Bill's Notes

Francis has an interesting take on American women. (And an introductory essay here.)

The case could be made that the above trends demonstrate a widening rift between the sexes: increasing distrust, increasing unease about the risks of long-term bonding, decreasing effort going to the maintenance of the marital bond, and decreasing interest in progeny. What interests your Curmudgeon most particularly is the possibility that changes in female behavior arising from the new, heavily promoted sexual hedonism, have stimulated the changes in men's attitudes toward women, matrimony, and family-making.

His essays are provocative, non-PC, and fearlessly argued. They're worth reading, even if you don't agree with all of it.

I just discovered this comment here.
This blog is declared in an "enclave of wingnuttia." Nice turn of phrase. That said, and turning to content, the commenter, "Pere Ubu," basically cops to being a left-wing paranoiac. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Somehow left-wing paranoia doesn't bother me as much as right-wing paranoia (see John Birch).

My advice for Pere Ubu, and I mean this with all sincerity: Have a root beer float. They're very good medicine for Bush Derangement Syndrome, or really any other syndrome that doesn't involve glucose-related illnesses. Eat something. You'll feel better.

... or near nothing. I just want to say that the older I get and the farther away from academia, instead of growing more and more bitter as I expected, I thank God and my lucky stars that I'm away from all that. People fighting over intentionality? Semantics? Semiotics? Please.

My friend Slats Grobnick put it this way: When you investigate anything closely enough to try to figure out why something is, sooner or later you end up with the answer, "Because Jesus wants it that way." It's a very good engineering answer to excessively abstract thinking. Speculating about why only goes so far. Let's just see what it does now.

It occurs to me that my career started 20 years this week. I graduated college, took a week off to move from Toms River to Bridgeton, and started right away as the city reporter on the Bridgeton Evening News.

It was a great summer -- one of the best of my life. I was the lead reporter on a small city daily newspaper, I had some new friends and my old ones, a great girlfriend (or two), and had my first apartment (utterly unfurnished). As the year went on, I managed to date both the competing reporters on my beat, one of whom's byline I frequently see on the front page of a metro daily, and the other was an interesting relationship that was cut short when I quit my job and moved back home.

I worked split shifts, so I had afternoons off. I'd go down to the playground in the local park and play basketball with the brothers. I once beat a guy who'd played for the USFL. In the fall I went back to school a few times and had a great time with my younger friends. It was a wild, wild time. As usual, when I had fun, I had too much fun ...

Eventually, the burning the candle at all three ends -- working my ass off in the morning and evenings, playing basketball in the afternoons, and going out after meetings at night -- it all caught up with me. The relentless daily deadlines, my progressing alcoholism, and my abject poverty (I started at $12k) took their toll. But I had a good time for the first six months. Got some clips together, worked my ass off, and made a real effort to learn my craft. There's a novel in there somewhere. In fact, some of it was "stranger than fiction." But I never wrote the novel, and probably never will.

After exactly a year, I called the Asbury Park Press and got a job as a stringer in the Toms River bureau. I moved home and lasted a week before my parents manipulated me into working for my father. I got out of the house in two months, and wasted a year of my life working as a project manager for a waterproofing contractor before getting back to my editorial career and started working for the Catholic Advocate in Newark, N.J. Two years of that, and I was off to grad school, Philippines, Peace Corps in Africa, and teaching in Camden and north Philly. Ten years ago, I started working in the business and legal newsletter publishing business, and that's been the second half of those 20 years.

So that's my career story. Strangely enough, the job's have tended to change around the summer time, just like changing grades.

20 years of working. Whew! What I really want is the summer off, three months like we got in college, so I could go work at the beach again. Well, first I'd need to get shoulder and knee surgery. Then spend the summer working out and losing weight, and starting fresh in the fall.

20 years of working. How much further to go? Heh.

Mebbe something about the blogosphere causes people to swear and form rabid wolfpacks of mouth-foaming ideologues. Maybe the U.S. has finally gotten as weird as Manila. Start here and follow the links. Then try to explain to me what the hell is the core of the intellectual disagreement. And why it matters. Seriously. Beyond the personalities, what the hell is going on?

My sympathies are with Jeff Goldstein, who wrote a thoughtful essay here.
I don't know if I agree with him, but what he wrote certainly qualifies as fair comment.

My best guess about what's going on: Goldstein's use of the term "authorial intention" was the intellectual equivalent of waving a red flag in front of a bull. You see, authorial intention has been out the door for a generation or two (see "The Death of the Author" by Roland Barthes and "Is there a text in this class?" by Stanley Fish). Authorial intention is not open for discussion in academic circles.

Goldstein appears to be arguing that all anti-intentionalist theories are ultimately grounded in authorial intention — an interesting argument, to be sure, if he can pull it off. How this descends in a multi-blog thread with people calling Goldstein a fucktard defies parody. I mean, this whole situation is dying for a Monty Python skit about playground bullies shaking down people for their lunch money, and using their arguments on literary theory as a pretense.

Powerline asks the impossible question and then puts forth this list of finalists:

Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Melville, Moby-Dick
Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
James, Portrait of a Lady
Twain, Huckleberry Finn
Cather, My Antonia
Wharton, The Age of Innocence
Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Warren, All the King's Men
Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
Ellison, Invisible Man
Chandler, The Long Goodbye
Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Updike, Rabbit, Run
Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor
Heller, Catch-22
Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird
Nabokov, Pale Fire
Roth, The Great American Novel

I've read the bolded entries. I've read books by all the authors except Stowe.

Okay, here are my thoughts:

* Nabokov is Russian, so he doesn't count.
* Rabbit, Run is the worst novel ever written and possibly that could ever be written; sucks so badly that there simply are no words for its badness.
* The Age of Innocence isn't even Edith Wharton's best novel, The House of Mirth is.
* Harper Lee's book was probably written by Truman Capote.
* We all love Raymond Chandler, but seriously, what's he doing on the list?
* The Sound and the Fury is over-rated and is obsessed with some weird shit about Quentin's sister's panties; the real work in the Quentin oeuvre is Absalom, Absalom.
* Huckleberry Finn is great for a while, but suffers from a cop-out ending, where Twain lost his nerve.Sorry. Jim dies at the end.
* Moby Dick is a Hardy Boys' story, but is useful in pointing out the horror of 19th Century whaling. It only has a reputation because New Critics such as T.S. Eliot needed Melville's book to make some damned point or the other. The books to read are Benito Cereno and Billy Budd.
* A Farewell to Arms has aged poorly, reads like a parody of Hemingway, and is NOT EVEN SET IN THE UNITED STATES! The plot is as follows: "Catherine Barkley was hot. I bent her over the end table. She got pregnant. The war continued. She died. My kid died. I walked back to the hotel in the rain." If you want Hemingway, In Our Time is the book, although not a novel. Hemingway's one decent novel, The Sun Also Rises, also is not an American novel.
* Henry James? He loses points for feeling inferior as an American.
* Philip Roth. Portnoy's Complaint and Goodbye, Columbus. In fairness here, I haven't read The Great American Novel.
* Catch-22 is great, but loses points for nearly destroying my life with its excessive cynicism (not a book to read when you're a teenager).
* Hawthorne? Young Goodman Brown is enough.
* Nathaniel West, Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust should be added.
* Ditto something by Nelson Algren.
* The Sot-Weed Factor is a great choice and one of the funniest, best-written books ever. Set aside a month and check it out.

The correct answer to the question is Gatsby. It's the great American novel, and the best written. My Antonia is up there, too, and a great counterweight to Gatsby (as is Cather's Neighbor Rosicky) and I was pleased to see it on the list. The Day of the Locust is the best book about Hollywood.

FWIW. YMMV.

BTW, over at Powerline, some people were suggesting Atlas Shrugged. Okay, I've read it. Rand's prose sucks. No other way around it.

Reading Robert McKee's Story. He mentions a concept called story values. It means those things that are valuable in a story, for a story to be a story. I've thought a lot about the concept before, but never heard that specific term.

I think "story values" cut to the heart of what's wrong with a lot of our thinking, especially in the macro sphere. There's a disconnect between what's valued in a story (conflict, for example) and what's valued in real life (avoiding conflict, for example).

Much confusion arises when people assume too much about the story they're in -- indeed, if they have a self-narrative that casts them in a heroic role, nothing, not facts, not argument, not their own suffering or the suffering of others, may be capable of moving them off their position.

And similarly, one way stories distort reality is by not thinking carefully enough about the connection between story values and "reality" values. Stories value subtext. Anything we see will, according to story values, usually have a subtext that's the opposite. We see a nice, clean-cut family man, and we assume that he's hiding a dark secret. The key to quality writing is to come up with story values that accurately render reality.

For example, say we start with a preacher. The easiest, most cliched story to come up with (according to story values) is to reveal him to be corrupt, either financially or sexually. A good writer, however, will be aware of these cliches and push past that. Let's say the preacher's problem is not sexual or financial. Let's say his problem is that he preaches love, but that deep down he's angry a lot. It comes out in an officious manner, or in regrettable verbal outbursts, or in sarcasm. He drives people away from him, but he doesn't quite get why. His "preacher" job then becomes a motivation source for why he wants to change. And change is hard, full of conflict [maybe his wife is equally sharp-tongued and doesn't like his efforts to change], yadda yadda yadda, you almost have a story. Not the best example, perhaps. But did I make the point?

I think about this stuff a lot. We are inundated with stories in this culture -- stories that are driven by story values which may or may not have any connection to reality, and which may in fact deeply pervert real values (mostly out laziness and shallowness) in the interests of moving the story forward.

This idea deserves deeper treatment. I'll return to it later.

Via the Corner comes this helpful glossary.

Some of you might find the link silly, but I laughed. Here's an excerpt:

Fundamentalism
The belief that basic elements of play - like passing, ball handling, and defense - are the essential building blocks of a winning basketball team is generally referred to as "fundamentalism." The fundamentalists formulated their doctrine in the 1980s against the showy, heretical play of Magic Johnson's Los Angeles Lakers. Leading fundamentalist institutions include Bob Jones University and Syracuse. Larry Brown's failure to get the Knicks into the playoffs has been seen as a major setback for the cause of fundamentalism.

Baptism
Baptists are Christians who believe God can only be accessed by means of a swimming pool or, in some cases, a shallow outdoor stream. The first Baptist was John the Baptist, who was said to eat locusts and honey, although contemporary Baptists generally prefer barbecue. "Baptism" is also the term used to describe a key Christian ceremony, in which prospective members of the church are either initiated actually (Catholics, Orthodox, confused Protestants) or symbolically (Protestants, confused Catholics, religious studies professors). Catholics believe that anyone can perform a valid baptism, Orthodox believe that any Christian can, while Baptists, paradoxically, believe that only they can.

How about you?

BTW, I have another deadline. Never stops.

Boring weekend. Nothing to report.