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Monday, February 19, 2007
EVERYTHING'S IMPOSSIBLE
Thinking Fellers Union Local 282
Bob Dinners and Larry Noodles
Communion : 2001
[Buy It]
HALLELUJAH
Jeff Buckley
Grace
Sony : 1994
[Buy It]
GIRLFRIEND
The Modern Lovers
The Modern Lovers
Berserkely : 1975
[Buy It]
TRY A LITTLE TENDERNESS
Otis Redding
Stax : 1967
Available on: The Very Best of Otis Redding
[Buy It]
YOU MADE A BELIEVER (OUT OF ME)
Ruby Andrews
Zodiac : 1972
Available on: Just Loving You
[Buy It]
MW stands accused of becoming a creative writing class rather than a venue for free mp3s. Unfortunately, this post will do nothing to clear our collective name.
A bad thing happened in our culture when depression became equated with moral clarity. On the one hand, it's heartening to think that hundreds of untreated mental patients found a market niche for themselves as SERIOUS THINKERS. How American is that? On the other, it means that some of our best creative and analytical minds work through the prism of misanthropy and self-loathing. (Leonard Cohen, anyone? Who's written songs like Hallelujah, which I love best in others' versions.)
I was thinking about this as I rediscovered one of the most glorious Internet artifacts of all time, one which, for me, justifies the entire existence of the medium: this riff on Jonathan Franzen's author photo.
I feel bad busting on JF. I haven't read any of his stuff. Then, I wasn't very motivated. It seems perverse to read someone's work just so you can make fun of him in an authoritative manner. Still, I'd checked out How to Be Alone from my local library. I'd leaf through it, reading a line or two of Franzen's plaints about not being read, or not being read correctly, and replacing it on my nightstand. After three renewals, I returned it to the public trust, leaving Franzen the gloomy satisfaction of being validated in his loneliness.
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In my youth, I had a weakness for moody boys and manifestos. I was a smart chick, with glasses and everything, and as many other smart women do I cultivated a protective severity. Serious thinkers, i.e. men, like having us around: they need access to women, for purposes of sex, competition, and status display. Becasue we are basically ornamental, we are assumed to be lightweights-inadequately serious, mere creatures of the flesh. Having a sense of humor makes you particularly vulnerable to criticism. This was the case in every realm I inhabited: the musicians, the music geeks, the theory boys, the writers, the politicos. In every case, this jockeying over ideas; in every case, the collecting of women as decorative objects. I saw one guy beam proudly as his normally reserved wife leaped into an intellectual fray, "Now, that's the way!" And aside to his mates, "It takes her a while to get going, but she's got the right ideas." Thank goodness!
So, imagine my amusement at reading this, in a recent article on terrorism:
Perhaps his most unexpected conclusion was that ideology and political grievances played a minimal role during the initial stages of enlistment. "The only significant finding was that the future terrorists felt isolated, lonely, and emotionally alienated." And this:He has called his model [of terrorism]...the "bunch of guys" theory. The bunch of guys constituted a closed society that provided a sense of meaning that did not exist in the larger world. And this:Within the "bunch of guys,"...men often became radicalized through a process akin to one-upmanship, in which members try to outdo one another in demonstrations of religious zeal. Am I the only one who sees the family resemblance between this and certain recent debates on MW? Let alone all of graduate school and most of the arts?
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I keep thinking about the kinds of knowledge that we value and privilege and wondering what it is we find comforting about ideology. In his memoir Fugitive Days, recovering ideologue Bill Ayers puts it well: "Ideology became an appealing alternative in so many ways. Practice was uncertain and inexact; ideology cloaked itself in confidence. Practice was slow and ideology a smooth and efficient shortcut. Mostly, ideology was serious-people with ideology meant business. I didn't know yet how domesticating and cruel and stupid ideology could become, or the inevitable dependency it would foster in all of us." Ideology, of one sort or another, keeps us locked up in cliques. The fact is, few people, mainstream or otherwise, know how to interact comfortably with people who are not mostly similar to them. For a long time after I moved to the suburbs, the only people I talked to were service personnel: the lady at the dry cleaners, the barristas at Starbucks, the janitors at the school. Everyone else was frozen into their upper middle class nuclear family world and they failed to perceive my many cultural refinements. My daughter had her first experience of social exclusion in first grade, when a friend of hers, who'd been to our home for play dates, wasn't allowed to invite her to a birthday party. "My mom said she wasn't sure what kind of person your mom was." Because I'm a single parent? Because we lived in a slum apartment? Because I dress like a hoochie? Because my kid was in day care? Even now, I walk into back-to-school nights and see women I've volunteered with on parent committees turn their heads away and fail to greet me. They cluster into mom cliques and fear the unknown.
Enough of high school, already. Lately I feel like the most subversive force in culture is friendliness or the willingness to say, "I don't know about that" and ask a question. When serious thinkers have exhausted themselves with complexity, with much more interesting views of the world, it's these sorts of hokey, simple things they come back to. I guess there is no workaround to the messy business of living.Labels: megan
posted by Megan
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