ProcrastiNation

When I have better things to do, I'm apt to wander off onto tangents.

I'd noticed that my 2011 post on Babe Didrikson Zaharias was consistently my most popular post according to Statcounter, consistently getting more than 15 hits per day over a protracted period of time.  Blogger shows cumulative statistics, so I found the post and discovered that it had received more than four thousand views -- 4375 as I write this now.  Most of my posts get fifty views, or less.

So I started looking at all my posts to see which had more than a thousand hits.  Some surprised me; some pleased me.  Here are the results.

The World As I Found It, 3/19/2008, 1040 views.  My review for Gay Community News of Bruce Duffy's novel about Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Limits of language: Andrew Hodges's "Towards 1984", 6/27/2012, 1051 views.  Andrew Hodges's great piece on George Orwell's blind spots about ordinary language, reprinted with Hodges's permission.

Eaters of Dust, 12/5/2009, 1053 views.  About a Nigerian novel with distinct homoerotic elements.

Seeds and Stems Will Rend My Hems, 6/6/2007, 1086 views.  My GCN review of blues-rock stylist Mitch Ryder's very queer solo album, How I Spent My Vacation.

Park Hyo Shin, 12/28/2008, 1087 views.  My appreciation of a Korean pop singer.

Gay Christians Say the Darnedest Things, 5/21/2007, 1104 views.  My first real post on this blog.  It also attracted some attention elsewhere in the blogosphere, so I'm mildly surprised it doesn't have more views.

Tenny Dearest, 1/27/2008, 1125 views.  My review for GCN of two biographies of Tennessee Williams.

Never the Twain Shall Meet, 4/24/09, 1133 views.  About a construction of eroticism between women in Thailand.  I understand why this one got as much traffic as it did: it was picked up by another site.

True Love Waits, 10/2/2008, 1182 views.  Alarmist stories about adolescent heterosexuality in South Korea.

"What Is Truth?" Said Jesting Pilate, 12/17/2011, 1186 views.  On the "liberal" media and journalistic truth.

I Am the Very Model of a Modern Homosexual, 5/5/09, 1213 views.  On orthodox academic Foucauldians.

The Common Clay of the New West, 3/12/12, 1237 views.  On "illegal immigration" and racism among the descendants of immigrants.

Bugs Bunny Made Me Gay, 5/22/2012, 1245 views.  On Glee and right-wing homosexual panic, plus genderbending in children's entertainment.

Are You Born Honosocial, Or Is It a Lifestyle Choice, 9/6/2008, 1261 views.  Fussing over the sexual orientation of fictional characters, especially Frodo and Sam; homosocial vs. homosexual.

I Do Not Like Your Christ, I Like (Some of) Your Christians, 8/2/2010, 1289 views.  On Christian atheist Frank Schaeffer and his ignorance of historical Christianity.

The Son of Man Came Not to Be Served, But to Serve, 3/24/2011, 1478 views.  Moderate respectable Christians, and why they annoy me.

Homo Sum: Humani Nil A Me Alienum Puto, 1/1/2008, 1610 views.  "Universality" in entertainment and art, especially where it involves LGBT characters.

Travel / Posting Advisory and Eternal Life, 5/19/2010, 1654 views.  Written while I was on my way to Korea in the summer of 2010, about eternal life as discussed on Andrew Sullivan's blog.  But not by Sullivan.

Marvin Martian, 12/28/2009, 1664 views.  My post on Edgar Pangborn's 1950s science-fantasy novel about benign Martians observing and interfering in humanity's history.

I Can Haz Slave Boy?, 9/13/2009, 1931 views.  Did Jesus affirm a gay couple?  Did he approve of the sexual use of a slave boy by his Roman centurion master?  Gay Christian apologetic works in mysterious ways.

Assimilation and Its Discontents, 3/20/2010, 2073 views.  A big post on the vexed topic of gay assimiliation.

The Killing of Sister Georgy Girl, 8/28/2010, 2135 views.  About the novel and film Georgy Girl, exploring their queer possibilities.

This Blog Is Not a Safe Space, Part 1, 2/15/2009, 2206 views.  The first of four posts on "safe space" in university diversity-education.

Is Park Hyo Shin Gay? Now You've Got Me Wondering, 3/31/2009, 2626 views.  I hadn't speculated about Park Hyo Shin's sexual orientation in my earlier post about the K-pop singer, but apparently some of his Asian fans looked at the name of the blog, assumed I had said he was gay, and wrote me an angry e-mail message.  This is my response, which got even more traffic than the first post. 

Just Say "Nein"!, 4/14/2010, 2864 views.  I wrote a couple of fan-fiction scripts inspired by the Sassy Gay Friend series on Youtube.  In this one, the Sassy Gay Friend visits Pope Benedict XVI. (Here's the other one.)

The Rule 3 - The Naked Kitchen, 11/26/2009, 2989 views.  I wrote a few posts on the Rule, the Liz Wallace /Alison Bechdel criterion for representation of women in cinema.  To my surprise, I found that quite a few South Korean films made the grade.  This post drew the most attention.

The Girl in the Basement, 6/4/2007, 3188 views.  Another early post, my GCN review of Kate Millett's The Basement, about the killing of teenaged Sylvia Likens in Indianapolis in 1965.  I wasn't surprised to find that this one had gotten so many views, because I'd noticed that it got steady traffic over time.

A Good Ol' Gal from Beaumont, Texas, 2/6/2011, 4375 views.  My post on the great athlete Babe Didrikson Zaharias, who is widely supposed to have been lesbian.

Dude, I'm a Fag, 5/9/2009, 5681 views.  I'm happy that this post, about lgbt teenagers, diversity education, and reclaiming langauge, tops the list; I think it's one of the best, most important things I've written.  Evidently a fair number of other people more or less agreed.

So that's it.  Quite a mixture.

Do As I Say, Not As I Don't

I can see that one major factor in my procrastination is that I start reading something interesting on the Internet, and that leads to another related something interesting, and so on.  If I read print, there's no click-through, so reading a book may fill me with the desire to log into Blogger and start writing a blog post.  I need to make myself go directly from the book to Create Post, but it's often difficult to write a post without links.  I must work on this.

Meanwhile, I'm going to pass along a lovely aside from a 1960 discussion of Robert A. Heinlein's notorious novel Starship Troopers.  It was written by another sf writer, Poul Anderson.  Anderson noted that Heinlein had always been a writer of ideas as much as of science fiction, and indeed wrote a kind of philosophical fiction -- which Anderson (and I) thought was a good thing to do.  He contrasted this aspect of Heinlein with another well-known sf writer of the period.  Playing around with ideas was, Anderson said, a major part of Heinlein's work:

Infinitely more so than, say, Bradbury, who's a nice guy and a talented writer but whose philosophy is epitomized in his belief that the highest foreseeable use for technology is the construction of electric grandmothers.

Did Bradbury ever explicitly declare such a belief?  I don't know.  But Anderson's quip sums up very well, I think, Bradbury's bucolic-nostalgic-Norman-Rockwell-goes-to-Mars aspect.  Bradbury had his virtues, and I liked his work very much for a few years as a kid, but he's not by any means an intellectual writer.  That is one reason why Fahrenheit 451 doesn't work: he couldn't keep his agenda -- and it was a simple one: books good! censorship bad! -- straight for any length of time.  For all my disagreements with it, Heinlein's work continues to give me something to argue with constructively: that is to say, he wrote about things that matter and still matter, which people should try to think about clearly and correctly.  Some of his apologists will try the Limbaugh-esque "Hey, I'm just an entertainer, not a politician" line in his defense, but though Heinlein himself used it sometimes, I can't believe that he didn't agree that these things were important and should be discussed, even in fiction.

I notice, by the way, as I read more of Anderson's piece on Starship Troopers, that I agree with his "politics" -- his views on human nature and society, I mean -- much more than I'd have expected.  He didn't do so well when he confronted feminist sf fans and writers later in the same decade, but he was good here.

My Lack of Faith Disturbs You

This is not good. I just realized that I'd posted my second, longish comment in twenty-four hours on a Glenn Greenwald post, yet I hadn't been able to muster the energy to post here since Wednesday. Actually I've been fairly busy, doing more reading of actual print than I have in some time, but still, that doesn't stop me unless I'm procrastinating for other reasons. Which I guess I am. It's amazing how much you can get done as long as it's not what you are supposed to be doing.

Consider this, from The Telegraph last June.

Professor Richard Lynn, emeritus professor of psychology at Ulster University, said many more members of the "intellectual elite" considered themselves atheists than the national average.

A decline in religious observance over the last century was directly linked to a rise in average intelligence, he claimed.

But the conclusions - in a paper for the academic journal Intelligence - have been branded "simplistic" by critics.

Professor Lynn, who has provoked controversy in the past with research linking intelligence to race and sex, said university academics were less likely to believe in God than almost anyone else.

That last paragraph sets off all kinds of alarms about Professor Lynn's intelligence and the quality of his research, let alone his claims. So, let's see ... why, he has his own home page, on which he lists "Eugenics" among his interests, and

In 1991 I extended my work on race differences in intelligence to other races. I concluded that the average IQ of blacks in sub-Saharan Africa is approximately 70. It has long been known that the average IQ of blacks in the United States is approximately 85. The explanation for the higher IQ of American blacks is that they have about 25 per cent of Caucasian genes and a better environment.

He has also published defenses of eugenics and is a director of the proudly 'politically incorrect' Pioneer Fund. So this man, despite his stature in certain circles, is not the best source for today's atheists to cite.

Some of them have done just that, though. I found the first two paragraphs quoted at Atheism Soup, though any rational person would immediately recognize that correlation -- in this case between rising IQs and dwindling church attendance -- does not equal cause. Besides, any decently scientifically-literate person should know that there's reason to doubt the equation of IQ with intelligence. Atheism Soup got those two paragraphs, which constituted the entire post, from Deep Thought, which might be a subblog of Atheism Soup. No doubt Atheism Soup's readers, being rationalists, will be as critical as I was, rather than taking such transparent and malign nonsense simply on trust. Snort.

The atheist cult of personality seems to be growing, as shown by the image above. See why I'm feeling a bit down? Hemingway as a role model? Well, as with the corresponding Christian cult of personality, it allows the lazy and mediocre to uplift themselves by identifying with people of higher status.

The Book Snob's Big 100

If you're on Facebook, you've probably seen this list. A number of my friends have 'done' it. One of them complained about strange repetitions, such as Shakespeare's Complete Works (14) and Hamlet (98). That and the way it was written reminded me of netlore and the popular "99 out of 100 people won't have the guts to put this in their status - will you" that turns up on Facebook so often, so I did a little search and found 1) it doesn't come from the BBC; and b) it probably comes from the Guardian, though their list says nothing about most people only having read 6 of the books. Still, I'm a book snob myself, so I did the list too:

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!

1. Pride and Prejudice- Jane Austen

2. The Lord of the Rings- J.R.R. Tolkein

3. Jane Eyre- Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7. Wuthering Heights- Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10. Great Expectations- Charles Dickens

11. Little Women- Louisa May Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy- Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30. The Wind in the Willows- Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32. David Copperfield- Charles Dickens

33. The Chronicles of Narnia- C.S. Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40. Winnie the Pooh- A.A. Milne

41. Animal Farm- George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code- Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52. Dune- Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70. Moby Dick- Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72. Dracula- Bram Stoker

73. The Secret Garden- Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75. Ulysses- James Joyce

76. The Inferno- Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81. A Christmas Carol- Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83. The Color Purple- Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92. The Little Prince- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94. Watership Down- Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

(54 read, 3 begun but not finished)

Who Knows Where the Time Goes?

I have no idea why I got so little done the past several days, despite a four-day Thanksgiving break. As usual when a holiday approaches, I had grandiose plans for reading, writing, watching movies, and visiting friends. I did manage to visit friends, which is probably the best use I could have made of the time, but that's about all. I watched the pilot episode of Glee and decided it was worth watching. Oh, and shopping: the going wasn't tough, but I didn't let that stop the tough from going shopping. I spent way too much on DVDs and books. (One factor probably was the knowledge that I've written 300 posts already this year, and something in my brain said I could stop awreddy.)

Anyway, it's back to work tomorrow, and that will probably get me back into the groove. There are a lot of things I want to write, and they'll have to be written on the run instead of at leisure.

Leave Lilly Alone!

After a fairly hellish day at work, on top of getting up at 7 to speak at an 8 a.m. class, I can only agree with this great lady. (The original version is on Youtube, but with embedding disabled.) I'll try to get myself in gear soon.

My Wives -- I Think I'll Keep Them

Dammit, there’s too much to write about – that’s my problem. And instead of writing here, I’ve been writing long comments on other people’s blogs. That’s one way to procrastinate. (I even thought of putting in links to those comments, but nah.) I’m at the laundromat now, washing my fine linens to get ready for tomorrow’s departure, and that gives me a little time. I’ve actually been pretty productive today, running around buying some last-minute gifts, calling the bank to make sure my debit card won’t get blocked when I use it overseas, and so on. The final packing will be a breeze by comparison. So some relatively brief notes while time permits.

One of my co-workers has been reading a book called His Favorite Wife: Trapped in Polygamy, by Susan Ray Schmidt, about a woman who’d lived in a polygamous Mormon household; she’s also read Escape, by Susan Jessup, which Amazon has paired with His Favorite Wife – get a bargain on voyeuristic tales of sexual exploitation! “More ‘Favorite Wife’ Products” are lined up below. This genre appears to have been a growth industry well before the recent raid at the Yearning for Zion Ranch. I doubt that many Americans want to read lurid accounts of, say, Iraqi women and children blown to bits by American bombs; but they do, clearly, want to read about young girls forced to have sex with, and bear the children of, brutal older men. It isn’t that I support such coercion, and I’d recommend anyone interested to read the Muslim Hedonist’s blog for some serious writing about the costs women pay living in polygamous households, but I do wonder about the motives of the people who want to read about the shame, the degradation, the tears, the blighted lives of young girls who in a better world would be living in suburbia, watching Juno, and giving non-reciprocal blowjobs, as teenaged girls were meant to do. (Or going to church-sponsored Father-Daughter dances: “Something I need from dad is affirmation, being told I’m beautiful ... If we don’t get it from home, we will go out to the culture and get it from them.” I don't think you need to be a strict Freudian to find that worrying.) I’m wary too of the apparatus of state policing and control that’s now in charge of those girls and women, deciding whether they will see their children, deciding where they will go next and what they’ll do.

At The Nation, one J. Goodrich gestures at some of the issues involved, and makes an interesting remark about the Amish. The Supreme Court ruled that “Amish children could not be placed under compulsory education past 8th grade, as it violated their fundamental right to freedom of religion.” Goodrich comments:

I doubt that it was the Amish children who pursued this case or that those same children were then free to have as much elective education as they wished once they had finished eighth grade. No, the decision was not about the children's rights but about the rights of a religious community to survive.

The first sentence is good, and surely true. The second I’m not so sure about. Do the adults in a religious community have the right to override its children’s rights to freedom of religion in order for the community to survive? Goodrich is correct that Wisconsin v. Yoder “was not about the children’s rights,” but what about the children’s rights? How do you decide whether an Amish kid really wants to get more schooling, or whether her parents and community are coercing her to quit?

I’ve written about this before, though, and I’ve wandered here. My first reaction to the subtitle of His Favorite Wife was “Trapped in polygamy, eh? What about the women who’ve been trapped in monogamy?” In the good old days women lost much of their legal personhood on entering into monogamy. Married women were less happy than married men and single women; only single men were less happy. This has changed slightly in the past decade, as more and more married women earn their own money outside the home – something they would not have been allowed to do in the past. Their husbands could forbid them to get a job, or keep the money they earned, and even if their husband was willing they would have trouble getting any serious work, beyond what might pay them “pin money.” Single women were assumed to be biding their time until Mr. Right came along, but they’d often be fired when they did marry.

There was also the double standard which treated a wife’s adultery as a much more serious offense than her husband’s. Men had, and still have, much more freedom of movement outside the home than women do; it’s assumed that marriage will not seriously affect men’s mobility, so it doesn’t. And after marriage, there are surely numerous reasons why widows and divorced women are generally less eager to remarry than divorced men and widowers. But it seems that a major reason is that they don’t want to be wives again. I recall reading a survey of sexuality among older people conducted by AARP, which found that older women wanted to have male friends (with whom they’d probably be involved sexually), but not to be married.

So, put together the (rather creepy, in my opinion) voyeurism about Mormon polygamy in the US with a corresponding lack of interest in the downside of normal American monogamy, and you can see that something interesting is going on. (Imagine a book called, say, His Only Wife: Trapped in Monogamy. Would my co-worker, who’s monogamously and apparently happily married, have that on her desk?) It ties in with the current same-sex marriage controversy, the assumption among its advocates that monogamous civil marriage is essentially a good thing that merely needed some fine-tuning reforms, and the popular rhetorical move by its opponents that legal polygamy will be the next step, which the advocates have trouble answering. Polygamy is a traditional, Biblical value, after all. If polygamy makes women unhappy and exploits them, so for the most part has monogamy.

(P.S. January 7, 2009 -- the original title of this post [My Wife -- I Think I'll Keep Her] always seemed a bit off somehow, and only today when I looked at it did I realize what it should be.)