Hey, somebody has posted an acoustic cover of “The Lonely Passion of Joey Heatherton,” the greatest song (against much competition) by 90s Boston indie-rock heroes Prickly:
You can hear Prickly’s original (in cassette quality, sorry) at my earlier Prickly post.
This is the world we used to live in. Herman Kahn, one of the architects of postwar US nuclear policy, from his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War:
However, our calculations indicate that even without special stockpiles, dispersal, or protection, the restoration of our prewar GNP should take place in a relatively short time — if we can hold the damage to the equivalent of something like 53 metropolitan areas destroyed.
Reassuring!
Dating is dead now, at the hand of Facebook, texting, “hanging out,” and “hooking up,” per the New York Times:
Blame the much-documented rise of the “hookup culture” among young people, characterized by spontaneous, commitment-free (and often, alcohol-fueled) romantic flings. Many students today have never been on a traditional date, said Donna Freitas, who has taught religion and gender studies at Boston University and Hofstra and is the author of the forthcoming book, “The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused About Intimacy.”
Hookups may be fine for college students, but what about after, when they start to build an adult life? The problem is that “young people today don’t know how to get out of hookup culture,” Ms. Freitas said.
This generation is not very good at face-to-face relationships. The image that comes to mind is two students, sitting in the room they share, angrily texting each other, but not talking. They all want to have intimate relationships, they want to get married and have kids, but that’s hard to do if you don’t know how to talk with another person. Just under half of freshmen said they’d been on a date. Relationships often begin with two people meeting at a party and hooking up. Then the next day they check each other out on Facebook, and if they like what they see they might send a message saying they’re going to a party the next night — but not inviting the other person. And if they both show up, and hook up again, that might go on for a while, and then they’d consider posting on Facebook that they were in a relationship.
Oh, for the old days, before Facebook and the ubiquitous Internet, back in 1998, when everything was different, and when Arthur Levine — yep, the same guy — wrote:
One of the things traditional-age undergraduates have been most eager to escape from is intimate relationships. Traditional dating is largely dead on college campuses, replaced by group dating, in which men and women travel in unpartnered packs. Group dating is a practice that provides protection from deeper involvement and intimacy. One student at Southern Methodist University summed up the dating scene this way: ”I don’t think there is much serious dating until people are seniors. I mean, people go out a lot but do not want serious relationsips. There is a lot of sex. College is about casual sex.”
Students talked a lot about sex. On a given night the typical pattern is to go to a bar or party off campus, get drunk, and end up back in someone’s room. One student explained, “People will stand in the bar just waiting to be chosen at the end of the night.” Developing a sexual relationship that is not intended to be emotional is just another alternative to traditional dating. It is a pattern repeated all across the country and rationalized by students, who told us repeatedly that they have never seen a successful adult romantic relationship.”
Young people who read my blog, I have an important message for you. I went to college in the early 1990s. There was not much “traditional dating.” Lots of people complained about this, especially in newspaper editorials, and worried about our ability to forge meaningful relationships. You know what happened to us? We all figured out how to get married and have kids. Just so you know.
I don’t know if it’s much remembered outside Baltimore, but it was a brutal heartbreaker. Mike Mussina was brilliant, pitching 8 shutout innings and allowing only a single hit; but the Orioles hitters couldn’t come through when it counted, stranding 14 runners over the course of the game. Tony Fernandez finally won it for the Indians, 1-0, with a homer off Armando Benitez in the 11th, only the third Cleveland hit of the game.
Jim Thome, tonight’s DH for the Orioles, started in that game too, on the other side. Since then, Thome’s played in 39 playoff games, while the Orioles have played in none.
The Rangers are the best team in the American League, playing at home, with a legitimate ace starting the game.
But so were the Orioles, in 1997, and the Indians beat them.
Go O’s.
From Rosecrans Baldwin in Slate:
As a reader of novels and not much else, I keep a running list of authorial whims. Male writers of the Roth/Updike generation, for example, love the word cunt. Also, where novelists once adorned their prose with offhand French bon mots, Spanish now appears. Here’s another: Novelists can’t resist including a dog barking in the distance. I’ve seen it happen across the spectrum—Jackie Collins, William Faulkner, and Chuck Palahniuk: “There was no more rain, just an eerie stillness, a deathly silence. Somewhere a dog barked mournfully.” (American Star) “She did not answer for a time. The fireflies drifted; somewhere a dog barked, mellow sad, faraway.” (Light in August) “This is such a fine neighborhood. I jump the fence to the next backyard and land on my head in somebody’s rose bush. Somewhere a dog’s barking.” (Choke)
I checked The Grasshopper King, and nope: no barking dogs. There’s a ceramic dog, and one dog who howls (but who appears moments later, and is named) and finally, near the end, a talking dog. Me 1, cliche 0.
In other Slate literary coverage, Dan Kois reviews Ben H. Winter’s novel The Last Policeman, a detective story set in a future where Earth is six months away from certain destruction by asteroid collision. When I was in college I took Spike Lee’s screenwriting course, and my screenplay was roughly on the same theme. It was a meteor heading for the earth, not an asteroid, and the atmosphere was supposed to be roughly that of After Hours or Into the Night. It was called Planet Earth. Lee’s total commentary on the screenplay, written on page 3, was “Some parts I laughed, some parts I didn’t,” and he gave me an A-.
The Guardian covers a literary hoax, in which several prominent literary magazines published short fiction by “Jiri Kajane,” purportedly a middle-aged Albanian emigre, actually a couple of twenty-something American MFA students. One of them was a classmate of mine in the fiction program at Johns Hopkins. Among the students he made no secret of the fact that he was writing stories set in Albania, putting the name “Jiri Kajane” on them, and getting them published in literary magazines. At the time it seemed like some kind of grandiose participatory performance art and I never thought of spilling the beans. But every so often I wondered, will this ever get revealed, or will Jiri Kajane become an accepted minor figure in the history of Albanian literature? Now I know.
For readers too young to remember. The patterns we used to put on things! They were wonderful.
“I Feel Good About Myself,” from Meet The Hollowheads
(This movie is indescribably strange and while it is not, in the usual sense, good, I’m extremely glad I watched it and miss the world in which it could be made.)
The Art of Noise, “Peter Gunn Theme”
I am the child of two statisticians, and as a result my childhood reading included the great sourcebook Statistics: A Guide To The Unknown, a collection of essays by some of the great statisticians of the century. The thing that made a lasting impression on me was the map of adjectives from Joseph Kruskal’s article, “The Meaning of Words.” Psychologists gathered survey data about pairs of adjectives describing personality traits, asking to what extent the traits were similar or different, until they had enough responses to estimate a “dissimilarity measure” for each pair. Then they used multidimensional scaling (pretty new in 1968, I think) to map the adjectives onto the plane in such a way that the distances between adjectives matched the measured dissimilarities as well as possible. That such a thing was possible was a relevation to me — I guess I knew on some level that arithmetic could be translated into geometry, but I didn’t know that meaning could be translated into geometry.
Here’s the map, from Rosenberg, Nelson, and Vivekananthan’s original paper:
More about on-line education. One hesitation people have, of course, is that it’s easier to dephysicalize some forms of education than others; and that if higher education gets redefined as something that happens online, the parts of higher education that don’t survive that transition get redefined as “not part of higher education.”
But what about creative writing workshops? Right now, these sit somewhat uncomfortably inside English departments in universities. What are you paying for when you pay tuition to attend a fiction workshop? (I was lucky enough to go to a program with funding, but I think most MFAs don’t work this way.) I think you’re paying to have a known novelist read and think carefully about what you’re writing, and you’re paying to create some official sense that This Is The Year I Write My Novel. (This last part might be the most important. Of course, you could write your novel any time! But having paid a great deal of money with the intent of doing a thing focuses the mind on the task extremely well. Freud always said this was why he charged so much; he didn’t need the money, but the patients needed to spend it.)
What happens if a novelist decides to offer a writing workshop via Google Hangout, to 12 people, charging them much less than university tuition but enough to meet his expenses? Like, say, $3K a person? Does that work? Or, since most novelists probably don’t care to run their own small business, what happens if a startup company collectes well-known but poorly paid novelists and runs the marketing/payment processing side of things, in exchange for a cut?
It’s not clear this is interestingly different from existing distance MFAs like Warren Wilson. Certainly I don’t think you can scale up the offering of “serious and admired writer X read my work closely” to hundreds of thousands of people, which I suppose is a reason it might continue being possible to charge serious money for the service.
An online workshop wouldn’t reproduce what I got out of my MFA program at Johns Hopkins, but I was a special case. I was on break between college and graduate school, I was pretty sure I was going to be a mathematician my whole life, and I really needed to be something else for a year. The people I saw every day that year were writers, the professors whose opinions I valued were writers, the people I drank beer with and argued with and dated were writers. And by the end of the year I was able to call myself a writer without feeling like I was half-kidding; not because I’d written a draft of my novel but because I’d lived in Writerworld for a year.
Going through old things, found this T-shirt, sure to spur memories for anyone who lived in greater DC in the late 80s:
Ed Meese was the Attorney General when I was a kid. I’m sure my political consciousness was not sufficiently developed at this point to have had an authentic opinion about Ed Meese. But like any warm-blooded kid I had a taste for the safely transgressive. Something I didn’t know at the time, and which maybe wasn’t publicly known at the time: the “Meese Is A Pig” posters and T-shirts were made by Jeff Nelson of Dischord Records.
