Month: November 2001

I accidentally stumbled on an amusing essay by John Updike. While I wouldn’t call myself a fan of his writing, I thought “The Disposable Rocket” was a really amusing piece. I’ve been scanning about looking for possible essays to assign when I start teaching, but this one might be a little bit on the edge:

From the standpoint of reproduction, the male body is a delivery system, as the female body is a mazy device for retention. Once the delivery is made, men feel a faint but distinct falling-off of interest. Yet, against the enduring female heroics of birth and nurture should be set the male’s superhuman frenzy to deliver his goods: he vaults walls, skips sleep, risks wallet, health, and his political future all to ram home his seed into the gut of chosen woman. The sense of the chase lives in him as the key to life. His body is, like a delivery rocket that falls away in space, a disposable means. Men put their bodies at risk to experience the release from gravity.

When my tenancy of a male body was fairly new— of six or so years duration— I used to jump and fall just for the joy of it. Falling — backwards, downstairs— became a specialty of mine, an attention-getting stunt I was practicing into my thirties, at suburban parties. Falling is, after all, a kind of flying, though of briefer duration than would be ideal. My impulse to hurl myself from high windows and the edges of cliffs belongs to my body, not my mind, which resists the siren call of the chasm with all its might; the interior struggle knocks the wind from my lungs and tightens my scrotum and gives any trip to Europe, with its Alps, castled parapets, and gargoyled cathedral lookouts, a flavor of nightmare. Falling, strangely, no longer figures in my dreams, as it often did when I was a boy and my subconscious was more honest with me.

From fucking to falling; what an admirable transition. I had a theory once that art was like falling. It was only great when it was accidental and disconnected, weightless and away from the cares of the mundane world, lose and unmediated. I suppose I was dreaming a lot of falling then, and I was in my mid-thirties. I never thought of my penis as a disposable rocket though. Updike goes on to give it a separate consciousness, and like the King Missile song, proposes that the penis is detachable.

An erection, too, defies gravity, flirts with it precariously. It extends the diagram of outward direction into downright detachability— objective, in the case of sperm, subjective, in the case of testicles and penis. Men’s bodies at this juncture, feel only partly theirs; a demon of sorts has been attached to their lower torsos, whose performance is erratic and whose errands seem, at times, ridiculous. It is like having a (much) smaller brother toward you feel both fond and impatient; if he is you, it is you in curiously simplified and ignoble form.

Okay, so maybe it might be a little inappropriate for freshman comp. But after reading so much feminist rhetoric in my early years in school, I for one would have welcomed such an interesting take on male sexuality.

I’ve been having a Frank Zappa film festival

On Usenet, a bunch of Frank Zappa videos have been making the rounds. Up first, “Does Humor Belong in Music” is a gem that until recently was locked away in my ex-wife’s stash of our old beta video tapes. It’s a concert from 1983, and it’s fun, but it’s been really outstanding to finally see old gems like “Uncle Meat.” I’ve been using a chicken to measure it every since.

Frank Zappa was a big influence on me growing up. Helped me forget a lot of the teenage angst crap with songs like “Broken Hearts are for Assholes” and the like. The most important lesson I think, is to never take yourself too seriously. It’s possible to be brilliant and enjoy gutter humor at the same time. It’s possible to enjoy both serious music, and fart noises at the same time.

I can remember one of the things I read in a Guitar Player article a long time ago. Zappa postulated that music needed to have at least one part that was simple, so that the audience could tolerate increasing levels of complexity in other parts. I remember how most of the people I knew couldn’t get past the puerile lyrics of “Valley Girl” to hear the incredibly smoking backing track. I think that was probably what amused Zappa the most: people love a good gag, and always miss the more complex subtext of what is underneath it.

The best of the videos so far, quality wise, has been “The Video from Hell.” Besides having such classic gems as “You Are What You Is” and “G Spot Tornado,” it’s also got footage of FZ defending rock music in front of the Maryland legislature, and conducting an audience on Australian TV from 1973.

The bird takes flight again. The gesture used to signal the band to play a high squeely note seems oddly familiar. My brother made the observation that we both attended the same university (and the same university that most of my heroes attended), Fuck U.

Of all the deaths of people before their time, I suppose it’s Zappa I miss the most. Though I wasn’t as big a fan of his classical music as I was of his rock and jazz, I might have been converted if he lived a little longer. The posthumous stuff that came out showed that he was not even close to losing the sort of edge that made him famous to begin with.

What is it about Australians and dead things?

While Shauna’s bird story and Luke’s obsession with things abandoned, along comes Small Deaths by Kate Breakey. Hand colored photographs of dead critters. Sounds, well, interesting! While you’re at it, you might want to have a look at Sharon Seligman’s Bird People

I’m using a chicken to measure it.

Whoever wrote the joke that said “I-40 is the best thing to come out of Arkansas” hasn’t driven it lately. Six sections of two-lane highway are funneled into one-lane nightmares between here and Ft. Smith. It took three hours to get 140 miles, compared to the usual two. But Thanksgiving with the parents was good.

I should have taken notes as I drove around, there were lots of ideas for writing. I spent some time driving around the Oklahoma-Arkansas border, and the contrasts are just fascinating. My brother lives in this sprawling shack of a house that makes you think of the TV series “Green Acres,” but the kitchen in his place is as big as my whole apartment. No one goes there though, because the roof is in severe danger of caving in on that section of the house. The garage is built of flagstone, and not in any danger. If I moved in, I’d want to live in the garage.

The town is called Rock Island (named after the railway spur that goes through) and the town hall is a 20 foot square aluminum shed. Rock Island has a population of 709. For the first time, I ventured the two miles to cross the border into Arkansas, to find the town of Hackett, with a population of 694. It freaked me out as I drove down highway 45 just outside Hackett to find palatial estates with two and three story ten-plus bedroom homes. My brother commented: “Oh, you found Beverly Hills.”

A little further down the road was a massive building of at least twenty floors tall, and twice that wide, sitting on the top of a hill. This building could hold the population of the entire county, it seemed. Turns out it’s the national headquarters of a health services company that runs nursing homes, Beverly Corporation. This cements the California-Arkansas connection: the company my brother works for manufactures stretch limousines, and their primary customers are in Hollywood. It’s such a strange combination of affluence and poverty. Sort of like California.

Stephen joked that the Arkansas highway workers needed to go to CalTrans school; in California, the roads never stay tore up longer than a couple of weeks, but they’ve been working on I-40 for about three years now and it just seems to get worse. Next time, I’m taking the backroads; they are in better repair!

The seminar tonight went okay, I suppose.

Night classes can be a difficult crowd, as everyone is tired and not necessarily all that motivated. I did the best I could to make some rather dry educational theory interesting to me. Of course, that meant twisting it into a linguistic theory perspective. I was amazed; the teacher didn’t interrupt to argue or complain that I was twisting it all wrong. But it’s just plain weird stuff, when you push hard on it.

The textbook, a case study of university and workplace writing called Worlds Apart argues that in order to teach effectively we need to make the motivation for writing in the university environment closer to the workplace. Drawing on activity theory, it seeks to make the case that motive is what accounts for the gap. However, if you read Leontev, the originator of this theory, he makes the claim that human consciousness does not exist outside activity. That is rather extreme. The social, according to him, is the only factor that governs activity. Marxist, and damn proud of it.

One of the conclusions of Worlds Apart is that writers in the workplace environment must inevitably lose their individuality and become alienated from themselves in order to survive. Sounds strangely like Marx’s theory of the alienation of the worker, only restated. The ultimate conclusion is that capitalism cannot survive. The workplace, because it denies the individual, would therefore be doomed. So, knowing this, we must be good Marxist teachers and teach teamwork, while accepting that it increases the misery in the world?

I don’t think so. Any model of writing that denies the power of individual motivation, of individual will, is seriously flawed to me. People write well when it fulfils a need in them to accomplish something; while “situated writing” is an important concept, it’s not the only way of looking at things. As a salesman, I know that the motivator of “what’s in it for me” far outweighs the pitch of “it’s for a worthy cause.” Teaching for me, is not much different. Making people better doesn’t mean shaping them into better cogs, it means giving them the power to make their own fucking wheel. That is what’s in it for them.

My presentation wasn’t interactive enough. I’ve got to remember to challenge people after the major points, instead of just rolling on. But I was tired myself, and the whole thing came in fairly neatly at 1 hour. We all got out early, because I just presented the contrasting points of view rather than asking people to choose sides. I think that worked out all right, because everyone was tired anyway. And this stuff just isn’t all that interesting, unless viewed in an incredibly broad context.

Just not feeling very communicative lately. I’ve had a headache for nearly a week, and when I looked in the mirror this afternoon I noticed that my face is swollen. Great, just in time for Thanksgiving I get to look like a turkey.

Got a letter from the University saying that I qualified for Magna Cum Laude. I coulda been a summa… but my grades from twenty years ago weren’t that great. Too bad they still count. I didn’t really need them, it’s just that it saved me taking the SAT again. If I would have known that I’d do this well, I would have reconsidered that expediancy.

Now, I’ve got a cold to look forward to. I can feel it coming on, slow but sure. Yuck. I could blame it on Rex; when he called from California he said he had a cold. I wonder if viri can travel across wires? It seems like a nice theory, anyhow.

Tomorrow night, I’ve got to lead a seminar on material I really don’t respect all that much. Funny how things change. In high school, I was defending Marx and now I’ve got to point out some difficulties with Marxist educational theories. I’ve been laughing at the irony that after the fall of the Soviet Union, Marxism has become firmly entrenched in educational practice— training people to become better producers for the capitalist economic system. There is just something decidedly odd about that.

Thinking of nice words

One of the adjustments in reading older texts is the shift in meaning that some words have gone through. Awful actually used to mean full of awe, or awe-inspiring— not horrific, as it does now. A similar, though not as radical transition occurred with wonderful. Uh, full of wonder does not describe most people or things which this adjective is often ascribed to. On the C-18L list, a recent discussion regarding wonderful and nice has brought some cute stuff to light. A message there offered this bit, which I want to save:

There is nothing in the least bit astonishing or strange to find scholars forming opinions based in a sound knowledge of textual usage. Johnson thought himself “nice beyond needless scrupulosity” regarding his manners, though some would argue that wiping his hands, dripping with the fat of his favourite roasted duck, was evidence to the contrary. You will read with pleasure Betty Rizzo’s article in the latest _ A of J_. Here she demonstrates that Johnson, and not Faulke Greville, was the better arbiter of nice etiquette. Whether standing in front of a fire and preventing the guests of the Burneys be benefit of the flame, as Greville did, or when scorning just criticism of his book on _Maxims_, poor little girls or eccentric old men could be equally nice.

Keats cautioned that the language must be “kept up,” but it seems a futile effort to defend a perfectly useful word when my spell checker automatically flags “nice” with an “error message”:”Weak modifier [records the nameless wit]. Consider using a more precise expression.” Edmund Malone, however, could shamelessly closed a letter in 1805 with a concern that he “must not venture on another sheet, lest the postmaster should attack my frank with his NICE scales…”

Gavin Murdoch, Toronto, Ontario

This bit reminded me of a suggestion by a writing teacher that we remove “very” from our spell-check dictionaries so that it would be flagged in documents. He told us that it was better to substitute “damned” rather than very, and if it worked, leave it in. Because very, like nice, has become a rather meaningless word.

Another interesting period thought, is to contrast the 18th century method of displaying artwork from floor to ceiling, illustrated nicely by the Courtauld museum’s Art on The Line exhibit with the modernist white wall. Get out the magnifying glass, and look at the artifacts, rather than live with the art. How meaningless is that?

I have become such a sloth when it comes to e-mail lately.

Most of it isn’t personal stuff anyhow, and when I last looked at my inbox today, it had over 400 unread messages. From the last three days, no less. I suppose I should cut back on the mailing lists I subscribe to.

But, so many interesting things come in that way. Found an interesting link on the Neil Young mailing list: Gilmour says that Pink Floyd is calling it quits. It’s about time I’d say, when you haven’t had anything new to say in about twenty years. Gilmour cites his age as one reason: “I don’t want to be touring anymore. I’m fifty-five; it’s a young man’s game.” What a load of crap.

Neil Young is around sixty; listening to a compilation CD of his latest European tour, I’d say it’s some of the best work he’s ever done. I really think age doesn’t have much to do with it. When the creative fountain stops up, it’s time to quit. But for some, the fountain erupts like a geyser periodically for many years past when the critics seem to think it’s time to stop. I’d add Pete Townshend to that list; though it’s been a while since he did much that was really new, I think the potential is still there.