness of a journal. If a higher rejection rate equals greater prestige, then the most prestigious possible journal will have the highest possible rejection rate: 100%. Literally no essay is good enough for its high standards.
We find this ridiculous, but the principle we’ve used to arrive at the ridiculous is taken for granted and makes perfect sense. If we’re as intelligent as we say we are, we re-evaluate just how useful for living is this principle that we’ve never bothered to question before. This is how satire can sometimes push us into ambitious and interesting philosophy.
As I thought about it this morning, The Journal of Universal Rejection also has some meaning for my own ideas about ethics based on singularity. One of the problems I face when trying to articulate this ethical point of view is that it seems to paralyze activity. It starts from a principle that’s arrived through an ontological investigation, an examination of how the world is. That principle is that every situation and every individual is a singularity, a unique body that differs at least in some degree from every other. The result is that any universal principle or proposition will be a generalization that misses some of the singular features of the bodies to which it applies. A proposition that applies to many bodies in common won’t take into account various differences among those bodies. If it did, then it wouldn’t be able to apply to all of them.
This means that any universal proposition can’t be necessarily valid: some difference among its members that the proposition doesn’t account for can create effects that render the proposition useless. To put it more poetically: Reality rebels against any attempt at unity. Or to put it more happily: Existence can surprise us at any time.
In order for a set of universal principles and propositions to hold, those rebellious features of reality have to be set aside. If the people who hold those universal principles and propositions want to maintain the widespread belief in the truth of their system, they have to convince people that these rebellious singularities do not in fact exist. The universal principle rejects the reality that surprises it. If enough of reality becomes surprising to the universal system that the rejections can no longer be ignored, then the system becomes ridiculous, like a government or corporation that denies reality.
Think of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad telling the United Nations that there are no homosexuals in Iran, or a British Petroleum executive telling Louisiana residents that there isn’t anything serious about Deepwater Horizon. These statements become ridiculous because reality has escaped their systems of universal propositions which tell us that the singularities we can plainly see cannot possibly exist.
From ontology to ethics to politics in four paragraphs. Would anyone try to say philosophy is useless now?
So the first interpretation I’ll explore is the simple satire. Academic journals have a way of measuring their relative prestige that I find remarkably strange. A journal gains prestige based on how many submissions they reject. Now, there are other criteria of prestige, like the age of the journal, the number of articles it has published that became pivotal in the evolution of its field, the reputations of its editors or regular contributors. But the shorthand prestige marker is the sheer statistical likelihood (or lack thereof) of actually having your submitted essay accepted for publication. If a PhD candidate like me gets an essay published in a journal with a 75% rejection rate, an established (if snobbish) professor or colleague may dismiss it as a relatively unimportant venue. “Oh, you had a one in four chance. Anyone could have made that!” But if you make it into a journal with a 95% rejection rate, that garners much more prestige.
Of course, anyone who actually knows how statistics works knows that this reduction of a peer evaluation, editing, and selection process to a fraction (1/4, 1/20) is a hideous oversimplification of an extremely complex process. But in most conversation, even among the supposedly most educated members of the human population, this little number is all that matters.
Academics themselves often take the criteria of a high rejection rate for granted, I think just because they’ve been acculturated to the idea for so long. Like the best satire, the Journal of Universal Rejection takes this simple principle and carries it to its logical extreme, so we can see how stupid it really is for measuring the worthiness of a journal. If a higher rejection rate equals greater prestige, then the most prestigious possible journal will have the highest possible rejection rate: 100%. Literally no essay is good enough for its high standards.
We find this ridiculous, but the principle we’ve used to arrive at the ridiculous is taken for granted and makes perfect sense. If we’re as intelligent as we say we are, we re-evaluate just how useful for living is this principle that we’ve never bothered to question before. This is how satire can sometimes push us into ambitious and interesting philosophy.
As I thought about it this morning, The Journal of Universal Rejection also has some meaning for my own ideas about ethics based on singularity. One of the problems I face when trying to articulate this ethical point of view is that it seems to paralyze activity. It starts from a principle that’s arrived through an ontological investigation, an examination of how the world is. That principle is that every situation and every individual is a singularity, a unique body that differs at least in some degree from every other. The result is that any universal principle or proposition will be a generalization that misses some of the singular features of the bodies to which it applies. A proposition that applies to many bodies in common won’t take into account various differences among those bodies. If it did, then it wouldn’t be able to apply to all of them.
This means that any universal proposition can’t be necessarily valid: some difference among its members that the proposition doesn’t account for can create effects that render the proposition useless. To put it more poetically: Reality rebels against any attempt at unity. Or to put it more happily: Existence can surprise us at any time.
In order for a set of universal principles and propositions to hold, those rebellious features of reality have to be set aside. If the people who hold those universal principles and propositions want to maintain the widespread belief in the truth of their system, they have to convince people that these rebellious singularities do not in fact exist. The universal principle rejects the reality that surprises it. If enough of reality becomes surprising to the universal system that the rejections can no longer be ignored, then the system becomes ridiculous, like a government or corporation that denies reality.
Think of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad telling the United Nations that there are no homosexuals in Iran, or a British Petroleum executive telling Louisiana residents that there isn’t anything serious about Deepwater Horizon. These statements become ridiculous because reality has escaped their systems of universal propositions which tell us that the singularities we can plainly see cannot possibly exist.
From ontology to ethics to politics in four paragraphs. Would anyone try to say philosophy is useless now?
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Switzerland Diary 4: Computers Exist, So Get Over It
About a month ago, I was talking to my friend Alanda for the first time in over a year. She was visiting her old friends still at McMaster philosophy after having moved to Barrie, gotten a teaching job at a college, and gotten married. One part of our conversation was about a new set of theories floating around educational circles about how to teach Millennials. This was a generation that had an entirely different perceptual understanding of computers, the internet, the temporal structure of the day. Millennials understood privacy, social interaction, how to behave in a classroom, how to learn, entirely differently than the generations before, because of their different relations to computer technology. She described them as a very alien society. It was then that, to her horror, I informed her that, having been born in 1983, I was a Millennial.
Normally, I don’t think this Millennial generational difference is that big a deal. But I saw some stuff at the Book Conference that made me think differently. The Book Conference had a different title when it began eight years ago, The Conference on the Future of the Book. The conference as I’ve come to know it in the last two years has covered many aspects of the phenomenon: literacy, education, book history, publishing business, the analysis of literature itself, intellectual and academic culture, and combinations and convergences of all these disciplines. But among them is a holdover from those early conferences: people who shook in their boots about the destruction of the book.
Their concerns were not Taliban-like anti-literacy movements, which exist and should be taken seriously and combatted. No, they were people scared of ebooks. Any new medium, like the electronic book, is going to have benefits and limitations. One advantage of ebooks is that they can be carried easily in large numbers. A library will be able to fit on an iPad. A limitation is the difficulty of controlling commerce in ebooks. They’ll be easy to download without financial recompense to the writer, so the economy of writers and books will have to change.
But I saw presentations and read essays about the popularization of ebooks that were conservative bordering on hysteria. I saw presentations that sought relevance for the physical book as a figure of fetishized pleasure, the turning of pages and the smell of ink deeply eroticized for the sake of preservation against the onslaught. I reviewed an essay for the journal that used Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts to villify the ebook as destructive of the individual human subject itself.
Every one of these people who were so afraid of ebooks was over thirty years old. They were all pre-Millennial, members of the generation less used to dealing with electronic media, generally less comfortable on the internet, those who find reading from a screen more difficult, an alienating process. It’s such a stupidly hysterical point of view that I can’t really take it seriously. It reminds me of those people who thought the advent of television would destroy cinema. But I’m not going to argue by analogy, because an analogy can be easily argued against: that’s A and B, but this is X and Y, with very different characters.
I still think this point of view, the defense of the paper book against the onslaught of electronic media, is utterly counter-productive to the best thinking on the topics of books and writing. The ebook is a different kind of medium for writing, one that is more mobile, easily distributed, copied, and stored. It will no more destroy literature and publishing than digital video has killed filmmaking. I think, like digital video, the ebook will offer a cheaper distribution method that will allow even more independent writers and presses to flourish, and encourage experimentation with literary techniques and tools. People who don’t understand this, because they’re too old and set in their ways to be comfortable with a new medium of artistic expression, should be quiet and let presentation slots at prestigious conferences go to creative people instead.
Normally, I don’t think this Millennial generational difference is that big a deal. But I saw some stuff at the Book Conference that made me think differently. The Book Conference had a different title when it began eight years ago, The Conference on the Future of the Book. The conference as I’ve come to know it in the last two years has covered many aspects of the phenomenon: literacy, education, book history, publishing business, the analysis of literature itself, intellectual and academic culture, and combinations and convergences of all these disciplines. But among them is a holdover from those early conferences: people who shook in their boots about the destruction of the book.
Their concerns were not Taliban-like anti-literacy movements, which exist and should be taken seriously and combatted. No, they were people scared of ebooks. Any new medium, like the electronic book, is going to have benefits and limitations. One advantage of ebooks is that they can be carried easily in large numbers. A library will be able to fit on an iPad. A limitation is the difficulty of controlling commerce in ebooks. They’ll be easy to download without financial recompense to the writer, so the economy of writers and books will have to change.
But I saw presentations and read essays about the popularization of ebooks that were conservative bordering on hysteria. I saw presentations that sought relevance for the physical book as a figure of fetishized pleasure, the turning of pages and the smell of ink deeply eroticized for the sake of preservation against the onslaught. I reviewed an essay for the journal that used Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts to villify the ebook as destructive of the individual human subject itself.
Every one of these people who were so afraid of ebooks was over thirty years old. They were all pre-Millennial, members of the generation less used to dealing with electronic media, generally less comfortable on the internet, those who find reading from a screen more difficult, an alienating process. It’s such a stupidly hysterical point of view that I can’t really take it seriously. It reminds me of those people who thought the advent of television would destroy cinema. But I’m not going to argue by analogy, because an analogy can be easily argued against: that’s A and B, but this is X and Y, with very different characters.
I still think this point of view, the defense of the paper book against the onslaught of electronic media, is utterly counter-productive to the best thinking on the topics of books and writing. The ebook is a different kind of medium for writing, one that is more mobile, easily distributed, copied, and stored. It will no more destroy literature and publishing than digital video has killed filmmaking. I think, like digital video, the ebook will offer a cheaper distribution method that will allow even more independent writers and presses to flourish, and encourage experimentation with literary techniques and tools. People who don’t understand this, because they’re too old and set in their ways to be comfortable with a new medium of artistic expression, should be quiet and let presentation slots at prestigious conferences go to creative people instead.
Monday, November 22, 2010
Switzerland Diary 1: Unreality Stuck in Time
So even though it’s been two weeks since I returned from Europe, I’ve only gotten the chance to write my experience of Switzerland now. I’m not exactly bound by the constant pressure for timeliness that the internet supposedly demands. My recollections will be slightly fragmentary, because there was no real narrative to my long weekend there. Honestly, it all seems a little surreal, in ways that I hope will become clear. I consider the fragments of my trip to be a reaction to the absurd punctuality of that country. I have never been on a walking tour of a city that ended precisely on time before I went to St Gallen, and I hope I never will again.
The punctuality of the place was quite unnerving to me, and the general perfection of the place was as well. I appreciate the beauty of the city and the country surrounding it, but it all seemed a little too perfect to be real. From my hotel window, I could see the entire city, as my building rested about halfway up a small mountain on the southern side of St Gallen. The entire city stretched out underneath me from my north-facing window. It honestly looked fake. I found it hard to believe that people actually lived there until I was actually in the thick of the city walking around downtown. It was as if the entire city was constructed as a film set, according to directions from a hack producer that consisted entirely of Swiss stereotypes.
The country was genuinely beautiful, however, and the people seemed very pleasant. One of the other graduate students presenting there was couch surfing with one of the locals. The couch’s owner had actually been to Canada, hiking in the Rockies. He was actually quite impressed by our mountain range, and one could consider it superior to the Alps in one important way. Hiking in the Alps, you’re always within sight of some cottage at the very least. The Canadian Rockies had mountain vistas and trails aesthetically equal to the Swiss Alps, but with the advantage that you were genuinely in the wilderness. Humanity in central Europe is inescapable.
There was one aspect of Swiss culture that did deeply disturb me, more than I thought it would, since I knew it existed going in. It’s one thing to think abstractly about culturally pervasive racism, but it’s another thing to see the posters and the physical behaviour of the people. In Zürich’s main train station, there were posters advocating the Yes side of another referendum to remove rights of legal immigrants who commit crimes in Switzerland. And the posters were of a sad-faced black sheep being angrily kicked over a border by a white sheep. My friend André, who comes from French-speaking Switzerland, described the people as not being “tender.” The word seems quite apt, implying a rigid, static, immovable quality to their hostility to foreigners, a congenital lack of empathy for the different.
The station itself was an amazing piece of architecture, an enormous stone framework for archways stretching at least three stories high from the indoor space alone. It was so open to outside breezes that it was no trouble to smoke in the station. The archways were the trains, and the pedestrians came in were so enormous that the station was more like a stone canopy, barely enclosed at all. Even inside, you were outside.
The punctuality of the place was quite unnerving to me, and the general perfection of the place was as well. I appreciate the beauty of the city and the country surrounding it, but it all seemed a little too perfect to be real. From my hotel window, I could see the entire city, as my building rested about halfway up a small mountain on the southern side of St Gallen. The entire city stretched out underneath me from my north-facing window. It honestly looked fake. I found it hard to believe that people actually lived there until I was actually in the thick of the city walking around downtown. It was as if the entire city was constructed as a film set, according to directions from a hack producer that consisted entirely of Swiss stereotypes.
The country was genuinely beautiful, however, and the people seemed very pleasant. One of the other graduate students presenting there was couch surfing with one of the locals. The couch’s owner had actually been to Canada, hiking in the Rockies. He was actually quite impressed by our mountain range, and one could consider it superior to the Alps in one important way. Hiking in the Alps, you’re always within sight of some cottage at the very least. The Canadian Rockies had mountain vistas and trails aesthetically equal to the Swiss Alps, but with the advantage that you were genuinely in the wilderness. Humanity in central Europe is inescapable.
There was one aspect of Swiss culture that did deeply disturb me, more than I thought it would, since I knew it existed going in. It’s one thing to think abstractly about culturally pervasive racism, but it’s another thing to see the posters and the physical behaviour of the people. In Zürich’s main train station, there were posters advocating the Yes side of another referendum to remove rights of legal immigrants who commit crimes in Switzerland. And the posters were of a sad-faced black sheep being angrily kicked over a border by a white sheep. My friend André, who comes from French-speaking Switzerland, described the people as not being “tender.” The word seems quite apt, implying a rigid, static, immovable quality to their hostility to foreigners, a congenital lack of empathy for the different.
The station itself was an amazing piece of architecture, an enormous stone framework for archways stretching at least three stories high from the indoor space alone. It was so open to outside breezes that it was no trouble to smoke in the station. The archways were the trains, and the pedestrians came in were so enormous that the station was more like a stone canopy, barely enclosed at all. Even inside, you were outside.
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
I Like It When People Feel Good About Themselves By Hitting Keyboards
In the past week or so, I’ve seen facebook statuses of some of my female friends that have confused me. “I like it in the closet.” “I like it on the back of my chair.” And so on. I knew there was some new meme creeping around, and when I did eventually discover what it was, I was even more disappointed than I had expected to be. I found out through this article, which I also discovered through a friend’s facebook link.
October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which means there are going to be commercials and memes telling me that breast cancer exists, and that it is a problem. I, and the vast majority of people, have known this for some time. But in the “I like it” meme, women are asked to change their status to say where they like to ‘leave their purse’ when they come home. The use of pronouns lets them feel naughty, as if they were talking about sexual intercourse (but not really, because that would be weird, wouldn’t it?). They send a message to a few of their friends explaining it, and the meme spreads, making lots of people aware of breast cancer.
Just when I think Christine O’Donnell or Bill Maher are the most disappointing features of Western humanity, this happens. As Stephanie Fusco explains in the linked article above, the only person who knows that the “I like it” status is actually about breast cancer is the writer of the status update. They have fallen for an increasingly common delusion of affluent Westerners with high-speed internet: thinking they can bring genuine social and political change with a status update or a tweet. They are deluded about their own significance in the world.
Before I go off on my major rant, Fusco mentions another terrible aspect of this meme: reinforcing moronic sexual mores. She, and her friend Amanda quoted in the article, say it better than I can.
“The whole idea that putting something so ‘provocative’ in your Facebook status will gain attention relies on the notion that women speaking openly about sex is both slutty and shocking. This may come across as feminist drivel, and I may be accused of having too many feelings, but it’s true. As my super-star feminist friend Amanda Judd explained, ‘This whole thing was really an exercise in using the associated shame of sluttiness to supposedly draw attention to a good cause. It wouldn’t have been provocative if slut shaming weren’t so big. So it was slutty, it was totally meant to be. Women were supposed to sacrifice their reputation for a moment to grab the attention of others.’”
Congratulations ladies, for your trip back to 1953.
And now for my own major point. I have long had a suspicion, which has since become a conclusion, that the most contemptible kind of activist today is the affluent white person who thinks they can make a difference to those worse off than they are. Isn’t this the basic principle of charity? Yes. Yes it is. But I’m talking about a very specific version of the principle of charity, which I think is perfectly exemplified by this “I like it” meme. An affluent person with no real problems in her life wants to make a difference to people who actually do have problems. She feels affinity with breast cancer as a cause because she’s a woman, and breast cancer is the most stereotypically feminized cancer in the world. Its ribbon is even a stereotypically feminized colour, pink. She is told about this meme with a message explaining it to her, feels slightly giddy because it’s also a sex joke, and posts the status.
Now she feels like she’s done something to help those less fortunate. Of course, she hasn’t. She’s just put a cryptic sex joke in her facebook status. But she knows exactly what the status update means. So, as her reasoning goes, ‘If I understand it, then its meaning was obvious.’ Of course, the meaning is only obvious to her because she was told explicitly what it means. To anyone, like myself, who hasn’t heard this explanation, this is just another confusing meme travelling around the internet. But the people updating their status this way get to feel good about themselves. They’ve done a good thing! Now pat yourself on the back, affluent little white person, while actual cancer research and treatment continues unhelped and unhindered by your complete lack of a contribution.
So much time and effort is wasted in the affluent West on protest campaigns like this that achieve nothing. The only thing that’s accomplished is that someone who normally does nothing to improve the world feels slightly better about themselves. Some of the people I know who joined the “I like it” meme are genuinely politically involved people, and actually work to correct injustices in the world. But I’ve seen many protests like this that exist solely to assuage the guilt of the affluent.
Another post will follow in the next week or so where I discuss what I think are the larger political and social trends revolving around the guilty feelings of the affluent and the decline of Europe and North America relative to China, India, and Brazil.
October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which means there are going to be commercials and memes telling me that breast cancer exists, and that it is a problem. I, and the vast majority of people, have known this for some time. But in the “I like it” meme, women are asked to change their status to say where they like to ‘leave their purse’ when they come home. The use of pronouns lets them feel naughty, as if they were talking about sexual intercourse (but not really, because that would be weird, wouldn’t it?). They send a message to a few of their friends explaining it, and the meme spreads, making lots of people aware of breast cancer.
Just when I think Christine O’Donnell or Bill Maher are the most disappointing features of Western humanity, this happens. As Stephanie Fusco explains in the linked article above, the only person who knows that the “I like it” status is actually about breast cancer is the writer of the status update. They have fallen for an increasingly common delusion of affluent Westerners with high-speed internet: thinking they can bring genuine social and political change with a status update or a tweet. They are deluded about their own significance in the world.
Before I go off on my major rant, Fusco mentions another terrible aspect of this meme: reinforcing moronic sexual mores. She, and her friend Amanda quoted in the article, say it better than I can.
“The whole idea that putting something so ‘provocative’ in your Facebook status will gain attention relies on the notion that women speaking openly about sex is both slutty and shocking. This may come across as feminist drivel, and I may be accused of having too many feelings, but it’s true. As my super-star feminist friend Amanda Judd explained, ‘This whole thing was really an exercise in using the associated shame of sluttiness to supposedly draw attention to a good cause. It wouldn’t have been provocative if slut shaming weren’t so big. So it was slutty, it was totally meant to be. Women were supposed to sacrifice their reputation for a moment to grab the attention of others.’”
Congratulations ladies, for your trip back to 1953.
And now for my own major point. I have long had a suspicion, which has since become a conclusion, that the most contemptible kind of activist today is the affluent white person who thinks they can make a difference to those worse off than they are. Isn’t this the basic principle of charity? Yes. Yes it is. But I’m talking about a very specific version of the principle of charity, which I think is perfectly exemplified by this “I like it” meme. An affluent person with no real problems in her life wants to make a difference to people who actually do have problems. She feels affinity with breast cancer as a cause because she’s a woman, and breast cancer is the most stereotypically feminized cancer in the world. Its ribbon is even a stereotypically feminized colour, pink. She is told about this meme with a message explaining it to her, feels slightly giddy because it’s also a sex joke, and posts the status.
Now she feels like she’s done something to help those less fortunate. Of course, she hasn’t. She’s just put a cryptic sex joke in her facebook status. But she knows exactly what the status update means. So, as her reasoning goes, ‘If I understand it, then its meaning was obvious.’ Of course, the meaning is only obvious to her because she was told explicitly what it means. To anyone, like myself, who hasn’t heard this explanation, this is just another confusing meme travelling around the internet. But the people updating their status this way get to feel good about themselves. They’ve done a good thing! Now pat yourself on the back, affluent little white person, while actual cancer research and treatment continues unhelped and unhindered by your complete lack of a contribution.
So much time and effort is wasted in the affluent West on protest campaigns like this that achieve nothing. The only thing that’s accomplished is that someone who normally does nothing to improve the world feels slightly better about themselves. Some of the people I know who joined the “I like it” meme are genuinely politically involved people, and actually work to correct injustices in the world. But I’ve seen many protests like this that exist solely to assuage the guilt of the affluent.
Another post will follow in the next week or so where I discuss what I think are the larger political and social trends revolving around the guilty feelings of the affluent and the decline of Europe and North America relative to China, India, and Brazil.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
A Better Expression of My Views on Sports Than I Could Write
It’s difficult sometimes for me to explain my hatred for the New York Yankees. It’s one of those principles that seems utter nonsense unless you already understand it. So it’s impossible to make anyone understand it. However, Joe Queenan of the New York Times does a very good job.
It all revolves around the smugness of the franchise: everyone hopes to win, but the Yankees (like the Dallas Cowboys, Duke University basketball, the LA Lakers, and Manchester United) expect to win. A team can go on a years-long winning streak, like the Green Bay Packers, or Chicago Bulls, and not necessarily have this smugness, the presumption of victory. Everyone has to work for victory, but these teams are still conscious of having to work for it, and that consciousness in a Bulls fan, Packers fan, or Blue Jays fan prevents smugness from developing.
Developing legions of insincere fans from all over the world also helps build that smugness. The Montreal Canadiens won almost every hockey game they ever played for decades (and even a few games that they weren’t even playing at all). But the paradigmatic Canadiens fan was still a Quebecois. But there is nothing more insufferable than a dedicated Yankees fan from Arizona or Paris.
Being a Canadian who likes baseball, we all converge morally on Toronto, because the Blue Jays are all we’ve got. Even when the Montreal Expos still existed, Toronto was really all we had. Being ten years old during the second world series victory in a row helped imprint the Blue Jays on my personality as something to which warm, fuzzy thoughts and feelings apply.
The most difficult thing about being a Blue Jays fan is that they’re in the toughest division in the entire sport. Every Blue Jays victory has to come with a Yankees, Red Sox, or Tampa Bay Rays loss. You shouldn’t count the Baltimore Orioles as a team, however, because a 1-11 record this season disqualifies them from that status. So not only have the Blue Jays become my only untainted expression of patriotism, but they are also my weapon against the itching smugness of the Yankees. They’re down to third in the division right now, but a 7-6 record is still good in the first two weeks of the season. The Jays keep above .500 win percentage, and maybe this could be the year we knock the Yankees out.
It all revolves around the smugness of the franchise: everyone hopes to win, but the Yankees (like the Dallas Cowboys, Duke University basketball, the LA Lakers, and Manchester United) expect to win. A team can go on a years-long winning streak, like the Green Bay Packers, or Chicago Bulls, and not necessarily have this smugness, the presumption of victory. Everyone has to work for victory, but these teams are still conscious of having to work for it, and that consciousness in a Bulls fan, Packers fan, or Blue Jays fan prevents smugness from developing.
Developing legions of insincere fans from all over the world also helps build that smugness. The Montreal Canadiens won almost every hockey game they ever played for decades (and even a few games that they weren’t even playing at all). But the paradigmatic Canadiens fan was still a Quebecois. But there is nothing more insufferable than a dedicated Yankees fan from Arizona or Paris.
Being a Canadian who likes baseball, we all converge morally on Toronto, because the Blue Jays are all we’ve got. Even when the Montreal Expos still existed, Toronto was really all we had. Being ten years old during the second world series victory in a row helped imprint the Blue Jays on my personality as something to which warm, fuzzy thoughts and feelings apply.
The most difficult thing about being a Blue Jays fan is that they’re in the toughest division in the entire sport. Every Blue Jays victory has to come with a Yankees, Red Sox, or Tampa Bay Rays loss. You shouldn’t count the Baltimore Orioles as a team, however, because a 1-11 record this season disqualifies them from that status. So not only have the Blue Jays become my only untainted expression of patriotism, but they are also my weapon against the itching smugness of the Yankees. They’re down to third in the division right now, but a 7-6 record is still good in the first two weeks of the season. The Jays keep above .500 win percentage, and maybe this could be the year we knock the Yankees out.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Philosophy as Critic and Creator
Again, Brian Leiter’s blog has informed me of an intriguing essay and a sticky problem that contemporary philosophers face: the perception among many in wider society that the problems of philosophy are irrelevant. This essay by Jason Stanley describes a typical philosopher’s problem of trying to make the issues around which his discipline revolves matter. Stanley describes philosophy as the target of a prevailing attitude in the humanities today that understanding the particularities of cultures are most important for human civilization. Philosophy concentrates on the ancient problems such as whether there is free will, the nature of rational agency, what constitutes evidence, what is the truth of existence? These are the eternal questions, the questions that would appear to make mere gossip of what Stanley calls “the anthropology of the other.”
Yet philosophy, as it is traditionally understood, is devalued by its fellow humanities disciplines precisely because it does not engage in this anthropology. Stanley describes philosophers who seek ways of writing that escape the traditional eternal questions (Friedrich Nietzsche, Slavoj Zizek, in my opinion John Dewey and Ludwig Wittgenstein also) as anti-philosophers. Stanley sees a role for philosophy in this new environment as one in its ancient Western tradition: the critic.
Often, people find themselves slipping into the dogmas of their cultural upbringings, their colloquial traditions, that which seems so obvious that it would never be questioned. Where this happens, the critical voice of philosopher turns, showing people by reasoned argument that they are straying from the truth through their mere anthropology. The job of the philosopher is to stand up for what is right and true, defending universal justice in the face of those who would say, “Ah, that’s not how we do things here,” sneaking abuse and violence under the banner of tolerant relativism. This relativism ends all discourse over right and wrong, which the philosopher, with his eye on the truth, can restore.
But I want to take this further. Stanley is mistaken to build an antagonism, an opposition, between the philosophy of the traditional eternal questions and the traditional critics of philosophy that tend to align with cultural studies and anthropology. The ideas they represent are only anti-philosophy insofar as ‘philosophy’ is understood as investigating the eternal, projects above merely cultural traditions, matters of absolute truth, unpolluted by facts of simple practicality.
To understand philosophy as a cultural tradition is not anti-philosophical, it is anti-necessitarian. I agree with Stanley about the importance of philosophical thinking as a critical, subversive activity. The biggest problem philosophy faces, I think, is its tendency to believe itself to have this priviledged role as the only path to reasoned certainty; its tendency to believe that the truth is unified, absolute, more pure than the cultural collisions described in mere anthropology.
John Ralston Saul gave a talk at McMaster University today on understanding Canada as having an important cultural tradition of embracing hybrids, multiple mutually inconsistent identities, continuing negotiation among neighbouring communities, and adaptation to changing conditions of life. He contrasted this attitude (which he associated with the traditions of the indigenous peoples of Canada and its first immigrants who implicitly picked up their ideas) with the European attitude that unity of identity, science, politics, ethnicity, territory, and truth is the only good way to run society.
From the very beginning of one’s education in philosophy, one is taught to unify one’s thinking, that inconsistency is a major problem in one’s thinking and identity, that you cannot be two things at once. Such inconsistencies and multiplicities are against the very nature of reason and truth itself. This is the kind of thinking that is dangerous, that brings adaptiveness and flexibility to an end. Convinced that what is true now is true at all times, one will run into severe problems when the nature of the world changes.
One rhetorical point Saul made was to bring up the condescending point about the technology of the indigenous peoples of the Canadian shield. “If these people were so intelligent, said the intelligensia of Europe, then why didn’t they develop such a simple technology as the wheel? Have you ever tried to use a wheeled vehicle of the nineteenth century to get through the wilderness of the Shield? You’d end up with a lot of broken wood very quickly.”
The point is that what is right and true for one land, region, culture, people, civilization, may not be right and true for another. This is not relativism, but adaptation. One can defend those abused by the powers of a foreign land, but not because you have access to an eternal ethical truth that holds sway over the contingent culture. The abused themselves know that they are abused, and if they ask for help, it must be given. A violent man may say that this is what we do here, but not for long once those to which violence is done rise up.
The philosophy that most intrigues me is the creation of new concepts and new ways of life for changing times, and the changing problems that come along with time. Philosophy is the branch of the humanities that deals with thought at its most abstract, but this is not superior because of the purity of the abstract. There is no absolute purity, only purity of some quality, abstractness being only one such quality. Thought at its most abstract is least restrained by our habits of daily thought, what we have become used to thinking is possible and impossible.
Maximizing freedom of thought in philosophical creativity lets us build ideas that can take us to weird, alien places. The world may change in an utterly unpredictable way one day. The more concepts we have at our disposal, the better we can approximate in our thinking and planning the strange new world where we now find ourselves. Philosophy can be our first foothold in a contingent, dangerous world.
Yet philosophy, as it is traditionally understood, is devalued by its fellow humanities disciplines precisely because it does not engage in this anthropology. Stanley describes philosophers who seek ways of writing that escape the traditional eternal questions (Friedrich Nietzsche, Slavoj Zizek, in my opinion John Dewey and Ludwig Wittgenstein also) as anti-philosophers. Stanley sees a role for philosophy in this new environment as one in its ancient Western tradition: the critic.
Often, people find themselves slipping into the dogmas of their cultural upbringings, their colloquial traditions, that which seems so obvious that it would never be questioned. Where this happens, the critical voice of philosopher turns, showing people by reasoned argument that they are straying from the truth through their mere anthropology. The job of the philosopher is to stand up for what is right and true, defending universal justice in the face of those who would say, “Ah, that’s not how we do things here,” sneaking abuse and violence under the banner of tolerant relativism. This relativism ends all discourse over right and wrong, which the philosopher, with his eye on the truth, can restore.
But I want to take this further. Stanley is mistaken to build an antagonism, an opposition, between the philosophy of the traditional eternal questions and the traditional critics of philosophy that tend to align with cultural studies and anthropology. The ideas they represent are only anti-philosophy insofar as ‘philosophy’ is understood as investigating the eternal, projects above merely cultural traditions, matters of absolute truth, unpolluted by facts of simple practicality.
To understand philosophy as a cultural tradition is not anti-philosophical, it is anti-necessitarian. I agree with Stanley about the importance of philosophical thinking as a critical, subversive activity. The biggest problem philosophy faces, I think, is its tendency to believe itself to have this priviledged role as the only path to reasoned certainty; its tendency to believe that the truth is unified, absolute, more pure than the cultural collisions described in mere anthropology.
John Ralston Saul gave a talk at McMaster University today on understanding Canada as having an important cultural tradition of embracing hybrids, multiple mutually inconsistent identities, continuing negotiation among neighbouring communities, and adaptation to changing conditions of life. He contrasted this attitude (which he associated with the traditions of the indigenous peoples of Canada and its first immigrants who implicitly picked up their ideas) with the European attitude that unity of identity, science, politics, ethnicity, territory, and truth is the only good way to run society.
From the very beginning of one’s education in philosophy, one is taught to unify one’s thinking, that inconsistency is a major problem in one’s thinking and identity, that you cannot be two things at once. Such inconsistencies and multiplicities are against the very nature of reason and truth itself. This is the kind of thinking that is dangerous, that brings adaptiveness and flexibility to an end. Convinced that what is true now is true at all times, one will run into severe problems when the nature of the world changes.
One rhetorical point Saul made was to bring up the condescending point about the technology of the indigenous peoples of the Canadian shield. “If these people were so intelligent, said the intelligensia of Europe, then why didn’t they develop such a simple technology as the wheel? Have you ever tried to use a wheeled vehicle of the nineteenth century to get through the wilderness of the Shield? You’d end up with a lot of broken wood very quickly.”
The point is that what is right and true for one land, region, culture, people, civilization, may not be right and true for another. This is not relativism, but adaptation. One can defend those abused by the powers of a foreign land, but not because you have access to an eternal ethical truth that holds sway over the contingent culture. The abused themselves know that they are abused, and if they ask for help, it must be given. A violent man may say that this is what we do here, but not for long once those to which violence is done rise up.
The philosophy that most intrigues me is the creation of new concepts and new ways of life for changing times, and the changing problems that come along with time. Philosophy is the branch of the humanities that deals with thought at its most abstract, but this is not superior because of the purity of the abstract. There is no absolute purity, only purity of some quality, abstractness being only one such quality. Thought at its most abstract is least restrained by our habits of daily thought, what we have become used to thinking is possible and impossible.
Maximizing freedom of thought in philosophical creativity lets us build ideas that can take us to weird, alien places. The world may change in an utterly unpredictable way one day. The more concepts we have at our disposal, the better we can approximate in our thinking and planning the strange new world where we now find ourselves. Philosophy can be our first foothold in a contingent, dangerous world.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Was This What Romans Felt Like, But With More Funny Cat Videos?
I read two articles today that gave me a very good sense of the national depression in the United States today. I don’t mean just the economic crisis, which is still just in recession territory. I mean the psychological and moral depression in the United States.
One explained a particularly strange investment: an insurance that will pay off if a country defaults on its national debt. Particularly, the article explained how counter-productive such an investment is when it’s held against the national debt of the United States. Because that country is so intimately integrated with the economies of so many other countries (particularly in terms of those countries which themselves have purchased large amounts of US debt), this actually would cause the entire global financial system to collapse.
Of course, under these conditions, no one could collect on this insurance, because there wouldn’t be any money left. And these insurance packages constitute a very small percentage of the total investment market. But the fact that they exist at all speaks to the amazing pessimism of contemporary Americans. What kind of people would even consider the possibilities of betting against their own country? Perhaps people who have become resigned to collapse.
The other article talked about a curious phenomenon in popular culture: the prominence of the Omega Male. We all know what an alpha male is: the muscular, dominating, soldier, jock, thunder lizard. And we can get an idea of what a beta male is: a nice guy who gets by, maybe a little on the bland side, the baxter, Jim Halpert. The omega male is the self-sabotager who whines about having been sabotaged, the loser, the stoner, the jerk. Referring specifically to Ben Stiller’s new movie Greenberg, he seems a holy fool, a pathetic figure played for laughs, but for whom a strange sympathy develops.
The omega male comes in many forms. The “Liberal Arts Layabout” is a failed artist or professional, becoming either bitter at the consciousness of their failure of retreating into a fantasy world. The “Mimbo” (thank you for this word, Elaine Benes) is a prettyboy without the intelligence even to direct his confidence towards some goal, or even to formulate some goal. The “Beer Guy” is a moron who has let himself relax into a pool of filth and Bud Lite. The “Game Boy” is the nerd who lacks the brains to make good use of his antisocial habits, the perpetual adolescent.
They are the figures of a society who has dropped out, archetypes of dominance who no longer have the capacity to control. Americans still have some measure of hope for the future, but this is a culture who has long equated success with domination, and that just isn’t possible anymore. Obama is probably a public figure who breaks most of these stereotypes of Greek-lettered men: intelligence, power, and charisma coupled with humility and respect.
But I still find something romantically strange about some of these failure figures. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been readind Don Quixote. Jason Schwartzman’s character in Bored to Death is described as a Liberal Arts Layabout Omega Male: a failed writer who enters a fantasy world to become a bumbling private detective after reading too many mystery novels. The parallel with Quixote is clear: our Don was a landed gentry of no note whatsoever until he read too many chivalric romance novels and took up a career as a knight errant, resurrecting through his own examples a golden age of justice that never before existed. I’m not saying Bored to Death is in the same league as one of the seminal works of Western literature. But there could be worse things to imitate, and far worse sources of material to steal.
The funny thing is that Don Quixote meets with a kind of success: he’s condescended towards throughout the first part of the two-part novel (I’m just under halfway through). But he demonstrates a kind of ethical striving that inspires a lot of the characters he encounters to improve their lives. He passes among quite a few people whose lives he plays a part in making better. He has an equal number of screw-ups, but the perfection he seeks is impossible. Perhaps this is the path of some of these noble loser figures, and dreams of better days gone by can resurrect that which never was.
One explained a particularly strange investment: an insurance that will pay off if a country defaults on its national debt. Particularly, the article explained how counter-productive such an investment is when it’s held against the national debt of the United States. Because that country is so intimately integrated with the economies of so many other countries (particularly in terms of those countries which themselves have purchased large amounts of US debt), this actually would cause the entire global financial system to collapse.
Of course, under these conditions, no one could collect on this insurance, because there wouldn’t be any money left. And these insurance packages constitute a very small percentage of the total investment market. But the fact that they exist at all speaks to the amazing pessimism of contemporary Americans. What kind of people would even consider the possibilities of betting against their own country? Perhaps people who have become resigned to collapse.
The other article talked about a curious phenomenon in popular culture: the prominence of the Omega Male. We all know what an alpha male is: the muscular, dominating, soldier, jock, thunder lizard. And we can get an idea of what a beta male is: a nice guy who gets by, maybe a little on the bland side, the baxter, Jim Halpert. The omega male is the self-sabotager who whines about having been sabotaged, the loser, the stoner, the jerk. Referring specifically to Ben Stiller’s new movie Greenberg, he seems a holy fool, a pathetic figure played for laughs, but for whom a strange sympathy develops.
The omega male comes in many forms. The “Liberal Arts Layabout” is a failed artist or professional, becoming either bitter at the consciousness of their failure of retreating into a fantasy world. The “Mimbo” (thank you for this word, Elaine Benes) is a prettyboy without the intelligence even to direct his confidence towards some goal, or even to formulate some goal. The “Beer Guy” is a moron who has let himself relax into a pool of filth and Bud Lite. The “Game Boy” is the nerd who lacks the brains to make good use of his antisocial habits, the perpetual adolescent.
They are the figures of a society who has dropped out, archetypes of dominance who no longer have the capacity to control. Americans still have some measure of hope for the future, but this is a culture who has long equated success with domination, and that just isn’t possible anymore. Obama is probably a public figure who breaks most of these stereotypes of Greek-lettered men: intelligence, power, and charisma coupled with humility and respect.
But I still find something romantically strange about some of these failure figures. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been readind Don Quixote. Jason Schwartzman’s character in Bored to Death is described as a Liberal Arts Layabout Omega Male: a failed writer who enters a fantasy world to become a bumbling private detective after reading too many mystery novels. The parallel with Quixote is clear: our Don was a landed gentry of no note whatsoever until he read too many chivalric romance novels and took up a career as a knight errant, resurrecting through his own examples a golden age of justice that never before existed. I’m not saying Bored to Death is in the same league as one of the seminal works of Western literature. But there could be worse things to imitate, and far worse sources of material to steal.
The funny thing is that Don Quixote meets with a kind of success: he’s condescended towards throughout the first part of the two-part novel (I’m just under halfway through). But he demonstrates a kind of ethical striving that inspires a lot of the characters he encounters to improve their lives. He passes among quite a few people whose lives he plays a part in making better. He has an equal number of screw-ups, but the perfection he seeks is impossible. Perhaps this is the path of some of these noble loser figures, and dreams of better days gone by can resurrect that which never was.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Wisdom Only Comes With the Falling of Dusk
I can now consider Lisa Moore to have officially made it, because she’s been reviewed in the New York Times. I first met her when I interviewed her for The Muse, either just before or just after she became writer-in-residence at Memorial University. I can’t quite remember the exact chronology. She filled the job incredibly well, becoming a popular fixture on campus and deeply integrated with the literature student community. I had given up on writing of my own when she was writer-in-residence, so I wasn’t really an active member of that scene. If I could go back now that I self-identify very differently, I don’t really know what would change. But this post isn’t about other possible worlds.
Her second book is called February, the story of a woman who has taken decades to deal with the traumatic death of her husband at sea. The Times article, by Sylvia Brownrigg, is a very positive review, and it looks like an intriguing book. But there’s an element of the story that the Times doesn’t notice, which is very important for understanding the particular resonance of the book. The book takes place in St John’s, and Brownrigg notes that the protagonist’s husband had died in the collapse of an ocean oil platform in a severe storm in the early 1980s, where none of the crew survived. To a typical New York Times reader, this is all you need to know, and you can appreciate the story for its craft and emotional power at the individual level just fine with this context. But if you’re from Newfoundland, once you know this, the story takes on a deeper, much more traumatic meaning. Because a Newfoundlander reading the description of the husband’s death knows immediately that it was The Ocean Ranger.
The impact of this incident can’t be underestimated. The closest analogue I can see for a more widely known event is difficult to find. The best example I could think of is that The Ocean Ranger is to Newfoundland what The World Trade Centre is to New York City. It’s the greatest single shock of national trauma which that society experienced, and national trauma is the best way to understand its social, cultural, and psychological impact. It was the climax of centuries of deadly terror inflicted on working people by the sea. I don’t want to explain it any more, because my words in a blog post won’t match the place this event has in Newfoundland’s national psyche.
Mindful of this, here is what I think Moore was trying to do. She’s trying to make a national catharsis, a work of art to process the inconceivable. It seems an indirect method, which is probably best, because of the magnitude of the event itself. I don’t know how well she pulls this off, because I haven’t yet read the book. But I admire the project, even while I remain ambivalent.
The particular role of national art in depicting and processing national trauma is important and fascinating, and remains incredibly difficult. An artist has to be very careful not to trivialize the event through the required particularity of a narrative. There also has to be enough distance in time that the event can be properly understood without the immediate pain intefering with thought. Her story takes it as a remove as well, since it’s more specifically about the mourning process for the Ocean Ranger, rather than the event itself. This can be effective, but also very dangerous. If her protagonist, Helen O’Mara, comes to stand too literally for the ‘People of Newfoundland,’ then Moore risks sliding into hokum. But it would only be hokum to someone already familiar with the trauma itself, only a Newfoundlander. This particular kind of hokum would be pretty much invisible to someone not from the island, such as a New York Times book reviewer. I think Moore has the talent to prevent this, but I’m going to have to read the book myself to see. When does it come out in softcover?
(Is this a sign that a national trauma has been overcome? When a citizen can ask when the first major attempt at artistic catharsis is coming out in softcover?)
Her second book is called February, the story of a woman who has taken decades to deal with the traumatic death of her husband at sea. The Times article, by Sylvia Brownrigg, is a very positive review, and it looks like an intriguing book. But there’s an element of the story that the Times doesn’t notice, which is very important for understanding the particular resonance of the book. The book takes place in St John’s, and Brownrigg notes that the protagonist’s husband had died in the collapse of an ocean oil platform in a severe storm in the early 1980s, where none of the crew survived. To a typical New York Times reader, this is all you need to know, and you can appreciate the story for its craft and emotional power at the individual level just fine with this context. But if you’re from Newfoundland, once you know this, the story takes on a deeper, much more traumatic meaning. Because a Newfoundlander reading the description of the husband’s death knows immediately that it was The Ocean Ranger.
The impact of this incident can’t be underestimated. The closest analogue I can see for a more widely known event is difficult to find. The best example I could think of is that The Ocean Ranger is to Newfoundland what The World Trade Centre is to New York City. It’s the greatest single shock of national trauma which that society experienced, and national trauma is the best way to understand its social, cultural, and psychological impact. It was the climax of centuries of deadly terror inflicted on working people by the sea. I don’t want to explain it any more, because my words in a blog post won’t match the place this event has in Newfoundland’s national psyche.
Mindful of this, here is what I think Moore was trying to do. She’s trying to make a national catharsis, a work of art to process the inconceivable. It seems an indirect method, which is probably best, because of the magnitude of the event itself. I don’t know how well she pulls this off, because I haven’t yet read the book. But I admire the project, even while I remain ambivalent.
The particular role of national art in depicting and processing national trauma is important and fascinating, and remains incredibly difficult. An artist has to be very careful not to trivialize the event through the required particularity of a narrative. There also has to be enough distance in time that the event can be properly understood without the immediate pain intefering with thought. Her story takes it as a remove as well, since it’s more specifically about the mourning process for the Ocean Ranger, rather than the event itself. This can be effective, but also very dangerous. If her protagonist, Helen O’Mara, comes to stand too literally for the ‘People of Newfoundland,’ then Moore risks sliding into hokum. But it would only be hokum to someone already familiar with the trauma itself, only a Newfoundlander. This particular kind of hokum would be pretty much invisible to someone not from the island, such as a New York Times book reviewer. I think Moore has the talent to prevent this, but I’m going to have to read the book myself to see. When does it come out in softcover?
(Is this a sign that a national trauma has been overcome? When a citizen can ask when the first major attempt at artistic catharsis is coming out in softcover?)
Thursday, January 28, 2010
What Kind of 91 Years Is Spent in So Much Anger?
So here’s my thing with J. D. Salinger. For me, it all started with how irritating Holden Caulfield was. His character development didn’t really matter, though understanding the character as an ironic commentary on the quest for sincerity alleviated this somewhat. Despite my detatched view of Holden, I can never avoid holding him in contempt myself. He has a vision of a perfect world, and then holds the world in absolute contempt because it won’t conform to his vision. And I can’t get past the stupendous immaturity of that worldview.
And also, there’s Mark David Chapman.
The reclusiveness of his life was a major irritant for me as well. Now, I’ve also become a big Thomas Pynchon fan, so you may ask about any hypocrisy between my love of Pynchon and my irritation by Salinger over the reclusiveness. There’s a difference between the two in their hiding. Pynchon isn’t belligerent about his reclusiveness. He lives in New York state like a normal person. He just isn’t photographed. I mean, Pynchon was on The Simpsons making fun of his own reclusiveness. His animated self was wearing a paper bag over his head standing next to a huge sign that directed you to his house, while he flagged people down on the highway to “Get your picture taken with a reclusive author!” Pynchon could joke about his hideaway along with you.
Salinger didn’t just hide in his house; he hid with a snarl of contempt for anyone who would even approach him. He refused to publish anything, despite it eventually becoming general knowledge that he was still working even while he lived off the substantial royalties still collected from Catcher. If it was perfectionism, it infested him to the point where it became almost pointless. Despite writing huge amounts, no one ever saw it, and there were doubts that anyone ever would.
Oh yeah, and Mark David Chapman.
This is the other, more sympathetic reason Salinger never published. From the very moment when Catcher was published, people sympathized with Holden Caulfield, to the point where they sincerely took on his contempt for the phony, for hypocrites, into their own lives. But they didn’t realize that the whole point of Holden’s character was to show the futility of a life that refuses to compromise with even the minor hypocrisies and inconsistencies that are necessary for life in the world. Now here were people taking Holden Caulfield of all people as a role model?
The worst of these worshipers of Holden, if we’re talking about consequences unintended by the author, was Mark David Chapman. This was a mentally disturbed man who needed help and guidance, and found it in a directly literal understanding of Holden Caulfield’s acidic contempt for phonies, for people who say they have one belief, but live according to another. The paradigm phony for Chapman was John Lennon, who professed values of peace and love while living the high life in a New York penthouse and going through long periods of Hollywood lifestyles and drug abuse. Chapman considered himself a hero worthy of Holden, and Salinger, when he rid the world of that ultimate phony.
Mark David fucking Chapman.
If I’ve learned anything about literature, it’s that great literature has no ideology. Whatever instruction manual you find in a genuinely great work of art is whatever you bring there yourself. You can read Oliver Twist entirely accurately as a condemnation of exploitation in the name of profit, and a celebration of the self-made capitalist working his way up from the bottom. And you’d be right both times, no matter what Dickens himself might have thought. A writer can only be responsible for the words s/he writes, but never how those words are understood, taken up, and carried forward. Maybe Salinger really did intend to indict Holden for his myopically selfish idiocy, but there were a lot of people who came to Catcher struggling for a way of living that could approach authenticity, consistency, coherence, and truth without hypocrisy. Holden may have been an egotistical fool to me, but he was a mirror to millions more. Really, Holden Caulfield and a self-absorbed teenager just reflect each other.
That, I think, was Salinger’s goal in writing. He saw a kind of innocence in youth that was washed away by the compromises of adulthood, and all his books tried to capture that adolescent innocence. But the innocence of youth, the innocence of a life that doesn’t yet have to make deals in a tough and messy world, is an innocence of extremism. It’s a refusal to compromise, a demand that the world be just as I want it to be because it is right that it be right and I am right to make it right! To deal with that world, to move among it and negotiate it, is just that: a negotiation. Life in the world entails compromises, and in the second half of his life that Salinger spent away from the world, he compromised nothing.
Really, Salinger will always be associated with Holden for just this reason. It wasn’t just that Holden is his most iconic character in popular consciousness. Holden was a character whose very existence, A Catcher in the Rye, was defined by his incredible sincerity, consumed by his yearning for a perfect and totally fair world. That’s an incredible dream to have. But learning to let go of that dream and understand the universe as being great precisely because it can never be perfect, because it is a place of disorder and craziness and compromise, that’s the sign of a mature personality, of someone who can be joyful in the deepest, strongest, most true sense.
And also, there’s Mark David Chapman.
The reclusiveness of his life was a major irritant for me as well. Now, I’ve also become a big Thomas Pynchon fan, so you may ask about any hypocrisy between my love of Pynchon and my irritation by Salinger over the reclusiveness. There’s a difference between the two in their hiding. Pynchon isn’t belligerent about his reclusiveness. He lives in New York state like a normal person. He just isn’t photographed. I mean, Pynchon was on The Simpsons making fun of his own reclusiveness. His animated self was wearing a paper bag over his head standing next to a huge sign that directed you to his house, while he flagged people down on the highway to “Get your picture taken with a reclusive author!” Pynchon could joke about his hideaway along with you.
Salinger didn’t just hide in his house; he hid with a snarl of contempt for anyone who would even approach him. He refused to publish anything, despite it eventually becoming general knowledge that he was still working even while he lived off the substantial royalties still collected from Catcher. If it was perfectionism, it infested him to the point where it became almost pointless. Despite writing huge amounts, no one ever saw it, and there were doubts that anyone ever would.
Oh yeah, and Mark David Chapman.
This is the other, more sympathetic reason Salinger never published. From the very moment when Catcher was published, people sympathized with Holden Caulfield, to the point where they sincerely took on his contempt for the phony, for hypocrites, into their own lives. But they didn’t realize that the whole point of Holden’s character was to show the futility of a life that refuses to compromise with even the minor hypocrisies and inconsistencies that are necessary for life in the world. Now here were people taking Holden Caulfield of all people as a role model?
The worst of these worshipers of Holden, if we’re talking about consequences unintended by the author, was Mark David Chapman. This was a mentally disturbed man who needed help and guidance, and found it in a directly literal understanding of Holden Caulfield’s acidic contempt for phonies, for people who say they have one belief, but live according to another. The paradigm phony for Chapman was John Lennon, who professed values of peace and love while living the high life in a New York penthouse and going through long periods of Hollywood lifestyles and drug abuse. Chapman considered himself a hero worthy of Holden, and Salinger, when he rid the world of that ultimate phony.
Mark David fucking Chapman.
If I’ve learned anything about literature, it’s that great literature has no ideology. Whatever instruction manual you find in a genuinely great work of art is whatever you bring there yourself. You can read Oliver Twist entirely accurately as a condemnation of exploitation in the name of profit, and a celebration of the self-made capitalist working his way up from the bottom. And you’d be right both times, no matter what Dickens himself might have thought. A writer can only be responsible for the words s/he writes, but never how those words are understood, taken up, and carried forward. Maybe Salinger really did intend to indict Holden for his myopically selfish idiocy, but there were a lot of people who came to Catcher struggling for a way of living that could approach authenticity, consistency, coherence, and truth without hypocrisy. Holden may have been an egotistical fool to me, but he was a mirror to millions more. Really, Holden Caulfield and a self-absorbed teenager just reflect each other.
That, I think, was Salinger’s goal in writing. He saw a kind of innocence in youth that was washed away by the compromises of adulthood, and all his books tried to capture that adolescent innocence. But the innocence of youth, the innocence of a life that doesn’t yet have to make deals in a tough and messy world, is an innocence of extremism. It’s a refusal to compromise, a demand that the world be just as I want it to be because it is right that it be right and I am right to make it right! To deal with that world, to move among it and negotiate it, is just that: a negotiation. Life in the world entails compromises, and in the second half of his life that Salinger spent away from the world, he compromised nothing.
Really, Salinger will always be associated with Holden for just this reason. It wasn’t just that Holden is his most iconic character in popular consciousness. Holden was a character whose very existence, A Catcher in the Rye, was defined by his incredible sincerity, consumed by his yearning for a perfect and totally fair world. That’s an incredible dream to have. But learning to let go of that dream and understand the universe as being great precisely because it can never be perfect, because it is a place of disorder and craziness and compromise, that’s the sign of a mature personality, of someone who can be joyful in the deepest, strongest, most true sense.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Fictional Inspiration Can Come from Anywhere, Even a Dog
I spent last weekend in Toronto housesitting and dogsitting for a professor of mine, in exchange for money. Overall, it was a pleasant experience, as I got to hang out with an old friend who did her MA at Memorial and is at York now, and I experienced what it’s like to be a dog owner for four days. The dogs were pretty charismatic, and were well-trained enough to follow my orders after I was introduced. I’m rather glad it’s over, as this means I’m able to sleep past eight in the morning again. I think dogs are a bit too high maintenance for me.
One thing I did pick up was some interesting material I can use to structure the story of Undesirables, my suburban story. I’ve decide to give Michael, the male protagonist, a dog, and have him interact daily at the neighbourhood park with other morning dog walkers that are his main network of friends in the community. The park can be a place where some actual conversations can happen, even though most of the story won’t actually happen in the text, because my central character, Michael’s girlfriend Jen, won’t directly see any of the events that are driving the plot, just the effects of those events. But the park would be a great place for the events to reverberate around the community.
A chance comment by one of the regular dog walkers, a middle aged mother Wendy from British Columbia originally, also gave me another facet of Jennifer, the antagonist. She mentioned that she never lets her dog near the playground in a corner of the park shaded by a large copse of trees, and prefers to stay around the rarely used soccer field. The reason is not because she’s afraid her dog might hurt an overeager child; but she’s afraid of paranoid mothers who themselves are afraid of dogs near their children. After getting to know the rambunctious and placid dogs of this neighbourhood, the idea of someone being afraid of them was laughable. But that paranoia is a key part of her character, and her distrust of the dogs can be the major sign that Jen sees of the general hostility that consumes her over the course of the story.
•••
For a book as mannered as In Search of Lost Time, every now and then I find some passage that is utterly out of place in its weirdness. The last hundred or so pages of this chapter of Volume Four, Sodom and Gomorrah, took place at this snooty dinner party hosted by an older woman who had shown up in Swann’s Way as the host of snooty dinner parties that weren’t quite so well-connected to the nobility as this current one.
On the way back to his hotel room after coming home from the party late at night, the following chapter opens with the page operating the lift ranting to him about his sister. The page’s sister is married to a rich man, and she continually demonstrates her newly elevated position in society by taking a dump in every carriage and hotel room she visits for the driver or the maid to clean up. And she blatantly gloats to her brother about her habit of leaving a “surprise” in dresser drawers of hotels and underneath carriage seats. Then the narrator leaves the elevator, and there’s a passage about the way sleep plays with memory.
One thing I did pick up was some interesting material I can use to structure the story of Undesirables, my suburban story. I’ve decide to give Michael, the male protagonist, a dog, and have him interact daily at the neighbourhood park with other morning dog walkers that are his main network of friends in the community. The park can be a place where some actual conversations can happen, even though most of the story won’t actually happen in the text, because my central character, Michael’s girlfriend Jen, won’t directly see any of the events that are driving the plot, just the effects of those events. But the park would be a great place for the events to reverberate around the community.
A chance comment by one of the regular dog walkers, a middle aged mother Wendy from British Columbia originally, also gave me another facet of Jennifer, the antagonist. She mentioned that she never lets her dog near the playground in a corner of the park shaded by a large copse of trees, and prefers to stay around the rarely used soccer field. The reason is not because she’s afraid her dog might hurt an overeager child; but she’s afraid of paranoid mothers who themselves are afraid of dogs near their children. After getting to know the rambunctious and placid dogs of this neighbourhood, the idea of someone being afraid of them was laughable. But that paranoia is a key part of her character, and her distrust of the dogs can be the major sign that Jen sees of the general hostility that consumes her over the course of the story.
•••
For a book as mannered as In Search of Lost Time, every now and then I find some passage that is utterly out of place in its weirdness. The last hundred or so pages of this chapter of Volume Four, Sodom and Gomorrah, took place at this snooty dinner party hosted by an older woman who had shown up in Swann’s Way as the host of snooty dinner parties that weren’t quite so well-connected to the nobility as this current one.
On the way back to his hotel room after coming home from the party late at night, the following chapter opens with the page operating the lift ranting to him about his sister. The page’s sister is married to a rich man, and she continually demonstrates her newly elevated position in society by taking a dump in every carriage and hotel room she visits for the driver or the maid to clean up. And she blatantly gloats to her brother about her habit of leaving a “surprise” in dresser drawers of hotels and underneath carriage seats. Then the narrator leaves the elevator, and there’s a passage about the way sleep plays with memory.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
"My Hands are Scarred with Papercuts and Stained with Curry Powder"
This was a phrase that occurred to me this morning looking at my own hands. Yesterday, I got one of those mysterious papercuts that appear from nowhere and didn't even hurt at the time. When you try to figure out precisely where it came from, you can get nowhere further than, some piece of paper. The curry stains come from what I cooked for dinner last night.
As I approach the end of the manuscript for A Small Man's Town, which is now the permanent title for the first novel I'm going to try to publish, I'm thinking about future projects and what to do next. But, as is expected, considering the way I do philosophy, I also see common themes and explorations among all my long fiction projects that are percolating in my brain and on my computer. I realize that I've fallen into a kind of mission statement, one I think is very suited for Canada on the Earth of the twenty-first century. All my ideas explore how Westerners can contribute to the world conversation, given that we will be mistrusted and marginalized by the new dominant cultures of the South. We've dominated the Earth for so long that our voices no longer have value. The West will be shut out of global discourse just as Westerners shut out everyone else, and in moralities based on fairness (almost all of them, really), we will deserve this treatment.
Of course, this will not literally happen. Europe and the US remain powerful enough economies that they will have important roles, though more as partners instead of authorities. But culturally, the excitement of the Earth will be in India, South America, East Asia, and eventually Africa. Cultural production will be focussed on those areas that were minor and ignored before. Cultural revolution and transformation will come from there, and it's happening already. Indian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese films are becoming the most influential on global cinema. The most exciting literature comes from writers like Roberto Bolaño the Latin American, and Orhan Pamuk the Turk.
The suburban narratives of white Western writers – of which I am one ethnically at least – are no longer important. The self-absorbed idiocies of Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt and John Updike's Rabbit are vanities to be set afire. Quite rightfully, the world should not care about these men dissatisfied with their picture-perfect families and lives that have rarely touched poverty. There are many more important problems in the world than rich white suburbanites having problems with their marriage and trouble communicating with their stuck-up self-absorbed spoiled idiotic children.
This is where my apparent mission statement comes in, what I think the new task of Western literature should be to suit best our new role as partners atoning for crimes of domination. The great Western literature of the twenty-first century will not revolve around the concerns of rich white people as if they were the most important things in the world. It will mock these concerns for their selfishness and stupidity. Bret Easton Ellis is a fine example of this. His greatest books, American Psycho and The Rules of Attraction, are about the emptiness, cruelty, and insularity of white Western life.
I think my own work fits into this as a positive contribution, where Ellis' are negative. The stories I want to tell in my fiction are stories of wealthy (in the global perspective) Westerners (not all of whom are white) who become aware that their own problems are selfish and meaningless, and try to find a new way to live. My characters are searching for a life beyond their insular environments.
A Small Man's Town is about a man, Joseph's encounters with two women. One, after she leaves him, becomes a global activist for free speech and ending poverty. The other, as they get married, is a nationalist Western politician, fighting for Newfoundland as if it were an oppressed, dominated nation. The novel ends as he weighs which life is more worthy.
I have two other stories which I might pursue, depending on circumstances. One is a subversion of cyberpunk motifs, about an ordinary suburban woman who slowly recovers from amnesia and rediscovers her old life as a government assassin. The setting is in a cyberpunk-ish suburbia. This story is of a woman who discovers the emptiness and cruelty of her capitalist society. I'd prefer to tell this story in a more visual medium than the novel, which will require collaborators, and possibly capital.
The other, which I've called Undesirables, is about a man who is persecuted in his quiet suburban community because when he was a young man, he committed an assault on a woman for which he feels immense regret and remorse. But because he's on the state list of sex offenders, the neighbourhood watch, led by a frumpy middle-aged woman with secrets of her own, tries to run him out of town. The protagonist, or maybe narrator, is a woman who becomes the persecuted former criminal's new partner, a young art gallery worker. She and his partner's persecutor both have the same first name, Jennifer. There is a side plot of an Arab family mistrusted in the community because of their race. This story is of a community that believes so strongly in its morality that it refuses to forgive any transgression.
Perhaps these stories are more negative than I initially thought of them. Aanyway, here, Orhan Pamuk talks about literature, culture, and life.
Despite the horribly antique opening graphics, this was actually filmed in 2008.
As I approach the end of the manuscript for A Small Man's Town, which is now the permanent title for the first novel I'm going to try to publish, I'm thinking about future projects and what to do next. But, as is expected, considering the way I do philosophy, I also see common themes and explorations among all my long fiction projects that are percolating in my brain and on my computer. I realize that I've fallen into a kind of mission statement, one I think is very suited for Canada on the Earth of the twenty-first century. All my ideas explore how Westerners can contribute to the world conversation, given that we will be mistrusted and marginalized by the new dominant cultures of the South. We've dominated the Earth for so long that our voices no longer have value. The West will be shut out of global discourse just as Westerners shut out everyone else, and in moralities based on fairness (almost all of them, really), we will deserve this treatment.
Of course, this will not literally happen. Europe and the US remain powerful enough economies that they will have important roles, though more as partners instead of authorities. But culturally, the excitement of the Earth will be in India, South America, East Asia, and eventually Africa. Cultural production will be focussed on those areas that were minor and ignored before. Cultural revolution and transformation will come from there, and it's happening already. Indian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese films are becoming the most influential on global cinema. The most exciting literature comes from writers like Roberto Bolaño the Latin American, and Orhan Pamuk the Turk.
The suburban narratives of white Western writers – of which I am one ethnically at least – are no longer important. The self-absorbed idiocies of Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt and John Updike's Rabbit are vanities to be set afire. Quite rightfully, the world should not care about these men dissatisfied with their picture-perfect families and lives that have rarely touched poverty. There are many more important problems in the world than rich white suburbanites having problems with their marriage and trouble communicating with their stuck-up self-absorbed spoiled idiotic children.
This is where my apparent mission statement comes in, what I think the new task of Western literature should be to suit best our new role as partners atoning for crimes of domination. The great Western literature of the twenty-first century will not revolve around the concerns of rich white people as if they were the most important things in the world. It will mock these concerns for their selfishness and stupidity. Bret Easton Ellis is a fine example of this. His greatest books, American Psycho and The Rules of Attraction, are about the emptiness, cruelty, and insularity of white Western life.
I think my own work fits into this as a positive contribution, where Ellis' are negative. The stories I want to tell in my fiction are stories of wealthy (in the global perspective) Westerners (not all of whom are white) who become aware that their own problems are selfish and meaningless, and try to find a new way to live. My characters are searching for a life beyond their insular environments.
A Small Man's Town is about a man, Joseph's encounters with two women. One, after she leaves him, becomes a global activist for free speech and ending poverty. The other, as they get married, is a nationalist Western politician, fighting for Newfoundland as if it were an oppressed, dominated nation. The novel ends as he weighs which life is more worthy.
I have two other stories which I might pursue, depending on circumstances. One is a subversion of cyberpunk motifs, about an ordinary suburban woman who slowly recovers from amnesia and rediscovers her old life as a government assassin. The setting is in a cyberpunk-ish suburbia. This story is of a woman who discovers the emptiness and cruelty of her capitalist society. I'd prefer to tell this story in a more visual medium than the novel, which will require collaborators, and possibly capital.
The other, which I've called Undesirables, is about a man who is persecuted in his quiet suburban community because when he was a young man, he committed an assault on a woman for which he feels immense regret and remorse. But because he's on the state list of sex offenders, the neighbourhood watch, led by a frumpy middle-aged woman with secrets of her own, tries to run him out of town. The protagonist, or maybe narrator, is a woman who becomes the persecuted former criminal's new partner, a young art gallery worker. She and his partner's persecutor both have the same first name, Jennifer. There is a side plot of an Arab family mistrusted in the community because of their race. This story is of a community that believes so strongly in its morality that it refuses to forgive any transgression.
Perhaps these stories are more negative than I initially thought of them. Aanyway, here, Orhan Pamuk talks about literature, culture, and life.
Despite the horribly antique opening graphics, this was actually filmed in 2008.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
"Let's Go Visit Little America and Eat With Forks!"
Over the past couple of weeks, my friend Rob was visiting as he slowly made his way back to Newfoundland from Seoul, where he had been teaching English. This is a social phenomenon I find fascinating, that so many young people, humanities majors mostly, are going to Asia to teach English on year-long contracts after graduation. The pay is often very good, and a lot of their expenses like moving costs and accommodation, are taken care of by the company. I know growing numbers of people who have done this, are doing it now, or plan to. I've sometimes joked about how eventually, Seoul, Tokyo, Beijing, and Shanghai are going to develop neighbourhoods with significant numbers of North Americans and their white or biracial descendants, just like Chinatowns and Little Toykos in Western cities.
Little America, self-contained cities of whitish people in a few high rises.
I think at some point in the future, I'll write a book about some of these English teachers, fictional of course, based loosely on the stories of people I know who've gone to Asia. I might go to Korea myself after I finish my PhD, mostly just to do first hand research for this book, which I might call Little America. It sounds like an incredible kind of journey to take, and there are lots of ways to approach the scenario, many hooks to hang stories from.
Korean culture is far more conformist than we're used to in North America. Rob describes how enthusiastically a whole class of elementary school students joins in denouncing one of their fellows when they commit some minor infraction. "Teacher, he's chewing gum in class!" In Canada, a kid who does that gets beaten up at lunchtime. But in Korea, the first one to tell on somebody gets popularity points.
There's almost no homegrown rock music in Korea. Older people listen to traditional music, and younger people listen to K-Pop, which I've sampled at the bottom of the post. Some of these songs are actually pretty catchy, even though the members of the groups are even less differentiated than the members of the old American boy and girl bands. You can't even tell which one is the Cute One™. They're all goddesses. One is usually a little more badass than the rest, because she's the one who does cheesy raps in the middle of the song. I say cheesy raps, because Lil Wayne could eat these people for breakfast.
There is a stereotype here in Canada of the Westerner going to teach in Asia and coming back with a hot Asian girlfriend or wife. It happened to my friend Dave, whose wife is Japanese. But Rob told me that many women in Korea look to Western English teachers as someone to cheat on their boyfriends with. There are many one night stands, but it's almost as if the experience is just to cross one more item off their bucket lists. "Slept with a Westerner. Check." The dynamic on the whole is about consequence free sex, which is attractive in some ways, but tiring in others.
And yes, Korean businessmen really do act that way when they're excited.
•••
Incidentally, the title of my almost-finished book has changed again. It's called "Small Man's Town," and I think it's going to stay that way. I had trouble saying "Laughing Lovers" out loud to people. But "Small Man's Town" gets to the heart of the book's major themes much better. I think of it as my love letter to Newfoundland and Memorial University, especially since I doubt I'll ever want to go back on a permanent basis. But it's also kind of a breakup letter, and "Small Man's Town" delivers that very directly and clearly.
Little America, self-contained cities of whitish people in a few high rises.
I think at some point in the future, I'll write a book about some of these English teachers, fictional of course, based loosely on the stories of people I know who've gone to Asia. I might go to Korea myself after I finish my PhD, mostly just to do first hand research for this book, which I might call Little America. It sounds like an incredible kind of journey to take, and there are lots of ways to approach the scenario, many hooks to hang stories from.
Korean culture is far more conformist than we're used to in North America. Rob describes how enthusiastically a whole class of elementary school students joins in denouncing one of their fellows when they commit some minor infraction. "Teacher, he's chewing gum in class!" In Canada, a kid who does that gets beaten up at lunchtime. But in Korea, the first one to tell on somebody gets popularity points.
There's almost no homegrown rock music in Korea. Older people listen to traditional music, and younger people listen to K-Pop, which I've sampled at the bottom of the post. Some of these songs are actually pretty catchy, even though the members of the groups are even less differentiated than the members of the old American boy and girl bands. You can't even tell which one is the Cute One™. They're all goddesses. One is usually a little more badass than the rest, because she's the one who does cheesy raps in the middle of the song. I say cheesy raps, because Lil Wayne could eat these people for breakfast.
There is a stereotype here in Canada of the Westerner going to teach in Asia and coming back with a hot Asian girlfriend or wife. It happened to my friend Dave, whose wife is Japanese. But Rob told me that many women in Korea look to Western English teachers as someone to cheat on their boyfriends with. There are many one night stands, but it's almost as if the experience is just to cross one more item off their bucket lists. "Slept with a Westerner. Check." The dynamic on the whole is about consequence free sex, which is attractive in some ways, but tiring in others.
And yes, Korean businessmen really do act that way when they're excited.
•••
Incidentally, the title of my almost-finished book has changed again. It's called "Small Man's Town," and I think it's going to stay that way. I had trouble saying "Laughing Lovers" out loud to people. But "Small Man's Town" gets to the heart of the book's major themes much better. I think of it as my love letter to Newfoundland and Memorial University, especially since I doubt I'll ever want to go back on a permanent basis. But it's also kind of a breakup letter, and "Small Man's Town" delivers that very directly and clearly.
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