wewitnessedtheapocalypse

Sex, Lies, and Data Mining

2011-08-04T10:21:00.000-07:00

I reviewed a book about Internet pornography by two computational neuroscientists for the New York Times Book Review.

Rage of the Loser Class

2011-06-09T12:36:00.000-07:00

I've only written two pieces having anything to do with being Korean. The second piece was the New York Magazine cover story titled PAPER TIGERS.

The first piece, which was titled THE FACE OF SEUNG-HUI CHO, appeared in a small journal called n+1. n+1 asked me, as it does of all its writers, to write as fearlessly and ferociously as I could on a subject that felt urgent to me. It touched on Asian-American identity only obliquely.

I was reluctant to write this piece, and then to publish it, for reasons that should be plain to all who read it. But for anyone who was puzzled by the strange and combustible hybrid of reportage, criticism, and memoir that was PAPER TIGERS, THE FACE OF SEUNG-HUI CHO may provide some insight into who I used to be and how I came to be the unusual writer and person that I have since become.

Matthew Yglesias called it "by far the best thing I've read in a long while" back in 2008.

Jenny Schuessler, an editor at the New York Times Book Review, bloggedabout it NYT's ArtsBeat blog.

Amazon's staff reviewer described the 10,000 word essay thusly:

"Amazon.com Review
Wesley Yang has an acrobatic way with a turn of phrase. Whether he's describing "lips with the puckered epicene aspect that speaking the French language too young will impart to a decent American mouth," or "sycophants, careerists, and media parasites… redefining mediocrity for the 21st century," he employs this penchant for vivid, snapping description liberally. ("Liberals! They'll hand over the ammunition that their enemies will use to kill them.") Here Yang puts his considerable talents to work in a wandering essay that purports to recall the sad story of school-shooter Seung-Hui Cho, but is in fact about much more. Throughout, Yang unleashes short, summary judgments so eloquent that it hardly matters whether you agree with him. Touching on indie rock, identity politics, or the artistic ossification of Nikki Giovanni, Yang's laser-guided cultural lens focuses the reader's attention equally on his own coming of age, his ostensible subject, and ourselves. --Jason Kirk"

The essay, which has for years existed only in print issues of n+1, was selected for inclusion in the anthology BEST CREATIVE NONFICTION of 2008.

It is now available as a Kindle Single at Amazon.Com for $1.99.

A Reply to the Korean

2011-06-04T08:24:00.000-07:00

[This is in reply to the very interesting and impassioned reply to my piece in New York Magazine called "Paper Tigers", written by the blogger who goes by the name "The Korean".]

New York law firms have more Asian associates than they do associates of any other minority group. But those Asian associates make partner at a rate lower than any other group. That includes blacks and Hispanics. This, too, is part of the scoreboard to which the Korean is gesturing.

So, racism can't be the only explanation for this gap. We all agree that blacks and Hispanics have it worse in terms of the perception of others than Asians. Asians are perceived as competent, hard-working, and technically skilled. Thus, in the same leadership study I quoted in my piece, the same engineering resume with a white name at the top would get a lower score for technical ability than it would with an Asian name at the top.

And yet, for just this reason, all that hard work and competence can often get turned against Asians in an insidious way that really discloses how race functions today. We no longer face the enemy in riot gear with water cannons. We don't face an enemy at all. Instead, we have these fugitive impressions that subtly undermine women, blacks, Asians in the workplace. We have racial communities that are divided within between the Asians, and blacks, and women, who have a demeanor that fits with the normative American leadership culture, who are not perceived as racially other at all, and those women, and blacks, and Asians, who do not fit into that culture, and who hit a ceiling.

Asians have bought into grade-based meritocracy more intensely than any other group, and have mastered grade-based meritocracy better than any other group. And yet, this very mastery is turned against them as a mark of their deficiencies in other areas of life.

This is not my observation, but the observation of Tim Wu, and Jane Hyun, and thousands of graduates of Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics. LEAP teaches Asian people: these stereotypes exist; they are applied to you by others whether or not you fit them; and even though they are half-flattering, they can easily end up being used against you, and get you cast as follower and not a leader, a technical grunt and not a creative visionary. And yes, I would add, and a great many Asian men would concur in this – a harmless nerd and not a person you'd want to go to bed with.

This is an extremely subtle predicament that nonetheless ends up tripping up Asians, not just in banking and finance, but in every other field as well. And when these subtle micro-politics work themselves out over time, they produce these racially disproportionate effects, where 17 percent of an associate class at PwC are Asian, but only a handful of them can expect to make partner. These numbers obtain across the board, not just in the corporate world, but in government, academia, and elsewhere.

Another study found that a white American engineer given a math test will ace that test if he is told that he is being tested for quantitative ability in contrast to women. He will, however, do markedly worse on the same test if he is told that he is being tested for quantitative ability against Asian men.

Social psychological experiments like this are bringing to the surface all the hidden stereotypes that people carry with them, and they are showing how harmful they can be to the performance of the people who labor underneath them. We can also see the expression of these stereotypes by examining certain statistical regularities and irregularities. The bias toward height expresses itself: 58 percent of CEO's are over six feet tall.

My piece was, at its core, an inquiry into these racially inflected social dynamics as they affect Asian people. These stereotypes mean that Asian SAT scores are discounted to the tune of 140 points. Because when the deck is not stacked against them, they make up 72 percent of the school.

The controversial part of the essay, and the thing that has set the Korean off is that I also inquire into the relationship between those stereotypes and the reality of the way Asians behave. I do this not on my own initiative, but following the analyses and prescriptions of LEAP and Jane Hyun and other observers of the white collar workforce like them.

There is a dynamic relationship between stereotypes and the behavior upon which these stereotypes is based. We should acknowledge that relationship. Jane Hyun interviewed a group of 40 white executives about their perceptions of Asians. She found that it was the perception of these executives that Asians were hard working, cliquish, passive, unassertive, and tended not to speak up at meetings. These executives, I'm sure, were governed partly by stereotypes. They were also, I'm sure, observing things that were really happening in the actual behavior of their Asian employees.

These are the racial micro-politics of everyday life. Everybody gets their share of them - blacks, whites, women. Asians too. We can argue about to what extent the perception of Asian people is based only on racist projection or only on the behavior of Asians. There can be no definitive answer to this, since the answer only exists hidden in the minds of others. From one perspective, it looks like one thing. From another, it looks like another.

My piece tries to present a balanced view. It tries to flush out the racism of white people with the confrontational tone it takes at the beginning. It also tries to examine the behavior and values of Asian people for those aspects of the Asian demeanor and approach to life that don't work in an American environment and that require adjustment.

The fact is that it's a little bit of both. There's a way you're supposed to defer to a Korean authority figure in a Korean workplace or in a Korean home that is just different than the way you're supposed to act in America. And if you do the Korean thing in an American workplace, because that's how you were trained at home, the fact is that you're not doing yourself any favors. That's just true.

Now, lots of Asian people do make this adjustment seamlessly and without any need for outside intervention, and if you're one of those people, great. These people make up the 0.3 percent of corporate board members who are Asian, the 10 percent of managers in Silicon Valley firms, (which are 30 percent Asian among the engineers), etc. We need more of you and the likelihood that more will emerge with the passage of time.

But lots of Asian do not. If they did, we would not have any Bamboo Ceiling type numbers. We would not need a group like LEAP.

Another controversial observation I made was that just as Asians are over-represented in elite high schools and colleges, they are also overrepresented in pickup classes. Now, pickup classes are not a normal thing for any group. I'm not saying that all, most, or even more than a tiny handful of Asian guys do it or need to do it.

I am saying, however, that when Asian Playboy explained what an "Asian Poker Face" was, and gave the example of being at a a party and having a white dude ask him "Dude -- are you angry?" -- a packed room full of Asian American students at Yale burst into laughter. Did they do this because they did not know what AP was talking about from their own experience? Or did they do this because they did? I will submit to you that they laughed because the same thing had happened to them. I can same this with confidence because the same thing has happened to me too.

Did the Yale Asian American Students Assocation invite Asian Playboy to speak at a Master's Tea in Silliman College because they thought he was a creep who was bringing a message that had no relevance at all to the lives of Asian American men? Or did they invite him to speak at a Master's Tea in Silliman College because they thought he was a creep who was bringing a message that had some relevance to Asian American men, such that a roomful of Asian American Yale students would pack into the Master's living room, making for what the Master told me was the largest and liveliest such event of the year?

Does this mean that I am calling the Korean or any other Korean man a "dickless slave"? No, I wrote about AP because he was funny and great copy, not because I endorse his message, or because I think it applicable to anyone in particular. It is applicable to the readers whom it is applicable to, and the response I've been getting suggests that those people are not few in number.

But the aspect of my piece that angered the Korean, and most of my detractors the most, was obviously the personal material. I open by saying that it feels strange to be reminded by my reflection that I am Korean because I never bought into any of the cultural things that are supposed to define Koreanness. This is how one man -- me -- feels, though I know for a fact that I am not alone in this feeling. I'm entitled to express that feeling, as the Korean acknowledges. So, when I say Fuck this and Fuck that, I'm demonstrating rhetorically on the page how much I break from these values, because no person who bought into them could possibly write and publish that passage. I say this not because I want to boast about how unique I am, but because I am identifying myself as a part of the relatively large fractions of Asian American who feels as I do.

But. I still have a Korean face, and I am considered by others to be this thing that I am not. Saying fuck these values does not mean that I think Asian values are the reasons that Asian people face problems in the workplace. The problem is, as I explain in the LEAP section of my piece, is that these values lead to behaviors that are interpreted by white people in a certain way that leads them to perceiving Asians in a certain way.

They then impose that perception on all Asian people -- including people like me, to whom they really do not apply -- which adds another layer of difficulty and complication. So if you fit the stereotype as defined by others, as many Asians do, they put you in a box and give you math problems to solve. And if you break from the stereotype, as many Asians do, they might say, as they did to Eddie Huang "You have a lot of opinions for an Asian guy." You're damned either way. Unless you are a very good and very adept, you're going to struggle. And the percentage of people who are adept in this way is going, by necessity, to be lower than the percentage who manage to do well on tests.

This is a kind of "post-racial racism" that I find fascinating. I told you about myself as a set up for the section in which I showed how it applied to me, despite my disavowal of these values for myself. I don't have Asian values, but I do have an Asian Poker Face. Not all Asian people have Asian Poker Faces. But as it turns out, I do. And this Asian Poker Face really was acting as a barrier to trust and acceptance by people who thought my demeanor meant one thing when it really was just my ordinary Asian face.

Lastly, I want to clear up something about my alleged "bitter loserdom." I am not a bitter loser. I am, in fact, more successful in my chosen field than the Korean is in his. Writing is poorly paid, and often involves a period of financial hardship at the beginning. It is a field in its way, just as competitive as finance or law. My period of hardship lasted way too long. But I've been doing well over the last three years and, with my contributing editorship at New York Magazine, and the recent sale of my last feature for New York to Scott Rudin and Sony Pictures, I've been doing even better this year. Writing is not steady work with a steady income, but once you've made it, it gets a lot easier. I now have a strong voice and a visible platform, and I can do and say what I want, which is all I ever wanted out of life.

So, during the years when the Korean was racking up tons of law school debt, and working 70 hour weeks to pay it down, I was leading a confused bohemian existence in which I was poor and unhappy and during which I both bitterly regretted not becoming a well-paid white collar worker, and remained determined to make it on my own terms as a writer. For the last three years, I've been making it on my own terms as a writer, with the expectation of more success to come. I also have a wonderful girlfriend. So, things have worked out for me.

I'm not saying this because I want to brag or compare my happiness to the Korean's. He's making six figures, and has a happy family and beautiful wife. We're both Korean American success stories. Hard work and discipline contributed to my success as surely as it did his. But, in the end, a certain cultural brashness contributed to my success even more than hard work did. That's just the fact. I respect his success and would never write anything designed to tear it down. In fact, I would celebrate it. I say in my piece that there are areas of Asian-American devoid of alienation. If he and his friends live there -- great. But I also say, contrary to the Model Minority stereotype that says that Asian people have no problems and face no racial obstacles, we do still have the Bamboo Ceiling, which ensnares many, and we do have this weird William Hung-style baggage that affixes to men. These problems might seem silly and inconsequential to people who view them from a distance, but to the people who are living these problems, they can really suck.

So, all the people who are saying that my piece is a bitter loser blaming Asian values for my failure are simply missing the point, and distracting from the real issues my story raises, which I think is a shame. I'm not a loser, and since I never embraced Asian values in my life, I can't possibly, and thus do not blame them for anything having to do with my life, either good or ill.

I do, however, know that having an Asian face -- an Asian Poker Face -- definitely had something to do with protracting the length of the period of social alienation I endured. I did not go through three years without a woman only because I was Asian. I went three years without a woman because I was poor, and struggling, and unhappy, and alienated, and too proud. That's all obvious and present in my piece. But you know what? During all that time, I was nevertheless always a strong, healthy, well-educated, well-spoken, variously talented man in the prime of my adulthood, and dudes like that, if they are white, even if they are total losers, or assholes, or drunks, or drug-addicts, or on a half-dozen psychotropic drugs, always have some girl wiling to bed them in this city where I live in and everyone knows it. And that's just reality too. So would I have gone three years without touching a woman if I were white instead of Asian? Of course I would not have. I'm sorry, but it's true. And thus I understand well enough what the 26-year old Asian virgin is facing, as do must Asian American men who are not in denial.

That's why I had empathy for the people whose stories I told in my piece, and that's why I thought an inquiry into the social dynamics that disfavor them, and me, and all of us Asians, was worth doing. I think it's sad but not that surprising that the people who have the least empathy for these guys and want to dump the most contempt on them are other Asian people. And I think it's sad, and paranoid, that so many Asian people think that my inquiry into these issues was an attack on them personally, and I think it's grossly ironic, though not at all surprising, that these are the same people that are calling my honest, vulnerable, painstaking self-accounting in my piece solipsistic or narcissistic. These people should spend a little more time regarding themselves in the mirror.

All this said, I enjoyed reading the Korean's response to my piece. Something that all people who think Asians are nerds and weaklings that they can pick on with impunity sometimes discover to their detriment is that Korean men, in particular, are angry, violent people who will fight and fight dirty.

So I think in certain ways, the Korean and I are more similar than we are different, in that we are both combative Korean men, even if he is a corporate lawyer married to a Korean violinist and I am a freelance writer dating a Jewish journalist. I just want to point out that the Korean's anger is totally misdirected, fratricidal, and aimed at a person who is on his side, which also makes him, in the end, also a very typical Korean.

This is a complete disgrace

2011-04-24T16:58:00.000-07:00

If the New Yorker promotional department could not afford to give out anything more expensive than a tote bag, it ought to have sent out handsome promotional tote bags, instead of this ghastly "New Yorker Weekender Bag" that smells like a gas station, whose material is perhaps one and a half increments in quality away from a trash bag purchased at a dollar store.

2011-04-10T00:09:00.001-07:00

c hotel

2011-03-11T17:31:00.000-08:00

fuck and run

2011-02-17T18:23:00.000-08:00

My Father's House

2011-02-04T23:16:00.001-08:00

2010-11-03T23:13:00.000-07:00

2010-11-03T23:08:00.000-07:00

2010-11-03T23:06:00.000-07:00

2010-11-03T22:40:00.000-07:00

javascript:void(0)

2010-11-03T22:28:00.000-07:00

One playable CD mix

2010-10-21T20:03:00.000-07:00

Click here to download

TS Eliot

2010-09-15T15:20:00.001-07:00

"In an interesting essay in the volume of ESSAYS ON THE DEPOPULATION OF MELANESIA, the psychologist W.H.R. Rivers adduced evidence which has led him to believe that the 'civilization' forced upon them has deprived them of all interest in life. They are dying from pure boredom. When every theater has been replaced by 100 cinemas, when every musical instrument has been replaced by 100 gramophones, when ever horse has been replaced by 100 cheap motor-cars, when electrical ingenuity has made it possible for every child to hear its bedtime stories from a loudspeaker, when applied science has done everything possible with the materials on this earth to make life as interesting as possible, it will not be surprising if the population of the entire civilized world rapidly follows the fate of the Melanesians."

Professor Longhair

2010-08-29T22:25:00.000-07:00

But even as Ahmet began to produce music using pieces of the knowledge he had acquired as an enthusiast, he continued to look for the inaccessible thing, the thing with authority, the thing that did not need his help. “Herb Abramson and I went to New Orleans,” Ahmet told me. “And we heard about this Professor Longhair, and the very name fascinated me, you know. But I didn’t know where to find him. He didn’t have a telephone. We were taken to a place where he usually hung out, but he wasn’t there. They told us he was going to play that night. We took the address, and we thought that the address was in town—you know, a local address. But, as it turned out, that evening when we got in a taxi and gave him the address the driver said, ‘That’s across the river. You have to take a ferry across the river. And I won’t go there anyway, because that’s a niggertown.’ So the driver took us as far as the ferry. And when we got across the river it was very dark, because there were no street lights on the other side, but there were a couple of taxis. So we took a taxi, a white taxi, and we told him where we wanted to go. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I can’t go there.’ So I said, ‘Well,’ and I made up some story. You had to make up stories in those days, because they were strict Jim Crow, you know. If you went to a Negro section of town, you’d have to have an excuse. If you said you were from a record company, that didn’t always work, so sometimes we’d say we were from Life magazine, or something like that. And so I made up a whole story. The man said, ‘The best I can do is take you near there, and you can walk over.’ He said, ‘I wouldn’t go in there for anything in the world,’ and so on and so forth. We said O.K. So in the middle of the night he took us and stopped in the middle of a field, it looked like, you know. Fields on both sides. And I wasn’t sure whether he was just, you know, taking some sort of revenge on us or something. So I said, ‘Where is it?’ So he said, ‘Well, you have to walk right across this field over there about a mile.’ Far away we could see some lights. He said, ‘That’s it over there, you see. This is as close as I can come.’ Well, I tell you, we tramped through this . . . field, in this pitch black, in the middle of the night. There was a bit of a moon out, so we could see our way. As we approached this village, we saw this house, which was bulging in and out. All the windows were brightly lit. A lot of light was coming out of the house. It was right in the town square, the main intersection, and from far away it looked, actually, as if people were falling out the windows. The music was just blaring. We thought this must be—‘My God, there’s a fantastic band in there!’ You know, there was a great sense of discovery to . . . tramping through this field and hearing this music from far away in this ugly black village, you know. ‘My God, Herb, we’ve really come upon a great discovery. It’s just what you dream about.’ When we arrived in the square there, people saw us, and a couple of people went running immediately into this house—this was a club, you know, where he was playing—because I guess every time they saw white people it meant trouble of some kind, you know. So we walked up into the place and we said, ‘We’re from Life magazine.’ And the guy at the door said, ‘Just a minute,’ and so on. ‘We’re also from this record company in New York,’ and so on, ‘and we want to see Professor Longhair.’ And there was a big row at the door. Some people ran out the back door. They weren’t quite sure. Thought we might be the sheriff or something, you know. After a few minutes’ talk, they let us come in and sit behind the piano, and— Oh, the thing that struck me when we arrived there, when we walked in, what I thought had been an R. & B. band turned out to be just Professor Longhair by himself. He was sitting there with a microphone between his legs. He used to play an upright piano, and he had a drum, kind of a drum, attached to the piano. Not a drum but a drumhead, you know, attached to the piano. He would hit it with his right foot while he was playing. He made a percussive sound. It was very loud. And he was playing the piano and singing full blast, and it really was the most incredible-sounding thing I ever heard. And he was doing it all by himself. And it was one of the most primitive dance halls I’d ever been in. There was just like . . . a club, you know, but people jammed in there dancing and this wild thing going on, and they hid us in the corner there and we were listening to the music. I thought, My God, we’ve really found an original—nobody’s ever heard this man. He played like nobody I’d ever heard. Had some of the characteristics of some of the early boogie-woogie piano players, but with a strong Latin influence. He had a little bit of Jelly Roll Morton, a little bit of Yancey, a little bit of— But he played in his own time. He kept a very strange, different tempo. And a lot of Spanish influences—West Indian, you know. And it was just a strange mixture but the most marvellous thing I’d ever heard. And I said, ‘My God, no white person has ever seen this man.’ So as soon as he finished, Herb and I, very excited, said, ‘Look, we have to tell you, we’re just astounded by your playing,’ you know, and shaking his hand. ‘We want very much to record you.’ He said, ‘Oh, what a shame. I just signed with Mercury.’”

songs

2010-06-18T22:14:00.000-07:00

Playlist

Follow the link above to see the 50 songs that I've listened to the most over the last two years. Statistics tell us what we really like instead of what we think we like. It's a little disconcerting. What does this list say about me as a person?

Responses

2009-10-27T04:39:00.000-07:00

http://stuartschneiderman.blogspot.com/2009/10/new-sex-andor-dating-game.html

This post, written in reply to my New York Magazine cover story on the Sex Diaries, seemed weirdly intelligent, and literary, from someone who identifies himself as a "life coach."

It turns out that the author is a former psychoanalyst who studied with Lacan in Paris and wrote an important book about the master for Harvard University Press.

But with the declining public interest in psychoanalysis, he has reinvented himself as an executive life coach. I find this act pretty interesting -- and of course, perfectly consistent with the doctrines espoused by life coaches. So one can have no doubt that Mr. Schneiderman in fact practices the practical credo he preaches.

I threw a party on Saturday night

2009-10-04T23:27:00.000-07:00

It has always been my feeling that a party will reflect the character of the person throwing it. I threw a party on Saturday night. It would be false modesty to suggest that the party wasn't a reflection of my character. If the principle is true generally, there is no reason not to apply it when the person throwing the party is you.

And so, to all of the guests who attended my party, and helped to make it the pleasing occasion that it was, I would like to say: Thank you for providing a fitting reflection of my character.

Latest story at Tablet Magazine

2009-09-04T12:39:00.000-07:00

I wrote about the Dreyfus Affair and Guantanamo Bay for Tablet Magazine.

Back by Popular Demand

2009-08-30T15:42:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, I posted some videos onto YouTube. Filmed on the cheapest webcam extant, they portrayed a pixellated image of me wearing two buttoned-down shirts -- a black one with epaulets superimposed atop a blue one with white pinstripes -- bashing through acoustic cover versions of a handful of popular songs: Springsteen's Factory; U2's Van Diemen's Land; the slave ballad Old Black Joe; Leonard Cohen's Chelsea Hotel; and the traditional Irish drinking ballad Whiskey in the Jar, in the somewhat grandiloquent baritone I was affecting in those days.

The audio and video were improperly sync-ed, the performances were too fast, and the guitar playing was hopelessly thrashy, max-ing out the levels and tipping the sound at certain important junctures of each song into that peculiarly wicked digital feedback that sounded like that moment in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Infocom game when, with the aid of the Infinite Improbability Drive, you wound up materializing inside of your own brain.

I received a surprising amount of feedback, a striking share of which did not consist of race baiting and abuse, and thousands of hits. It was a small satisfaction for a period of life in which there were no larger satisfactions on offer. It was understood by all, and most of all by me, to be a fairly pathetic thing to do -- on YouTube, one could participate in a perpetual coffee-house amateur hour to no tangible end, broadcasting around the globe the image of the earnest loser one no longer had to fear becoming, having become it -- and an even more pathetic thing to derive one's satisfactions from. But I was coming to understand that one would have to take whatever satisfactions one could get in the form that was given, and the Internet was rapidly extending the range of miniscule, nugatory, and ultimately self-undermining satisfactions which one would not have the self-possession to refuse.

You see, the videos went up right around the time it was clear that I was never going to attain the very modest ambitions I had once attached to music. I had pursued them desultorily, and without the requisite spirit of enterprise, and yet with a certain belief that I did, in fact, as a performer and songwriter, have something to offer the world. If you Google my name, you'll see that I am credited with my writing partner, G F McN, with a song that aired on the pilot of the television show the Gilmore Girls. I wrote, performed, and recorded that song. It's pretty good -- as competent and well-crafted as any album track on any of the large majority of major label releases; indeed, probably better than most. We recorded more than 30 songs on 4-track tape and even a handful at a small project studio run by a locally successful Central New Jersey band.

We were not good enough, maybe, to have made ourselves the next whatever whomever. But we were good enough to, you know, maybe do some regional tours, release some records on some indie labels, perhaps, even engage in the intermittent act of sexual intercourse -- disappointing in itself, but gratifying in what it signified, or in any case, gratifying inasmuch as it was preferable to its alternative (masturbating alone, desultorily, but then oddly, unaccountably, in tears) -- with a fan. We did not look like anything that anyone was going to pay much attention to,

and we did not sound like anything that was presently in vogue,

and the combination of our sound and image did not tap into some deep structure of shared desire among the sensitive liberal youth who would have been our prospective audiences, if we did not abhor them even more than we did the mainstream audiences who seemed so distant from us in sensibility that their existence could easily be forgotten. There would always be some male music nerds -- short, black-clad, pudgy but solid -- who would give us respect for sounding like we did, without any real passion, and then the beautiful girls -- neurasthenic, with diaphanous skin, invariably trailing some haughty ephebe -- who would watch for a while, and then turn away.

Right around then, these bands were emerging in New York City -- principally the Strokes -- who were creating a gorgeous pastiche of everything that excluded us. They were rich and urban and sophisticated, smart but anti-intellectual. They hung out with models and fashion people, while we were awkward, angry, suburban, and thwarted before we had even entered the contest. And we knew that they had everything that was going to rocket them fame while we could only remain forever mired in obscurity, and we had admit that some of their songs were just perfect, and so good that we were never going to match them.

There will be more to say about all of this, and further documentation of it all, when I can figure out how to post music and pictures, but for now, what I'm getting at is that I'm back up on YouTube. You see, I bought this great new digital camera, and the video I took has all these different shades of mustard and amber, and is pleasing to the eye for that reason.

Delightful Afternoon

2009-08-15T19:08:00.000-07:00

This was a spontaneous gathering of young people on Lafayette Street. It emerged that all of them had something strongly in common that drew them to stand in single file, gesticulating toward an imagined crowd of of onlookers, and beaming those inimitable smiles. Maybe it was the cheerful and complementary colors of their swimsuits, the very small breasts on the women, or the highly toned mid-sections of the men, none of whom had done so much as a sit-up since passing the President's Commission on Physical Fitness in the eighth grade. But glimpsing one another in that transitional stretch of road between Prince and Spring Street, on a lovely Sunday afternoon, their pale bodies glistening in the sun, all of them felt drawn to one another and came to understand, instinctively, that they would share a common destiny.

Essay on Middle East for Abu Dhabi National Review

2009-07-09T13:43:00.000-07:00

http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090710/REVIEW/707099960/1007
href="http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090710/REVIEW/707099960/1007">

Hound Dog

2009-07-02T21:01:00.001-07:00

Summer Fling

2009-07-02T08:31:00.000-07:00

I attended the second and third sessions of the Summer Institute for the Gifted at Blair Academy in Blairstown, NJ. There we were encouraged to think of ourselves as we already did: as people set apart from the ordinary school population by the curiosity and talents that our peers (the prematurely mustachioed boys and the girls with the big hair) were intent on snuffing out. The idea that there were children possessed of abilities beyond the ken of what the world could regard without jealousy and malice and that you were one of them was at an early stage of the universal diffusion that would instill a mild personality disorder into every child of college-educated parents in America. By now we know that all of the children are above average; back in the summer of 1987, the idea of running a camp consecrated to this proposition still seemed obnoxious. Of course I wanted to go.

Here I would learn my first significant lesson in love, which was also a lesson in society. The camp was an artificial setting that reversed the hierarchies of the American public school, giving the assorted nerds, drudges, grinds, closet homosexuals and Asians who attended a taste of social preeminence they might not otherwise experience. As was usually the case in such instances, the popular people turned out to be the ones who still had it going on in the conventional sense. A clique of wealthy, attractive, and stylish – according to the curious standards of 1987 -- Asian people turned their ethnic solidarity into an instrument of domination of others. I was happy to discover that I was not excluded from this solidarity, though I was not myself wealthy, attractive, or stylish. The Asian kids came from Bergen County suburbs like Tenafly and Alpine, and they had discovered music – New Order, Erasure, and Depeche Mode – that felt more interesting and subversive than alternative music has the capacity to feel anymore. We looked down on white people and coined a derisive term, “meegs” (short for the Korean word – itself a derisive term – for “white person,”) to refer to them.

It was my first exposure to the quality of self-entitlement that could inhere in other people, (that there were people far more self-entitled than these people could ever have dreamed of being, and for better reasons, did not change the effect it had on me -- all perception being relative to one's own restricted experience,) and I did what I could to adopt it. With surprising success. Because by the end of the first weekend, when everyone had begun to pair off, I found that my ruminative nature and watchful demeanor had somehow earned me the affection of the bubbly center of our little clique – adorable, sparkly-eyed, babyfat Carissa – with whom, by the end of the camp, I would finally reach a milestone I would not reach again until I arrived as a freshman at college – first base.

While all of this was going on, a pale and solitary white girl with a drawn expression and long butterscotch blonde hair had conceived of a crush on me. I recall her sad eyes regarding me as I engaged in the supercilious antics that the camp setting had empowered me to unleash. The look in her eyes is one I will never forget, though of course I affected not to notice it. It was pure ardor. And so the little tableau I want to paint for you here is just this – sitting in the front seat of the short bus with Carissa's head against my shoulder, and the pale blonde girl – I never did learn her name – in the back seat with her face in tears. I knew back then that I was gaining a privileged glimpse into what genuinely rich and popular boys (white boys, mostly, but not all) in the real world were going to go on to experience all the time, as often as the world (which was happy to collaborate with them in the satisfaction of this desire) would allow – the exquisite pain, and pleasure, of a breaking a young girl's heart. What I experienced at that moment was a premonition of what I knew I was going to see more of throughout my life – women preferring to be used and discarded by worthless men who cared nothing for them to all other alternatives – and it made me sad for two reasons: because it was sad in itself, but also because I knew then that my momentary glimpse into an experience outside of my own true portion -- the experience of being among the popular, rich, and stylish people that others would look upon with longing and ardor -- was an accident that fate was quickly going to correct.

New Story at Tablet Magazine

2009-07-02T08:30:00.003-07:00

http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture/music/8898/their-magic-moment/

2009-06-24T15:25:00.001-07:00

2009-06-24T15:13:00.000-07:00

On survivalism in Abu Dhabi National

2009-04-23T19:30:00.001-07:00

http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090424/REVIEW/704239994/1007

A piece about Darfur for the National of Abu Dhabi

2009-04-03T13:33:00.001-07:00

http://tinyurl.com/clh5vb

2009-03-04T13:08:00.000-08:00

Advice to the Lovelorn

2009-02-28T11:54:00.000-08:00

The only further point I wish to convey about last night is the following thought: obsession, of the kind you described, that goes on for years, and is not reciprocated -- it isn't real, and it isn't love. It's something else, and it isn't good, and there's only one way to treat it. You have to tear it out by the roots.

Of course, you should feel free, as you have, and as I'm sure you will, to disregard this truth. But you should hear it, so as not to be able to say, at some later point, that you were never told.

Wittgenstein book at Nextbook

2009-02-27T15:19:00.000-08:00

I reviewed a book about the Wittgenstein family at Nextbook.

2009-02-19T18:46:00.000-08:00

2009-02-17T15:55:00.001-08:00

Inside the Box

2009-02-03T09:11:00.001-08:00

Inside the Box
February 2nd, 2009

I knew about Britney Spears a few months before the rest of the world. What I mean by this is that I was a viewer of The Box in 1998. You could call into The Box to request a video, and the idea was that at some interval after you had made your call, the video you had requested would appear. I sometimes thought about doing this, but the logistics of it seemed daunting to me, and I could never muster the nerve. Instead, I was content to watch the videos that others had chosen, which were not the videos I would have chosen. To judge by the videos that did play—and there seemed no difference between this pseudo-democracy and the usual kind of pre-programmed channel, since the same handful of videos rotated with numbing regularity—The Box catered to an "urban" demographic underserved by MTV, which was then in a transitional phase of its existence, long past the heroic days when it featured gender-bending synth-pop from limp-wristed limeys with a perpetual sob in their voice, and just at the beginning of Carson Daly's brazen ascent at TRL.

The Box played the trashiest videos by the trashiest acts with the lowest production values. And many of these videos showed a lot of skin, which made them an indispensable resource to young men caught in the New Jersey suburbs. Back then, in the days of dial-up Internet access (and it may be hard for our younger readers to conceive of this) it was hard to find things to masturbate to if you weren't ready to admit—as mostly people weren't, back then—that you were a disgusting pervert willing to spend money to see women treated like objects in front of a camera.

If you had one of the old cable boxes, you could press channels 3, 5, and 7 simultaneously and get a flickering, distorted look at the Playboy Channel. Sometimes the screen resembled a gold mosaic bearing the faint outlines of an image; other times a chaos of harsh colors in scrambled flux. Occasionally, it would resolve into a clear image, though only for a few seconds at a time. You would see a breast surging in slow motion as it passed through a sprinkler, brushed by the water's prismatic spray, or cut-off jean shorts shucked off onto a haybale. Or a car wash would degenerate into a naked sudsy free-for-all. Though you could not hear, you could imagine the various soundtracks—the perfunctory fiddle and banjo accompanied with the airless syn-drum beat; the wart-hog growl and squeal of a neon pink BC Rich, as the guy with the black-painted fingernails eased off the whammy bar. Time was short: you had to be ready to respond to these inducements, to answer the call to solitary arousal.

If you wanted to see a picture of a penis penetrating a vagina, you had to venture out to a former warehouse space on the West Side Highway and pay $25 for a magazine that came hidden in a brown paper sleeve. You had to put yourself in the company of seedy characters bathed in blear light amid the all-pervading odor of ammonia. If this was your interest, you desired something known then as "hardcore" pornography, which was ostensibly against the law as recently as the early 1990s. It was a curious time to be trapped in the hormonal tempest of that period of life—between the Meese Commission's report on pornography, and the publication of Catherine MacKinnon's groundbreaking work (and more than thirty years after the release of the Beatles' first LP)—when one of the consequences of sexual exploration was death from an incurable illness, and when Christian morality and radical feminism both inveighed against what the consumption of pornography was doing to the heart and soul and loins of a people.

We took these dire admonitions at least partially seriously, we earnest youth of America, because though we didn't really believe in any Christian creed, we believed that there was something inherently precious and singular in everyone (but particularly in ourselves) that deserved to be loved, something that was endlessly fragile and needful of protection. Even if we held the hysterical aspects of campus feminism at a remove, we believed that equality was the foundation of the true love that would express itself in an intimate, mutually fulfilling eroticism. That's what we thought back then.

My mood in those days was somnolent. I drove a 1989 Nissan Pulsar NX that my parents had bought me for $500. I was working as a reporter at a free weekly newspaper in East Brunswick, NJ, earning $15,482 a year and living in Milltown, NJ. I would drive down a peculiar strip of Route 18 that looked like one of those long tracking shots that filmmakers rely on to establish a mise-en-scene of anonymity and cheapness—those garish colors attenuated by years of grime, those ghostly commercial icons suspended on massive pedestals projecting into the sky, and all those tons of polished metal darting around the off-ramps bearing their vulnerable human cargo. You grew accustomed to risking death at the jug-handled turn ramps that were unique to New Jersey highways. It felt like the end of the world.

The music I preferred on these excursions were hissy dubbed cassette tapes of Glenn Gould playing Bach in that bludgeoning, affectless style he invented, so remorseless in its inhuman power. The music, turned up all the way so as to be audible over the wide open windows—the car had no air-conditioning—felt a little bit like purgatory, and a little bit like anesthesia, and most of all like the cold rapture of thought struggling to transcend its surroundings. I've never felt as alone as I did in that little box, the hot wind battering my face, cutting through those desolate stretches of big box stores, passing through the newly built subdivisions that had sprung up on raw pastureland. But sometimes, when the music was high, and the sun was a hot smear at high noon, or you were hurtling down an empty stretch of road at night, you felt the immense power of the car you were driving to propel you beyond yourself and into—Jameson called it the hysterical sublime.

Those were the days when (if I wasn't watching the Box) I would work my way through the dense thickets of the pseudo-philosophical jargon that proposed to name this condition in which I was living, to dignify it with a lofty vocabulary that radiated a paranoid dread that seemed to be the only feeling worth feeling back then, the only feeling that was real and alive. What was this malign historical stasis I was living through, that my own life seemed so helpless a product of, in which there was no fate beyond bored passivity in the face of capitalism's triumphal march?

When I first saw Britney Spears on the Box, in the fall of 1998, what I thought about was Britny Fox. Now, Britny Fox was a terrible hair metal band that had scored a hit earlier in the '90s with a song called "Girlschool." It featured a classroom full of Catholic schoolgirls gyrating to the beat in defiance of a stern teacher. They roll up their shirts to expose their abs, and muss their hair, but they don't go any further—there isn't anywhere further to go. Thus the video, which started off promisingly, reaches a narrative impasse, and the women just keep swaying around in the classroom for the rest of the song.

But that was a sexist video by a horrible hair metal band that exploited women. Britney Spears was something else—an inflection point in the culture. TRL's arrival in Times Square was an important signpost in that neighborhood's new identity. Giuliani's quality-of-life police ran out the junkies and the prostitutes. Disney remade the square as a gleaming, candy-colored monument to anodyne, family-friendly, corporate-sponsored mass entertainment. Britney, the former mouseketeer, literally straddled the divide between Times Square's old and new identities. It was a further elaboration of the "winner take all system" that still obtained in the world of 1998, whereby all the money that might once have supported an ecosystem of joke-tellers in the Catskills was sitting in Jay Leno's pocket. Instead of an army of diseased whores, there would be one perfectly airbrushed youth whom the whole world would watch together.

Now, none of this became clear to me until the spring of 2001, when Pepsi ran an amazing ad in which Bob Dole is sitting alone in his bedroom, bathed in that eerie blue light cast by the TV screen, watching Britney Spears dance around singing an anthem of generational change that is also a paean to Pepsi. And this one-handed war hero and Presidential aspirant who was, by that time, better known as a commercial spokesman for Viagra, is as engrossed by the image of the young Spears as any man who would like to have an erection but requires the help of cutting-age technology would be. His dog barks, and Dole says: "Down Boy."

And there was something about this moment more eloquent, radical, and true than anything I had read in those candy-colored paperbacks. It was like a wild utopian novel condensed into a single, electric image: freedom, spontaneity, youth, and a sexuality that was boundless, innocent, and all-encompassing confronting age, authority, infirmity, limitation, subsuming and vanquishing it. Or it was like a dark dystopian satire folded into an instant: a man of power and authority prostituting himself to the seduction of a dream world concocted by corporate masters who feed out endlessly deferred dreams of power, success, and love in the name of fizzy, corn-syrupy water. The commercial did not merely suggest, but actually demonstrated in the most palpable way, that no man had the dignity to rise above this fate.

Most of all it, it was a picture of world as it was, it felt like the world, the American present and it felt like life. I went on Amazon and liquidated what remained of those theory books, while they still retained some value. It was the spring of 2001 and American prosperity was at its height. We had elected George W. Bush president, Britney Spears was the biggest pop star in the world, and I had finally acquired a broadband connection. I was ready for what was to come.

n+1 Symposium on Britney Spears curated by me

2009-02-02T21:47:00.000-08:00

http://www.nplusonemag.com/one-more-time-britney-symposium

On Gregor Von Rezzori's the Snows of Yesteryear and Memories of an Anti-Semite at Nextbook

2009-01-30T10:19:00.000-08:00

http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=2885

Follow Me

2009-01-25T12:46:00.000-08:00

http://twitter.com/wesyang

wewitnessedtheapocalypse classic

2008-12-20T00:00:00.000-08:00

I'm going to post some painful old diary entries here, from the days when my online diaries went by a series of other, long forgotten names.

[A face is closing in on your face!]
[What will you do?]

[Take evasive action]

or

[Submit to be kissed on the mouth?]

>>BLOCK LIPS WITH CHEEK

You turn your face just in time to prevent the oncoming lips from brushing up against your lips. The lips press harmlessly up against your cheek.

You are standing outside of the Astor Place train stop.

An Asian man in a blonde jacket coat is studying your face.

>>AVERT EYES

Your eyes remain fixed on a broken segment of sidewalk.

>> SAY GOODNIGHT

"Good night." says the Asian man.

>> WALK TO SUBWAY

You are already standing outside the subway.

>> ENTER SUBWAY

As you start heading north toward the subway station, the Asian man continues walking alongside you.

>> ASK ASIAN MAN WHERE HE IS GOING.

"I'm going to the PATH train," he says.

>> ENTER SUBWAY

You walk down the stairs to the platform. It's cold and bright and lonely. You return home on the train and spend the night haunted by what might have been.

********************GAME OVER***************************

Score: 0/250

WOULD YOU LIKE TO PLAY AGAIN? Y/N

N

2008-12-18T13:25:00.001-08:00

Morgenthau on Realism

2008-12-18T11:58:00.000-08:00

Realism maintains that universal moral principles cannot be applied to the actions of states in their abstract universal formulation, but that they must be filtered through the concrete circumstances of time and place. The individual may say for himself: "Fiat justitia, pereat mundus (Let justice be done, even if the world perish)," but the state has no right to say so in the name of those who are in its care. Both individual and state must judge political action by universal moral principles, such as that of liberty. Yet while the individual has a moral right to sacrifice himself in defense of such a moral principle, the state has no right to let its moral disapprobation of the infringement of liberty get in the way of successful political action, itself inspired by the moral principle of national survival. There can be no political morality without prudence; that is, without consideration of the political consequences of seemingly moral action. Realism, then, considers prudence-the weighing of the consequences of alternative political actions-to be the supreme virtue in politics. Ethics in the abstract judges action by its conformity with the moral law; political ethics judges action by its political consequences. Classical and medieval philosophy knew this, and so did Lincoln when he said:

I do the very best I know how, the very best I can, and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

Forthcoming

2008-12-17T21:54:00.000-08:00

I went to see Lost in Translation at Cinema Village with a girl named Karen. Karen had inhumanly large, slightly distended, milky-blue eyes. Afterward, we walked to Union Square, and then to the Cedar Tavern on University Place. We agreed that the movie had been useless and that it fell into the second category of things that should be abhorred: there were things that deserved to be hated, and then there were the things so hateful that you had to hate anyone who liked them. I explained to her that the only way I could experience love for one thing was by hating other things, that the people I loved reminded me to hate others: they were a reminder of the way things could be, but weren't. I told her that all of the things that were really meant to happen between people had a way of happening, and by this I specified a special category of things that one could not do otherwise. I still believed in this category of thing, though I had not myself experienced it. The insinuation, and also the thought, was that this might be one of those things. She had caramel colored hair that always looked a bit fried, and was wearing a high-necked sweater. She was small and lemur-like, all eyes and hands, and had grown up in a farm in South Dakota. I told her that the Masters and Johnson survey had found that as many as 40 percent of all rural males had had sexual contact with an animal. I told her that I had a habit of losing my erection whenever a woman was on the verge of climax. I told her that I defied all of the stereotypes that were imposed on Asian males. I was not studious, for instance, and I could hold my liquor. There was only one way that I resembled other Asian men, and that was, of course, that I had a very small penis.

We had met in an apartment in what we were still then calling East Williamsburg, by the Morgan stop, and a a 5 am, we had danced to a Smiths LP. Later she would tell me that I had seemed at once bored and expectant. At that at hour, in our condition, it had seemed like, together, we had become the still point of the turning world. The sun was setting and it was early fall, and now the magic was gone. Later, she would tell me that I had seemed on that occasion, both bored and expectant, which seemed to me an unfair, and an unperceptive, account of my mood. Three months later, she was engaged to be married. The Cedar Tavern, established 1866, and once host to generations of total fakers who banded together and inscribed their names, simply by default, into the annals of our cultural history, is now a seven story luxury condominium.

Further commentary on: Game Theory

2008-12-17T21:42:00.000-08:00

I genuinely liked the Game guys. I recommend the book without equivocation or disclaimer to anyone who is curious about it. It has the quality of being immediately, and continuously engrossing that not many books, serious or popular, possess. Anyone who starts it will finish it in two days after marathon reading sessions. It is one at one and the same time, one of those naked fragments of painful truth that popular culture is always producing -- like the show "To Catch A Predator," or the career of Britney Spears, or the candidacy of Sarah Palin -- and a reasonably intelligent, self-aware, and always ingratiating account of the things it stands for that knows how to draw its readers, even the ones inclined to despise it, into a temporary complicity with itself. I have made the analogy between the Game and the 9/11 Commission Report: they are non-literary texts that provide much of what we turn to literature to provide, often through an unintentional series of elisions of perspective that take on the quality of literature.

I told the Voice reporter who was asking me about my piece, and who wanted to know the extent to which my researches were confined to the theoretical, that I hadn't, in fact, applied any of the methods taught in the Game, but had instead, absorbed a "whole ethos of approaching life as one of manipulating others to do our will." I was kidding, or exaggerating, of course, but there was an element of truth to it.

The Rousseauist egalitarianism of television and the wide-eyed, sentimental idealism of our American youths -- steeped in ideals of innocence, and true sincerity, liberal perfectionism, bourgeois moralism, and unmediated love -- do not withstand the test of life. I discovered, at 30, the Maxims of La Rochefoucauld, and found in this jaded 17th century French aristocrat and Frondeur, a guide through the vicissitudes of life, and the hypocrises of people . I feel at home with him in a way that I do with only a few other writers:

http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Francois_de_La_Rochefoucauld/

He helped me to find bearable things that I hadn't been equipped to deal with about life in a place like New York. And in their own homespun, autodidactic, nerdy way, the Game shows people their own world as it is in a way that has palpable and immediate value to them. It also equips them to destroy themselves and become complicit in their own misshaping and the further misshaping of the world -- the difference between a critical and a positivist system-- so the book has to be read at the proper distance, but also with the right intellectual framework. That's what I was groping for in my Game piece.

Further commentary on: The Face of Seung Hui Cho

2008-12-17T21:40:00.000-08:00

There didn't seem to be much to say about the Virginia Tech shootings. A mentally ill person went on a rampage, as mentally ill people will sometimes do. The independent variable was that he had such ready access to guns. You could talk about gun control, violence in popular culture, or the ways we have failed to provide for the care of the mentally ill. There was something to each of these points, but they all had a rehearsed, formulaic quality when you read about them. Any effort to yoke this thing to some larger agenda felt forced. There was, for instance, an extremely lame attempt by right wing bloggers to link "Ismail Ax" (a cryptic term that Cho had written) to Islamic terrorism. The temptation was to conclude that this was an essentially meaningless event, without any larger significance beyond itself.

It was my feeling that the event actually enacted something about the structure of American society -- something so apparent that no one could see it. Not something that could be read in terms of reform, or of moral outrage, but about the way it felt to confront a society of open opportunity, where your own actions determined your fate, and your own actions could make you, if you were an elegant, smiling, self-possessed, brilliant, handsome, but then also unthreatening, person with a preternaturally cool demeanor and a heart full of idealism tempered by wisdom and pragmatism, into the President of the United States, even if you had come from nowhere and had started as nobody; and it could also lead you, if you were a weak, wounded, stunted, sickly soul, into a position of total and unmitigated isolation, even though there were people whose job it was to care about you and care for you.

We celebrate winners, but a society conceived in these terms is premised on the existence of losers; people who try to make it but can't, people who don't have what it takes to earn a place for themselves; people who have earned their total exclusion from life as surely as others have earned their place at the center of it. Let us call them the untalented tenth. And since we aren't comfortable with this fact, we don't want to look at the losers, even if we know something about what those people felt and knew; especially because we do. To evoke some of this feeling, I found it necessary to go beyond the usual commentary and try to involve the reader in some of the internal turmoil of youth, particularly male youth, and to remind everyone of the aspects of Cho's predicament that are expressed all around us, every day of our lives. Cho wanted, above all, to be looked at and regarded as the things he was not: strong, manly, and capable; and he fantasized into existence a shadow life, fashioned out of the detritus of American popular culture, in which the same fantasies of the besieged self rising up to smite down a sea of enemies are in constant circulation. What desire is gratified by these images? And don't they arise from out of the matrix of our everyday lives? The experiment I attempted in this piece -- and its success or failure is for others to judge -- was to see if I could make that connection.

On torture in the Abu Dhabi National

2008-12-05T08:46:00.000-08:00

http://www.thenational.ae/article/20081205/REVIEW/362144390/-1/NEWS

2008-12-01T15:27:00.001-08:00

2008-12-01T15:02:00.001-08:00

2008-11-20T12:34:00.001-08:00

From a Harlot High and Low

2008-11-19T10:37:00.001-08:00

"Anybody who was once caught up in journalism, or is caught up in it still, is under the cruel necessity of meeting men he despises, smiling at his worst enemy, condoning actions of the most unspeakable vileness, soiling his hands to pay his aggressors out in their own coin. You grow used to seeing evil done, to letting it go; you begin by not minding, you end by doing it yourself. In the end, your soul, spotted daily by shameful transactions always going on shrinks, the spring of noble thoughts rusts, the hinges of small talk wear loose and swing unaided. The Alcestes become Philintes, characters loses its temper, talent degenerates, the belief in works of beauty evaporates. A man who wanted to take pride in his pages spends himself in wretched articles which sooner or later his conscience will tell him were base actions. You came on the scene, like Lousteau, like Vernou, intending to be a great writer, you find you have become an impotent hack."

latest in nextbook

2008-11-19T09:15:00.000-08:00

http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=1575

Some autobiographical notes

2008-11-12T19:00:00.000-08:00

I don't remember much anymore. It's how I stay young. I don't think much of the future or the past. How did I spend seven years without health insurance? How did I live on less than $12,000 a year for seven years? Not by thinking of the future or the past.

I am not a member of the threatened middle class. The relentless appeals to the interests of this class do not reach me where I live. I have lived for so long in the condition that this group fears that I do not share its fears; I never believed what this group believes about the efficacy of its own efforts, or the worthiness and decency of the life they have earned to try to earn it for myself, and I have thus not earned it for myself, and thus I am not outraged when the promise has turned out to be false, and thus I do not believe it when a politician promises to restore this life in which I cannot believe, though I acknowledge its basic decency, or at least I see the extent to which it is intrinsically benign.

Neither am I a member of the liberal elite. Like them, my relationship to the life they observe and comment upon and for which they provide us the symbolic structures, as the sociologists would put it, to parse our experience, is mediated by book learning. Unlike them, I am not protected by earned position, recognized prestige, or inherited wealth, and unlike them, I do not feel guilty about the way that I am protected from life's cruel vicissitudes (because I am not protected) and thus I do not feel obliged, as they do, to clothe myself in an outward show of commitment to some principle -- any principle -- so as to convince the world, or most of all themselves, that they are in it for anything other than themselves, and the infinite expansion of their own self-regard.

Neither do I feel any solidarity toward people who make as little as I do. I am a model of bourgeois propriety and rectitude in all things other than earning a living, and the daily business of manipulating others to do my will voluntarily, and with the sense that they serve themselves by serving me, that is life under managerial capitalism -- I pay my debts, I live within my restricted means, I surrender to vice only in highly controlled and protected settings, I research every purchase to ensure that I get the best value for the least money spent, and I am sure that anyone can learn to discipline themselves in this way without the intervention of the state or a deity. In my neighborhood, if a voice is audible on the street, it is saying the word "fuck" -- I am just barely exaggerating when I say this -- and I know for a fact that this constant venting of rage is keeping my neighbors down at least as much as anything any Man has ever done to them; it is a small, quotidian form of collaboration in one's own imprisonment that one has no choice but to transcend, or failing to transcend it, there is no one to blame but oneself.

What kinds of appeals would reach me where I lived? They would not be political ones. With whom should I feel solidarity, if I were capable of this feeling?

I read an account of an Obama rally in Philadelphia in the New Republic. It ended by quoting an old retiree named Edith MacDonald:

"This is just such a happy place," she says, watching the crowd stream past. Brooks and Dunn's "Only in America" is playing again, and McDonald shouts over it to tell me that she's the last one left from her generation, born in South Carolina before migrating north. "I told my family, God left me here for a reason," she says. "So when I go up to heaven and see my family, I tell them" that the country had a black president.

And I wept at this. And what I wept for was not for anyone else, it was just for me, and me alone, because sentimentality is the mark of the person whose ability to feel -- in this case, the emotions of solidarity and hope -- has been fatally compromised. And what I mourned for was the person my own time hadn't permitted me to become: someone who could believe in a cause, and fight for it, and endow my life with meaning that wasn't either futile or actively malign.

I believe that Barack Obama is a good man and a capable one, and an intelligent one, and a person who knows things that lots of good, capable, and intelligent men who haven't been forced by the accident of their physiognomy, to know things about other people, will never be able to know. I also know that he is, in the end, a conventional Democratic politician operating within the limited and limiting framework of conventional Democratic politics. The one hope I can still muster is that like JFK, who was himself a conventional politician, something about the irrational and unjustified hope he arouses can itself awaken an appetite deeper than the one he can himself satisfy, and thus make possible things beyond himself. So here's to victory for Obama, and also to the hunger for something beyond.

2008-10-31T01:05:00.001-07:00

Question for Richard Cohen

2008-10-07T15:55:00.000-07:00

Dear Richard Cohen,

I liked your piece on Sarah Palin.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/06/AR2008100602634.html

But then I came across this sentence:

"Ah, but the scorn, approbation and ridicule that would have descended on Clinton -- I can just imagine the Journal editorial -- have been withheld from Palin."

Do you know what the word "approbation" means?

I'll give you a hint: it's not a synonym for "opprobrium."

Another one: it helps, when decrying the stupidity of others, particularly of other mainstream journalists, not to expose one's own.

Most recent publication: Review of Guyland

2008-09-30T13:23:00.001-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/books/review/Yang-t.html?em

I thought I would share with you

2008-09-06T21:25:00.000-07:00

The most pathetic feature profile I have ever read:

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB122066012828905783-lMyQjAxMDI4MjAwNjYwNjYwWj.html

2008-09-02T18:30:00.001-07:00

2008-08-24T09:02:00.000-07:00

2008-08-23T19:47:00.000-07:00

"The only philistinism that counted was the kind that deforms the heart, trapping us in an attitude of scorn and fear until scorn and fear are all we know."

Zadie Smith

2008-08-18T12:19:00.000-07:00

(no subject)

2008-08-15T13:11:00.001-07:00

Just because we did it doesn't mean we're the kind of people who would
do that.

Does it?

link

2008-08-13T10:04:00.001-07:00

http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=849&page=1

quote

2008-08-12T09:04:00.000-07:00

" 'True courage is often nothing other than the expression of a metaphysical conviction, so to speak, of our own superfluousness."

You Jew, Georg thought without animosity, and then: perhaps he's not so wrong.'

-- Arthur Schnitzler, The Road Into the Open

Advice, Part II

2008-08-12T08:10:00.001-07:00

Yes, one must choose with the heart. And the heart desires riches.

Stones Vs. Springsteen

2008-08-10T20:47:00.001-07:00

Here's the Stones during their Golden Age:

value="true">

Here's Bruce:

Anybody that knows the first thing about rock ensemble playing knows which is the dynamic, explosive, kinetic performance and which is the bunch of largely inept poseurs phoning it in onstage.

So maybe you haven't tried rock ensemble playing yourself or trained your ear to hear it in others: Anybody who nonetheless has their instinct for rhythm intact ought to be able to perceive that one of those things has real groove while the other is lame-ass limeys wanking. And they should be able to tell which is which.

If you don't know enough to know the difference -- it's not important to me to persuade you. That's your problem, and, if you want to write lengthy posts exposing your problem to others, that's OK with me too. We'll just to have to disagree.

Mick Taylor had a nice tone and feel, but his playing was always a dull collection of blues licks strung together in no coherent order; Bruce's solo here is actually a far more carefully structured composition than anything Taylor ever played. It uses simple elements, but it builds to a climax; it's musical in a way that not much the Stones ever did really was.

To subject the lyrics of Prove it All Night to detailed textual analysis is to commit a category error. They do the work that is required of them.

Lyrics of songs like Spirit in the Night, For You, even the River, nonetheless survive the test of close textual examination better than any Rolling Stones song, and better than almost any rock songwriter other than Dylan.

"But that medal you wore on your chest always got in the way
like a little girl with a trophy so soft to buy her way
We were both hitchhikers but you had your ear tuned to the roar
of some metal-tempered engine on an alien, distant shore
So you, left to find a better reason than the one we were living for
and it's not that nursery mouth I came back for
It's not the way you're stretched out on the floor
cause I've broken all your windows and I've rammed through all your doors
And who am I to ask you to lick my sores?
And you should know that's true...
I came for you, for you, I came for you, but you did not need my urgency
I came for you, for you, I came for you, but your life was one long emergency
and your cloud line urges me, and my electric surges free:

Now, you can take that apart and find various solecisms embedded within it. But when placed within the context of that song, and with his delivery, that thing sings. It has poetry, and it stands up to Dylan's stuff, which was itself full of solecism and can also easily be pulled apart and ridiculed.

Bruce's songs tell complex stories; they bristle with verbal ingenuity; they bring to life characters struggling with the pain and limitation of life. They are full of an almost crushing generosity of feeling and empathy.

By contrast, Brown Sugar:

"Drums beating, cold english blood runs hot,
Lady of the house wondrin where its gonna stop.
House boy knows that hes doin alright.
You should a heard him just around midnight.
Ah brown sugar how come you taste so good
(a-ha) brown sugar, just like a black girl should
A-huh."

Stray Cat Blues:

I can see that youre fifteen years old
No I dont want your i.d.
You look so rest-less and youre so far from home
But its no hanging matter
Its no capital crime

Oh yeah, youre a strange stray cat
Oh yeah, dontcha scratch like that
Oh yeah, youre a strange stray cat
Bet your mama dont know you scream like that
I bet your mother dont know you can spit like that.

Under My Thumb:

Under my thumb
Her eyes are just kept to herself
Under my thumb, well i
I can still look at someone else

Its down to me, oh thats what I said
The way she talks when shes spoken to
Down to me, the change has come,
Shes under my thumb
Say, its alright.

I like all these songs, of course, in part because they are so dirty and wicked and so rankly fraudulent, and it can be fun to play along with the disgusting misogyny that is so central a current in the Stones' pose. But it's transparently childish posturing.

Anyway, the videos speak for themselves. If anyone watches both and picks the Stones as the more compelling performers -- let's just say that I don't understand that person, and don't care to try.

Viewer's Diary, Introduction

2008-08-10T19:39:00.000-07:00

My brother has an apartment near Lincoln Square. I've been dogsitting here weekends for the last four months. He used to have a pair of dachsunds that he shared with his boyfriend. For a while they lived in Fort Lee, NJ. Then they moved into a rent-subsidized one-bedroom at 64th and West End Avenue. They lived together for three years, and even talked about adopting a child together. Brian was a blonde-haired Jew from Atlanta. He had a very gentle drawl; a long, slender body with a very long torso; dark, intense eyes; and a pronounced limp. They met while my brother was a graduate student in political science and Brian was an undergraduate studying English literature. While he lived there, Brian had bookshelves that lined the walls stocked with clean paperback editions of Remembrance of Things Past, the Man Without Qualities, and Foucault's the History of Sexuality. He had all of the books that a person who was serious about studying literature in those days would have owned. He had studied French and he also knew Ladino. He explained to me over a Korean dinner what Ladino was.

Eventually, Brian moved out, taking his bookshelves and one half of the canine pair with him. The remaining dog is named Mookie. The one remaining half-bookshelf is stocked with opera books, CD guides, and four nonfiction books about professional tennis, including John McEnroe's ghost-written autobiography _You Cannot Be Serious_, all of which I have read while staying here. I walk Mookie three times a day, feed him twice, and pick up after him. Sometimes he poops twice on a single walk, and if I haven't thought to bring two bags with me, I leave the second one. This has happened twice. There is always poop from other people's dogs on the sidewalk, so I feel entitled to leave a turd every now and again. I do feel bad, but I also feel entitled, and anyway, what other option do I have?

On my way to the apartment, I ride my bike from the World Trade Center PATH all the way up the West Side Highway. I pass the Chelsea Piers, and the USS Intrepid, and I veer around the sharp turn to the broken and rutted stretch of road connecting the bike path along the Hudson River to West End Avenue, and make the steep climb from 56th Street to 64th Street. Usually I stop in at the Western Beef Supermarket at 62nd Street and buy orange juice, tomatoes, luncheon meat, skinless, boneless, chicken thighs, smoked almonds, Raisin Bran, and mozzarella cheese. There are two grocery stores on West Avenue -- a large, fairly clean Gristedes across the street from the new high-rise, and a cramped, filthy Western Beef for the project-dwellers across the street. The Gristedes costs roughly one and a half times what the Western Beef costs.

My brother's sixth floor apartment has bare white walls, a blonde linoleum floor, and two windows that face south at an adjacent apartment complex. He does not have a river view, but in the late afternoon, the apartment fills with a river light. It is very lovely, and a little sad.

My brother has a 26 inch TV and an excellent sound system. He also has digital cable. When I come here, usually I come with a heavy load of books. My purpose here is to write. I seem always to be taking on projects that require me to read a dozen books. I usually read seven and a half, skim the rest, and decide I've done enough. I have trouble getting myself to do more once I've done a certain amount.

I am three weeks overdue on a piece I'm writing right now. I am in my brother's apartment, all alone, and away from distractions. I have nothing to do but finish. I am therefore watching TV.

Rule

2008-08-06T19:09:00.001-07:00

OK, I'm going to lay down a rule, and excuse me if this seems presumptuous. In fact, it's the contrary practice that is presumptuous, though I am all too aware that it is the general one.

Nonetheless, I feel it's important, lest I lose all control of my Facebook page, to assert the rule, however quixotic the assertion may turn out to be.

Here it is: you must have been at least sort of a friend at one some point in my life in order for you to befriend me here. Let's define friendship this way: at some point in our lives we were inclined to greet each other with benign intent, at no point in our lives has either of us insulted or abused the other, (or if this happened, we have subsequently reconciled ) and at least once or twice in our lives, we have had a conversation that extended beyond small talk, and that left both of us with a feeling of having gotten to know one another better than we do the other minor acquaintances in our lives whom we do not count as friends.

This is not a very high threshold to meet. Quite a few people meet this minimal threshold, many of whom you can see listed in my friend's list. But, the world being a very large place, many more people in the world do not meet this threshold than meet it. There are 6 billion people on the planet; my friends list has 130 people on it. There's plenty of room for it grow without adding the many people I have encountered in life who do not meet this minimal threshold, nor can I understand why any of them would want to add me to their friends list.

From henceforth, I will not accept anyone who does not meet this threshold, and I encourage you, if ever, for some strange reason, I try to add you without myself meeting this threshold for you, to reject me in turn.

springsteen

2008-08-06T16:52:00.001-07:00

I'm not sure that there's another man on earth that manages, on a nightly basis, to make himself so fully a conduit of humankind's capacity for untrammeled joy. One actually feels, watching this low-res video, that one is looking at the promise of American democracy incarnate. That a person could be at once so fully self-realized, so completely the star, and yet so weirdly selfless in his exertions, so utterly without ego or condescension toward the masses of ordinary people he galvanizes -- feels magical and heroic. I can completely understand why so many liberal writers, in particular, feel the urge to rhapsodize (as I have just done) over the man: he is the last remaining link for many effete and disenchanted people, to a dream of the decency and goodness of the American people.

He makes the Stones seems like utter poseurs.

This is just a note

2008-08-06T16:23:00.001-07:00

To send you my neutrality.

Musings on the Public Interests

2008-08-06T11:45:00.000-07:00

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2008/08/11/080811crat_atlarge_lemann

Dear Nicholas,
I've been thinking about the analogy you make between pluralism in domestic affairs and realism in foreign affairs. There appears to be a confusion here. Isn't pluralism in foreign affairs, after all, the opposite of realism in foreign affairs? Realism says that there is a rational calculation that can be made about what America's national interest "really" is. The realists say that if you look at the correlation of forces in the Middle East, it's folly for us to be supporting Israel, and that lobbying by interested parties on behalf of Israel has distorted our foreign policy and placed it out of alignment with our "actual" interests.

The pluralists say that the American national interest is whatever the American people believe it should be, and because most Americans support Israel, supporting Israel is by definition in the American national interest, and there is no such thing as a rational "realist" calculation that can stand over and above this desire.

Pluralism in domestic affairs also argues that interest group politics is the only politics there is and that invocations of a "public interest" that stands over and above the petty politicking of narrow interests are just ways of disguising a discrete bundle of narrow interests. It's Progressivism that says that we have a transcendent public interest that our best intentioned, most enlightened liberal intellectuals and their political allies can incarnate.

Then again, I can also see how both domestic pluralism and foreign policy realism are analogous in that they both eschew transcendent politics.

It seems to me that the relevant axis here is between democratic and monarchical politics. "Realism" is the watchword of monarchical politics; in domestic politics, it's the king who claims to be the only person able to represent in himself the unified general will of the people as a whole.

There are certain things, like national health insurance that have only one interest group: and that would be "everybody". Narrower interest groups, however -- private insurers, doctors, hospitals, etc. -- have a clearer sense of their own immediate interests, and the ability to mobilize in their defense to block everybody's interest in favor of their own. (They will, of course, argue that their own interest is everybody's interest, as they did back in the 90's, but this won't really be true.)

The mobilization required on behalf of national health insurance would call for someone to incarnate "everybody's" interest. And since no concrete set of pre-existing institutions represent that interest, we need someone to stand over and above the existing set of narrow interests to incarnate everybody's interest. For this, we need a strong unitary center of power -- a strong executive, as the liberal reformers of the Kennedy Administration argued. Enter Obama -- that's the wish he incarnates: the desire for a king. Our multicultural, meritocratic king. It /does/ feel a little bit apocalyptic in its grandeur.

Maybe you would classify what I call "everybody's" interests as something more like "consumer's interests"?

Wes

(no subject)

2008-08-05T14:31:00.001-07:00

She has a beautiful smirk.

An Old Manifesto

2008-08-03T16:48:00.001-07:00

Most people are not that interesting. They have no values other than simple self-preservation; they have no interests other than the ones specified for them by the media; the most they aspire to is a few harmless eccentricities, and even these are pursued in a spirit of shamefaced self-denigration. Many of them go to great lengths to disguise this fact about themselves, often expending as much effort to dissemble their basic human nullity as it might require to alter it, but their interest is not to change their shapelessness but to repackage it, the latter being their instinct and the only thing they have learned how to do, the former being something they fear for what it might disclose to them of their own failings. Their attachments are meaningless conspiracies of collective self-evasion and most of what they feel for the people they are stuck hanging around with is justified, and reciprocated, disapproval.

Occasionally, a new person will come along upon whom they can practice their arts of deceitful self-presentation, and, seeing their own mugging and capering reflected in the eyes of a stranger, can partake in a momentary self-intoxication that permits them to suspend awareness of their own emptiness. The euphoria of most sexual attraction consists of this and nothing more; the eventual decline in desire tracks a mutual realization of the truth that people glimpse in one another. We tire of each other because we are tiresome; we see through the carefully crafted illusions to the dismally commonplace appetites within, and recoil.

Advice for the anti-bourgeois

2008-07-31T20:43:00.001-07:00

You will have to marry a poor man. Or, failing that -- a rich one.

2008-07-28T14:44:00.000-07:00

Vermin, Part 1

2008-07-14T06:14:00.000-07:00

Each summer, we’ve been afflicted by a new form of vermin. There were tiny roaches, and then there were ants, and then there were mice. A bird made its way into the room beside mine, spattering the wooden floor with its droppings. The white shit mixed in with the white powder of crumbled sheetrock. A squirrel skittered around our kitchen for a weekend before being swept into a garbage can. He hunched in the corner of the counter, every muscle tensed, every hair standing on end. When the broom made its foray into the crevice, he uncoiled in a show of impotent fury, flurrying his clawed fingers. In accordance with his intention, he looked momentarily bigger than he was, and more dangerous. He was putting all of himself into this charade, and he really did scare me. I could scarcely look at him. With a blind flick of the handle, he was whisked downward to darkness.

They come and go, and then they return. This summer, it’s fleas. They are curiously indolent. They gather on your ankles, and you can catch them with your thumb; they make the most perfunctory efforts to elude it, and usually fail. They are incredibly hardy. Even after pressing down on them with the full weight of your thumb, often they recover, and jump away to some other part of your body, only to be caught again. Sometimes, you get them just right, and you squeeze; they are helpless beneath your peremptory digit. With a slightly indecent relish, you leave behind a smear of blood. Eventually you get the ones that you notice, though a dozen escape detection for every one that you catch.

I’ve lost my squeamishness about vermin. Perhaps I never really had any. Some things that have never really frightened me: night, black people, Catholic priests, death. I’m not saying that they should have scared me, or that they shouldn’t have scared me: just that they scare others, but not me. My ankles are stippled with red perforations where the fleas have gnawed and sucked, but I remain where I have been: supine in my bedroom, though I know it crawls with these tiny bloodsuckers. To my credit, I haven’t done much to exacerbate the damage by scratching. I did my scratching in youth, and all through my teenage years. By now my skin is practically impervious to adversity: all of its sensitivity has been torn out of it. I used to tear off the skin that covered the underside of my thighs, and sometimes the tops of my thighs too: the slot on the underside of my knee, the notch where the kneecap protrudes into the shin, the shins themselves. I liked to leave white streaks and to look at them, and then the white streaks would become flecked with red on my flayed skin.

This is what I remember of the house on Manchester Lane, where I was born, and where I lived for four years: vanilla wafer cookies, Sesame Street, inflamed skin, torn skin, that grisly feeling beneath my nails, compound of dust, flaked skin, oil, and traces of blood, the cold rapture that came when you surrendered to an illicit urge, all the way to satiation. There were other things too – a child’s pain, a child’s sadness, a child’s discomfort – so much larger and more intransigent for being new. The first picture of me shows a baby on a flourishing lawn frosted with sun. I was dressed in a white diaper and a cream-colored bib. I was pear shaped and wore a world historical scowl – V.I. Lenin could scarcely have mustered the same attitude of disdain. It’s perhaps my earliest memory: the chafing of the grass against my skin, the heat that welled up around the plastic openings where my legs protruded from my diaper. I’m too sensitive for this world, I thought: I knew it even then, in the midst of those hot fits. Once I had drawn blood, the itch would recede. The open wound would cool in the air. Those were my first intimations of heaven.

Reader Response

2008-07-09T13:31:00.001-07:00

I received two responses to my muxtape. Here is the first:


Subject: re: your your muxtape

""what do all the people know" is one of my favorite songs in the world"


Here is the second:


XXXXXXX XXXXXXXXX

9:36 PM XXXXXXX: mazzy star? really?


People disclose themselves in the things they do, the small gestures no less than the large ones. In many cases, it's the small gestures that tell us the most. When confronted with a list of twelve songs selected in accordance with some principle, presumably that of admiration, love, or simple attachment, one person will write to tell you they loved one of the songs, that they shared your enthusiasm. Perhaps they hated the rest, or felt indifferently toward them: what matters is that they loved one of them, and they wanted you to know.

Another person will scan that same list and fasten on the one song that they can try to make you feel foolish for liking. Perhaps they liked the other songs, or felt indifferently toward them: what matters is letting you know that they can scarcely believe you included one of them.

It's a small thing, a subtle thing, but it's a very deliberate gesture intended to assert many things all at once: I know better than you; I'm in a position to judge your choices; I know what you were trying to do; you haven't done it. Not just that I have judged -- because of course we all judge -- but that I want you to know that I have judged you. And it exposes a certain way of looking at the world: that of a person anxious that he will choose or declare the wrong thing, a person that assumes that everyone else is engaged in the same project, and beset by the same anxiety.



The purpose of a mix-tape, as I understand it, is precisely to select out those songs that come from unexpected -- unhip -- sources and put them in a new context -- specifically, the context of one's own affective life. That Mazzy Star song is not a song for the ages, but it has a surface gorgeousness that left an indelible impression: one afternoon it transformed Brower Cafeteria in New Brunswick into a site of sublime beauty. I was young, I was nearly suicidal, and I was in love. It was ephemeral, and it was glorious, and it's never sounded quite the same again. But I listen to it sometimes to relive that moment. I'm not on the defensive about liking it, nor am I proudly flaunting it in the spirit of ironic glee that people bring to their purported love of Andrew WK or other things in that spirit, nor do I accept the attempt by another to put me on the defensive about liking it.

It's a good song, and anyone who listens impartially will agree.

link

2008-07-08T15:42:00.001-07:00

http://wesleyyang.muxtape.com/

(no subject)

2008-07-01T20:00:00.001-07:00

You were never my cause, but you are now lost.

Notes, Part Deux

2008-06-30T16:51:00.001-07:00

All of my power expresses itself in the form of apathy. As the one
grows, so does the other.

I think if people don't write, they go crazy. They also go crazy if they
write, but in a less haphazard, more structured way.

He is as fastidious as a man of large, ungainly appetite can be.

She is incapable of accountability, to say nothing of contrition. But it
would be an injustice not to give her a chance to exceed her moral
incapacity.

For him, it's less about terrible abjection, and more about golf.

And then, perhaps, the underminer shall become the undermined.

Various Fragments

2008-04-22T23:47:00.001-07:00

He doesn't loathe himself for the right reasons.

You're right that it's hard to understand why he chooses them, but in
fact the much greater puzzle, to my mind is -- why they choose him.

She hates herself for being a Jew -- as only a true Gentile can.

I love you more than I hate your work.

She wants so intensely to be admired that it feels like a cruelty to
withhold.

I know you well enough to know that you will always be a mystery to me.

A despicable woman should have a beautiful house.

I'm not half as vain as I have a right to be.

It's part of the dignity of my life -- such dignity as I've managed to
acquire -- that I have lived it as a man without an instinct for the
winning move.

Just because they are hypocrites doesn't mean they are not saving the
world.

Relationships do not end -- they merely disclose the fact that they
never existed in the first place.

I broke her hymen. She broke my heart.

A Discarded Preface

2008-04-20T10:45:00.001-07:00

There have always been people who have never quite been able to get over the outrage of sex. That men should want to do what they do to women -- which is, in the best of cases, an invasive penetration of another's bodily integrity intended it induce a wild excitement that might easily be mistaken for agony -- that women should consent to let it be done to
them, that they might even want it, indeed, more than they want anything else in the world -- there are many worldviews with which this tableau does not square easily, one of the most prominent of which happens to be the dominant Western spiritual tradition. The early Christians expected Christ to appear again in their lifetime; in the meantime they aspired
to remain, in emulation of their spiritual ideal, perfectly chaste.

Eventually those millenarian hopes faded, and the curious sect of Jews who believed the Messiah had come in their lifetime and would come again to redeem all mankind, made a rather successful transition to a new strategy of propagation of their numbers. But the concession made to the necessity of marriage was always a grudging one -- it was the thing you
had to do if you just couldn't manage the true ideal of chastity -- and the original contempt and hostility toward the body and its desires has never entirely been effaced from the way we regard sex. It flares up at different times and different places to bedevil us all.

In every age, even one as, by turns, "healthily sex-positive," and grossly licentious as our own -- from a certain viewpoint especially our own -- there's a temperament that still struggles with the conundrum of sex. The loftiness, vehemence, and idealism of youth can easily find themselves provoked by it, and provoked to a rage by the spectacle of a whole people freely rutting and flaunting it before world. When we try to peer into the menaced psychology of the Muslim youth that murder themselves in order to murder Americans, the dutifully right thinking in our number catalog the political grievances they hold against us, (American troops in the land of the three holy places, etc.) but the rest of us can't help but thinking -- and sometimes we'll even say it on our irreverent talk shows, and at our irreverent dinner parties, with the same cynical bluntness that we feel it -- those dudes just need to get laid.

And the thing to realize about this -- the dialectical balancing act that must be performed -- is that, of course, on this score, anyway, we're right about them, and they're right about us. They're right about us because it's true when they say that we love life and they love only death; and it's true when they say we find it impossible to conceive of an order of values other than our own grossly materialistic and hedonistic one. They're so desperate to prove otherwise that they're ready to kill and die, violating every stricture of decency and morality that they purport uphold, and we're right about them, because hey -- those dudes just need to get laid.Because once that happens they'll be just like us -- the eventuality they are willing to kill and die to prevent -- and then they'll see. They'll see that it's not so bad, that sex is a part of life and part of the freedom of being a grownup is to have it, though it comes with perplexities and difficulties, it's a thing that men and women have always wanted to do, and always will want to do, and it's no occasion for the apocalypse.

All of which brings me, by apparently circuitous means, to the subject of Otto Weininger. Stay tuned!

On the Ivy League

2008-04-20T08:58:00.001-07:00

http://www.nysun.com/arts/princetons-flim-flam-man

DEAR FRIENDS

2008-04-20T06:55:00.000-07:00

I used to have an online diary, then I took it down. Then I started again, and stopped, started and then stopped, and then I didn't blog for a long time. My online diary used to portray the people I knew a little and then the strange new people I met, and also the funny, or at times poignant, and often perplexing conversations we would have. Sometimes I would post email. I kept my blog, such as it was, private, or private enough, which is to say that I held it aloof from the search engines, so that anyone who wanted to read it would have to have gotten the address from someone else who knew about it, and the idea was -- there was no idea, really.

Today I begin anew, with a different mission, if not quite an idea. I used to be avid to write long emails to people, not excluding women I wanted to get to know better, and I used to watch a lot of TV and movies so as to be in touch with the times, and also because I found it a struggle to get through a book of any genre. I can no longer watch TV, and I've lost the urge to answer email other than tersely in all lower-class letters on logistical matters alone. Nothing really seems worth the effort anymore, though I sometimes trade the odd link or quip or aphorism or inappropriate confession with my old correspondents.

In my spare time -- and there is a sense in which all of my time is spare time -- I read a lot of wikipedia on subjects such as Mike Tyson, inter-species sex, and the career of Andrea Dworkin, (my current girl-crush of the moment) and updates on my favorite depraved news stories. My favorite news story from the last ten years is still the one about the schoolteacher who had a child with her 12 year old student, was released from prison after a few years under the stipulation that she not contact him on her release, immediately got herself pregnant by him again, spent a few more years in prison, and is now happily married to him.

I also try to stay in shape. I skip rope, do an ab workout, and push-ups, never as regularly as I should, just enough to slow rather than to halt or reverse the rate at which my youthful hardness diminishes into the softness and complacency of middle age. My life is a series of routines meant to hold at bay the existential torpor of a life lived in solitude, outside of any larger context, or even the illusion of such a context, of purposeful striving, historical consequence, or cultural meaning.

Dear reader, my double, my brother, my relevance to your life will exist, to the extent that it exists at all, in its total irrelevance to everything outside of its cramped and narrow self-regard. The world here will be parsed, digested, and consumed like a series of treats skewered on toothpicks and served up for you idle and sated appetite. I will go to movies, attend lectures, parties, readings, galleries, and museums, and write about them, idly, without notable expertise, and in accordance with my own somewhat perverted priorities alone. In lieu of individual relationships, which I hereby abjure, I will live my life in prose only through the medium of this blog, and of this blog alone. I make no promises to be entertaining or worthwhile, but I will never be anything other than truthful.

Follow me on this mediocre endeavor, if you dare.