Intellectual Culture

I'm reading Noam Chomsky's latest book of interviews with David Barsamian, Power Systems, just published this month by Metropolitan Books.  As usual, there's plenty of good stuff in it.  For example, Barsamian asks Chomsky how he manages to read so much: "We're sitting in your office, surrounded by piles and piles of books.  How do you get through all this stuff?"

Unfortunately, I don't.  This is the urgent pile.  There are many more stacks elsewhere.  But one of the painful experiences which I try to avoid as much as possible is to calculate how much time it would take, if I read constantly, to go through them.  And reading a book doesn't just mean turning the pages.  It means thinking about it, identifying parts that you want to go back to, asking how to place it in a broader context, pursuing the ideas.  There's no point in reading a book if you let it pass before your eyes and then forget about it ten minutes later.  Reading a book is an intellectual exercise, which stimulates thought, questions, imagination [103].

That gave me a small thrill of recognition, from the piles and piles of books to the despair that follows from thinking about how long it will take read them to the process of reading itself.  Chomsky goes on:

I suspect that will disappear.  You see various signs of it.  There has been a shift in my own classes over the past ten or twenty years.  Whereas I once could make casual literary references and people more or less knew what I was talking about, this is less and less true.  I can see from correspondence that people are constantly asking questions about something they saw on YouTube but not about an article or a book.  They very often rightly ask, "You said so-and-so.  What's the evidence for it?"  In fact, in an article I wrote the same week as that talk, there might have been footnotes and discussion, but it doesn't occur to them to look for that [103-4].

Oh dear.  I can't say for certain, of course, but I bet one reason why young people don't recognize Chomsky's "casual literary references" is that they come from works that were current when Chomsky was growing up, but which aren't current anymore.  The common culture that makes such allusions work is constantly changing over time, and always has been.  The only halfway stable body of literature that could have endured for more than a generation was the Greek and Roman canon, which was stable because it was closed, with no additions for over a thousand years.  But even in the days when a university education was built around that core, students were reading and writing new works in the vernacular, and they were as likely to be quoting soon-forgotten minor poets as the newer literary giants.  I know that today's undergraduates are still reading, but the works they know and quote are not any that Chomsky has had time to read.  I'm in the same boat: though I probably read more contemporary fiction than Chomsky does, I've read very little by the writers who are popular among twenty-somethings today.

"What does that mean for an intellectual culture, then?" Barsamian asks.

It's going to degrade the intellectual culture.  It can't help but do so.  It's a mixed story.  Take, say, electronic books.  They have advantages.  You have half a dozen books you can read on an airplane trip.  On the other hand, when I read a book I care about, I want to make comments in the margins, I want to underline things, I want to make notes on the flyleaf.  Otherwise I don't even know what to go back to.  You can't do that the same way with an electronic book.  Words just pass into your eyes.  Maybe they don't even stay in your brain [104].

And so on.  But wait -- write in a book?  I was brainwashed out of that from my earliest years as a reader, and I've never shaken the conditioning as an adult.  So I started by keeping notebooks, and eventually began writing notes on the computer as I read.  This has advantages, especially since it means I can search for "what to go back to" much more easily, and I can copy and paste what I've typed at will.  But I can't always write my notes when I'm reading, on the bus for example.  I used to see students in the university library making notes on index cards; now they're usually using their laptops.  From what I hear, e-books have made some advances, making it possible to make notes and bookmark passages.  People for whom that matters will adjust.

People for whom that matters, though, like Chomsky and me, are not typical readers.  We're atypical, probably even among people who've been to college.  The "intellectual culture," as I said, will adjust, even though I don't know exactly how.  Academics already have electronic tools for organizing material, which will filter down to non-academics who have use for them; ironically, the next group after academics will most likely be devout Christians who will use them for Bible study.  Older people, like Chomsky and me, will stick to the methods we know when we can't be bothered to adopt the newer ones.  (But look at Samuel Delany's remarks on hypertext, quoted here.)  While the number of people who read seriously, and the "intellectual culture" that includes them, may wax and wane, it would take an asteroid impact to wipe it out altogether.  Our rulers are ambivalent about literacy and intellectual work, but they need people who can do it to sustain themselves and their system.  This problem, I think, just constitutes one of Chomsky's blind spots.

He Played Real Good (Like a Violinist Should) For Free

Today a friend on Facebook passed along an item about the time the classical violinist Joshua Bell played incognito, without fanfare, in a Washington, D.C. metro station during rush hour.  This was in January 2007; I remember reading about it not too long afterward.  The performance was arranged by a Washington Post reporter, Gene Weingarten, "an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend? " The results were predictable -- only one of the 1097 people who passed Bell recognized him, and very few tossed him any money.  He took in $32 for 45 minutes of playing.

A sentimental detail: hardly any adults stopped to listen to Bell, but "Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away."  Weingarten waxed melodramatic: "The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too."

If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that -- then what else are we missing?

As an experiment, this was pretty bad.  As an interpretation of a social experiment, it's worse.  I'm not at all surprised that children wanted to stop and listen to Bell.  Back when I used to play my guitar outdoors, the very same thing would happen, and I'm no Joshua Bell.  But little children have no sense of time.  It isn't "life" that "starts to choke the poetry out of" them, it's social institutions whose purpose is to hammer us into cogs, and who value nothing that doesn't make money.  Schools take at least six years to accustom children to live by the clock, and that's more important than trivia like reading and writing.  As Noam Chomsky says in Understanding Power (Pantheon, 2002, p. 236):

My oldest, closest friend is a guy who came to the United States when he was fifteen, fleeing from Hitler. He escaped to New York with his parents and went to George Washington High School, which in those days at least was the school for bright Jewish kids in New York City. And he once told me that the first thing that struck him about American schools was the fact that if he got a “C” in a course, nobody cared, but if he came to school three minutes late he was sent to the principal’s office – and that generalized. He realized that what it meant is, what’s valued here is the ability to work on an assembly line, even if it’s an intellectual assembly line. The important thing is to be able to obey orders, and to do what you’re told and to be where you’re supposed to be. The values are, you’re going to be a factory worker somewhere – maybe they’ll call it a university – but you’re going to be following somebody else’s orders, and just doing your work in some prescribed way. And what matters is discipline, not figuring things out for yourself, or understanding things that interest you – those are kind of marginal: just make sure you meet the requirements of a factory.

I wonder what Gene Weingarten would say if one of his underlings was an hour late because he or she had stopped to listen to some guy playing a violin in the metro station.  And most of the people who dashed past Bell were probably government workers; do the taxpayers want government workers to loiter around in subway stations listening to some longhair fiddler, instead of sitting down at their desks and doing their jobs?  Most American males, I think, would be more sympathetic to someone who stopped to watch the recap of a pro football game on a TV.  But classical music?  That's for cheese-eating, latte-sipping, NPR elitists.

Instead of blaming the passersby at rush hour, maybe the writer should criticize institutions that are run quite ruthlessly by the clock, in the service of money. (Much is made in the Washington Post article, and in various versions of the story I've read, of Bell's $3.5 million violin, as though it made his music more worthy of attention than a cheap instrument.  I suspect that for Weingarten and many others who've retailed this story, the cost of the violin and of the tickets to hear Bell play in a regular concert hall are more important than the music.)  The people who dawdled to listen to Bell weren't just responding to beauty, they were engaging in tiny acts of rebellion. The next thing you know, they'll be camping out in public parks. And then where will we be?

You Made Your Bed, Now Lay In It

The other day, another of my right-wing acquaintances posted this meme on Facebook:

I think it's fair to doubt that Betty White actually said this; the photo came originally from an AARP ad campaign.  As I've said before, that's one trouble with memes: people seem to take for granted that the person pictured said the words attributed to them.  If I were White, I'd be displeased.  (There's a meme someone should make: White looking severely over her shades and saying, "Don't put words in my mouth, bitch."  Maybe I'll make that one myself.)

The friend who shared the image commented, "This has always bugged me too."  Well, she's a retired elementary school teacher, but her own posts on Facebook aren't always immaculate in their grammar, spelling, or punctuation; physician, heal thyself.

Most obnoxious here is the class snobbery, by a bigot who doesn't even have the guts to express it in her or his own voice, but hides behind a celebrity.  And I don't get where Wal-mart comes into this.  Pronouncing "ask" as "axe" is usually associated with African-American speech nowadays; Walmart is usually stereotypically associated with white trash, though I bet my friend shops there regularly herself.  Ironically, however, "axe" appears to be the original word, dating back to Old English. It survives in several regional variations of modern English. "Ask," historically speaking, is the corruption of the correct word by the illiterate rabble.  This is a pitfall of a lot of linguistic proscriptivism: the forms that proscriptivists believe are correct often weren't always correct, and may not be correct even today.

Then today another Facebook friend shared this meme:

Ironically, again, the person who posted this (a writer) isn't always immaculate in her grammar, spelling, or punctuation.  I've called her out on this sort of thing before, so I was harsher in my comments this time: "Being a grammar bigot is like being any other kind of bigot. You can do it if you want, but don't be surprised when people draw their conclusions."

My friend replied, "I agree - if you get overbearing about correcting grammar, people will not appreciate it. But I also think it's true that you ignore appropriate use of language - whether it's proper English or slang, depending on the situaton - at your own peril."

To which I replied:

The thing is, this meme is "overbearing" (that is, bigoted), and you re-posted it. And who are the "people [who] will not appreciate it"? And "peril"?

There's also the small detail that much grammar bigotry is erroneous, based on misinformation about what is and what isn't "correct", and on the assumption that one's own subset of the population has the True Correct English. Which is not true.

My friend then took a revealing detour: "I see you may have had some overbearing grammar nazis in your life. Sorry about that."  I've often encountered this move, as in Christians who tell me that I must be an atheist because I'm gay and Christianity doesn't approve of my lifestyle, or maybe I've met some really overbearing Christians who made Christianity look bad.  Both speculations are wrong, but that's another subject.

As I told her, this is not about me.  As a male I've encountered very little sexism in my life, but I still give sexists a hard time; as a white person I've encountered very little racism in my life, but I still pick on racists whenever they're incautious enough to state their opinions in my presence.  I learned standard English early and easily, mostly by reading -- I learned little about it in school, and much of what I was taught was wrong anyhow.  I don't have to have suffered personally from bigotry to object to it; I spoke out against racism years before I was ready to speak out against antigay bigotry.

I have no doubt that the opinions my friend endorsed here are bigotry.  True, if I owned a business and were hiring someone to write letters for me, I'd rule out people who hadn't mastered standard English, just as I wouldn't hire someone as a pianist who couldn't play the instrument.  But it's a long way from such requirements to looking down on the applicants who didn't qualify, let alone claiming that they apply "at their own peril." This meme has nothing to do with necessary skills. It's about a kind of racism that ties humanity to certain language abilitiies.

Nor does communication have anything to do with it, as is often claimed.  It looks to me like most of the errors that drive grammar bigots into conniptions are trivial, like confusing "too" and "to" or "they're" and "their."  (Indeed, the tinier the error, the bigger the conniption.)  They may momentarily bother a reader who isn't very fluent in English, but a native speaker should breeze past them easily.  The human brain does a lot of error correction without any noticeable effort, as anyone who's done proofreading will know: it's hard to catch all the typos, because you don't notice them.  So someone who throws public tantrums (like posting on Facebook) over other people's poor English is telling me much more about herself or himself than about the state of the English language today.

My friend's rationale is familiar from other contexts, and I feel sure she'd recognize its bad faith if she encountered it anywhere else.  The first step is to distance oneself a step from the bigotry, to pretend that one is open-minded oneself, but there are all these other people who aren't as evolved.  For example, I've encountered people who disapprove of "interracial" marriage, not because they're racists themselves -- heavens, no! -- but because other people are narrow-minded and will pick on the kids.  So why not pick on the racists?  Because it's the parents' fault: they ignored these basic social realities, and now the children must suffer.  The fake compassion is almost palpable: Oh, I would never look down on someone for saying "ain't" myself, but not everyone is as liberal as I am.

The same rationale also turns up in the abortion-rights debate: If a woman has unsanctified sex ("at her own peril!"), she was just asking to get pregnant, so she should take responsibility for her actions instead of trying to get an abortion.  This is also familiar from the treatment of rape in rape cultures like our own: What did she think she was doing, going out dressed like that?  Or more respectably (because scientists said it), young women need to learn to prevent rape by not dressing provocatively.  So what can non-standard English speakers expect if they go around talking like that?  They do so at their own peril.

(I should probably try to clarify something.  I'm not implying that my friend is racist, sexist, homophobic, or a forced-birther.  As far as I know -- we've never met -- she's a perfectly nice person in most respects.  Most bigots are perfectly nice people in most respects.  But she's shown herself to be a bigot in this one area.)

Then there's this, which is probably close enough to the topic.  The sign below apparently was posted in a Delaware playground.

For those who have not adjusted to the Reconquista and learned the language of our new benevolent overlords, the sign in Spanish says "You must have permission to play in this field.  Violators susceptible to police action."  (To my amazement, one bilingual commenter argued that it might just be a bad translation.  My Spanish is not perfectly fluent, but I see no way that "police action" could have gotten in there by accident, incompetence, or computer translation.)  According to the Daily Kos article referenced by the Facebook poster, similar signs were erected at three different playgrounds in the vicinity.  Some include warnings that the site is under video surveillance.  An update reports that the school superintendent asked her husband to take down the signs personally.  But how did they get put up in the first place?

One commenter wrote this about the controversy:

Another reason to take the time to learn English. Bilingual is a good advantage in life, but refusing to learn the common language in a country impacts your ability to participate in many seen and unseen ways. The earlier generations of immigrants did things correctly by learning English to succeed in business. It's only in the past generation that school notes have had to come home in two languages.

Besides being irrelevant, this is false in just about every point.  Many immigrant communities survived for generations without really assimilating to the English majority.  Most first-generation adult immigrants did not learn to speak English -- their children did.  And even many of their kids didn't.  As Gerald Bracey wrote, "Most of them sank.  Like stones.  They simply weren't noticed because so many native-born children also were not attending school, and the immigrants just melted into this larger crowd." *

But more important, it's irrelevant.  An assimilated Latino child who knew English wouldn't be able to read the Spanish sign, and would be "susceptible to police action" for playing in that playground.  So, for that matter, would an Anglo child who knew no Spanish, if the warning was the intended meaning of the sign.  But since the signs say different things, it's most likely that racism was the motive for the Spanish signs' different message.  I don't believe that whoever posted them wanted to trap Anglo kids by not warning them away in a language they could understand.

Back to the main topic.  None of what I've written here means that I think that standard English is not a class marker, or that students shouldn't be helped to master standard English.  The trouble is that traditional methods of teaching English are so ineffective in giving students such mastery that I'm tempted to believe that their continued use is at least partly deliberate, to prevent some students from learning standard English.  It is well-established that skill-oriented instruction in English doesn't work: at best it produces no improvement in writing ability.  Harvey Daniels, whose Famous Last Words contains too many useful ideas for me to quote them all here, recommended:

In spite of all we know about language, dialects, and education, most people still believe that if you can just get them young and teach them standard English, they will get better jobs and be forever grateful.  The history and the assumptions of bidialectical programs do not offer much hope that this is true.

Instead we should accept the kids as they are, welcome them to school, and encourage them to talk, read write, and think in the language they already have.  Once they are off to a good start, and once their sociolinguistic awareness has developed sufficiently (when they are eleven or twelve at the earliest), we can tell them the story about standard English being the key to a better life.  If they believe it, we can help them to learn the contrasts.  But we should make no grand promises.  As long as the general public retains those prejudices against black people which have infected the study of Black English, no semistandard we can teach them will offer our students much protection against the bigotry they may encounter later in life.  Nor will such teaching diminish the differences between black and white dialects of English.  For as long as the black and white communities in this country are largely separate -- geographically, socially, politically, and economically -- their languages will continue to be different.  Black English will not disappear, no matter what the schools or other social institutions may do to eradicate it, to modify it, or to punish its use.  **

Daniels was writing here about African-American students, but I think it obviously applies to all English-speakers.  And while there is room for debate about the best way to teach people standard English, there is no excuse for the kind of bigotry I've cited against those people who fail to learn it.

* Setting the Record Straight: Responses to Misonceptions About Public Education (Alexandria VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1997), p. 72.
** Famous Last Words: The American Language Crisis Reconsidered (Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), pp. 182-3.

P.S.  Of course the use of "lay" in the title of this post was deliberate.

A Fool's Theodicy

John M. Chernoff's Hustling Is Not Stealing: Stories of an African Bar Girl (Chicago, 2003) has a 118-page introduction, but unusually for such matter, it's worth reading all the way through.  I like Chernoff's approach to mapping out the problems of describing African society -- or any society, really -- but 80 pages in, I'm starting to notice a pattern.  He starts off well, then wanders off in what seems to me a wrong direction.  Then he takes up a new subject and repeats the pattern.  For example:

… Maybe in some situations, the purpose of knowing about something is not to understand it. Maybe in some times in places, the purpose of building and sustaining our knowledge is merely like that of a sermon, or even an incantation, in which Western social thought and social science function theologically as a bulwark against chaos, drawing boundaries to keep chaos away or to project it outward. If one assumes that there are things we will never understand, then chaos is another word for the limitations of our knowledge and capability, a word like nature or uncertainty or irony or fate or mess. Perhaps disorganization is part of the system, a regressive part that is beyond what we know and work with every day, yet nonetheless is a part that is serving the system or helps in a mysterious way, something like the imagination of the system. At least, for some philosophers and most fools, chaos represents the capacity to make fun of self-evident knowledge and of people who claim to know what is happening. Faced with a mess, the narrator of this book and her acquaintances do not need a teleology grounded in social policy or social theory. They need a theodicy grounded in a comic vision, a pathway to redemption, or at least an assertion of hope [21-2].

What I like is his initial speculation that understanding isn't necessary for knowledge, and even more, that "Western social thought and social science function theologically as a bulwark against chaos, drawing boundaries to keep chaos away or to project it outward."  I mean, I thought that was obvious, and I don't think it's just "social science" that has this function; so does physical science.

But I don't think it's necessary to "assume that there are things we will never understand," though it depends on what conclusions Chernoff wants to draw from that assumption.  We can't know in advance which things we will be able to understand and which we won't, so we might as well take on whatever problems look interesting.  It's not like we're in any danger of running out of questions we can't answer in the foreseeable future.  Mainly, though, we can't know in advance which things we will or won't understand.  The horizon of knowing all we can possibly know is still too far off to worry about.  And so often we don't even know what it is that we don't know.

I agree that Hawa (the name Chernoff gave to his narrator) and her acquaintances don't need a teleology, but I didn't know that anyone does.  But a theodicy isn't needed either.  The word means "justification of God", and in practice refers to any "defense of God's goodness and omnipotence in view of the existence of evil."  But what if God is in the wrong? What if God is guilty?  What if there is no "pathway to redemption"?  Can one live without it?  I don't see why not.  Hawa probably believes in God, and so do her acquaintances, but they don't need Chernoff to justify Its ways to them.

Maybe Chernoff recognizes this.  In his discussion of AIDS (which is not very good, I'm afraid -- it's the weakest part of the introduction so far), he writes (page 83):

An African proverb says, "When a river is dry, it is God Who is in shame, not the river."  And truly, as for this case, God really should be ashamed.

Absolute Zero

Glenn Greenwald has a fine column on freedom of speech at the Guardian today; the Blogger Formerly Known as Ioz addresses some some important issues that Greenwald didn't take into account, notably the totalitarian nature of corporations.  I could add to the discussion, but not tonight.  Maybe tomorrow.

Ou Sont Les Bonnes d'Antan?

I just finished reading My Husband and My Wives (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) by Charles Rowan Beye.  Beye is a classicist who's taught at various distinguished universities, but this book is a memoir of his life as a gay man from Iowa, born in 1930.  That was what led me to check it out from the library when I happened on it.  Beye is technically old enough to be my father, and we're both from the Midwest, so I was curious to see what his experiences were like.

Beye came from a middle-class family in Iowa City.  His father, who died when he was quite young, was a surgeon in the University hospital there.  Beye started having sex with other boys when he was about twelve. He found plenty of eager male partners at school and elsewhere, and his availability was an open secret.  When scandal erupted, he was incredibly lucky that the therapist his mother sent him to wasn't interested in trying to "cure" him; instead he listened to him and helped him sort himself out.  After a brief flurry of hysteria, his schoolmates (many of whom had been sex partners) calmed down and he got through high school with minimal fuss.  From there he went to college, discovered an interest in (primarily Greek) classics, and embarked on an academic career.

I find myself comparing Beye to Merle Miller, also gay, also from Iowa, born a decade before Beye.  Miller's family was lower-middle-class.  Miller escaped to journalism (he was a war correspondent during World War II) and the writing of fiction.  In 1970, infuriated by a bigoted article on gays published in Harper's Magazine, he wrote a long essay for the New York Times Magazine, published in book form as On Being Different. The Times softened his anger during editing, but it was still a breakthrough for the time and for the Times: a homosexual writing as a homosexual under his own name, expressing his anger at a heterosexual writer's bigotry. 

I share Beye's discomfort with the gay scene, though not as strongly, and I have a different explanation for it.  Try a thought experiment: Suppose that gay men all acted exactly like straight men, so that when you entered a gay bar you wouldn't know from the customers' mannerisms and speech patterns that they were homosexual.  I don't know about Beye, but I would still not be very comfortable among gay men, just as I'm not comfortable among most straight men.  Or among most people of any type or class or background.  I depend on the fact that all straight men are not exactly alike, any more than all gay men are alike. The behavior of people in groups is very different from the behavior of people as individuals, however, and what surprises me is when I encounter a large (more than half a dozen people at a time, say) social group where I don't feel uncomfortable.

The most interesting part of Beye's story for me is his two heterosexual marriages, which produced four children.  Merle Miller married once, but only as a desperate attempt to be normal, and he had no children.  I have no idea whose experience was more common, but Beye's is a good example of the kind of erotic "fluidity" so often touted nowadays.  He seems to have had no difficulty functioning sexually with female partners, but he never lost interest in "male companionship" either.  Eventually he settled down with a male partner, whom he married after Massachusetts ratified civil same-sex marriage.  This comes out of nowhere, because though he mentions several times that he wishes for more from sex than quickies, and recounts several "affairs," usually with men who didn't think of themselves of gay, he frequently discounts the possibility of long-term committed relationships between men.  He never resolves this contradiction, simply states it.

Beye's viewpoint reminds me how easy it is to mistake one's own experience of gay life for its totality.  That's why I've always been interested in reading other gay people's life stories, to learn about other perspectives.  So when Beye claims that gay men are really only interested in one-night stands and not relationships -- "the truth of male-male relationships," he calls this (79), the result of (his interpretation of) male biology -- I wonder if he really hasn't met gay men who wanted to be in couples, or if he just didn't see them.  Certainly just about every gay man I met in Bloomington wanted to find a lover.  But you could look at older gay literature, from Walt Whitman to Ralph Meeker's Better Angel to Christopher Isherwood's fiction, memoirs, and diaries, and see that many gay men routinely coupled.  Isherwood was a quarter century older than Beye, and he seems to have been in relationships most of his life.  So Beye's view isn't a product of his pre-Stonewall generation; maybe, though I find this hard to believe, he just never encountered more than the one or two male couples he mentions.

Still, My Husband and My Wives is a good read.  I'm always glad to hear people's stories (I just began reading the oral autobiography of an African "bar girl," Hustling Is Not Stealing [Chicago, 2003], compiled by the anthropologist John M. Chernoff, and it looks good), and Charles Beye told his story engagingly.

Greatest Hits of 2012

One thing I do like about the new Blogger interface is that it shows how many views each post has had.  This doesn't mean that every person who landed on the page actually read the post, of course, but there is a wide range of numbers.  So, instead of trying to summarize the highlights of the past year's posts, I'm going to list those which got the most views.  Counting down the top 25:

25. Rudi, I Killed Your Father On watching the Disney live-action movie Third Man on the Mountain for the first time since I was a kid.

24. I Like Your Queer Theory, I Do Not Like Queer Theorists  Queer Theory isn't the problem, it's the way so many Queer Theorists get it all wrong.  This post is the first of three I wrote about a new book of GLBT history.

23. It's National "Don't Talk Like a Tribalist" Day In which I tried to think through my reservations about the use of "tribal" and "tribalism" as putdowns by certain leftish bloggers.

22. Too Gay, Not Gay Enough, and Just Right On GLBT characters in GLBT fiction, starting with an interview with writers Stephen McCauley and Carol Anshaw.

21. Alien vs. Predator?  Julian Assange vs. Mark Zuckerberg, Wikileaks vs. Facebook, journalism vs. corporations, public vs. private.

20. Shin Jung Hyun  About the US release of a retrospective CD of music by a great South Korean rock guitarist from the 1970s.

19. If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say, Come Sit Here By Me President Obama and the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

18. Treating Falsehood with Complaisance About supposed early Christian "gay marriage" rituals, as misunderstood on the Internet.

17. Can They Do That?  Pearl Cleage fawns on President Obama, Ron Paul's supposed appeal to young voters, George Carlin and the Seven Words You Can't Say on the air.

16. Disappointment? About a common diversionary tactic used by Obama loyalists during the election campaign.

15. Evolution Helps Those Who Help Themselves It was meant to be, by Fate, God, or Natural Selection.

14. The Sound of Silence  A meme I liked, featuring Steve Buscemi on God.

13. The Perfect Is the Enemy of the Good On voting and whining, and Obama loyalists' attacks on Glenn Greenwald and other critics of Obama from the left.

12. Control Freaks On the disturbing persistence of eugenics in progressive/left discussion of population growth.

11. Love Me for My Skeleton Alone Hatred of the body among pro-gay people.

10. The Mouth of Bourbon Street About a creepy video of college football fans molesting a passed-out fan from a rival school.

9. What a Handsome Young Man They Had Got.  About Sylvia Townsend Warner's 1954 novel The Flint Anchor and its subtle homoeroticism.

8. Father Knows Best Authoritarian patriarchal psychiatry during the 1950s and 1960s in the US and England.

7. My Haters Are My Motivators.  The controversy over J. C. Penney's taking on Ellen DeGeneres as a spokesperson, and the ethics of boycotting corporations.

6. Bugs Bunny Made Me Gay Gender confusion in popular entertainment, from the Good Old Days down to the present.

5. Oh Myyy ... Gay Christians Say even more Darnedest Things, with George Takei as enabler.

4. The Fools Think About the Clever People, Of Course On the triumph of emotion over reason, and the personality cult in the Obama election campaign. 

3. Un Baile Dulce Really just a picture I found online, of some cute Mexican men dancing together.  I guess other people like to see that as much as I do.

2. On Stereotyping The Triumph of the Meme, or Who's the Guy in That Picture?

1. The Common Clay of the New West Racism and the inability to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants on the nativist Right.

In case you're wondering, the number of page views for these posts ranged from 149 for number 25 to 903 for number 1.