Thoreau-Going Twenty-Somethings

The reason I was poking around in Ellen Willis's Don't Think, Smile! was that I've begun reading a new book, Twenty Something: Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck? (Hudson Street Press, 2012) by Robin Marantz Henig and Samantha Henig, mother and daughter respectively.  The book grew out of a New York Times Magazine article by Henig Senior, as an attempt to deal with its subject in more depth and with the added perspective a twenty-something co-author could add.  I noticed the book because I'm interested in the perennial problem of adults who complain about the coming generation's fecklessness, irresponsibility, and dependence.  The Henigs promised to survey empirical research as well as interviews of real people, so I let myself form some expectations.

I'm about ninety pages in as I write this, and the book is due at the library today, with a hold on it so I can't renew it.  I may return to it later.  But for now I'm a bit disappointed.  The authors do shoot down stereotypes of the Millennials, as they call them, showing that many of the same complaints were leveled at the Baby Boomers: inability or refusal to commit to a career or a spouse, for example.  And I was amused when it was pointed out that Henry David Thoreau, the bold and free individualist who lived alone in the Walden Woods, nevertheless took his laundry home every week (only a few minutes' walk) for his mother to wash.  But not until just a page ago was it acknowledged that the Boomers, the generation Mother Henig and I share, are the anomaly, not the norm against which to measure twentysomethings now.  For example, the average marriage age in the Fifties and Sixties was low, historically speaking, compared to the Boomers' parents and grandparents.  The number of kids who went to college was also higher than ever before.

Among the most important, and one that the Henigs have so far ignored even though it's relevant to their topic, is that the economic boom after World War II raised expectations for economic mobility and security that were to be dashed in the 1980s and after.  My parents, and I presume Robin Henig's, grew up during the Great Depression and came of age during the War.  (The Depression is not mentioned in the book's index, nor so far have I seen it mentioned in the text.)  The US had long been the richest country in the world, but after the war we became politically dominant too, and unlike most of our competitors we had not been devastated as Europe, Russia, and England were.  As they rebuilt, we flourished, and we did so in a New-Deal environment where the federal government subsidized technology and education, with high marginal Federal income tax rates and regulation of banks and finance to prevent any more economic crises.  The GI bill sent unprecedented numbers of Americans to college, which meant that the universities no longer were the exclusive preserve of old family WASPs, and new civil-rights laws opened new opportunities to white women and to people of color.

What this meant was that my parents believed and hoped that opportunities were there for anyone who wanted them enough to work for them, and that their children could be anything they wanted.  It was no longer necessary to watch every penny, or to grab any job available to keep the wolf from the door.  They wanted their children to have easier and richer and freer lives than they had.  The Henigs are aware of this to some extent, but so far they haven't explored the political and social ramifications of these changes.

Which boil down to this: the Henigs agree with the pundit consensus that twenty-somethings tend to believe that there's no hurry to settle down, they have time to decide on a career and a spouse, the world won't collapse if they take a while to find their course.  This isn't some random fantasy: it's what they learned from their parents, and from the postwar social consensus.  The trouble is that the postwar consensus was falling apart just as the Millennials were being born.  American economic elites had never been happy with the constraints imposed on them after the Great Depression (let alone those of the war, when their ability to make obscene profits was kept under pretty tight rein).  They didn't like workers having job security, or the power to make demands on the owners and managers.  They hated the idea that workers could retire with a government pension, though of course the money for the pension came from their own work.  They preferred that working people should live in constant insecurity, never far from being thrown out on the street.  They couldn't see why the kind of speculation that nearly destroyed the world economy in 1929 should be regulated or forbidden -- on the contrary, there should be more of it.  And why should the lower orders be sent to public universities, where they learned sedition and class-hatred from the Italians and Jews who'd gotten in because of the GI Bill?  They began plotting reaction, which they began to implement during the 1970s.  (See David M. Gordon's Fat and Mean: The Corporate Squeeze of Working Americans and the Myth of "Managerial Downsizing" [Free Press, 1996] for more about this.)

At any rate, by the time today's twentysomethings were coming of age, deregulation had set America's moneymakers free, offshoring (subsidized by the taxpayer) had depleted the American manufacturing base, and kids who wanted a college education were finding it necessary to go into debt to do so.  Thanks to Reagan's policies, unemployment shot up to Great-Depression levels and never really came back down: the "new" jobs that replaced those lost under Reagan were largely less than full time, with fewer or no benefits, and lower wages. (Again, the Henigs haven't paid attention to this particular point as they consider twentysomethings' difficulties in finding good jobs.)  If twentysomethings were ill-prepared for these changes, it was largely because their parents didn't see them coming either.  They had been raised to believe that America was getting better and richer, that the barriers to equal opportunity had come down, and everybody could be whatever they wanted.  To the extent that they'd seen these claims in their own lives, why shouldn't they pass them to their children?  But by the 1990s the conventional wisdom had changed: the post-WWII boom was not the flowering of  the American free-enterprise system but a fleeting illusion, Americans were just going to have to lower their expectations, stop whining, and accept that a diminished life was inevitable.  (That was only most of us who needed to lower our expectations, of course: for the rich, no such adjustments were necessary, or tolerable.)

The Henigs do have an interesting quotation about the rise of student debt that reveals how narrow their focus is:

"It's not like we had a great national debate about whether we wanted to impose huge debts on young people," Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, said recently.  "We just woke up and it had happened" [30].

That's right, it fell from the sky like a meteor, without human effort or thought!  True, the changes happened without a "great national debate," but people made them happen.  The Henigs aren't interested in asking who, or why, though both questions seem appropriate.

Ellen Willis is relevant to this because, as an older contemporary of Robin Henig and me, she observed the same changes and wrote about them with an eye to politics and history.  Don't Think, Smile! has a chapter called "Intellectual Work in the Culture of Austerity," which addresses the changes in the economy after the end of the Vietnam War and the rise of Reaganism.  Willis stresses that in this period it was possible to bypass the usual career paths (a big deal in the Fifties, with its Organization Man and Lonely Crowd, not to mention its Rebels Without a Cause) not merely to pasture one's soul but to engage, fully consciously, in intellectual and political work on a shoestring.  You could hardly expect the big organizations of the corporate state to subsidize work which undermines them, but young left intellectuals of Willis's generation didn't expect it to.  Willis's essay describes how she herself moved from freelance writing to regular journalism to the fringes of academia and ultimately to fulltime teaching, always with an eye to supporting the kind of work she wanted to do, which included political activism as well as writing.  She wasn't representative of her generation, but neither on her own account was Robin Henig, who married young, started a family and settled down while pursuing a career.  (Not to put her down: she got her BA at 19 and her Master's a couple of years later.)

The Henigs have so far ignored this political and historical context.  Like student debt, the economy and the job market are just out there, somehow, and their empirical resources have been resolutely apolitical.  They're also often ahistorical: most of the research the Henigs cite, while colorful, studies twentysomethings without a control group.  As I noted before, the Henigs' own basis for comparison is mostly limited to their own generations, aside from an occasional anecdote from Henig Senior's parents.  Twentysomethings are mostly compared to Boomers, not to the generations that came before the Boomers.  Maybe this will change later in the book, which is an engaging read.  I'll try to pick it up again early next year when it returns to the library shelves.

Always Vulgar and Often Convincing

A couple of years ago I alluded to an old article by Ellen Willis about the time CBS commentator Andy Rooney got into trouble for offensive statements.  I couldn't quote it directly because it wasn't online and I didn't have a copy of the original, but today I found basically the same material recycled in Willis's book Don't Think, Smile! (Beacon, 1999), on pages 148-149.

Consider the infamous Andy Rooney affair.  The 60 Minutes commentator was attacked by the Gay and Lesbian Association against Defamation (GLAAD) for publishing a crude, antigay letter in the gay newspaper the Advocate and allegedly making racist remarks to a reporter.  As a result he was suspended from CBS, and elicited reproving editorial noises about "civil public discourse" from the New York Times. This was seen in some quarters as a victory for the left.  Yet the real reason Rooney got into trouble was that he violated the media establishment's bland, centrist criteria for acceptable speech.  In demanding Rooney's removal, lesbian and gay activists appealed to precisely those standards of "civility" -- that is, niceness -- regularly used to marginalize their own speech.  While Rooney was slapped down for expressing bluntly illiberal views, it's hard to imagine anyone comparably left of the mainstream -- particularly in a libertarian direction -- ever having his job in the first place.  And suppose such a person did slip through and then wrote a letter to the editor defending illegal drug use or attacking organized religion as tyrannical -- can anyone doubt that he or she would have been not suspended but fired, and with little public protest at that?

The expression of a homophobic opinion is not an act of domination.  Where the real issue of inequality arises is in the consistent denial of radical dissidents of equal access to the mass media and other public forums.  Rather than pressuring CBS to throw Andy Rooney off the air, GLAAD should have demanded time on 60 Minutes to rebut him.  In choosing instead to define his speech as an intolerable threat, they merely reinforced the basic assumption of the dominant culture that we can't afford freedom, that all hell will break loose if we relax controls.  In effect, campaigns against offensive speech displace the fight for equality onto battles against freedom.  This is a tempting maneuver, particularly at a time when the left is weak and on the defensive, for a simple reason: fighting for equality is a difficult, long-term, exhausting process that meets bitter resistance every step of the way while attacks on freedom often get immediate results and -- odd, isn't it? -- sympathy or even outright support from the very people in power who are supposed to be the enemy.

Some things have changed since this was first published.  A few high-profile atheists, of whom the late Christopher Hitchens is probably most notorious, have managed to publish attacks on religion in corporate media.  Hitchens was allowed to do this largely because he'd established himself as a vocal advocate of American aggression in the Middle East, but still, he did clear a space for vigorous anti-religious statements in the mainstream.  He also benefited from the access right-wing frothers won to corporate media: Rooney looked moderate, reasonable and civil compared to Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and the rest of the Right's attack clowns, while Hitchens could be pointed to as their left-wing equivalent.

But some things haven't changed, especially the dominant culture's assumptions about the importance of "bland, centrist criteria for acceptable speech" and that "we can't afford freedom, that all hell will break lose if we relax controls."  "In effect, campaigns against offensive speech displace the fight for equality onto battles against freedom," which are always in season since we can't afford freedom; it was a nice experiment in the 1790s, but we now know that it's not relevant in a civilized modern society.

Rebuttal and debate are my preferred mode of response to offensive speech.  Way back in 1971 or 1972, late-night TV star Jack Paar made some antigay remarks on the air, and to his credit he allowed some activists from Gay Activists Alliance or the National Gay Task Force to appear on his show and have a debate.  (Bruce Voeller is the only one whose name I can remember.)  The liberal newspaper columnist Nicholas von Hoffman wrote an attack on the gays; as I remember, he wasn't all that happy that Paar had let these weirdos speak on national television.  I wasn't pleased with the activists' performance; I remember thinking that we had several people in Bloomington who could have done a better job.  But the fact that they were allowed on national TV, and chose debate rather than suppression as their response, pleased me a great deal.  I foolishly thought that it would happen again.

I've noticed that a lot of people hate debate.  (Compare the popular meme "Debating on the Internet is like competing in the Special Olympics.")  It certainly has its limits, but I don't know of any better way to handle controversial topics without violence or repression; but of course, many (most?) people prefer violence or repression as a response to opinions they dislike.  I first encountered real debate in connection with the Vietnam War.  I wasn't a participant, but I found it interesting and exciting to watch other people confront and answer each other's claims.  But this debate was largely virtual, even then.  First I absorbed the official US line on the war through the mass media, not all of which was corporate in those days.  Then I heard Tom Hayden describe the history of US involvement in Vietnam in a speech at Notre Dame University.  What he said was so different from anything I'd heard before that I went to the library to check other sources, and I found out that he was right.  I also read Howard Zinn's book on the "logic of withdrawal" from Vietnam, which explicitly answered the official US arguments for continuing the war.  I argued about some of this with my mother, but of course our exchanges were warped by parent-child dynamics.  And so on.  You'll see that I constructed my own debate, but I chose debaters who stuck to the issues instead of just yelling "Commie" or "Surrender monkey" or "Warmonger" at each other.  I mean, what kind of weirdo would do that, instead of just listening obediently to Uncle Walt every night and hearing the sane, responsible point of view?  There was no need for me to question; the truth was out there for the taking.

I suspect that many people don't know how to follow a debate.  They think it's like a football game, where you figure out which team is your team and then you cheer every time it makes a good play, and then you go out and overturn cars when it's over.  Some debates, I admit, are like that.  In a good debate, though, the kind that interests me, you listen to both sides and see how well they make their case.  The goal is not to convince the other debater that he's wrong, much less to score points, it's to convince the audience, or at least to shake their own positions.  (National political debates, of course, are like a football game.)

But my original concern here was with "civility."  Two memories keep cropping up for me in that regard.  One is an exchange I had in comments on another blog after Gerald Ford died.  Some of us began discussing whether Ford should have pardoned Nixon, and at some point one of the other commenters said that she didn't like debate, because it involved disagreeing with another person, and she was afraid she'd hurt their feelings if she did that.  Some others agreed with her, and that brought us to something of a stalemate.  A few months later, someone posted anti-choice, pro-forced birth opinions in comments at the same blog, and my goodness but you should have seen the claws unsheathed!  I believe the same person who didn't want to hurt anybody's feelings joined the others in hurling abuse at the anti-choice commenter.  But on reflection I realize she wasn't really contradicting herself: it was only debate she didn't like, not abuse.  (And some people's feelings just don't count, apparently.)

The other memory involves RWA1 and his concern about civil discourse after the Arizona shootings last year.  Disturbed by the dreadfully rude rhetoric of the Far Left (i.e., liberal Democrats), he declared: "It is time to retire analogies to Nazis and fascists once and for all."  What he meant, of course, was for Democrats to retire those analogies; he himself was tossing around Nazi and fascist analogies within a month or two, nor did he ever chide other Republicans for using them.  And in that respect he was no different from liberal Democrats who called for civility: they were complaining about Republicans, not themselves.  Attacks on Republicans, in the crudest schoolyard terms, were just fine with them.  Truth be told, they're fine with me, too -- up to a point.  It feels good to mock and deride your opponents.  But at some point you have to start thinking.  Well, come to think of it, I guess you don't.  Who has time for thinking?  Most people just don't have time to inform themselves, so they find a team to cheer for and another team to jeer at.  You have to know your priorities.

This Woman Was a Prophet

Ellen Willis's writings are trickling onto a Tumblr run by her daughter, though the links keep breaking almost as soon as they are linked. But it gives me the chance to see some of her articles I hadn't seen before, like this New York Press piece on the Elian Gonzalez controversy. For those who've forgotten the case, five-year-old Elian was rescued from the waters off Florida after his mother and several other adult Cubans had drowned trying to reach the US. His parents were separated and his father, back in Cuba, hadn't consented to the project, so he demanded Elian's return, with Cuban government support. US Immigration ruled that Elian should go home, but his relatives and other Cuban exiles in Miami created a political circus that raged for seven months. In the end, federal agents raided his great-uncle's house in Miami just before dawn, took the boy, and returned him to his father.

I remember it vividly because I happened to be visiting a friend with a TV that weekend, so I saw the coverage. It occurred to me that perhaps the raid went so smoothly (and it did: no one was hurt, and despite theatrical wailing from his great-aunt, Elian was found and rescued without difficulty) because a deal had been worked out between the government and the relatives, to save face for the latter. Why had they kept a little boy up all night, till 5 a.m.? How did an AP photographer get there so fast? (At first I thought he'd been there when the raid began, even more suspicious; but I was wrong.) The relatives had threatened armed resistance -- as Willis wrote, "Elian was both their prize and their hostage. They had no scruples about putting him in danger" -- but luckily those threats were empty. The friend I was staying with, a heterosexual of conservative politics with a father's-rights focus, was a bit conflicted: on one hand he thought Elian should be 'allowed' to stay in the Land of the Free; on the other, he thought his father's wish for his return trumped his relatives' wish to keep him with them. Another even more reactionary masculinist I knew felt the same way.

Anyway, it's history now, and little Elian is now grown up. This retrospective is amusing, though, for its blatant dishonesty:

As you can see, Elian looks like a normal boy. His cuteness factor though, has dwindled because of what he now stands for. But he's 16-years old so he can't be blamed; we can probably thank his country's government for corning him into that. While Elian Gonzalez and his family originally fled their native country to escape Fidel Castro's communist regime, these pictures were taken of him at a Young Communist Union meeting.

"Corning him into that"? I have no idea what that means, and I don't think I want to know. But it's false that "Elian and his family originally fled their native country," because Elian was only five (a five-year-old taken to Cuba by his mother -- without his father's knowledge! -- would not have been described in the US as having fled George Bush's imperialist regime), and his father remained in Cuba.

But back to Ellen Willis. What I want to pass along is her judgment on the Clinton administration, though Democrat-wise, not much has changed since then.

The far right has lost the culture war. Americans may be social conservatives, guilt-ridden about sex and self-righteous about the undeserving poor, but they don't like theocrats, sex police and antigovernment fanatics. Nor can they whip themselves into a frenzy about Castro, in this 11th year since the fall of the Berlin Wall. They much prefer Clinton's mushy corporate neoliberalism, not to mention his softer brand of masculinity. The irony is that Clinton, who thinks a principle is someone who runs a school, never met a reactionary he didn't want to appease. He has pandered to the right on family values and welfare. He has been its staunch ally on censorship and the drug war. He allowed the Elian crisis to burgeon out of control by not ordering [Janet] Reno to take action back in January. He stayed silent on Elian until the last possible minute and then spoke with all the passion of Alan Greenspan announcing a rise in the interest rate. Al Gore was even more pathetically eager to lie down for the Miami Cubans; never mind that he can expect as many votes from them as Giulani could from blacks in New York City. Hacking at a sponge with a razor blade, the right manages to look both ridiculous and insane. Yet somehow they keep afloat, waiting for their next chance at something like a coup.

I wonder what Willis (who died, too young, in 2006) would have to say about the Obama administration if she were still alive. (This 1992 letter to the New York Times on corporate violence is suggestive, as is this 1998 Nation piece on the need for a radical left movement.) Obama, too, never met a reactionary he didn't want to appease, and has pandered to the right when he hasn't been its staunch ally. I think Willis's reading of the American public is correct too; only a small, if vocal, fringe wants theocrats, sex police, and antigovernment fanatics in charge of the country. The Democrats continue to try to win these frothers over, instead of brushing them off, let alone confronting them, which turns off the majority. The hopeful sign is the recent emergence of a third option, not asking either party for its support. I'm not sure it will succeed, but it appears that the Occupy movement is not going to be intimidated by Red- or hippie-baiting, so it might manage to survive. And then we'll see.

I Can Talk to Strangers If I Want To, 'Cause I'm a Stranger Too

(The title comes from Randy Newman's "Have You Seen My Baby?", a song I'd almost forgotten until Ellen Willis mentioned it in her review of Newman's Twelve Songs.)

Some more quotable bits from Out of the Vinyl Deeps.

From a review of Song Cycle by Van Dyke Parks (102):

His most nearly perfect triumph is "Donovan's Colours," an exquisite three-and-a-half-minute instrumental track that sounds like a nice, simple piano piece played by someone with six hands.

I love that sentence, but I'm not sure it accurately describes the track; listen for yourself. Virgil Thompson reportedly said that music criticism should be done by simply describing the music, and the description will be the criticism. I'm beginning to think, as I reread Willis's criticism, that she was not a very good music critic in Thompson's sense, though she was very good on culture and politics.

For example, her realization about Bette Midler's concert at the Palace, 1973 (94):

The real test of Bette's genius was whether she could make me believe in palm trees and cricket noises, feather-duster fans, the Harlettes in their chorus-girl outfits, and -- oh, God, as Bette would say -- Hawaiian dancing girls. Although I thought I was prepared, the overblown production jolted me into exactly the reaction it was calculated to elicit: What is this? Then I remembered that Bette Midler grew up in Honolulu, and I wondered -- as I was sure I was meant to -- at how the schlockiest elements of our popular culture always relate in some way to some person's real life.

On Simon and Garfunkel and "rock poetry" (103):

Bob Dylan, so we kept hearing, had banished the infamous Tin Pan Alley cliche. Accordingly, Paul Simon ... became a "rock poet," dealing with such noncliche subjects as the soullessness of commercial society and man's inability to communicate.

On the generation gap (it comes so soon) between the Sixties and the Seventies (111f):

When Grand Funk [Railroad] was becoming the most popular son-of-white-blues band in the world, I listened some more, on the usually reliable theory that a band beloved of teenagers must be doing something right. The music still didn't do much for me; I caught myself thinking of it as abunchanoise, and I knew what that meant -- creeping senility. Hadn't my parents reacted the same way to Little Richard? (Little Richard was the supreme test: my mother liked Elvis, but she couldn't stand Little Richard.)

Finally, something written not by Willis but about her, by her former student Evie Nagy and her longtime fan Daphne Carr in the book's Afterword. In 1995 Willis co-founded the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University.

CRC graduate Priya Jain remembers a shocking meeting of Ellen's Sex and American Politics class where she challenged liberals who argued that it was absurd to think gay marriage could lead to legal plural marriage or bestiality -- her suggestion, to everyone's extremely awkward horror, was that legally, perhaps it could. "What Ellen did was say those things with the full confidence that your liberal beliefs could withstand some of the more taboo arguments," says Jain. "It's not good enough to say there are areas where you're not supposed to make an argument -- all she really wanted you to do was articulate it, and once you articulate it, you realize how shaky it is, and from there you figure out how and where to draw the lines. And it doesn't mean you can't continue thinking that gay marriage, for example, is a good thing." For Ellen, as Lauren Sandler says, "there was no party line." Her consistency was in thought, not personal ideology, and it was one of the reasons she was so effective at putting herself in her work without indulgence, and teaching others to do the same [230-1].

It's hard to say whether I learned not to be afraid of following arguments to their conclusion from Willis -- there are other writers and thinkers who led in the same direction -- but she was surely an important influence on me. I tend to approach the kind of slippery-slope argument mentioned here from the other side, pointing out that plural marriage is a traditional Biblical value, so why don't conservatives support it? (Willis once wrote a satirical piece, "Toward a National Man Policy," reprinted in Beginning to See the Light, that played with the same idea.) But like her, I reject the common liberal response to many conservative arguments, Oh how can you say such awful things? because I believe that if those arguments are that absurd, they should be dissected, pitilessly. If rereading Willis these past two days has been somewhat less exciting than I expected, it's probably because so many of her radical ideas have become my common sense. Didn't I already know that? If I know it now, it's because I encountered it so compellingly in Ellen Willis's writing.

Out of the Vinyl Deeps

I found something today that I'd known I wanted, but didn't expect to turn up: a new collection of Ellen Willis's pop/rock criticism, Out of the Vinyl Deeps (Minnesota, 2011), edited by her daughter Nona Willis Aronowitz.

Because her main interest was political (left/feminist/Zionist), Willis didn't write much about music after about 1980, though her rock criticism was always political. After her very professional essay on Bob Dylan was published in Cheetah in 1967, the New Yorker, of all places, hired her as their rock critic. She stayed on until 1975, writing fifty-six pieces for them. Her work was very influential but partly because she left the field and (mostly?) because she was female, it has been largely forgotten. This compilation and republication may help to remedy that situation -- I hope so.

As I read the book, though, I'm struck by some odd mistakes, especially in reviews of Bob Dylan's work. In the Cheetah article, for example, she refers to the "electronic beat" (11) of "Desolation Row", whose instrumentation consists of two acoustic guitars and an electric bass. Not exactly "Pump Up the Jam"; the arrangement owes a lot more to Marty Robbins's 1959 song "El Paso" than to the Rolling Stones. Again, she wrote that on 1970's New Morning Dylan "plays the piano for the first time since Highway 61 Revisited" (32) but Dylan had played piano on "Dear Landlord" on John Wesley Harding. (Hell, he's credited with playing piano on Blonde on Blonde.) These aren't big problems, just small annoyances, but couldn't they have been fixed for republication?

I'm also bothered by some more serious mistakes, as when she confused "bisexuality" with "androgyny" in a piece on David Bowie.

As for his self-proclaimed bisexuality, it really isn't that big a deal. British rock musicians have always been less uptight than Americans about displaying, and even flaunting, their "feminine" side. Androgynousness is an important part of what the Beatles and the Stones represent; once upon a time Mick Jagger's bisexual mannerisms and innuendos were considered far out. Bowie's dyed red hair, makeup, legendary dresses, and onstage flirtations with his guitarist just take this tradition one theatrical step further [39-40].

"Bisexuality" doesn't mean a man wearing a dress or wearing lipstick (strictly speaking, neither does "androgyny"): it means that one relates sexually to persons of both sexes. It's true that many male rock critics were upset by Bowie's theatrical effeminacy (Lester Bangs once referred to him as "the chicken-headed king of suck rock"), but Bowie's bisexuality involved writing songs about sexual/erotic love between males, most notoriously "Queen Bitch" from Hunky Dory. There were also rumors -- I'm not sure at this remove how seriously to take them -- of love affairs between Bowie and other male rockers. Willis doesn't mention any of this, and I don't believe she wasn't aware of it.

It occurred to me how much the job of writing has changed since the early 70s when Willis mentioned that Nils Lofgren looked "like a cross between Donovan and the lead singer of the McCoys" (36). The New Yorker's fact checkers were famous even in those days, so surely someone could have made a phone call and learned that the lead singer of the McCoys was Rick Zehringer (aka Rick Derringer), later to play with Johnny Winter, Steely Dan, and as a soloist; but nowadays you (or I, anyway) would expect a writer to do some Googling rather than leave out the name.

(Another mark of changing times: she refers to "the ten-dollar-top ticket prices" (37) for Elvis Presley's 1972 Madison Square Garden concert, clearly regarding that as a high price. It's like seeing an old movie featuring a gas station selling gasoline for under a dollar a gallon.)

Mostly, though, it's a pleasure to reread these pieces, many of which I read when they first appeared. I value Willis's writing so much because, as her New Yorker colleague Karen Durbin writes, she was "that wondrous creature, an intellectual who deeply valued sensuality". Even when I disagree with her, which I did more often later in her career as she became more of an apologist for Israel and even (to some extent, ambivalently) for the War on Terror, she's one of my most important role models as a writer and an intellectual.

(Which reminds me, I need to do a post about Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism, and when I do, I want to address Willis's review of it.)