Bill's Notes

Instapundit calls gay marriage "progress". I doubt it. Calling an absurdity "progress" is not what I'd call moving forward, but hey what do I know?

The battle over gay marriage in the civil arena will be lost within 10 years. Young people support it and that's not going to change as they get older, so that's pretty much the end of it. As the older Americans who are against gay marriage die off, they will be replaced by supporters. It's part of what Nietzsche called the "collapse of all values."

Gay marriage in the civil society doesn't worry me all that much. That may sound weird because I've written against it a lot. But what worries me is the arguments. If the argument is libertarian-based, that is, freedom-based, I can sorta see the point. Gay marriage is still absurd and a fucked up idea, but what the hell. Do what you want. It's a free country. I'm not going to stop you.

What worries me more is homosexuality being used more broadly as a wedge issue in two areas: To attack the traditional idea of masculinity, and to attack Christianity. That is, homosexuality allows society to broadly label orthodox Christians and strong men as bigots to be ignored — and whose arguments not only do not need to be heard, but may be suppressed.

Think not? Look at the Boy Scouts. A wonderful organization with a once great reputation; now it's tarred as a group of bigots. Look at the Roman Catholic Church; an infestation of homosexuals in the priesthood led to massive scandal — and the larger society simply lacked the integrity and honesty to admit that's what happened. And look at the gentlemen in Alberta who posted Biblical verse numbers (not the verses themselves) in a newspaper and was fined more than a thousand dollars Canadian for promoting "hate." And hell, look at any criticism of gay marriage as being labeled, "homophobic."

We are going to see in the next two generations whether this U.S. experiment can remain free without an underpinning of Christian faith. My suspicion — based on everything from the smoking bans to the quelling of free speech in the workplace to the silly regulation that makes toilets too small to the 40 million aborted babies — is that our freedoms are already stripped away one by one and it will just get worse.

Orthodox, conservative Episcopalians meet in Dallas.


Pray the Holy Spirit will sustain them in this time of trial and discernment.

The google search for 'porpentine' keeps leading people to this page thanks to an entry on the Bard/Wodehouse. But I forgot where else I knew the word porpentine. It is a character in Thomas Pynchon's V. Which I suppose, would make this porpentine thing Pynchonesque. (Yeah, I wish.)

Porpentine is a spy who was killed beneath the Sphinx in Egypt in the eight chapter, I believe. But that's not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about V.

But first a little background. In 1990, I went to a creative writing master's program at Temple. Shortly after acceptance (that is, the spring before fall enrollment), the department secretary sent the students a creative writing reading list. It was about 140 works — and I thought it would simply be impossible to read it all. I'm ashamed to say that now I'm still less than halfway through it, though I can say I've read something of every author on the list.

Anyway, at the time the list seemed very strange — there was a boatload of stuff that I simply had never heard of. And one that intrigued was the listing of Thomas Pynchon's V. I'd heard of a sci-fi movie of the same name, so I assumed this was the novel from that. A-hem. OK, I was a bit green at the time.

So I pick up V. and read the thing. I threw it at least twice, and put it down to swear on perhaps 40 occasions. The book seemed designed to frustrate the reading process, and the characters had strange names, and the whole thing seem portentous but without getting anywhere. Profane. Porpentine. Dr. Eigenvalue.

Years later, I ran into the book again. Book seemed the exact opposite. Seemed ham-fisted in its wedding of technical metaphors to literature.

Example: Chapter 1, in which Benny Profane reaches an apogee. OK, first of all, that's awkward phrasing. First time I read the book, I didn't know what an apogee was and still didn't know after looking it up in the dictionary. Ooh, I thought, this guy's using space science. I must be a dummy.

Well, on second reading, duh. An apogee is the farthest point a satellite travels away from whatever it's orbiting; the perigee is the closest point. In a literary depiction of an apogee, Benny Profane should be a man stuck in a cycle of some kind. His movements away from something should just go so far before he is revealed to in fact be orbiting, that is, drawn back the other way. Sure enough, Benny reaches an apogee.

That's it. Nyah nyah nyah. Big hairy deal. (OK, there are still a dense web of other references within the chapters, but at least we now know what the hell is going on.) All right, actually, it's a lot of fun — if you know all the stuff that Pynchon knows. (Which nobody does.)

But we were talking about porpentines. Porpentine is the bard's porcupine. A character called Porpentine: He'll be prickling and fretful and doomed. And he was.

And Eigenvalue is this. I don't know what that is. (Someone is welcome to try to explain eigenvalue in plain English if they can. However, if it is a concept like object-oriented programming, that is, it simply cannot be explained to someone without first explaining something else very complicated first, such as data structures, then just tell me that.)

What's cool about the Eigenvalue thing: Note in the equation (in the link of course) that the vector is depicted as V. Like the title of the book. (The book contains a series of V's whose meaning gets deferred— it took me awhile to spot this one. Very Nabakovian ... almost word golf. [Word golf is a practice described by a character in Pale Fire of changing one letter in a word to create a new word ... to create a list. Bell. Sell. Tell. Till. Toll. Told. Mold. ] And who lectured Pynchon at Cornell? Anyone? Anyone?)

The whole novel is like this ... a big puzzle written by an engineer (which Pynchon is) who is a smartass and thought it would be cool to use mathematical and scientific concepts as forms for composing fiction. Problem is once you figure this out, it loses something because a lot of the execution is not elegant ... it's well-handled in someplaces, but it's also a bit clumsy in a lot of other places, too. That is, it feels more mechanical than perhaps a masterpiece should. And it was this close, you know.

That's not to say it isn't beautiful. The ending of V. is one of the great moments in postmodern lit.

A list of references in V. is here. Maybe I'll take a third reading.

But I just found that Temple creative writing reading list and still haven't read, I ashamed to say, a lot of the big stuff. Maybe I'll cycle around to V. again after I'm done with the list.

Saw an odious little drama over the weekend on the tube. It was set in Las Vegas and had James Caan looking constipated and irritable, as if he was saying, I can't believe I got this fucking old and now I'm television. I begged Coppola to kill Michael and let Sonny star in the sequel, but no ...

Caan plays a casino security director. One episode concerned a character clearly modeled after Bill Bennett, the author of The Book of Virtues who later revealed he was a big gambler (and probably not a very good one, possibly in debt to millions.)

The character, unlike Bennett, is a completely evil senator. The senator spends his time immersed in booze, whores, slots and ogling casino staff. Meanwhile, on television, this character attacks the morally depraved atmosphere that he apparently enjoys reveling in. He is of course exposed at the end, as Caan allows a snoopy reporter to keep digital images of the character being sleazy.

Here we go again. The fantasies of Hollywood producers are on display. If there is something more hypocritical than television producers creating shows that criticize hypocrisy, I don't what it is. Write industrialblog at hotmail dot com if you have an ida.

Twisted Heart of the American Dream

One thing that has always fascinated me about Las Vegas is the role of fantasy in shaping and creating the city. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was Hunter S. Thompson's classic view of the sordid, greedy, petty fantasies at the black heart of the American Dream. Leaving Las Vegas was John O'Brien's fantasy of regressing to infantile narcissism while a beautiful hooker (i.e., mommy) cares for him. So a television show about a city itself based on fantasies is rich ground. Or at least could be if the writers had any fucking grasp of nuance.

But they don't. The evil senator is a cartoon. He is an ogling sleaze bag in private, and an insufferable prig in public. He gets exposed in the end. And the moral of the story is what? Back to Sophocles, all of you bastards...

Yet, yet ...

I'll tell you what ... this comment here of mine could be another whining piece about liberal writers, but I don't think so now that I'm writing it. I don't even think this show was an attack on Bill Bennett — that would ascribe too much intelligence to the show.

I think this was a TV show that was meant to be about flashy visuals of cool Vegas attactions and cool, cool music and cool, glamourous looking actors and actresses and story lines that allow the producers to show the sleazier side of Las Vegas. It's the closest thing to advertorial I've ever seen on television. And the Bill Bennett story gave them a news hook to make the thing look a little relevant to today. In other words, the show approaches pure cynicism.

Which, in a twisted way, you have to admire.

Sophocles, Dante

Still, one thing I've been thinking about since watching the show is why do liberals get so upset about conservatives who demonstrates human weakness.

I think it's because they sincerely believe that conservatives don't care about others. That is, they equate the liberal agenda with their idea of The Platonic Good and to oppose that agenda is to oppose The Good. Thus, conservatives are evil and any evidence of bad behavior shows conservatives' essential hypocrisy.

Sophocles would have a little more nuanced view of the whole thing. Good and evil lie in the heart of every person, and sometimes our best efforts come to nothing. It can be just a moment of stubbornness, or pride that grows from success, or any virtue pushed too far that produces evil.

In fact, one classical view of vice is any virtue taken too far. Thus, any classically educated person should understand what virtue is, and what people have normally considered virtuous. Because often it is those very virtues that can turn around later and get us.

Catharsis rooted in pity and fear is what audiences are supposed to take away from the story of a great man who falls because he allowed one aspect of himself to get out of control. Not a smug sense of moral superiority because the one who fell is from an opposing political party.

But you know television ain't Greek drama, is it?

Red Sox-A's today. As much as I'd love to see a Cubs-Red Sox series, I have no faith that the Red Sox will do anything but roll over for the Yankees. And I mean 1999-style four games to one kind of rollover.

That means the Yankees will be tan, rested and ready for the World Series. I don't want that to happen.

The A's on the other hand, play attrition baseball. That means they stand at the plate and force the pitcher to throw strikes. They are also talented. I believe the A's could force the Yankees into six or seven games brutally attritious, four-hour baseball games.

And that means the Yankees arrive in the World Series a little more beaten up than they would if they had faced the Red Sox in the Championship Series.

So it's "Go A's." Beat the Red Sox, and then wear down the Yankees as long as you can.

And of course I hope the Cubs sweep the Marlins, meaning they're rested and ready for the World Series as they Yankees come limping into town.

But that's not what's gonna happen. The Red Sox are going to win today. The Yankees are going to sweep 'em or take 'em in five. Then the Yankees will take the World Series in five or six games against the Marlins. Because that's how life is.

The strong get stronger and the weak get eaten and excreted get weaker. Bloody Yankees.

Ah, but this entry has become "too dark altogether." Today there's still hope. So let's hope.

Cubs win! Cubs win! Cubs win! Cubs win!

Cubs-Marlins series for the NL pennant. Who'd a thunk?

Holy Cow!

(Fox Sports had that headline up one second after the last out. Congrats on the quick reflexes and tribute to the late Harry Caray, who also has a hell of a restaurant in Chicago). Congrats, Chicagoans and Cubs fans everywhere!

Little Tiny Lies has the following joke:

Q: Did you hear about the nude man who just ran through town?

A: No.

Q: He ran by the butcher's. He ran by the baker's. They caught him by the cobblers.

Why is that so funny? It's the accent. It's gotta be the accent.

This Mark Prior guy is for real. Great news!

People wonder where I developed my anti-authoritarian attitude. People say, "Bill, how did you cultivate this finely tuned sense of victimhood get like this?" They do.

It all started in the spring of 1973 during a Saturday afternoon in the Hasbrouck Heights, N.J., Little League. Through diligent hitting, a young IB Bill had become the No. 2 hitter on our team. And our team was no slouch. We were in second place.

I came up to the plate and no longer remember strike one. But I remember Strike 2. The pitch came inside. I tried to move out of the way, but the ball hit me. I went to take first.

But the ump, Mr. Parisi, yelled, "Take yer ... wait, no, strike!"

I protested. Mr. Parisi tried to explain the rule that you have to try to get out of the way of the pitch. As young as I was, I explained that:

(1) I tried to get out of the way but the ball was so inside that it still hit me, and

(2) I'm pretty sure the rule in Little League doesn't say that if you get hit with a pitch, even if you didn't try to get out of the way, that it's a strike. Maybe a ball. But certainly not a strike. Nowhere in baseball does it say if you get hit with a pitch, you've got a called strike. It would reduce the game to absurdity in a second. But at age nine I could not articulate this as fully as not. But it wouldn't have mattered.

Because Mr. Parisi kept trying to explain the rule, thinking I was disagreeing because I didn't understand the rule. Whereas I kept trying to explain (1) and (2). No matter. The lesson I drew from this is adults are morons who are incapable of hearing what you say, they're only capable of telling you the thing they think you don't know. So if they're wrong, there's no way to appeal. Because they think they just haven't explained their point of view — it doesn't occur to them that you've considered their point of view and they're just plain friggin wrong.

Anyway, after a delay of about half a minute, I went back up, and the next pitch bounced off the plate. Bounced off the effing plate. And Mr. Parisi, what did he do? He called it a strike. Stupid SOB.

I was furious and stomped off, actually leaving the dugout for a while to kick dust all over. The coach let me blow off steam and eventually I returned to the dugout, where more people tried to explain the rule, while ignoring the counter-arguments cited as points (1) and (2).

Not long after, within a few weeks I think, Mr. Parisi died suddenly of a heart attack. I'm not saying those were just desserts. He wasn't an old man, though. I felt bad, yes, but not that bad. The blind SOB sucked as an umpire and he called a second strike that HIT me and a third strike that BOUNCED off the plate.

Yes, I hope God saved him, but not before throwing a high hard beanball off his coconut and saying, "Is that a strike? No? I thought so. Fine, enter into the glory of the Lord."

Theme of history
Conservatives believe irony, not class conflict, is the central theme of history. This is usually fairly obvious to them.

Example: The independent counsel law. Wanna bet the Dems wish they had an independent counsel now for the Joe Wilson/CIA affair? Oh, but no, they scuttled that after Clinton. Irony. See? No class conflict.

Meanwhile ...

BTW, in the tenuous-link-to-the-news-department, Joe Wilson was the ambassador to Gabon during my Peace Corps service. He was slick and Frenchified but candid and had absolutely nothing to do.

As I recall, he was already in trouble for his role in Iraq from the first gulf war and thus was banished to a place where the French controlled everything and the U.S. had no say. He did not screw up the gig because it was unscrewable. He played golf a lot. Occasionally he dropped by to talk to the volunteers in impeccable, clipped French. He seemed nice enough.

His wife then was French — I'm not certain if Valerie Plame is the same wife. According to the news reports, he has had three wives, which makes him an optimist of sorts.

One thing I remember: He seemed very proud to have gotten two stores opened in Libreville that contained American products. They were both small, but were stocked with manna for Peace Corps volunteers — Pringles especially were very popular, but also Oreos and other such things that could not otherwise be purchased. Wilson's claim to fame in Libreville. I wonder if the stores are still there.

Response I left to Andrew Olmstead on the Yankees.

Every year I tell myself I won't expend emotional energy hoping the Yankees lose, and (almost) every year I've failed and gotten sucked in at some point. (The only exception was in 1999, when I successfully ignored the whole season.)

I try to be logical: Major League Baseball is obviously a mechanism for awarding championships to the Yankees. The league is specifically designed to do specifically that one thing. Still, despite these enormous advantages in structure, the Yankees win only about one-third of the time.

Remember, the Yankees have won one-third of all AL pennants. One-third of the angels in heaven fell with Satan and became demons. Coincidence? I think not.

See, if you are rooting for the Yankees, you are on the side of darkness, and forever will it dominate your destiny, as a small green wise being once said.

The California recall, a stupid idea to begin with, has reached farcical proportions. The Republic sinks to a new low as Arnold Schwarzenegger becomes the favorite to win the governor's race.

Why? He's an amateur thrust into the spotlight by name recognition alone. And as the Republicans are about to find out, Schwarzenegger is not a real Republican or even a real conservative. There's no reason to support him other than a desire for power — power they will not achieve with Schwarzenegger in Sacramento. (Also, can you see Arnold really leaving LA?)

At least Ronald Reagan served as a union president before running for governor. Jesse Venture was a Navy SEAL. But Arnold has been a bodybuilder and an actor and that's about it.

I'd say California deserves this, but I'm not sure that's true.

BTW, I no longer work at the company with the crazy owner. Thank God.

For those who still do — Run away!

Thinking about Patrick, the cocker spaniel's who is dying from cancer, I spent some time over at Cocker Adoption.

A friend at work stopped by and said that he understood what I'm going through, and that he's on his third dog and that this one may be his last because it's so hard to lose them.

It is hard to lose them. I pray we get a few more months of health out of Patrick ... even though that's not what the doctors have said. It would be a nice time for a miracle.

Erin O'Connor has an outstanding post over at Critical Mass in which she well-articulates the situation many students find themselves in when they enter graduate studies in English.

Here is the paragraph that hit home with me. Because this is what happened to me ... though it wasn't personal.

On the other hand, I have often had occasion to say to students that the things that draw them to advanced literary study--a love of learning, a love of literature, a deep desire to share those loves with students through teaching--are not the things that drive most English professors, and have next to nothing to do with what they would be expected to do in graduate school and beyond. The student who enters grad school intent on becoming a traditional humanist is the student who will be labelled as hopelessly unsophisticated by her peers and her professors. She will also be labelled a conservative by default: she may vote democratic; may be pro-choice, pro-affirmative action, and anti-gun; may possess a palpably bleeding heart; but if she refuses to "politicize" her academic work, if she refuses to embrace the belief that ultimately everything she reads and writes is a political act before it is anything else, if she resists the pressure to throw an earnest belief in an aesthetic tradition and a desire to address the transhistorical "human questions" out the window in favor of partisan theorizing and thesis-driven advocacy work, then she is by default a political undesirable, and will be described by fellow students and faculty as a conservative.

I couldn't believe that I was considered conservative for wanting to become a traditional humanist. Hey, I didn't even tell 'em I was a Christian (mostly because I wasn't until my second year).

But you know what? Fuck it ... my problem is I took it too seriously after the fact. I had a hell of a lot of fun in the creative writing program for two years, and I read and talked and wrote and learned. I took some of it seriously, and the rest — the politics, the unhappiness of many of the lit majors — I just ignored. And then I didn't want to live with the results of my decision: I refused to play the game because the game was rigged. Well, if you don't play, they cut off your pay.

And here's the kicker: I had the life I wanted. I was having the time of my life. I had enough money to get by, a nice car, a nice little apartment in South Philly, and a nice little office. There were plenty of young coeds interested in my attention.

And because of my position as a journal assistant, I didn't have to teach. I had access, in fact, to three offices that were the journal's and the department supply closet, which kept me in everything from printer paper to legal pads. Even better, I had the journal's credit card for the college high-speed copier.

Additionally, I was doing some volunteer work teaching immigrants in Center City and had developed a bunch of friends from there. In fact, the director said that she'd never seen the teachers bond so quickly. We'd hit the Caribou Cafe (the old one, on the north side of Walnut Street) after class, and talk about philosophy and art and literature and and our experiences in class.

I'd read a novel down at Penn's Landing, or in a diner, or wherever. A Passage to India was read in the Melrose Diner on Snyder, Marguerite Duras' The Lover was read on the steps of the University of the Arts (at which point a girl from my undergrad days at Seton Hall recognized me and gave me her phone number), and B.S. Johnson's Albert Angelo was read at Penn's Landing, and the moment I finished John Prine came out and did a concert. In the summer, I wrote half a novel and drove down to New Orleans, straight through, on a whim, and then over to Florida, and then back up through Charlottesville.

During the semesters, I had off every Friday,and I'd drive up to Princeton to see a good friend and we'd have lunch and talk about everything under the sun. About that time I got it into my head that I wanted to see the world, too, and began the process of applying to the Peace Corps.

Alas, my wonderful, literary life filled with fantasies of world travel that would ultimately result in a best-selling novel and lots of ... er, fringe benefits, couldn't last. Two years and time was up for IB Bill. I graduated.

So I helped the department secretary move into my friend Brad's place, then later I helped them both pack up their truck and move to Tennessee. They got married and live in Knoxville. My good friend John from the volunteer work went to Gabon as a Peace Corps volunteer. Pretty much the entire creative writing program graduated and left town, including me. I went to Manila, Tonia went to Prague, Aaron to the Canary Islands. Ray and Val got married and moved to Champaign, Illinois. Brad and Nancy to Knoxville. Only two Ivy Leaguers stuck around--and they went to Penn.

As a backup in case the Manila plan didn't work, I'd applied and been accepted to the Ph.D. program, and asked for a continuation of my assistantship. But then the Commonwealth cut the university budget, and the journal assistant positions — all of them — were eliminated. I applied for teaching but was turned down because of the critical theory thing.

So I went to the Philippines without a backup plan, and that was bad because it turned out I needed one. In retrospect, the Manila episode was an absolutely necessary learning experience for me. But the lesson was painful. The culture shock, both in going and returning, was so great that I have never felt remotely like the same person before I left. That guy — the happy, naive dude who wasn't above using half-understood literary ideas as a way to, well, you get the idea — was gone. Just gone.

After Manila, I came back not only with just a few friends left in town, I couldn't locate me again. That's how alienated I was. I was walking around and everything was completely different — everything. Portions of food seemed obscenely huge. America seemed mind-bogglingly wealthy. And Americans seemed to be unself-aware, whiny, self-absorbed, clueless and full of shit.

Then, a year of under-/unemployment/struggling in the Ph.D. program, at which point I was turned down again for an assistantship. With that, I went to Gabon. If you recall a few paragraphs up, my friend John from the volunteer teaching was already in Gabon. That sounded very cool. I'd be starting out with a friend there. But John turned out to be a quitter and frankly a bit of a punk, and returned to the city only two weeks before I left (basically he quit because he was a big pussy), just enough time to give me an earload of bitterness and anger.

Meanwhile, on the corner of 18th and Spruce, I said good-bye to a good friend who'd helped me in the past 10 months. I left for Africa. The Philippines had put some caution into me (OK, the fear of God), and thus I was careful. The care paid off. I spent two years teaching. An unfortunate motorcycle accident cut the last bit off my tour. It was an odd experience — Peace Corps as a whole, not the accident. I experienced for the first time in my life something you might call surface misery. That is, I was often pissed off and irritable, but there was underneath that a deep sense of satisfaction during my service.

When I came back to the U.S. a second time, I was again different. I wasn't the miserable wretch I'd been after Manila, and I was two steps removed from the happy guy in the creative writing program. I was just different. The Manila demons were permanently exorcised.

This time, the culture shock was treated very carefully. Things went better — except for one piece of unfortunate news. Yes, the friend from Spruce Street, who'd gone to law school in Nashville, had moved on with her life and had in fact tossed several people out of her life, including, I discovered upon my return, me. I was determined not to be a broken-hearted asshole (paraphrasing Frank Zappa here) even though I was one. I decided to move forward. And it worked. I was much happier than I'd been in years.

After taking a year back in grad school (mostly for purposes of recovering from culture shock), I got a job I loved, yeah ... I couldn't believe it, either. Something worked out well for a change. I was working with smart people whom I respected. I learned a lot from them; in fact, I learned a lot of the things I'd hoped to learn in grad school, when of course you can't learn those things in grad school. They turned me into a writer ... I felt lucky. Had a couple of good years.

Then, things evened out. A lot of my friends at work left for other workplaces. The company owner turned into Captain Queeg and decided that the company's success was a sign of God's favor and even Divine admiration and that he, the owner, must be universally admired for his success. Most people left or gagged or both.

In the meantime, almost everyone I'd known in the city or the company was leaving — either married off and raising kids, or moved away, or disappeared. One guy went crazy and another proved to be a criminal. Weird to have spent so much time in a city and moved in circles that, the words of Keats in a different context, were "written on water."

Left with a lot of memories, but not a lot of the people I shared the times with.

So when I'm pissing on about the grad school thing, it's because, yes, there was an element of injustice to it. I'd earned the chance to stay and was screwed for political reasons. But mostly I was angry at having to give up a lifestyle that I really, really enjoyed.

And I'd like to do it again, but I don't think I can live on that little spending money again.

Alas, I didn't mean to go on like this. Quite a long history there. Ack. You know, I'm turning 40, and probably just trying to order some of my memories.