Living Stereotypes

Today I was looking at an electoral map of the country and this guy I work with, A1 said, "Agh, look at that sea of red. I hate to see all those red states." I was surprised, because I'd thought A1 was one of those moneyed white-trash Republicans (the Sarah Palin-type)
Then he said, "Oh wait, which is red and which is blue? No, I like seeing red Republican states! That's the good one!"
Every day I'm stunned by how ignorant, stupid and illogical my co-workers are. I was, as usual, dumbstruck. If you can look at a map of the US and see the big "wild west" heartland states and they're all red, and not remember what red means...if you've been a lifelong trustfund republican from Massachusetts (!!!!!!) and can't remember which are red states and which are blue...you lose your right to vote. Sorry!
I thought, when I was in high school and college people would say things like, "The only people who could really be Republicans are lazy, incompetent, white trustfund kids who are afraid of minorities. I would always say what a cheap, tacky cliché this was. And then I met A1, who fits every inch of that stereotype to a fucking T.
One time, T said, "Some of my friends said Iraq had nothing to do with 911. I don't think so! Otherwise, why else would we have invaded Iraq? I thought, are you an actual individual human being or are you a human microcosm of the American Public (tm) (r)?
I generally feel a kind of mixed guilt about coming down from my elite high horse to tell ignorant hillbillies that evidence has to support claims, rather than the reverse, but that day I blew up. That logic is completely backwards, T, I said. The White House used 911 as a smokescreen to invade Iraq, because they wanted people to be too afraid to question it, they implied, or allowed the public to assume, a connection, to justify what they wanted to do all along.

Yul Brynner

T had the most hilarious dream I've ever heard of. It was like the kind of anxiety dream you would have if you were in a sitcom. He said he woke up in a cold sweat, almost screaming. "B-I-L-L was there, and he was dressed like Yul Brynner, you know, in that movie, dressed like a gunslinger and he said 'Draw...' and then he shot me, and as I was dying he says 'It is what it is!'"
I said, "Are you talking about Westworld?" Unbelievable! Every time I talk to Tony, it takes me a fair bit of time and a huge amount of concentration to distill from the details of what he's saying what he's actually referring to. He constantly jumps from one diea ot the next, and uses generic pronouns like Him and That.
A is kind of the same thing. It's not that he makes zero sense, it's that he totally ignores the existence of or possibility f segues, and he draws totally off the wall conclusions from facts that don't in any way imply what he seems to think they do.

Insistent

We went to Ikea this afternoon and I found myself in the unpleasant situation of being along for the ride in my own life, not caring about what happens, and unable to make any change in it. Beanz made a plan for what she wanted, she orchestrated the trip, she drove, we walked around and she asked me what I thought every ten feet, and nine times out of ten I had no opinion whatsoever, and when I did, she insisted on the opposite. I feel like this happens all the time: I let myself get dragged along, and choose not to care one way or another because I won't be comfortable defending what I want. So I wind up not caring about anything, choosing not to care about anything. I feel like I'm too non-confrontational, but I've always believed men should be extra careful about being too pushy, too controlling. My mother always told me not to tell women what they should want. But no one ever told me that sometimes, women want to have someone make the decisions for them. It's emasculating enough being dragged along to Ikea, pretending to have any opinions whatsoever about what kind of bookshelves we choose. I'd be happy with milk crates and cinder blocks, honestly, as long as they were dust free and covered with books and music equipment.

Controls

We went to a dinner tonight hosted by the company that makes the supplements for Beanz' store. I kind of like meeting natural health/food people, because they tend to be a nice blend of socially progressive political types, pragmatic small business types and intellectual types, without being too over the top in any of those areas. Although, they do tend to take themselves and what role they play in the world awfully seriously for people who sell organic pies to yuppies. But I'm just being cynical; we all sell organic pies to yuppies in one way or another. Grad students going into debt to spend your life studying post-Colonial theory? Bull shit! You teach luxury education to upper middle class white kids.
Anyway, we talked with this one guy who is the rep for the supplement manufacturer. He was interesting because he came across as a very typical glad-handing grown-up jock turned salesman, but he turned out to be a pretty interesting guy, with much more nuanced ideas about life and health than the initial impression I got. But he did say one thing that made absolutely, positively zero sense to me. He was talking about how powerful the placebo effect can be on people, and described how he used to talk with his ex-wife, a rep for a pharmaceutical company. He had said to her that the very fact that you rely on a placebo group as the control implies that you ultimately don't know why things work, and therefore all these hippy-dippy supplements might work to cure God-knows what!
To me, this was so assbackwards. The point of control groups is to prove that drugs actually do work beyond the placebo effect. Science isn't about trying things at random and relying on placebos to see what might happen, it's about trying to deduce what should happen and then using a control to prove whether or not the drug (or whatever) works as we expected it to. Controls don't show that science is afraid of not working, they show how vigorous the standard for success is.

Third Debate

Normally when people go on about how John McCain should be ashamed of himself, I feel like they're being overly PC, trying too hard to line up behind their party etc. I generally don't hate McCain the way I hate, say, Sarah Palin or George Bush. But tonight, he really pissed me off talking about Roe v. Wade. The fact that anyone can get away with calling someone pro-abortion, and make light of the "health" of the mother (which can meaning practically anything! 'Waaah, I was raped and I'll die if I give birth to this rapist's seed. Waaah!' Fucking slut lesbian.), and yet if you implied any Republican was pro-war, you'd be labelled a tree-hugger. Who the fuck is pro-abortion? Is this really such an unbelievable position?

Spazzers!

I mentioned to R, my manager, today, that the more I work with A, the more he reminds me of T. R said that he'd noticed the same thing. Both A and T are grown men who act much younger and more childishly than their chronological ages would suggest. They're both self-conscious and thin-skinned about being slighted and fear being blamed for things (which are usually their fault), and about getting older. They both ask the same questions over and over again, fail to learn from their mistakes, and more than anything, they get very easily overwhelmed by minor stresses and confusion, and then they panic. They both have logorhea something fierce, and free-associate from one idea to the next, taking for granted that the listener will both care to and be able to follow the connection from one thought to the next. They both seem to have a deep need to be listened to, attended to and reassured. They monologue and don't seem to care that you've heard them say the same thing a hundred times. Actually, everyone in the mailroom does that to some extent. They both have terrible trouble reading (and seem self-conscious about reading out loud), paying attention and sitting still. They sound like typical ADHD, dyslexic nine year olds, don't they? T is about fifty-two and A and thirty-eight.

MacGuffins

Another clerk, A, is basically a good guy but drives me up a fucking tree with his chronic immaturity. He's a huge sci-fi geek of, to me, the worst kind: the pointless detail cataloger. He's that guy who obsessively points out that, in Predator 2, there's an Alien skull inside the Predator's trophy cage, and that at the end of Cloverfield, if you watch closely you can see a meteor falling from the sky, and that's where the monster came from! Wow-wee! Who fucking cares?
To me, obsessing about that sort of mundane, banal detail is a symptom of crippling literal-mindedness and ultimately lack of imagination. He started talking about his intense curiosity that drives him to need to know, for instance, why the dead start coming back to life in zombie movies. I immediately balked, saying, "Nobody cares why the zombies come back. Radiation, or Indian burial ground, or ancient curse or whathaveyou; all the best zombie movies don't bother to explain why because it's ultimately irelevant. All you need ot know is 'When Hell is full, the Dead will walk the earth'."
I then explained the idea of the MacGuffin a la Hitchcock, the plot device whose detailed explanation is ultimately irelevant to the whole movie. You don't care what's written in the documents the spies are trying to steal; all you care about is how they steal them.
He came back with, "So you don't care what was in Marcelus Wallace's case in Pulp Fiction? It's his soul, you know because there's a bandaid on the back of his neck and blah blah etc."
I would argue that the case in Pulp Fiction is ultimately not a macguffin, because what's in it ultimately affects the way you understand and appreciate the film.
In the first part of the movie, it is a macguffin, because it's contents are not really relevant. The point is, he really wants it back, and they really don't want to give it back to him. It's merely a device that drives the plotty/atmospheric story. Later on, it becomes a fairly clunky and obvious pseudo-metaphor for his soul/innocence/the human element that would stop a normal person from doing these horrible things, etc etc.
My point is just that nitpicking over minor details in movies, which in the end have no importance to the way one reads the movie, is a pointless and dreary exercise. Look at Donnie Darko; all the ambiguity that makes the film so fun and interesting actually has, if you listen to the director's commentary and/or watch the director's cut, a very dry science-fiction--science explanation having to do with God making a time loop that gives Donnie super powers and so on. The abgiguities are actually vagueries.

I just read a really excellent short story by David Foster Wallace called "Mr Squishy". It's about a corporate focus group for a giant company called Mr Squishy that sells a Twinkie type foodproduct whose mascot is a blandly iconic smiling cartoon character, a generically likable cartoon that's meant to be familiar, easily categorizable and unthreateningly pleasant to everyone around. The focus group is for a new product by the same company called Felonies!, which is trying to capitalize on resentment of healthfood, that's trying to sell an idea of being a renegade, going against trends, being unrepentantly into immediate personal satisfaction.
At first it's told from what seems to be an omnisceint narrator, and only gradually does a protagonist emerg, in the person of the focus group facillitator, a sort of lonely loser type, plugging away at his pointless job, feeling worthless because he sees through all the bullshit he has to peddle to people, and sees through the way the company manipulates statistics so that they appear to say what they wanted them ahead of time to say, and is trying to tell himself that his job has meaning.
Meanwhile, the narrator, presumably speaking in the suposed-protag's voice, talks about how easy it would be to poison some of the cakes undetectably, and thereby destroy the company and perhaps the whole snackfood industry.
Meanwhile, emanwhile, some sort of human fly begins to crawl up the otuside of the building (Are we even certain it's the same building where the focus group takes place). A group of people outside begin to wonder if he is some kind fo psychopath about to open fire, or fi it's some kind of publicity stunt. At the same time, the narrator suddenly speaks in the first eprson and it very slowly becomes clear that the narrator is one of the focus group subjects, and he has some kind of contraption in his person to make it look like he is vomiting after having eaten the test product.
As the story nears its close, it turns out that the company knows exactly how bullshit the focus group is, and how they cook the stats, and really the test administrator (the former protag) is being tested, to see if how much he influences the meaningless tests he gives. If he makes too much of a difference, he will be fired, and if he truly does have no impression on the people he tests, then he will be allowed to continue in his meaningless job that he knows is meaningless, but that he doesn't know all his superiors also know it is.
It's all about advertising, and counter-advertising to the idea that everyone thinks they're beyond advertising, somehow special and unique.
The human fly climbs up to the top of the building, being watched by what seems like a test group, people who don't know if they are being tested. He has some sort of device attached ot his body, and an inflatable suit that blows up. We as readers don't know if his suit blows up and he's just a guy dressed up as Mr Squishy, and/or if he's going to open fire or spray poison, or if he's just a harmless ad stunt.
We also don't know if the former protag was going to poison those people, or if he's being set up, or if the company itself is going to poison people, so that they, like Tylenol, can make a big show of making ammends for their negligence (which in this case may be full-scale malevolence) and wind up actually having a better reputation after having killed people.

Sophie Problems

I'm struggling to finish Sophie's Choice, not because I hate the book, but because I have major problems with the way he decided to tell the story he did. The plot is told from the self-obsessed and extremely verbose young southern struggling writer, Stingo, as he essentially wallows in self-pity
in Brooklyn until meeting a brilliant but tempermental Jewish scientist named Nathan and his beautiful and almost masochistically doting girlfriend, Sophie, a Polish Holocaust survivor. The main meat of the story is Stingo recounting what Sophie told him about her experiences in the Holocaust, struggling to survive, to protect her children, her learning to overcome inborn anti-Semitism ingrained by her father, her struggle to reconcile herself with her break with him (her guilt at having accepted horrible views, her resentment of him for teaching them to her, and her guilt for hating her father, and so on). While this is the interesting part of the story, we have to wade through reams and reams of Stingo whining about his lack of success in love, career and life in general. And when we do get Sophie's backstory, it's all exposition from Stingo's perspective.

"If the foregoing paragraphs with their accumulation of statistics seems, then, to have an abstract or static quality, it is for the reason that I have had to try to re-create, these many years afterward, a larger background to the events in which Sophie were the helpless participants, using data which could scarcely have been available to anyone except the professionally concerned in that long-ago year just following the war's end." (p. 411)

I would have said 'blood-less', or 'dry' rather than 'abstract' or 'static'. The point of the novel seems to be, from very early on, that everyone excused themselves of having any responsibility, and the true horror is that people allowed what they knew to be or should have known was awful, happen anyway, and that Stingo and Sophie were guilty of the same thing: overlooking their own white privilege, wiping themselves of any social responsibility. But it still seems like the most boring, least visceral, least engrossing way to tell a story that must have been, to Sophie and people like her, shattering.

Tonight at copyediting class, one of my teachers mentioned that if you tend to notice bad grammar and poor word choice in articles and so on, and it bothers you right off the bat, then you're born to be an editor. I felt a sort of warm sense of belonging at that moment. I always notice what seem to me to be awkward wording or phrasing. In fact, I tend to think first about the poetics level of what I'm reading, how does he say what he says and why did he choose those words, rather than what is it saying, the hermeneutic level of interpretation. I always felt it was a more natural method to look at the surface first and drill slowly down into it, using that to understand what those choices say.
On the other hand, the ladies in my class can be so fucking annoying. Some of them are just kind of bland, uninteresting flakey types, others are these WASPy daddy's girls with that rich girl lisp, and a bunch are these fusty, musty anal retentive weird middle aged permanently offended effective-lesbians (by effective lesbians, I mean that type of super progressive, asexual middle aged white ladies who listen to NPR twenty three hours a day and carry Wholefoods tote bags) who sit around quibbling about unbelievably pointless minutia of grammar, like the female equivalent of Trekkers.

Metal

Went to see Dylan's show tonight. Well, his band was the first on the list, the only one not highlighted/linked on the Middle East website, the first of like six in a night, all leading up to some supposedly awesome Swedish band called Watain. Isn't that some stupid Walpurgis NAcht witch reference?
I enjoy metal, mainly for the visceral power and the technical dedication it requires
. And yet, I find it ultimately boring. Metal is more about conformity than any other genre of music, particular pop music. The difference between a mediocre metal band and
a terrible one and a great one are all barely noticeable to anone but a true "connoisseur". And yet, connoisseur here seems to have a different meaning than it would in other situations. Would a connoisseur talk about how great the Godfather and Goodfellas are, and think these were outrageous, interesting, dangerous opinions? Metal is more formulaic than blues, which could hardly be any more formulaic. And discussions of metal are more formulaic than anything: it's either more or less brutal than the last "most brutal" band. Why is it any better or even different than hipster bands being trendy or not his week to the next? Blah; the whole idea bores me to tears.

Hedwig

We watched Hedwig and the Angry Inch the other night. I really enjoyed; in fact, much more so than I had thought I would. Movies about transexuality, cross-dressing, any kind of gender-bending are always either condescending, patronizing, or embarrassingly pseudo-sincere, dripping with bathos. This was somehow the perfect balance. Something about the way it only barely sketched the notion of a plot, and the way realism was only implied. The characters and the story are so stylized it couldn't be sappy, and they were so gutsy, so unwhiny that it really sucked the viewer into the over the top fun of it all. It's so much better than the outwardly similar camp-romp, Breakfast on Pluto (which, by trying to be slightly realistic and weave in IRA stuff into the plot, totally failed to be either fun or gritty)
The music was quite good, too, much more early seventies glam and punk than Broadway/American Idol. Although there is one sappy acoustic folk-rock ballad that had been an 'our song' in an earlier chapter of my life (Well, she had thought it was). It was very strange to listen to a song that had been represented what someone else had felt about me, and which had failed to move me then, with someone who actually does move me in the way I had mvoed the previous person.

Computer Porn

I've sometimes wondered how anorexic white girls with no pubic hair, dyed black hair and swallows/naval star tattoos posing nude on the internet for whoever bothers to pay a few bucks a month can be an exemplar of "post-modern feminism."

VP Debate

The vice presidential debate was weird and frustrating. Biden did a fairly good job of
making substantive points and treating Palin with a measure of respect while still talking to her as if she were a non-threat; treating her seriously without taking her seriously. Of course, the bar was much much higher for him, who we all expected to do a solid to excellent job, whereas all she had to do was not make an gaffes.
It was definitely a weird moment for women. On PBS after the debate Jim Lehrer interviewed a few historians and academics to see what their reactions to the debate were. A female historian mentioned Geraldine Ferraro vs the elder Bush, vis a vis the danger for Biden to seem condescending. She pointed out that Ferraro was asked if the country would be in danger if she were elected, and she answered in a very straight-laced, unemotional way that in no way acknowledged the fact that she was a woman. Rather than reacting to the inherent sexism in the question, she had to answer it as if she existed in a genderless vacuum, as if she were neither female nor male, as if this were the case for male politicians. Sarah Palin constantly referred to her being a mom, a small town home-maker, hockey mom, blah blah blah. She got flustered, she implied that the media was against her.
The historian made the rather unimpressive, but also unoffensive point that gender roles have changed. She said that if Ferraro had said the sort of things Palin had, she would have been accused of pandering, of palying into feminine stereotypes. In fact, Hillary was pilloried (heh) for supposedly playing into gender stereotypes, for crying for sympathy, etc. It seems obvious to me that Palin is only acceptable as a candidate because she depends upon stereotypes of the non-threatening little woman who agrees with everything the big strong older male soldier thinks. And furthermore, the only reason McCain's campaign (I still do him the service of separating him from his current White House bid) considered picking her was because Hillary broke down the door for a viable female candidate, and left a vaccuum when she lost the Democratic nomination.

Tired

I had a really long day today: I worked nine to five, after having gotten not quite enough sleep, and I've been hearing this bullshit from HR saying I can't apply out until a whole year as a full employee!!! Everyone else, including some HR people, and the policy which I've read several times, but whose link is broken, says it's only six months, with your supervisor's approval.
Of course, on this particular day I tried to step up my game, be a little more responsible, and of course people were condescending and obnoxious to me.
Then I went to class, which was a long and frequently confusing lesson on grammar. I learned some confusing terms, such as noun phrases ("Give the box to whoever asks for it", whereas I assumed it would 'whomever') Towards the end of the evening, I started to feel really spacey, like my brain was shutting down.
Then the subway stopped at Jackson, two or three stops from my place, and I had to walk a couple few miles from the skanky part of town, half asleep, in humid weather, with a dying phone and no real dinner in my stomach.