Oops! This post was meant for the other site, but got posted here. Oh well, a dumb mistake on my part–but let it stand.
From Threat Level:
The next time someone tries to “friend” you on Facebook, it may turn out to be an undercover fed looking to examine your private messages and photos, or surveil your friends and family. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has obtained an internal Justice Department document that describes what law enforcement is doing on social networking sites.
The 33-page document shows that law enforcement agents from local police to the FBI and Secret Service have been logging on to MySpace and other sites undercover to communicate with suspects, read private postings and view photos and videos that are restricted to a user’s friends, according to the Associated Press.
It pays to know who your friends are. Or, I don’t know-maybe don’t leave so much information about your life just lying around on the hard drives of companies that don’t give two shits about you, yeah?
It was such a lovely, Spring-like day, Sunday, that it put me into an odd mood. It started with meeting for coffee with an old friend, and ended up as a journey into the past.
As we were talking, I mentioned that I was looking for a book that (thanks to the Internet) I knew was only available in a store that was about an hour’s drive from where we were sitting. Of course, I casually admitted, actually going and picking it up would represent a huge waste of time, gas, and money. But still.
Neither one of us really felt like going back to our respective homes, or finishing up the mundane chores that awaited us there. Nor did we particularly want to acknowledge the resumption of humdrum responsibility that tomorrow would bring, and the baleful shadow that sort of thing inevitably casts on the last day of any period spent away from work. Fuck tomorrow. It was that kind of day. So we got in the car and started to drive.
That was nostalgia trip number one. It has been so long since I spent that much effort, or traveled that far, in an attempt to satisfy a nagging acquisitive urge. I couldn’t tell you the last time that sort of thing happened. I could tell you about the first time, though, when I used to ride my bike across town to buy issues of Dragon magazine. But–some other time, perhaps.
As it happens, this particular book store was in an area I haven’t visited since I lived practically next-door to it. And I didn’t only live there; I worked a mere stone’s throw away, too. It was the old stomping grounds of my early twenties, when I could think of the future as something that wasn’t horrifying.
Nostalgia trip number two: The old stomping grounds.
The old home turf changes, like everything else. Outside, many of the businesses I knew had changed, of course–but so had I. The old neighborhood looks different when you’re no longer invested in it. It felt crowded and tatty. Jumped-up and sad.
I’m impossible to be around, when I start talking about things like that. But, inside my own head it was an interesting to find myself so off-kilter, even if such wobbling was brought about by just another apartment building, just another commercial center, just another office park. Especially moving was the knowledge that the younger version of me, whose ghost I was seeing out of the corner of my eye in all these places, would happily stab this sort of sentimentality in the neck. All that’s left of him, however, is the fact that I’m not at all proud about these feelings.
Nostalgia trip number three: The book.
Of course, I didn’t go back to get all maudlin and reflective. I was after a book–a normal, average, every day sort of book that I could have bought online for less money than I was willing to spend on it. Now, as it happened, it was the latest book in an ongoing series that I had fallen in love with back in junior high school. Unlike a lot of the things I was into back then, I’ve managed to keep my interest in this one.
It’s almost too much: To go back to an old neighborhood, in a long abandoned method of pursuit, to buy a book that is a sequel to a beloved artifact of my childhood–I tell you, if it hadn’t been such a nice day, and if the company hadn’t been so amenable, it never would have happened.
Some days are just like that.
Peter Straub has written an interesting piece for The Millions, where he makes some excellent points about the relationship between genre and literary fiction, and suggests that horror, done correctly, is as free of barriers as literary fiction is supposed to be. Also, I suspect that Straub is sick and tired of fielding questions from an apparently endless parade of effete, fussy mandarins, because he goes at them (well, their effete, fussy, straw man stand-in, anyway) with a rhetorical hatchet.
And that’s fine. I’m sure he’s sick and tired of defending his chosen genre against imputations that all examples of such writing are inescapably, axiomatically inferior to literary fiction; who could blame him for hitting back? But I don’t know if the best way to fight back against snobbish, pretentious, dismissive people is by basically calling them a bunch of pussies:
How certain are you, anyhow, that what you call “unpleasantness” is not a necessary, even crucial, part of our experience? Maybe you should lock yourself up in your heart long enough to work out your actual relationship to matters like shame, loss, envy, panic, brutality, greed, insecurity, loneliness, failure, whatever you find particularly unpleasant. Because that, dimwit, is where you live, especially if you really hate the whole idea of familiarity with such crappy, low-rent feeling states.
Never mind that your average Nine Inch Nails fan would say exactly this sort of thing. And never mind the fact that people who are removed from their own negative feelings are often only able to maintain their distance because their lives are fucking sweet, or that they rightly consider that distance a blessed luxury. That’s not the problem. The problem is that some of these same folks have no difficulty whatsoever in employing this quién es más macho tactic against others on their own, and therefore would assume that you’re not even talking about them in the first place. Because these literary mofos are tough.
Maybe you didn’t like The Road. Huh. You obviously lack the grit and the steely-eyed determination that’s required to crawl your way a through sewer, only to eventually realize just how wonderful the fetid muck you’re buried under actually is.
You might laugh—but I swear to god, I actually read an analysis of The Road that basically hurled that accusation at anyone who didn’t think the book was very good. (And here’s where I want to kick my own ass for not bookmarking that horseshit, but I assumed it was not worth linking to. Ah well.)
There’s plenty of misery in literary fiction—enough, anyway, that it seems a little odd to claim that its readers are a bunch of lily-livered pantywaists who would never embrace a novel that made them consider just how grueling, capricious, demeaning, or insignificant life is. In fact, I think it would be fair to say that there’s more than a few literary fiction fans who look for works that inspire those sorts of feelings.
What separates the genre fan on the make for gut-punching dread from the literary one, is that the latter requires a kind of intellectual imprimatur to be present before they are willing to give themselves over to a work; they need to be flattered, a little bit. Or, I suppose they might say instead that they have an aesthetic standard that must be met if they’re going to take a book seriously; they want artful writing, if they can get it.
Eh, six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Then again, what the hell do I know? I just wrote an essay sticking up for the toughness of literary fiction readers—don’t ask me what I think.
We all make mistakes. How we prepare to avoid making errors, how we deal the repercussions of the ones happen anyway, and how we decide when to forgive those who screw up, are a large part of our personal lives and our larger culture. Part of that is how people react when they make blunders of their own. When celebrities, politicians, or giant corporations, make mistakes, they’re often writ large, and require big, splashy apologies to keep the money people happy.
Private individuals have more freedom, generally because their mistakes are often small-time, at best. On the domestic level, and when dealing with errors that result in nothing more than a minor inconvenience, a person has a lot of options when it comes to admitting fault. They could deny everything, or cover their tracks—thus the world will never know which family member left the toilet seat up, or tracked mud into the kitchen. Or, they could own up—knowing that the consequences will be light, or last only a short while. The most irritating response, however, is when a big, flashy admission of fault is brought to bear on the tiniest of offenses.
This usually has to do with the fact that the person making such a big deal about making a mistake is attempting to do it in such a self-aggrandizing way. “There’s no doubt about it, yup I made a mistake. I can admit when I’m wrong, you know—when I blow it, I’m not going to try to make excuses. I did it, and there’s no getting around it, yes indeed.” Yes, a Foghorn Leghorn rant is surely the appropriate response to forgetting to change the toilet paper roll and you certainly deserve a cookie for being so honest about your blunder!
There’s a particular personality type that seems especially prone to the occasional bombastic admission of meager mistakes. These folks tend to live in a constant, rotating circle of blame; a place where things keep going wrong all the time, and it’s always somebody’s fault, and it’s their job to remind those idiots that they really need to do better, next time.
When one of these Blamer makes a huge mistake, they desperately fling the responsibility outward. But of course, they know that nobody’s perfect, they know that a person who never seems to be responsible for anything that’s gone wrong is suspicious—and, of course they’re also highly motivated to prove that they’re not the sort of person who is always looking for scapegoats.
So, it becomes vitally important for them to prove that they can take responsibility for their own mistakes. Which is why they latch on to low-cost errors that nobody really cares about, and why they make such a huge deal about them, because–wow! If that’s how he reacts when he forgets to unload the dishwasher, imagine how sorry he’d be if he did something really bad!
The thing is though, the kind of person who owns up to tiny mistakes in such a grandiose way is a lot like the guy who does the least work when helping someone move: “You guys grab that sofa—don’t worry, I’ll get those cushions for you!” Instead of always somehow managing to avoid the heaviest physical burdens, the Blamer always manages to avoid the weightiest part of the responsibility when something goes wrong.
That’s not the problem, though.
The problem is that the Blamer only does the big-deal owning up in order to justify their efforts to assign blame to others, to find fault with others, to nail down once and for all why their plans are always failing, why their desires are always frustrated, and why they can’t seem to get anything important done. And things never ever just happen by themselves, in the Blamer’s world. There’s no such thing as an unavoidable error. They are the Quincy, M.E.’s of personal interactions: It’s never an accident—it’s always murder. In the confines of a private home, this kind of personality-type is destructive enough; but, in an office setting, people’s livelihoods are at stake.
So, let the grandiose mea culpa over nothing serve as a warning. If you encounter someone who makes a big deal about their own little mistakes, do yourself a favor and keep your distance.
I used to have really strong opinions about music, until I eventually realized that almost all of those opinions were negative. Like many blinkered indie music snobs, I found that lots and lots of songs just pissed me off for no clearly discernable reason. I don’t know exactly why I felt that way; it was automatic.
And that’s a little scary.
Oh sure, I had my arsenal of gripey adjectives: corporate, boring, cookie-cutter, bullshit. But, if I’m honest, when it came to me and music, the emotional response happened first, and the predictable critiques were drafted ex post facto. I didn’t know that I was doing this, of course; I thought I was coolly and dispassionately assessing artistic merit (or lack thereof).
Bullshit.
But the anger I lived with was real. When I eventually realized that I wasn’t Lester Bangs Jr., and that I lacked critical acumen—or even the basic vocabulary of a music critic—I abandoned my rationalizations. But the anger was still there; it just became unmoored from language.
I think we’ve all been blindsided by a particularly effective insult before. Rationally, logically, its content was probably trivial. But, sometimes, someone gets you with a shot that should bounce right off you, but actually really freaking hurts. And though the initial shock might wear off pretty quickly, you find yourself probing the wound for days afterward, because the disproportionate response it brought out of you points to a disturbing fact: You have a weak point that you didn’t know about. Anything that hits you harder than it should sends the same message: You are not as strong as you thought.
“Bad music” was one of the things that got me to consider some pretty uncomfortable truths about myself. For example: If I hated a song that millions of other people seemed to love, then either I knew something that those other people didn’t, or I was missing something blindingly obvious. After realizing that I was no informed connoisseur, the latter option seemed far more likely. In the end, it became clear that my attempts to dress up my emotional responses as thoughtful considerations had more to do with my fear of being thought of as a reactionary dummy than any real intellectual evaluation.
So, that’s why I’m posting Harry Nilsson’s “Jump Into The Fire.” I can’t say I’m a huge fan of his work, but my parents loved him, he died tragically, and he was kind of a fucking maniac. And, since I’ve talked so much about how I tend to like or dislike things without quite knowing why, I thought I might as well put up something that I actually have a reason for enjoying. I mean, the song has basically one verse that gets repeated over and over, but Harry’s vocals just get more and more histrionic until the whole song just breaks. I love vocal performances where the singer goes from just-about-to-completely-lose-it to just-fucking-losing-it. I value that more than any well-built technical performance—even though those can be great, too—it’s just the way I’m wired to respond, I guess.
Just wanted to take a moment to say congratulations to Francesco Marciuliano, on his 1000th Medium Large strip. If you haven’t seen Medium Large before, this weekend might be a good time to check it out. (Caution: you may bruise your diaphragm with laughter if you try to take in all the strips at once, so you might want to go at it one at a time, and take frequent breaks to rehydrate.)
I seem to have picked up some kind of bug, so I think I’ll call it quits a little early this week. See you on Presidents’ Day.
Whilst reading this piece at The Weekly Standard, decrying the so-called hook-up culture in which our nation’s youth is currently mired, I came very close to dying of hypoxia brought on by excessive yawning. Milk, cow–you don’t say? Yes, it is disturbing that some girls are attracted to serial-killers. Do go on.
I had nearly forgotten why I had started reading the essay in the first place, which was this jaunty pull-quote:
Some argue, though, that it is actually beta men who are the greatest victims of the current mating chaos: the ones who work hard, act nice, and find themselves searching in vain for potential wives and girlfriends among the hordes of young women besotted by alphas.
I wanted some context for that. Because my first thought upon seeing it was, “Well, I bet the short, pudgy, homely boys who can’t get a date will be happy to know that it’s not all their fault that–wait a minute. Short. Pudgy. Homely. Oh no. No, no–hold on a minute!”
As you might have guessed, that’s a pretty (superficially) accurate description of yours truly here–the guy whose stubby fingers are even now tapping away on the keys of this here pre-war on terror iBook. Frankly, I was mortified.
It’s not for my vanity that I take offense. I may quibble over such reductive terms as “beta man”, but I freely confess the rest. I am fat and homely and short indeed, and much worse besides (I don’t work all that hard, and I am not particularly nice). But, fine: Call me a beta male, plaster a list of my flaws across the billboards of the town, brand me a loser, a loaner, an inadequate waste of protoplasm–I am all that, and less, if you please.
But don’t use me as an excuse for your sex-fearing, pro-early marriage, anti-feminist tracts, dammit.
I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but I would really, really appreciate my “plight” not being used as a cudgel in any attempt to reassert the supposed superiority of 1950′s era sexual values. I happen to think that we’ve made some precious little progress since then, and I’d just as soon not be the putative rational behind rolling back what has been accomplished.
The idea that sexual freedom, even with all its complications and challenges, should be curtailed to create some kind of marriage-granting welfare program for the benefit of toads such as myself is, frankly, horrifying. I’d rather live alone in a cave with touch-sensitive explosives wired to my genitals, than live in the nightmare-world of the essay-writer’s description, where women aren’t allowed to associate with whomever they choose, where any partner I might find myself with is only putting up with me because she’s been shamed into a monogamy of last resort.
What is this, tee-ball? Where everybody gets a trophy no matter how badly they suck? Women are people, not prizes. And if guys like me are alone, it’s usually for one of two reasons: Either they want to be, or they deserve to be. (In some cases, it’s both.) We’re not entitled to anything. Liberty is a human right. Companionship is not.
I disagree with the point of view in this essay, period. And I am additionally disappointed that that point of view is allegedly being promoted for my benefit.
Of course, it’s not about little ol’ beta me; these screeds mostly claim to be fighting for women by wishing for a world where no choices–and, therefore, no bad choices–are possible. And that’s worse.
