Movie Review: ENNUI by Charles Doran

In Los Angeles filmmaker Charles Doran's nineteen-minute short Ennui, a transfigurative elision of interpellative erotism, the problematic of the matrix of cultural fictions that constitute and are constituted by the contemporary art scene of Los Angeles -- indeed, of any city -- suffers a subversive inversion, an humiliating expose of its pietistic grammatology, as seen through the eyes of a mid-twenties privileged white female artist who resents her privilege, her race, and her entire society.

Playing with Foucault's trope of Power as an infinite, sheer yet unbreakable rhizomic web inescapably encompassing all social relations, Doran explores the nature of privilege and the futility of the deconstructed and nonrecognitive subject's attempt to escape its enfleshment. Destined to be remembered as an eloquent chiaroscuro memoir of a Los Angeles whose nostalgic gravity overpowers Ennui's main character, known [ironically (?)] only as "the victim," we see that there is no one Los Angeles, but a perpetually generative multitude, as the world's first postmodern city plays a coercive cat-and-mouse with a posthuman subject who, wielding camera and eyeglasses, can only see herself, by means of an elusive illusion of inalienable and nonevolutive specificity, everywhere she goes, in every shop-window and self-filmed photograph in an ideographic Lacanian mirror-stage gone awry.

No matter how many transsubstantive metaphorical pictures The Victim draws, no matter how many boyfriends she disposes of, no matter how many strange little movies she films as talismanic pharmaka -- of which Ennui itself may be one -- she cannot escape the speculum-prison of her own nostalgic Desire, of that Deleuzian will-to-power that purblindly, arationally seeks to make the world in its own image, its own langue. The "effusive genera" of the conversativity of desire and of the scopic regime is relegated to a Benthamian panopticon, to an almost sub-Barthesian, retro-Nietzschean eradicative Will in which, as one reviewer puts it, Judith Butler meets Medea.

Shot in black and white film and with an original score by Los Angeles industrial ensemble Eckancore, Ennui's reprisive grammatic persiflage configures a feminist restoral of agency, the infinitesimalism of the unyielding Subject, and the simultaneity of the postmodern metanarrative of glossematic colonization of the heterologic resistive act of differential signification. Her shocking act -- a discovered, affirmed, and only secretly identifiable sign -- ruptures the Cartesian split and through its interpellative interplay of repeating signifiers ultimately violates the articulative theory of the designatory bond of authoritative (re)presentation.

(For more of this kind of horseshit -- which, if you have half a brain, which I know you do, you have clearly realized the above essay is, although the movie described is real and was made by my brother -- consult http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo)

NAKED GRADUATE SCHOOL. TRUE UNCANNY STORIES FROM UC BERKELEY.

I came into graduate school with a fairly thorough education in 20th century intellectual history and a quite developed disdain for the central tenets of postmodernism, anti-foundationalism and extreme social constructionism. I had also developed by this time a contempt for persons who embraced these tenets, especially uncritically. When I met the True Believers at UC Berkeley, I didn’t hide my contempt for these ideas nor for the people who believed them, partly because I couldn’t believe anyone was so naïve. I’m not going to say that I wish I HAD hid my contempt, only that I now find myself nodding and smiling rather than arguing with people whom I must regard quite frankly as irrational.

In my first semester of graduate school at Berkeley, I decided against advice to enroll in the graduate seminar in literary theory, Approaches to Classical Texts, offered every two years. It is required of the graduate students in Classics, but not in my program, which is assumed to be less literature-based.

I was the only person in a very full classroom who was not a Classics graduate student, although we had read a great, great deal of the same ancient literature. I assumed that they would like Greek and Roman history but simply be more interested in Greek and Roman literature. As I have great interest in literature of classical antiquity, especially Aeschylus on the Greek side and Petronius on the Latin, I assumed that I would have much in common with these folks.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Aside from a reading knowledge of Latin and Ancient Greek, these people were about as different from me as could be imagined. The differences were not merely age (I was ten years older than some of them) or life experience (many had never worked before, and almost all had, after prep school, gone straight through college and graduate school out of high school, with no break) but deeper, more philosophical, emotional, intellectual, temperamental. I ended the course with a rather low opinion of most of them. I was left with the conclusion that although I love ancient literature and always have loved it, I cannot study it. The way people study it now is just not the way I want to study it. The ways that literature is studied today, especially in allegedly "cutting edge" institutions like Berkeley, is fundamentally flawed by several things. Firstly, its epistemological foundations are entirely based upon the axiomata of postmodernism which essentially denies any epistemology, any basis for knowledge. Secondly, no cultural or social study can be done today in a school like this unless you are a flaming leftist. There is no other way, and no other political view is allowed by or practiced by those who perform cultural or social studies of the ancient world. Thirdly, the way literature is taught now, and the postmodernist foundations of it, are implicitly hostile to the historical project (i.e. the project of trying to find out what happened). This sounds like, perhaps, an exaggeration, but it is quite well borne out at UC Berkeley; worse, this school must represent dominant trends in scholarship in the USA at least. I must blame much of this sorry state of affairs to deep causes in literary theory, although certain psychological trends in many of its practicioners can also be observed.

Modern literary theory, to those who know little of it, to whom this piece is primarily aimed, has an interesting history in the U.S. There have of course always been many ways of approaching texts, many emphases throughout human history. Few discounted the world outside the text. The first great break occurred with what is called New Criticism, and it became ascendant in the United States after the Second World War. Drawing on its forerunner, Russian Formalism, which had enjoyed some vogue earlier in the twentieth century, New Criticism (over)reacted against a style of literary criticism canonical at the time which concerned itself with the biography of the author of a given literary work and which tried to use the work to get to the author. Perhaps New Criticism represented a breath of fresh air. In any case, it became canonical, and there are still people today, whom I must call idiots, who believe that it is a virtue to deliberately ignore the historical circumstances in which the author of a text was enwebbed.

Despite this shortcoming, New Criticism grew. Why? Because there is an absolute concentration on the words of the text. You don’t need an encyclopedia or any works of biography history to understand a text with New Criticism; you only need the text and perhaps a dicitonary. With the massive growth of higher education occasioned by the return of soldiers after the Second World War on the GI Bill, New Criticism was a convenient way to teach literature: no books necessary, just a few poems and a pair of eyes sufficed. New Criticism, some would argue, taught us how to perform close, close readings, to look in a text for patterns, equivalences, symbols, metaphors. I cannot believe that these habits did not exist before New Criticism, but I am willing to credit it with an insistence on close readings. What does seem new with New Criticism is an insistence that what the author intended does not actually matter since: 1.) Whatever he intended might not have ended up in the text; 2.) He may have not known exactly what he intended, as with the poets in Plato’s Apology, but may have been, at least metaphorically speaking, daimonically possessed by a creative divinity; 3.) His statement about what he intended may not be trustworthy; 4.) Often such a statement does not exist and the author is dead and cannot be interviewed; 5.) There is more in the text than the author intended, and that must be looked at too: no author can control all that ends up in a text. This last one, #5, would be built upon later in the 20th century, its significance expanded.

The denial of the importance of life events of the author always annoyed me, but the insistence on examining a text rather than guessing at the intention of the author was salutary. To write a mock essay in the style of New Criticism is a most useful exercise: you are forced to attend only to what is present, and to weigh out each word with wonderful carefulness. You must discipline yourself from referring to the socio-historical milieu of the author. Such an exercise helps you to read better, to think better.

Several other schools of thought spun off from this and began a life of their own, building on point #5 in interesting ways. People began to look for structures in texts that revealed unconscious desires and thought-patterns of the author: Freudian literary theory had a certain vogue. People then realized that a text would inevitably contain, unintentional to the author and unbeknownst to him, thought patterns from the larger culture to which the author belonged. For an unknown reason such thought patterns, within which the author is assumed to be inextricably enmeshed, became known as ideologies, an ill-fitted usage of the term. However, the more I explored the history of literary theory after the twentieth century, the more I became aware of an orgiastic maelstrom of such misuses of words, an effete and quite pretentious aping of, on the one hand, scientific words and ideas, as Jacques Lacan performed with his attempt to explain psychoanalysis with mathematical formulae that never made sense, and on the other hand, highly specific reanimations of archaic or obsolete words of germanic, latinate or hellenic provenance, selected more for their obfuscatory non-Englishness than for their older meanings in these languages: for example, habitus, used, actually, by Quinitilian to mean simply “bearing” as in posture; revived by Bourdieu in an unusually useful fashion for his ilk to mean the total way a person carries, presents, and projects himself.

Postmodernism

In an above paragraph I used the expression “the more I explored the history of literary theory …” This requires a little clarification. I had studied, read about, and read many of the ideas we were presented already. I had read existentialist literature at a very young age: my sister’s English translation of Camus’ L’Etranger was one of the first books I ever read. (Regrettably, it was the translation with the hatted clowns on the cover, which failed to reproduce Camus’ tough-guy, semi-hemingwayesque, noir detective style that he used in the French. Regrettably also, it translated the first word of the book, maman, as “mother”: inexcusable.) The ideas contained within it had moved me. I had been raised a fairly strict Catholic, a religion to which I have perversely returned; however, at thirteen I left the Church in a huff. Why? Because of this exact reason and no other – before I get to the reason, let me state the things that did not cause me to with to leave the Church: the reasons, that is, which some folks might list for having left the Church, but which attracted me greatly to the Church: the strictness. The discipline of silence, of sitting, kneeling, standing, response, ritual, prayer. The fact that in a rationalistic world we engaged in worship. The priests and nuns in their seriousness. The ritual silence. The code of morals. The fact that we were not to dishonor an invisible being around whom, although untouchable, undetectable, unmentionable, we were somehow supposed to center our lives. The reading of the Bible. No, I left for one reason: I could not imagine that it would be possible that we Catholics could be correct and everyone else all over the world could be wrong. This seemed beyond probability. I left the Church, after promising my mother, while she grieved over the abandonment of the Church that all my four siblings had enacted, that I would not leave it.

I had been playing with relativism, too, for many, many years, wrestled with it mentally. I had gone through a fairly, but not totally, extreme relativist phase: I never stopped believing that there were physical rules (or, if you prefer, lawlike regularities) in the physical world that did not go away, but all other things, including the value of human life, were relative.

(TO BE CONTINUED.)

THE STUPIDEST ARGUMENTS I HAVE EVER HAD

One day, when I was quite young, my father stated that it was established that the optimal temperature was around 72 degrees (fahrenheit).
“But I prefer it a little colder,” I said. “Like around 60. That’s ideal for me.” (This is, by the way, still true of me. Nowadays I like it 55 or 50 even better.)
He said, “No, they say that 72 is really the best temperature.”
I said, “Perhaps that is some sort of average for most people. I, however, like it a little colder. That’s too hot for me. I like it eight or so degrees colder. Perhaps ten.”
He retorted with, “well, it says in the paper that 72 is really ideal for people. That’s why we stayed in L. A. Because the temperature is so ideal.” (L. A. is actually very often considerably hotter than that: around 80, which I find utterly intolerable unless one is sitting a lot. As a walker, I judge temperatures by how it feels to walk in them – just as I judge cities by how it feels to walk in them, too.”)
I said, “But it’s too hot here. Even if it stayed at 72, which it doesn’t, it would still be too hot, in my opinion. I like it colder.”
“But, no, they say that 72 is really the best.”

LITERATURE: Defecation, Disgust, and a Hostile Tightrope

DEFECATION AND DISGUST
V. S. Naipaul
An Area of Darkness

A caustic travel memoir, an unafraid foray into the non-politically-correct, a highly judgmental and opinionated examination of India that only a person who had not been raised in India would be able to write and that only a person of Indian descent would dare to write. In the lovey-dovey multicultural world of today, of California, of the Bay Area, of Berkeley, one reading this becomes bemused and then amused -- if one can get over one’s shock, as one does when one starts to tell oneself that this man ethnically is Indian and thus has the right to criticize. Anyone else spending pages on public defecation everywhere in India, on the pursuit of image and dream at the expense of progress (what’s progress? - ask our idiot postmodernists, unfamiliar with countries without sanitation, literacy, decent roads, or plentiful hospitals and schools), on a castigation of the caste system more for its inefficiency than for its inherent cruelty, would be nailed to the wall by a lynch mob of American Hindus and, worse, bespectacled lesbians of either sex (but sex is only a construct, right? then try having a baby, Tomas) with master’s degrees in rhetoric or women’s studies and a working knowledge of Foucault but nothing of Jeremy Bentham. This book will annoy. It is not meant to, but innocently (it was published in 1964) (oh, I forgot – there are no innocent readings or writings, everything is “imbricated” in Power) records the dire disappointment, the deep and doleful disgust of a Trinidad-born, Oxford-educated native son who has returned to the old country. Impossible to put down; sad in many parts but never a tearjerker, and also terribly funny and human throughout. Naipaul’s knowledge of – and appreciation of the utter importance of possessing a knowledge of – History animates his observations without pedantry, and his deep but quiet erudition in modern literature situates his criticism of Indian culture in a powerful and sophisticated way while remaining formally only a highly readable travel memoir and nothing else.

HOSTILE TIGHTROPE
James Goad
The Redneck Manifesto (1997) and Shit Magnet

One’s emotions pulse between an admiration and a contempt for Goad like alternating current. He wrote the hilarious and often brilliant zine Answer Me! in the early 1990s, the only zine that dared to intelligently ridicule the vast pretensions of the counterculture, mainly the punk rock counterculture, and did so in marvelous style and with a complete absence of typos, grammar flaws, or the other maladroit monstrosities that bepepper the stapled-together, crudely photocopied, poorly thought out artifacts of Idiot Rebellion that Goad ridiculed. Goad’s zine tore apart zines and the “culture” that spawned them, and he walked a fine but hostile tightrope between becoming the garbage he spurned and becoming a forefinger-waving, naughtiness-accusing male schoolmarm. However, he avoided the latter stance by including such highly dubious, and by now also very pretentious-seeming features in his magazine as a sinister set of sick hagiographies of serial killers, suicides, and mass-murderers.
Goad happily moved on to other subjects. The Redneck Manifesto, a smart and always hilarious combination of elite-bashing and revisionist history. But this is not revisionist history in the style of Howard Zinn or the U. C. Berkeley AC (“american cultures”) requirement, better known as the PC requirement, whose crude message -- in the form I was forced to take, what could have been a fascinating course on antebellum American history – consisted of the following “historical” lessons: 1.) White people are bad; “people of color” are good. Any time a “person of color” has done anything violent or awful, it has been an entirely legitimate rebellion, or at least an understandable reaction, against white dominance. 2.) Heterosexuals are bad; homosexuals are good. 3.) Males are bad; females are good. This carries to nonhuman males and females too, dammit, and any time a female does something bad (cf. Medea or Clytemnestra) see Justification under first lesson. 4.) Christians are bad; non-Christians are good. No, Goad wants to defend rednecks, hillbillies, and “white trash”: not any old white persons, but the poor uneducated ones, the ones whose poverty, missing teeth, bad eating habits, and so on it is still politically correct for liberals to laugh about. Goad defends them not out of Christlike desire to defend the marginals but because he himself is from their caste.
Goad compares indentured servitude in the Colonies and early republic to slavery, relying, ironically, on Howard Zinn to do this. He reports on the consistently cheerful usage of “white trash” in the media and in dictionaries, as opposed to the ostracized lexical item “nigger.” He spends a fair amount of time in personal anecdote of the slights he has received for his own background, especially at the hands of the Los Angeles Weekly, one of the better of the awful free liberal weekly newspapers that pollute our country (but that do have useful event listings, one must add).
In fact, he spends an awe-inspiringly brilliant entire section on these journals, embedded within the marvelous and sarcastically-titled chapter Several Compelling Arguments for the Enslavement of All White Liberals, opening with a madly perceptive quote from Industrial Society and its Future, the Unabomber Manifesto. However, what about Goad’s writing? Let me quote Goad to give you a dose of his style, inflected by hip-hop and, perhaps, a third-generation (but hardly third-rate) shadow of Louis-Ferdinand Celine: “I’m a cynic. A skeptic. A partial epileptic. I’m sadistic, yet I find myself unable to enjoy it…. I’m a fly in the ointment. A Goad in the machine. A glob of sperm at the bottom of your popcorn.” And, later, “I started losing faith in liberalism when I began noticing that every liberal who accused me of white privilege seemed to come from a more privileged socioeconomic background than I did. I got sick of their middle-class hypocrisy that shed tears for the black “struggle” while laughing at my white-trash roots. If indigenous Amazonian tribes were subjected to acid rain, the liberals were emotionally devastated. But if a trailer park full of white trash across town all got cancer because they lived atop a toxic dump, it was a joke.” (p 236)
In his critique of liberal weekly newspapers, starting on page 238, for those of us at least who have read and been annoyed by these journals for many years, Goad shines, shines, shines, providing a satirically hostile intensity of exaggerated images that almost compares to Juvenal, the greatest satirist of first-century AD Rome or any time before or since (see next review).
“It’s a free weekly, and it’s worth every penny. These alternative weeklies thrive on advertising, because it certainly isn’t the writing. Futon prices slashed and universal brotherhood. Colonic irrigation while astral-projecting. Ceramic dildoes on sale and how to tell if you’re a sexist. Pierced nipples and punctured brains. Dull tattoo rebellion. Classified ads for gay cruises and lesbian home furnishings. Nudist bed-and-breakfast weekend retreats. Reiki bodywork for men. A drowning sense of wellness. Anal isometrics. Anti-smoking spirit-channeling hypnotherapists. Voluntary herpes-cream experiments. Holistic veterinary clinics. Marimba benefits for persons with AIDS. High financed tax-free arts foundations. Giant corporate sponsors spreading good will.
“Ballet. Performance art. Modern dance. Pottery class taught by an old woman from Guadalajara. Bulk-grain foods in large cardboard barrels. Forceful coffinlike enclosure in a saline flotation tank with twenty-four hours of feminist folk music pumped in at one hundred twenty decibels. Scented candles, closed minds. Unicorn incense holders and a knife to the throat. Homeopathic herbal remedies and a bullet to the brain. Shiatsu foot therapy and glass fragments rubbed into your skin. Rebirthing and a bloody smear of afterbirth. So full of their own shit, it’s a wonder they don’t sprout daisies.”
The storm of images of hilarity, happily, is tempered by more piercing critique: “[The liberal hipsters’] ideas of ‘freedom’ are purely a fashion show – freedom to suck cock, smoke crack, and wear loud clothing … For much longer than I care to remember the ‘counterculture’ has been an empty parade of runway models with needles in their arms. Bratty slackoffs with nothing to say and a lot of costumes in which way to say it. The rotted produce of post-World-War II prosperity, taking money from their parents with one hand while flipping them off with the other. While the angriest segment of society – and thus the most disillusioned, open to new ideas, and most potentially creative – was stinking up the assembly line with its bone-sapping labor, the leisure-class art geeks tossed out frilly satirical lead balloons, weighted by irony and one hundred percent substance free.” (p. 239)
He wrote his most recent book, Shit Magnet, in jail whilst he served a few years for beating up his girlfriend. The police cross-referenced this crime with the fourth issue of Answer Me!, which, some people argued, celebrated rape. That issue was repulsive but, I think, satirical, and at times sympathetic. One of the questions it insisted on: why is it that feminists dogmatically dictate that rape is a worse crime than beatings or murder? Why do people believe this? The issue featured a fascinating although stomach turning article by Donny the Punk on his own experiences of jail gang-rape (he was the victim, not a perpetrator) which reads like repellent gay porn (see the cover of the Coil album Scatology for an example) but is sadly and horribly true. The issue also featured one of the sickest things I have ever read, what seemed to be a masturbation fantasy from one Peter Soto, whose disgusting compilation of his own child rape zine Goad also published, allegedly for First Amendment support reasons. Goad, you may realize, is not an entirely sympathetic character. My brother, who has met him twice or thrice and interviewed him for his own now sadly departed Los Angeles punk zine Glossolalia, reports that Goad is an extremely polite person “but not someone you’d want to cross.”
Such publications did not endear the court system to Goad, and undoubtedly worsened his sentence. In Shit Magnet, he explains what went wrong with him, starting with his childhood and the constant beatings he received. Some of this last is written in a juvenile singsong that I found nauseating. He moves on to explain the history of his relationships: the first with Debbie, his ex-wife who died of cancer, and much of this is movingly written; the second with Anne, a quite imbalanced young masochistic sex-maniac he hooked up with, alas, while still married to Debbie. People will do many things for deeply satisfying sex, and even for the promise that it might occur. Goad never left Anne despite escalating threats back and forth, despite her assaulting him and trash-talking about him in the apparently incestuous zine community in Portland, Oregon, where all this drama took place; he left her a number of times, even enacted a restraining order against her, but voluntarily and melodramatically returned to her many times too. Everything crescendoed in his beating her in a car ride, at which point he got arrested and began his sentence. The book, especially this section, has great interest as a tale of amour fou. Yet Goad’s refusal to adopt a better philosophy of life throughout it, even at the end, makes him even harder to sympathize with than his personal history and publication choices already does. He leaves prison a worse man, “more subhuman and more superhuman but definitely less human” as he relates in a web site interview elsewhere.
Moreover, speaking of superhuman, the book pushes a pair of ugly conceits throughout. The first consists of that variety of Nietzscheanism that one finds uttered in the mouths of the vulgar, that I first used to hear in the mid-1980s from certain persons I knew in the Los Angeles punk scene who found themselves in juvenile hall, jail, and prison quite often. “I’m stronger than him so I took his doctor marten boots. It’s like Nietzsche said. The strong prevail over the weak, and that’s the way it is, and any way of denying that or trying to prevent that is bullshit and evidence of a sick society.” Now, I am not one to carefully and finely discuss the niceties of Nietzschean interpretation, as I have never found much of admiration or interest in his writings to begin with, but I would hesitate before asserting that Friedrich had that in mind. Goad’s entire text quivers with this sort of thing, with the ideology of the abused: people abused me when I was helpless and small because they had more power than me and they wanted to and they could, so they did. No one stopped them. This is the way the world works. This is how it is. There is nothing to be done about this universal rule but accept it. Shit Magnet secondly applies this sort of moral nihilism (or is it only depression?) to the political realm. His philosophy of government is shockingly naïve, the sort of thing one only hears from committed anarchists and misanthropes. A man may be excused for a certain level of misanthropy: that is personal and can be worked around. Anarchism, however, is idiocy, as any historian, or even any person who has read more than ten history books, well knows. A few courses in political science might help him out a bit. One gets the impression when he is mouthing these pseudo-Nietzschean platitudes that his intended audience consists of a fantasy cult of Taxi Driver wannabees. This is a shame, because his writerly gifts, and the legitimate points he makes about the denigration of America’s white working class deserve a more serious, perhaps even scholarly audience. If I were teaching American and not ancient history, I would assign my students Redneck Manifesto in a heartbeat as a cranky classic. But Goad, self-destructively, seems not to want to find something better and work for it, not to want to change his habits out of a perverse allegiance to a degraded version of authenticity. I admire Goad on a few levels, but vainly. It is Goad’s failure to develop and adopt a better philosophy of life and of government, that damns him forever to the white trash half-world whose existence he decries.

(Naipaul, postmodernists, India, Bentham, Panopticon, Foucault, Berkeley, Goad, zine, punk rock, satire, Juvenal, white trash, redneck, hillbilly, Answer Me, Unabomber, Redneck Manifesto, prison rape, misanthropy, Nietzsche, doctor martens, Taxi Driver, masochistic sex-maniac)

MAN POSTS PERSONAL DICTATORSHIP AGENDA: Sometimes freedom must give way to beauty.

Notes on Personal Dictatorial Utopia

"If I were dictator," he said,"Things would be Better. People would be smarter and happier. My dictatorship is clearly necessary, and, given the sorry state of our democracy, it is clear that this country needs a period of dictatorship, both to straighten a lot of things out politically and culturally, and to make people realize what democracy is, so that when my period of dictatorship is over they will finally actually participate knowledgeably. I figure that two generations of dictatorship may be necessary. As I am 35 now, that will keep me busy until I am 95, which would work quite nicely: at that point I could die, knowing I had made my nation better.

"To begin with," he continued, "considering the fact that the first three years of a human’s life are so important, everyone would be guaranteed food, shelter, intellectual stimulation, and, as far as possible, affection for these years. That way we can really punish them if they do wrong later. Second, prior circumstances will no longer be considered upon sentencing for crimes. If you did the crime, you are punished. Third, these prisons are too full, and I dislike the idea of a slave labor force taking jobs away from workers. Further, keeping people in prison only acculturates them to the mores of a criminal class, which is no good. Corporal punishment would come back as a replacement for the bulk of prison time. In fact, modifications on punishment would be a great part of the regime. Whippings would occur. However, there will still need to be a few prisons here and there. Jail rape is too horrible to imagine, so a temporary chemical castration would occur for all inmates. We want them to have less testosterone. Anyone convicted of forcible rape would be castrated, at least chemically. In fact, many criminals would be chemically castrated. I am convinced that too much testosterone contributes to crime. Those prisoners in jail will receive daily counseling; but rather than lily-livered social workers, their counseling will come from accredited tough guys who don’t break down but who say things like, 'yeah, I know you had a rough childhood and that’s partly why you turned to burglary. But so did I, and I didn't end up in jail (or if I did, I grew out of the stupid desire to 'act out') and you need to stop doing this shit, or else. It’s stupid.' This is clearly what criminals need, not unlimited sympathy.

"The Ministry of Culture will be the thing that would upset the multiculturalists and hippies the most. But I’m afraid there’s no way around this. Multiculturalism has a bad side, a very very bad side, as well as a good one. I am in favor of people learning many languages, and of learning many ways of doing things, but there NEEDS TO BE A STANDARD FOR THE WAYS PEOPLE ARE EXPECTED TO BEHAVE or else we have what we have now, which is not a nation or a community but a repellent melange of differing and utterly incompatible folkways. Any standard would be fine, as long as there was one. For the sake of simplicity and maximum compatibility, the standard will have to be European. Yes, I know that there are different European peoples; so let’s make it a vaguely British standard. You stand up when ladies enter the room. You open the door for old folks. Everyone must know English perfectly. America needs to be more like France in the acculturation of its minorities. The message should be: yes, you can come here (a limited number per year, that is), but you will need to act like an American. You do NOT need to give up being a Mexican, a Muslim, a Frenchman, or whatever; however, you need to become bicultural so that you fit in.

"Entertainment would be heavily regulated. There would be no more reality shows. In fact, television would be discouraged from having tasteless things on the air, and I and my lietenants in the Ministry of Culture would set the standards. The following would be promoted and rewarded with prizes and fame: televised plays, many of yesteryear; televised classical musical performances and ballet; televised improvisational comedy. In fact, television would be used to whet the appetites of the public to go see these things live. This would create a new wave of enthusiasm for live performances other than rock and roll. The goal wouldn’t be to get people to be afraid to televise crap, but to get them to want to televise better things because those things are better. By age ten, every American will have seen several different televised productions of every Greek tragedy and comedy that survives, if their parents have a television. People will still be allowed to present shocking things, but under these rules, those things will actually shock, rather than be the standard. Shocking entertainments may require a license.

"The Ministry of Culture would have a few other responsibilities. The Fashion Police would form a subdepartment. Anyone seen wearing a tie-dyed shirt, or anything else hideous, will be apprehended and either brought to the local jail (confinement, not beatings and rape, would be the conditions here) until someone could bring him suitable clothing, or else, if the Fashion Police are feeling very nice, escorted home where he will find a new outfit. The offending article of course will be destroyed. All men will be expected to wear suits, ties, and hats, all women dresses -- at least MOST of the time; you will have the opportunity occasionally, perhaps on one weekend day, to dress differently -- for example, women in pants -- but that will be the EXCEPTION, not the rule. Anyone who compares the way people dress now with how they dress in films noirs cannot seriously tell me that they disagree with this rule deep down inside. Sometimes freedom must give way to beauty. You will have the right to express yourself by your color combinations and so on. It’s not like there will be no free expression allowed. The manufacturing of ties will enjoy a renaissance. Buy stock now.

"While we are on the subject, let us discuss homosexuality. Gayness will be tolerated, and anyone making a stink about gayness will be given a public dressing-down by the police or, better, by their fellow citizens. However, gays will also need to cooperate somewhat. Limp wrists and ridiculous voices will be frowned upon. As many gays I know agree that gays who act stereotypically gay can be annoying, I don’t really anticipate too much trouble.

"There will be a new law that individuals are forbidden from expressing resentment toward other individuals for the ancestral crimes of those individuals against the resenting ones’ ancestors. This has gone on long enough, and has replaced intelligent thought as well as civility and even personality. The punishment for this sort of crime will be inconvenience: the offenders will be arrested and taken not to a prison but to a place where officials of the state will chat with them and tell them exactly why their actions are stupid.

"It is true that some things will have to be restricted. This is an unfortunate thing, perhaps, but it must be done. I would not restrict freedom of speech too much. I think that some types of really disgusting hardcore pornography might be outlawed, in photographs at least. People who produce written forms of disgusting pornography – anything severer than the Story of O – will be arrested and spoken to. If they are recalcitrant, they will be kept in custody. In addition, if their work is of poor QUALITY --- that is, if it is not written as WELL as the Story of O – they will be quite heavily fined. The arbiters will be persons with PhDs in literature.
"
On this subject, we must proceed to my educational changes. Postmodernism will no longer become the reigning orthodoxy in the academy. I will personally alter it by writing rebuttals against postmodernism. Anyone arguing that the world is constructed of language rather than of stones, dirt, etc will be deported permanently, or pelted with sticks and stones to see whether or not they will be saved by the alleged building blaocks of their universe, "language." Their family will be prevented from seeing them: they will be subject to a special tax. All persons will have to learn the following languages FROM ELEMENTARY SCHOOL ONWARDS: English, Latin, French, German, Ancient Greek. Persons in California, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and Florida will be REQUIRED to possess a fluency in Spanish equal to that in English or else they must live elsewhere. Persons in New England must learn French equal to their knowledge of English. The other languages, besides English, must be learned at a pretty good level. Anyone passing tests in hard languages, like classical Chinese and Sanskrit, will be given fame and money. The educational system, in the humanities at least, will be retooled to emphasize historical studies foremost. Everyone will have a comprehensive knowledge of the ancient and modern culture of every single continent on the planet. Greece and Rome will be emphasized the most. There will be no exceptions. Elementary school teachers must have PhDs above grade six. Pay will be upgraded accordingly.

"While exercise will be encouraged, it will be decoupled from schooling, so that no one has to stink sweatily while studying. Personal exercise trainers will make the country fit. No male will be permitted to be unable to do 25 pushups in one set. Nutrition needs revision as well. There will be no more fast food, or at least fast food will be squeezed out because they will be forced to pay great amounts of money to heart and cancer foundations to offset their damage. Vegetarian and low-fat fast food will be encouraged: Taco Bell will still do fine. I imagine a system in place similar to the "milk bars" in Poland, of cheap, high-quality food served ON CROCKERY (not on paper plates) by people who may be government employees. You can get a dinner of soup, compote, Polish ravioli, and a vegetable for less than three dollars at these places. No one needs to go hungry. If this system requires a government subsidy, then the government will subsidize it.

"Perhaps the most immediaterly visible change will occur in architecture. Each building is a sculpture and must be considered accordingly. The inventors of the ugly suburban box strip mall will be hunted and executed and their children punished with fines. Any architect using that style will be fined and subjected to corporal punishment. He may flee but upon his return he will face the music. Many buildings will be demolished or at least given attractive facades. New developments will undergo the strictest controls.
"
Money? Let’s talk money. The tax will be heavier on the rich and as light as it is now on the poor. Anyone making over 100,000 a year will suffer increasingly serious taxes. This is the system that has made you rich, and you must pay into it. Don’t like it? Go somewhere else. But you won’t be allowed to take your money with you. In addition to all this revenue supplying infrastructure imporvement, such as better roads and hospitals and schools, it will also feed my government’s system of incentives and prizes, a system evidently necessary to encourage excellence.

"These are the beginnings of my proposed reforms. I will add more as time goes by."

With that, he walked away.

Something to consider by Norman Davies

I have noticed the trend dominant over the past two decades of a focus on Oppression as the main or sole dynamic behind many social phenomena. Something Norman Davies, the noted historian, wrote almost twenty years ago in the New York Review of Books (to which I advise all persons to subscribe) has been rolling around in my head recently, to wit:

“One must seriously inquire whether the concept of anti-Semitism is adequate to the task of defining and explaining the historic conflict of two nations. For one thing, the word "anti-Semitism" appears to be infinitely elastic, being applied to everything from the advocacy of genocide to a dislike for bagels. Nowadays in America, it is widely used to condemn any criticism of Jews, or of the Jewish state, Israel, irrespective of the merits of such criticism. Furthermore, like all its dialectical counterparts, such as "anti-Sovietism," it can easily be used to smear all expression of dissenting opinion, since any protesters to the smear can automatically be tagged with the same lousy label.

“Worst of all, when applied to complex international or intercommunal relationships, it assumes from the start that the main source of any antagonisms where Jews are involved must lie with the Jews' opponents. In the nature of things, anti-Semitism cannot be invoked to explore the attitude and conduct of the Semites, nor to consider the happier aspects of the Semites' relations with their neighbors. When applied to the history of Poles and Jews, it cannot do other than suggest firstly that there are no redeeming features to the tale, and secondly that the Poles are to blame for all the misery.

“Anti-Semitism, therefore, looks to be a sadly blunt and one-sided tool, capable of probing only one side of multidimensional problems. It is as though one were asked to write the history of Ireland armed solely with the concept of "anti-Protestantism," or to analyze Moslem–Hindu relations in India on the sole basis of "anti-Islamism," or to expound on Russo-American relations on the sole basis of the "anti-Americanism" of the Russians. No one in his right mind would deny that an irrational hatred of Jews has been a recurrent and deplorable ingredient of Poland's many social and political conflicts. But that ingredient is but one item in a far more complicated and unsavory menu. Another ingredient is the irrational hatred of some Jews for Poles.” (NYRB Nov 20, 1986)

PROKATALAMBANO'S INS AND OUTS.

Presented to you by popular demand.

IN:
1. Correct Capitalization.
2. Quaint Overcapitalization of all Nouns as though you are writing in B. Franklin's Age or simply in German.
3. Essays with a Beginning, a Middle, an End, and a Point, rather than a Series of Word-Clusters separated by Ellipses. Celine could pull off the Telegraphic Style. You can't.
4. Reading Books written before 200 Years ago, preferably over 2000 years ago. If you need recommendations, ask me.
5. Acme Comics by Chris Ware. While we're at it, also Optic Nerve, Love and Rockets, and old issues of Eightball and Hate. However, it is UTTERLY unacceptable to possess only a Taste for Pop Culture and not care about High Culture. (See Outs #6 if you are still under the idiotic and soon to be outdated Assumption that "it's all Culture" and there is no substantive Difference between the two. We all admit there are gray Areas; but there are also completely non-gray Areas. Such as Episodes of "Friends.")


OUT:
1. The Term "blog," which is ugly enough to begin with.
2. Writing possessing a gratuitously informal Character and Style.
3. The idiotic Undercapitalization and Failure to capitalize any Words at all, as though this be a Virtue.
4. Approaches to Literature that are entirely rhetorical and artistic and ignore the Era and Situation of the Author; to wit, new Criticism of the 1950s.
5. Anyone who thinks that Roe vs Wade is, or should be, or can be, the Rallying Point behind the Democratic Party. Even the New Yorker recently pointed out, in a beautifully written and highly intelligent Article, how Abortion has gradually crept higher in the Consciousnesses of the Left until it has blotted out Concerns such as social Justice and Poverty. This State of Affairs is unacceptable and unfortunate.
6. Trying to pretend that there is no Difference between Pop Culture and High Culture. This Tack is only getting boring now. We are sick of it.
7. A Hatred of Pornography. This is old now, and part of the strident boredom of our next Out:
8. Second-Wave Feminism. Booooring. Sexless, angry, reactionary, narrow-minded, and, yes, we shall say it -- HYSTERICAL. They hate not only porn but sex in general, especially hetero, yet their vision of women's Oppression in America reads like a sadomasochistic novel: the woman is degraded, dismissed, dishonored, destroyed, etc. Boring. We appreciate the nuances of Third-Wave Feminism much more. Also, they enjoy porn.