The Murky Twilight World Between the Pages of the Promiscuous Reader

I'm feeling enervated and neurasthenic tonight, so I'm just going to paste in this little piece I wrote for the student paper back in the 90s. It's a sort of Promiscuous Reader's Manifesto.

[Wealthy 19th-century bibliophiles] were people who also enjoyed the smell of fine leather, the feel of rich papers, the colors of lustrous inks and the look of clean, crisp type.
--"Savoring Literary Treasures", The Chicago Tribune, 27 January 1995

In his younger days, the Promiscuous Reader had to concede, he had been rather indiscriminate, even reckless at times. But he would never denigrate the excitement he'd felt, after years of deprivation, prowling for whole afternoons in the poorly lit and disorganized shelves of the St. Vincent De Paul Thrift Store or the White Elephant Shoppe, where used paperbacks were 10 cents and hardcovers went for fifty cents, a dollar tops. It had begun innocently enough, with a comic book or two behind the barn; then he'd moved on to paperbacks bought from a rack at the local drugstore. Only years later, when he had a job, could he afford to move on to the hard stuff. "You'll go blind," his mother warned him. "So," he shrugged, "I'll do it till I need glasses."

He knew that some evangelists loved to induce a voluptuous shiver of loathing in their congregations with horror stories about people like him: "And some of these so-called intellectuals," they would say, "read as many as five hundred books in a lifetime!" (Little did they know: the Promiscuous Reader's personal tally was about ten times that.) No decent person really needed more than one Book, they asserted, with at most a Pilgrim's Progress or Family Shakespeare for the more worldly. Wasn't that, after all, why Jesus had exhorted his followers to pluck out their eyes, rather than be led by them to sin? It was far better for your hopes of salvation if you received the divine charism of illiteracy.

The Promiscuous Reader was less disturbed by such squeamishness than by certain feminist theorists' attack on "linear narrative" and "patriarchal print media." In the same vein, some Men's Movement writers had deplored the life of the mind as an artifact of the Industrial Revolution, to say nothing of William Burroughs's insistence that language is a malign extraterrestrial virus -- though the Promiscuous Reader noted sourly that these folks' beliefs didn't stop them from writing and publishing many tedious books.

Then there were the champions of the Academic Canon, who held that Great Works of Literature, if read in the missionary position, were no fun whatsoever. This, be it noted, was intended as a compliment: by submitting to the minds of the Great Master Spirits of the Past (who by an amazing coincidence were nearly all male and white, though often not heterosexual) one might improve oneself in a way formerly associated with the effects of cold showers, castor oil. and high colonics.

Supporters of this "family-values" approach to reading cited a new University of Chicago study which supposedly revealed that Americans' favorite pleasure reading were Hamlet, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and Aquinas' Summa in the original Latin; also that 95% of Playboy readers bought it solely for the articles. This study was welcomed in the media as evidence that the New York Times best-seller lists were a ruse by the "cultural elite" to make it appear that Americans preferred trash like Stephen King and Danielle Steele to the Classics.

The Promiscuous Reader bought none of it. Reading was dirty, if you did it right, and the classics were no exception. The Victorians had reason to produce censored versions of Plato, the Bible, Shakespeare, and Chaucer, just as Plato had reason to ban poets from his ideal republic. Those who wish that citizens were robots, docile and interchangeable, have always tried to domesticate literature, washing off the sweat and other unclean body fluids, turning it into in a chaste and proper bride for the virtuous reader. The real lovers of books love them passionately and messily, not for their corseted leather bindings and smooth creamy paper, but for their wicked, hairy, anarchic human souls.

Everybody's Unique -- Except Me

I've begun reading Stephanie Meyer's Twilight. Yes, the megabestseller; your Promiscuous Reader will read almost everything. Aside from the irony that the heroine/narrator announces at the outset she she's not "what anyone would call verbose" -- at the beginning of a 500-page book! -- it's going well enough. But something occurred to me.

One of the early warning signs of gayness, everyone agrees, is feeling different from other children from a very early age. This is even cited as evidence for homosexuality's being somehow inborn. But Bella tells us right away that she didn't fit in, that she'd never found a place where she belonged. The Twilight books are huge bestsellers. Many thousands (millions?) of young women identify with Bella and her alienation. Many thousands (millions?) of readers also identified with the alienated, isolated Harry Potter. So what's unusual about feeling different? If anything, it's a sign of being just like everybody else.

(Image credit -- the whole story is posted there. Click on the image above to enlarge it and make it more readable.)

For a Long Moment

Wow. Suddenly I have nothing to say. Or nothing that I want to say. But it will pass.

What's bothering me is political, not personal (except insofar as the political is personal); it's aggravated by reading David Levithan's most recent novel, Love Is the Higher Law, set on September 11, 2001 and the period immediately afterward. It's much better than Wide Awake. I also am watching the 2008 American remake of My Sassy Girl, which is depressing in its own right. The Korean original, released in 2001, is one of the great screwball slapstick romantic comedies; the remake is competent and disciplined, and that's the trouble: it has none of the craziness and joyous excess that makes the original so memorable, and the American leads have none of the chemistry or charm of the Korean leads, Cha Tae-hyun and Jeon Ji-hyun.

So, to fill the space, here's a number from the 1964 Hindi film Dosti, which means "Friends." I learned about it from Ruth Vanita's book Love Rites: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West (Penguin, 2005). Dosti is a love story involving two teenaged boys, one blind and the other lame. It's not a gay film, but the friendship is extremely intense and rapturously emotive. I haven't usually liked the music in Bollywood films, but I love the songs in Dosti. According to Vanita, it was the songs that made the film popular. At this point, the two have been separated, and Mohan, the blind boy, sings of his loss and continued devotion.



There's a literal translation of the Hindi lyrics here.

Hoist with Her Own Petard

This gem by Andrew Sullivan by way of Homo Superior:

Where there is Christianism, there is usually hypocrisy, corruption and abuse. From Haggard to Maciel, from the Vatican to the Swaggarts, from Rove to Limbaugh, the sheer gulf between their public moralism and their private failings is vast. That's because they're human; and they deserve compassion and understanding, the compassion and understanding they always, always deny to others.

This caps a link to a story about a reactionary, bigoted Irish politician, Iris Robinson, who had an affair with a 19-year-old boy she'd known since he was 9. She is around forty years older than he is. To add to the fun, Robinson funneled money to her boy toy from local developers to fund a business he wanted to start, and got a 5,000 pound kickback into the bargain. As Sullivan wrote, such behavior is only to be expected from someone of Robinson's opinions, and not because they're "Christianist," but because they're human. I'd say that hypocrisy and corruption will turn up anywhere there are human beings, and in a weird sort of swerve, Sullivan even concedes as much. But the way he sets up this paragraph, it's clear he thinks that "Christianists" are especially prone to it. I think it's just more fun to make fun of them when they get themselves into trouble.

But two things occurred to me. One is that Sullivan could just as easily have included his own name in his list of Christianist malfeasants. Back in 2001, queer gossip writer Michelangelo Signorile attacked Sullivan for advertising for bareback sex on the Web. Sullivan used the term "power glutes" to describe his own mighty haunches. (At around the same time, Signorile was getting mileage out of his own adventures without condoms, flagellating himself for his lapse -- these Catholic boys! -- but also attacking the gay community for somehow making him do it.) It's often hard to keep up with Sullivan's changes of mind -- he reinvents himself as fast as David Bowie -- but he'd become notorious in the first place as a gay Catholic moralist who scolded other gay men for their tomcatting, and advocated same-sex marriage on the ground that it would civilize us. Somewhere along the line, though, he got into leather, testosterone injections, cruising, and other fun stuff, and decided to keep touting marriage while enjoying what we laughingly call the benefits of gay men's culture. So, of course, when the news broke, Sullivan whined about other people's "Sexual McCarthyism." Eight years on, even his fans equate "power-glutes" with Sullivan, not least because he keeps the phrase alive himself.

Second, I read Virtually Normal and have read stray bits of Sullivan's writing over the years, and I can't remember ever seeing him exhibit any compassion for or understanding of anyone. If he changed his mind on gay men's sexual culture, it wasn't because he began to empathize with men who inhabit a different world than he, it was because he moved into it and adopted its customs and language himself. Similarly, as David Talbot wrote at Salon in October 2001, after George W. Bush took office and the 9/11 attacks made frothing superpatriotism the hysteria du jour, Sullivan lashed out at anyone who didn't meet his standards of (what else can you call it?) Political Correctness. Four years later he was still at it. At some point he changed course again, and wrote an essay condemning torture that even I find difficult to fault, but that's another of Sullivan's distinguishing traits: he reacts first to any problem with reactionary ideology, condemning "the left" with gleeful self-righteousness, then does a little thinking and crabwalks to a more sensible position -- but without, as far as I've seen, ever conceding that the leftists he used to condemn were there first. This makes him an effective media brand, a gay Catholic Limbaugh, but it doesn't make him much of a thinker.

(Red Velvet Jesus from -- or via -- The Gay Librarian)

Jumping on a Bandwagon Whose Wheels Are Falling Off

A couple of days ago, one of my Facebook friends from high school, a minister and the son of a minister, posted a link to this New York Times column by Bob Herbert, and remarked:

Bob Herbert of the NYT may be a prophet. Not always perfectly right but talks this week about our country being preoccupied with a few things and not paying attention to the big things that can help us...few of us willing to sacrifice today for a better tomorrow.

One of his friends chimed in with "We live in the land of instant gratification." That's a familiar variety of sermon-speak, of course, and I'm neither surprised nor complaining that a minister talks like a minister.

But what he said set off some alarms in my head, because I really do not agree that "few of us are willing to sacrifice today for a better tomorrow." Every day I'm around students who are mortgaging their futures to get a college degree that may or may not get them a suitable job. Every day I work with people who are sacrificing all kinds of transitory pleasures to earn money to support their families, hoping against hope that their children will have a better future (just as my parents did). I've seen reports that most Americans express their willingness to pay higher taxes to support social programs. Such easy moralizing as my friend's -- and, as you'll see, Bob Herbert's -- is a gross insult to such people.

I looked at Herbert's column, and I'll admit it's not really that bad. I guess he didn't really have any better idea for this week's column, so he just threw together a tossed salad of the current headlines and cliches: America is more concerned with Tiger Woods's sex scandal and the death of Michael Jackson than with really serious matters, job growth has been stalled for the past decade, a quarter of American children are on food stamps, and we're fighting two wars. Something Must Be Done, or the Decline will continue! We must make some serious changes around here!

The fault lies everywhere. The president, the Congress, the news media and the public are all to blame. Shared sacrifice is not part of anyone’s program. Politicians can’t seem to tell the difference between wasteful spending and investments in a more sustainable future. Any talk of raising taxes is considered blasphemous, but there is a constant din of empty yapping about controlling budget deficits.

(I put Herbert's remark about "sacrifice," seized on by my friend, in boldface; you have to look closely as you read the article, or you'll miss it.)

Now, Herbert's diagnosis of the problems we face is accurate enough: the American economy is indeed in trouble, but then it has been since the 1970s. He's hardly the first journalistic hack to complain about the celebrity fixation of the American media, nor the first to blame that fixation on the American people. Back in the late 90s, when the Republican Party, the New York Times, and the Washington Post were engineering their coup against Bill Clinton, the same complaint appeared in print and on the air: Americans are obsessed with this scandal, we in the media are just giving them what they want, it's not our fault. I don't think so, though I do notice that while my coworkers who express an opinion complain about the media's obsession with Tiger Woods, their displeasure doesn't seem to make them seek out different media. And I do consider them responsible for that.

But as I read Herbert's column I began wondering: Who is "we" here? As I said, a good many Americans have been saying the same things all along; if Bob Herbert is a prophet, so is Noam Chomsky. So are the left media. It's the corporate media who are obsessed with trivia, and particularly with the fall of sports heroes; a lot of the people who run the corporate media are jocksniffers (but then so are a large number of American men), but rather than keep their fetish on the sports pages where it belongs, they think it is news. And since corporate advertisers, who pay their bills, would rather see celebrity trivia, scandal, and crime than serious news coverage or analysis, the path of least resistance is to cover what sells ad space.

Short representative digression: The latest viral text on Facebook, from shortly after Herbert's column was published, called for women to put in their status the color of the bra they were wearing that day, without further explanation. I saw it in the morning, asked one of my coworkers about it, she explained. It was supposed to further awareness of breast cancer, or something. I don't think so, but it seemed harmless to me. Today, though, on the AOL news page (which I see when I log out of Netscape mail), I found this link header: "Facebook Bra Post Stirs Outrage", with the subhead "I'm vomitously sick ..." So I clicked the link, and guess what? It's a male blogger on Sphere who's having a hissyfit -- "Broadcasting the color of your bra to your friends and colleagues is not typical or even acceptable behavior for most women, yet that's precisely what thousands of female Facebook users were doing this week, ostensibly to raise awareness of breast cancer" -- though he does quote some female bloggers who disapprove too. I think that aside from queasiness at women talking about their lady parts, he was just peeved that they did it without checking with him first.

The "we" in Herbert's column, then, must be the elite media, corporate leaders, and the Beltway. Those people don't want to pay higher taxes, don't care if public services degrade (most of them have enough money to buy their own), like war, and do not have sacrifice on their agenda. (They're happy to make other people sacrifice, of course: their jobs, their pay, their pensions, their health insurance, their time [by working longer hours]. But they themselves had better get their multimillion-dollar bonuses, because they're doing God's work.) The Times has run numerous stories over the past year about wealthy folk who are having to tighten their belts due to the economic downturn -- $500/bottle champagne instead of $1000, going to Cancun instead of the Riviera, having to sell the third house, and so on -- and such people may be the audience Herbert had in mind when he wrote his column. I doubt they'll listen. But, assuming that I'm right and giving Herbert the benefit of the doubt, to cite him as a "prophet" on a social site frequented by people who are much lower on the socioeconomic pyramid isn't in the best taste. From what I can tell, I doubt that even my old friend's congregation even fits into the Times demographic. What the vast majority of Americans need, given the deteriorating conditions Herbert listed, is less sacrifice, not more.

It may be trivially true that "The president, the Congress, the news media and the public are all to blame", but not everyone is equally to blame. I notice that Herbert didn't mention corporate America, including the banking and finance sectors, which bears a heavy burden of blame for the fix we're in. (But I suppose that's who Herbert meant by "the public," in keeping with Noam Chomsky's dictum that in current discourse, "the public interest" refers to the corporate sector, while "special interests" refers to "women, labor, youth, the elderly, ethnic minorities, the poor, and farmers ... almost the entire population.") It could be argued that by voting in Obama and a strongly Democratic Congress, by rejecting the policies of the Bush years, "the public" did its part to signal its wishes for the direction of change in America. By ignoring that mandate, the president, the Congress, and the news media deserve all the blame that can heaped on them.

Chaos Is What Killed the Dinosaurs, Darling

Today Jonathan Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution linked to an article by the eminent journalist Orville Schell, on America as a "can't-do" nation. What stuck in my mind about this mostly forgettable article (anyone who uses the phrase "tipping point" without reference to cows should not be taken seriously) was this part:

Lately, I’ve been studying the climate-change induced melting of glaciers in the Greater Himalaya. Understanding the cascading effects of the slow-motion downsizing of one of the planet’s most magnificent landforms has, to put it politely, left me dispirited. Spending time considering the deleterious downstream effects on the two billion people (from the North China Plain to Afghanistan) who depend on the river systems -- the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Salween, Irrawaddy, Brahmaputra, Ganges, Indus, Amu Darya and Tarim -- that arise in these mountains isn’t much of an antidote to malaise either.

If you focus on those Himalayan highlands, a deep sense of loss creeps over you -- the kind that comes from contemplating the possible end of something once imagined as immovable, immutable, eternal, something that has unexpectedly become vulnerable and perishable as it has slipped into irreversible decline. Those magnificent glaciers, known as the Third Pole because they contain the most ice in the world short of the two polar regions, are now wasting away on an overheated planet and no one knows what to do about it.

To stand next to one of those leviathans of ice, those Moby Dicks of the mountains, is to feel in the most poignant form the magnificence of the creator’s work. It’s also to regain an ancient sense, largely lost to us, of our relative smallness on this planet and to be forcibly reminded that we have passed a tipping point. The days when the natural world was demonstrably ascendant over even the quite modest collective strength of humankind are over. The power -- largely to set an agenda of destruction -- has irrevocably shifted from nature to us.

Doesn't Schell know that the glaciers began receding thousands of years before the invention of the internal combustion engine, when human beings were fewer and weaker than they are now? Their "downsizing" (a word I think Schell also misuses) is a consequence or symptom of the end of the last Ice Age. To say that is not to deny that human actions have aggravated or accelerated the rising temperatures, only to point out that climate changes in any case, and not for the better.

Nor is it only human beings who change the biosphere. Scientists agree that the amount of oxygen, a poisonous gas, in the atmosphere increased greatly about 2.3 billion years ago, in what is called the Great Oxidation Event. Why this should have happened is debated, but a common theory is that one-celled organisms converted carbon dioxide to oxygen and exuded that waste product into the atmosphere. That probably had an effect on the anaerobic bacteria that are supposed to have been the dominant life form till then. Science cultists enamored of war metaphors can have a field day with such events, imagining an aerobic bacterium putting a tiny foot on the neck of the fallen anaerobic foe, beating its chest and uttering a victory call to attract females, thus ensuring its evolutionary success. But that's neither here nor there.

That third paragraph, with its rhapsody about the "creator's work," and its concluding lament that the "power -- largely to set an agenda of destruction -- has irrevocably shifted from nature to us", makes particularly painful reading. The "creator's work" is destructive at least as often as it is constructive -- volcanoes, numerous extinction events, tsunamis, earthquakes, supernovae, plague, the ichneumon wasp, and death. The "creator" killed off the dinosaurs, for heaven's sake! The metaphor of human disobedience to a benevolent deity or Nature makes for good Mad Scientist movies, and it plays a major role in the current narrative about global warming: "Man" has meddled in matters that he ought not, sought knowledge that properly belongs to Gawd, but soon he will reap the harvest of his sinful pride when Nature strikes back, cities are drowned by the rising sea, and blah blah blah.

Schell then switches topics and moves on to failures in American civil society, comparing us unfavorably to China, South Korea, Europe, and other countries. Unfortunately his approach is the same as his approach to Nature: comparing "China’s gleamingly efficient airports to our chaotic and all-too-often broken-down versions of the same, or Europe’s high-speed trains to our clunky railroads", but what is the carbon footprint of those gleamingly efficient edifices? (What is the plural of edifice? Edifaeces?) That gleaming efficiency, which is often wasteful, has other downsides, which is why "developed nations" want to export their pollution to the less developed nations, where Orville Schell won't have to see it and get all depressed.

TomDispatch founder Tom Engelhardt contributes a much more relevant note as a preface to Schell:

New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which runs the city’s bus and subway lines, finds itself (like many other transportation systems across urban America) facing a sudden financial “shortfall” -- in the MTA's case, almost $400 million, which means severe cuts in service just when we couldn’t be more in need of public transportation. Whole subway and bus lines lopped off or significantly scaled back in places like the borough of Queens, which guarantees that, for many, getting to and from work, especially in the off-hours, will be a nightmare, or in some cases for late night workers essentially impossible. “The cuts,” reported the New York Times, “would eliminate two subway lines, create more crowding on subways and buses, and reduce frequency at off-peak hours. Service on dozens of bus lines would be reduced or ended, and disabled riders would find it more difficult to get around. ...

This has one practical meaning. If you’re poor and young in New York and your family can’t afford approximately $4 a day in subway or bus fares, you’re stuck in your neighborhood, maybe at the crumbling, overcrowded school around the corner. No hope of better. The finest, most competitive schools in the city’s public school system will be left for those who can afford to get to them. It’s a small thing on the scale of this planet’s problems, but it tells you a good deal about the direction this country is heading in and even if the MTA reverses its decision under pressure, the thinking behind it goes with an America I’ve never known.

The America Engelhardt has never known, however, is an America that has always been there -- the America of slums, high infant mortality, sweatshops, industrial accidents, and the upper strata that don't mind all that as long as it doesn't affect them. It's always going to be a struggle to create and maintain structures that benefit the mass of people, like public health, public education, and public transportation. I'm not blaming Schell and Engelhardt for that struggle, only for supposing that it can ever be resolved finally, that the well-off will ever give up.

I think something else is going on here, though. It's the childish wish that everything should stay the way it was in our first memories, that stories should always be told exactly the same way every time. I remember how strange I felt the first time I passed the site of my first elementary school and saw that the building had been demolished; it was as if something had been destroyed in me. But someone who'd passed by that site when the school was newly built would probably have mourned the loss of whatever was there before, whether it was a familiar house or an open field. I suspect that our fear of mortality is related to this wish to stop the world. Not that I think death is a good thing, or that wanting not to die is unrealistic or childish; what I mean is that the way we think about mortality is affected by our wish that nothing should change. Change is always destructive as well as constructive; something that was there must be replaced with something that will take its place. The hard part is figuring out what to change and what to keep.

These Are So Gay

I got this link from Band of Thebes, but felt compelled to post about it myself when the bloggers kicked off their list of "The 10 Gayest Pinoy Commercials of the Decade (2000-2009)" by saying, "These commercials are so gay, and we salute them." Is there, could there be a comparable list of American commercials? Sometimes I recognize the cultural deprivation that comes from not watching TV, but not enough to get satellite.

Some of these commercials lean rather too hard on the gay-man-as-sissy trope, but with good humor. As Harvey Fierstein declared in The Celluloid Closet, "I like the sissy ... my view has always been, visibility at any cost. I'd rather have negative than nothing. And also because I am a sissy." And once again, I'm surprised at the visibility of gay people in supposedly conservative Asia (or hell, an archipelago off Asia, whatever). The Bakla Review also has sidebar polls for what its readers consider the best gay Filipino movie of 2009, with 22 choices and a check box for "others". I suppose at least that many independent gay films are made in the US each year, but wow. The Philippines are so gay, and I salute them.

Incidentally, the noodle commercial embedded above works a motif I've seen in several comedy sketches on Korean TV: a couple eat their way toward the middle of one noodle until their lips almost touch, while the live audience shrieks in mixed delight and horror -- only in the Korean routines, the couple are heterosexual, a man and a woman who've been influenced / corrupted by American customs, probably while visiting or studying in the US. Now, that's cultural conservatism, but nowadays even South Koreans are seeing gay commercials on TV.