We're taking a little break so that we can all get enough rest for the 3-day New Year's drunk we're planning on going on. We'll be back with your regularly scheduled content on Monday, Jan. 2. In the meantime, happy holidays to all our readers.

It took me a long time to find my way to the blues. One of the first things I did when I started making my own money was go out and buy the complete Robert Johnson, but it somehow didn’t take. The deluxe box set had been padded out with alternate studio versions that followed immediately after the ones from the album, which made listening to it an unrewarding academic exercise akin to comparing the A and B editions of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction. I also bought the least crappy-looking of the many, many crappy-looking John Lee Hooker releases in the bins at Tower Records, which was even more disappointing.

The blues most people are familiar with are the electric blues of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and B. B. King: throaty hollering or tight croaking, a vamping burlesque take-it-off beat and a solo full of wailing bended notes, all served with love-you-up lyrics invoking the mysteries of Hoochie Coochie, Mojo and Wang Dang Doodle. At their most schematic, these blues seem to be one song with some small variation in words. A lot of early blues and jazz come off like novelty music today.

The natural desires these songs express are forced by public decency to retreat into double-entendres, and as a result come out seeming winking and lewd. Most of the Chicago blues standards were written by a single man, Willie Dixon, the pennies-paid poet in residence at Chess Records, who late in his life decided to start singing them himself. There’s a very fine line between macho posturing and realistic portrayal of masculinity, and much of Dixon’s work seems to fall on the wrong side of it.

This common strain mutates into the white blues of Clapton’s Cream and Led Zeppelin (people who hate on the Stones for their sticky fingers should take a look at Zeppelin, who were actually sued for stealing from Dixon and had to settle), before finally degenerating into the trash blues of Stevie Ray Vaughan and, alas, George Thorogood. A real low point for me in my twenties had to be sitting in the same bar night after night listening to the lousy jukebox play his thoroughly un-good hits like “I Drink Alone,” “Bad To The Bone,” “Who Do You Love?” and “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer” – and I wasn’t even drinking.

To me the blues-rock guitar solo is like a Corvette, a dumbass conception of excellence. I could reel off examples all day -- single-malt scotch, Cuban cigars, the Bond films, four-alarm chili -- but you get the idea, and doing so would involve leaving the realm of aesthetics for sociology.

When music became free, the blues gave me a second chance. Whenever someone mentioned a blues artist, Leadbelly, Charley Patton, whoever, I downloaded a couple of their tracks and gave a listen. The blues is a confusing world, in which for example there are two people calling themselves Sonny Boy Williamson and the imposter is actually better than the original. Dylan unfortunately is not a useful guide for the novice because he loves all the old-timers, Big Bill Broonzy, Bukka White, Furry Lewis, you name it. Jack White was a little more helpful because he offered less. His cover of Blind Willie McTell’s “Your Southern Can Is Mine” helped point me in the right direction.

I’ve never been too impressed with technical explanations of the blues, as an AAB lyric pattern and an 8 or 12-bar structure over a I-IV-V chord progression, or mythic ones, as the expression of the collective suffering of an oppressed race. I prefer to take the blues as an idiom, a period, and a body of work.

My blues are the Delta blues, the pre-war country acoustic blues from Mississippi you play with your fingers instead of a pick, the lonely, death-haunted sound of darkness and the woods. In the end, I came up with three unbeatable aces, three stone pillars of the blues.

If I had to bet all my chips on one song, it would be Son House’s "Death Letter Blues." It is one of the best examples I can think of the sublime, that terrible, chilling greatness of some art which is not well covered by the term beauty, and of how the mysterious art of story-telling is so very different from providing information about events.

The speaker gets a letter informing him that his woman is dead and he must hurry if he is to attend her funeral. He arrives in time to see her corpse laid out. As they lower her down into her grave, he realizes that he loved her. Night falls, he begins to feel worse, and when he wakes up in the morning, he can only hug the pillows where she used to lay.

Playing with a stabbing guitar slide, Son House seems to be clawing at the strings trying to pull them off the wood. “It’s so hard to love someone who don’t love you,” he sings. It can’t be said any better than that. But why were they separated, for work or some other reason? Who is the one who loves and who is the one who doesn't?

At the end, he thinks he hears her voice saying his name. Describing this echo of the beloved in the language of the old hymn “Hush, Somebody’s Calling My Name” is a ghostly moment. It invokes both the notion and the palpable absence of Jesus at once, as well as the possible approach of madness.

Son House’s attitude to religion is always ambivalent. The a capella hymn “John The Revelator” is delivered straight, but in his own “Preachin’ Blues,” he mocks the Baptist religion devastatingly, saying he too would rather preach than work. Later he did attend seminary school but was never ordained.

“Grinning In Your Face” is another song he does a capella, clapping his hands and singing chain-gang steady. The power of his voice alone is enough. Listening to this music on the porch of a log cabin in the mountains would be my idea of a good life. As bitter as the song is, as hard as life gets, that’s how bitter and hard Son House became to get through it with his humanity intact.

The second card I’m playing is Mississippi John Hurt, as gentle as Son House is raw. In part because his music was not loud or danceable, he made his living as a farmhand all his life. Hurt’s guitar flows like a peaceful river, but with a slight ragtime jump to it, and his soft, warm voice provides a complex contrast to the violence of his traditional lyrics, as when he kindly warns that if his girl catches you around, “she might shoot you, may cut and starve you too.” He's clearly proud of her possessiveness. In another song he catches someone with his wife and he cuts that joker "so long deep and wide,” the phrase rewriting an earlier blues describing the Mississippi river. The delicacy of his delivery does not belie the claim.

His Stack O’ Lee is bound by honor to take a man’s life. In case you aren’t familiar with the story, my client Stack O’ Lee most emphatically did not kill a man for his hat, as some believe; rather his hat was taken from him by Billy D. Lyons in a rather insulting and provocative manner, and he responded accordingly, to his way of thinking.

“Avalon Blues,” Hurt’s signature song, is a nice tune about missing the girls in his hometown, written when he went to New York to make his first recording at the age of 35. I prefer Hurt’s understated playing to that of Django Reinhart, which seems stagey by comparison. I would have liked to play his songs for my child the hour she was born, to introduce her to the sweet side of life first, to ease her into all of this as one does in a water-birth.

When I first heard Iggy Pop sing “I Wanna Be Your Dog” I thought, No one has ever said anything like this before, but of course that’s never true. Not only does Hurt sing it in his bluegrassy “Salty Dog,” but Iggy was a very serious student of the blues who had probably heard this and many of the other versions, all of which derive from the Morris Brothers’ 1938 hit “Let Me Be Your Salty Dog.” There’s a change of emphasis when it's carried over into the punk style – we imagine Iggy on all fours wearing a collar - but it’s the same sentiment, that craving for debasement at the hands of an ideal expressed so perfectly by Morrissey when he sang, I don’t want to be your lover, I just want to be tied to the back of your car.

With Skip James, my final ace, it’s the voice I like most. It’s a high, plaintive, keening voice, wiggling upwards like a plume of campfire smoke in a light breeze, and nicely complemented by the minor key retuning of his instrument, like he's home-cooking Kabuki. Why I should prefer him to Robert Johnson, I can’t say. His timing is looser, more natural and conversational, a little bit sleepy even. He avoids cleverness and keeps it personal; I believe he's singing about his own life, which is the supreme effect art can achieve: reality. I also don’t miss Johnson’s juvenile obsession with the devil, who he sees lurking behind every problem in his life.

Maybe James feels more personal just because he’s less famous, easier to claim as my own, as a favorite. Cream had a big hit with his song “I’m So Glad,” which finally put some money in his pocket. They take up the melody but leave the feeling of the words by the side of the road; it’s like listening to a language practice tape or a stump speech by Al Gore.

One of his late songs is a song of gratitude to the doctors and nurses in Washington, D.C. who treated him for cancer even though he couldn't pay. In the middle of the song, he thinks back to an old girlfriend who left him when she found out he had no money; unlike the doctors, she couldn't see past it.

I don’t know which is better, the early 1930 recordings remastered from beat-up old 78’s because the masters hadn't been kept, or his pristine Vanguard sessions from 1966 and 1968, but from what I’ve heard I’m inclining toward the latter. Personally, I’ve also grown fond of his Monkishly unsteady 1964 piano album, which was recorded informally with a group of friends, and particularly an old hymn he does called “Walking The Sea.” The song suits him perfectly because it suddenly goes high on the word sea, surprising you with his beautiful falsetto once per line.

One of the obstacles I had to overcome on my way to the blues was authenticity, in this case the idea that the older recordings were inherently better. For two of the three greats, I tend to favor the newer recordings, the exception being Mississippi John Hurt, whose 1928 sides survived beneath the surface noise and cleaned up real nice.

A second obstacle was not wanting to spend money, or not having it. The internet solved that problem when file-sharing came along but immediately created another, that of too much information.

The biggest obstacle was being unaware of my own ignorance. In a world of bad taste, in which supersonic stadium-ready sound effects are what passes muster most days, what you find is that not only is the good music buried beneath the bad, but that even within the good music, things are upside-down: the cream is at the bottom of the milk bottle and it’s the crud that rises to the top.

In a similar vein, one might read Li Po and Arthur Waley’s translations and give up on Chinese poetry without ever finding Rexroth’s Tu Fu or Burton Watson’s Po Chu I and Su Tung Po. The problem then isn’t not knowing, it’s thinking you know when you don’t. The truth waits beneath false knowledge like fresh water beneath ice; one day you just fall through.

[Editor's Note: Due to technical difficulties K Klingensmith's regularly scheduled post will not appear. In its place, please enjoy the following encore presentation of a post that begins with the imagination of a seamlessly connected wireless world. Truly K Klingensmith would recognize this as a bitter irony, if only she could read this.]

Sometime in the early nineties I invented the wireless internet. My invention consisted of a drawing on a paper napkin of my Apple PowerBook with a small satellite dish, about the size of 1/2 a lemon, in place of the telephone port. Wavy lines represented the information being sent through the air to an equally unscientific rendering of a satellite, high in the napkin’s top corner. That was about all I could do, so I didn’t send it in to the patent office or anything. I was satisfied with my great idea.

Years later I invented (designed) the graphite iMac. I was actually on the phone ordering (settling for) the tangerine model when I invented the 3rd generation, transparent grey beauty. The person who was taking my order and I started talking about the available colors -- she had decorated her entire house in white, black and red or pink and so was very pleased with her strawberry machine. I longed, aloud, to Apple, on a phone call that was probably recorded and then played at the next design team meeting, for a “clear grey iMac.” I had waited through Bondi blue, and for as long as I could through the 5 assorted fruit flavors. It seemed that Apple and I were just out sync, and I revealed to them my dream vision.

And it’s not just me. A good friend of mine invented the CD-Rom well before CD-Roms were in use. He was simultaneously gratified and disappointed to see one for the first time a public library.

Of course, these aren’t exactly inventions. It seems likely that there were enough clues in the world, enough of the components of these incipient objects already in use, that the “invention” was less an invention than the vision of a slightly modified existing object or combination of objects. It also seems that if I was thinking it, or my friend was thinking it, so were lots of other people and chances were good that some of those people were scientists.

Maybe this phenomenon, less invention than premonition or intuition, makes us not so different from fish. Researchers found in a study a few years ago that some schooling fish, when separated and allowed to swim as individuals in a tank, all swam the same route. What appeared to be collective decision making was only a number of individuals, independently making exactly the same decision.

It’s a relief, in a way, to be more like fish than another of the world’s simplest organisms, Homer Simpson:

Homer’s idea of invention is of the unique, inventive mind seizing upon the brilliant, original idea, here the forced combination of processes (automation, fluorescence) and objects (butts, boogers). In my -- I should mention much more successful -- experience of invention, it’s less the combination of the unique mind and the original idea than it is an experience of being tuned in to a sort of collective understanding as to where we could go next. This may well be the experience of actual inventors, too -- again like schooling fish, whose eyes on the sides of their heads allow them to see only what each other are up to not what’s directly in front of them.

So as a test case, I’ll offer up one of my latest inventions and wait to see whether it proves to be an original idea or a prediction of what’s already in the works -- still under wraps but just around the corner. It's a reality TV show called Citizen’s Arrest. (I invented this one while driving.)

I’ve got more that I’m not quite ready to let out just yet. And of one them, let’s just say it will forever change the way you practice oral hygiene …

Stocking Stuffers

Some seasonal advice as the forces of atheism begin their final assault on the now ruined fortress city of Christmas:

1. Be happy that consumerism has a different name than the birth of your redeemer.

This seems so obvious that I feel like kind of a sucker bringing it up again, but:

If you care if Walmart or Target exclusively celebrate Christmas, Christmas is already “The Holidays” for you.

In the spirit of the season, I ask, “How in Christ’s name does having a retail chain refer to Christmas help people commemorate the birth of God’s only son?”

I would tend to think that calling what Target does “Christmas” would be more confusing to the meaning of Christmas and that a devout Christian would rather have a little distance between the immaculately conceived Holy Son of God and the annual vending of Tickle Me Elmo. And yet, no.

2. Stop shoveling snow if you start vomiting.

Some say – actually, you know what, I say. That’s right, I’ve got the Holiday sprit of honesty and desire to be a better person, so I’ll come right out with it. I say that local TV news is a worthless drag on civilization. I’ve called local TV stations to facetiously pretend to be terrified that I would fall prey to the “silent killer in my home” before the 11-o’clock news could tell me what it was. I’ve made something of a scene at an honest-to-goodness Judeo-Christian holiday dinner to which a local TV news anchor was brought as a date. But even I must admit that the local news sometimes nails a story.

I have in mind a story that, though a few years old at this point, is, to use a term of the trade, as “evergreen” as the traditional holiday tree. The goal of the story was to provide a set of warning signs that would allow viewers to self-diagnose a heart attack brought on by the exertion of shoveling snow. Among them, delivered professionally – without fanfare or embarrassment – was the advice that if you, viewer, were to start vomiting while shoveling, you should stop and come inside. Printculture readers, I repeat this advice to you; tempting though it might be to keep on shoveling, (really, is there a better tool than a snow shovel to deal with a little vomit?) once you start throwing up, it’s time to stop shoveling snow.

3. Fall in a particularly Santa-like style.

This from the Santa of the Year competition in Swedish Lapland:

It is, indeed, tough at the top of the world.

Merry 21st of December to all and may printculture bless us, everyone.

My deep admiration for university presses dates way back—to teenagerdom, when I encountered erudition in the form of books like Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era. Universities aren’t just training grounds for the future white-collar workers of the world, nor are they fund-raising operations, nor are they palaces of pure research.

[*Spoiler Alert*: Key plot elements of a couple of novels revealed.]

Half way through this semester, I started reading books again, ending a work-induced months-long hiatus. I might not have allowed myself the luxury of leisure reading until at least Winter break had it not been for a friend from out of town who’d left a book behind. It was Kazuo Ishiguro’s sixth novel, Never Let Me Go, just sitting there on the coffee table, too tempting to resist. I quickly followed that up with Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions, a used copy of which I picked up over Thanksgiving weekend.

When I stepped into the worlds of these two novels, the landscape of each was distinctively familiar. I had read other works by both authors years before, and in returning to them in these works, I was struck by how each writer was reworking themes and ideas that he’d traversed before. If one wanted to generalize, one could say that each was writing the same book over and over again. And what’s wrong with that, I had to ask myself. After all, one could argue that Jane Austen wrote the same story six different ways, that Henry James’s obsessions with the clash of New World money and Old World manners took him pretty far. Thomas Hardy and William Faulkner delineated their main topoi by literalizing them into a geography. But maybe because I had never bothered to think about contemporary fiction in critical or literary historical terms, at least not in any sustained way, the thematic consistency in Ishiguro and Auster struck me with greater force.

To go by premise alone, Never Let Me Go—about cloned children raised in a boarding school environment before they begin donating their vital organs, set not in the future but in the recent past—seems like a departure from something like The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro’s most famous work. But the first person retrospective narration and its muted, intimate tone are clear markers of Ishiguro’s style. His narrator-protagonists recounting their pasts speak to us as if we, too, inhabit their worlds and are familiar with its social laws. Thus, the fact of the narrator Kathy H. being a clone is revealed only gradually and obliquely, and is itself secondary to the way it conditions the characters’ existence and the possibilities available to them. What concerns Ishiguro are his narrators’ attempts to reconstruct their pasts from the flawed and fragmentary bits of memory that they sift through with great care and attentiveness; yet any definitive truth or emotional resolution is frustratingly out of reach, for both narrators and readers, hampered not only by the subjectivity and limitations of perspective that come with first person narration, but by the complex act of memory itself.

Memory, Ishiguro’s novels say, is a fiction cobbled together from fact and wish, regret pulling against remembrance. Ishiguro’s characters are compelled to remember because memory is all they have to compensate for what they’ve lost, but no amount of retelling can change the course of events or restore lost opportunities. And because of that, the characters are most reticent, most unforthcoming about their greatest loss, the revelation of which is consistently deferred. It becomes clear that the characters’ obsessive worrying over the details of past events is less to determine what really happened than to manage the loss that defines their present. As such, there’s a certain claustrophobic tamping down of the emotional register that is a signature of Ishiguro’s novels. The hesitations, evasions, repetitions, circlings back that characterize the narration are simultaneously devices of memory and the resistance to it. Early in Never Let Me Go, Kathy H. tells us explicitly what she thinks her retrospection is about:

At this point, readers are in the dark about “what occurred later,” or even what it means that Kathy will no longer be a carer, will have occasion to rest and think. If, as one “guardian” tells the children, “the problem . . . is that you’ve been told and not told” about what’s in store, the readers are treated to a similar experience of unsettling and partial knowledge. And the matter-of-fact tone of the narration only adds to the melancholic effect.

If Ishiguro explores memory, loss, and regret by scrupulously staying within the limited unreliable perspective of his first person protagonists, Auster seems to invent characters who are more obviously versions of himself—writers, academics, philosophical types (even when the philosopher is a dog)—through whom he can meditate on the ideas that preoccupy him most: chance, coincidence, solitude, the illusory boundaries between fiction and reality. Book-ended by two sets of improbable deaths, The Book of Illusions follows literature professor David Zimmer (the narrator) as he retreats from the world after he loses his family. Much of the book is about the narrator’s reconstruction of the life of another man who disappeared from the world decades ago, a silent film actor Hector Mann. In the early part of the novel, the narrator tells us of tracking down all of Mann’s films, and writing a book about them—whole chapters are devoted to analyses of the films, to meditations on film itself. Here he is on the enduring power of silent films:

The voice here is recognizably Auster’s, by which I mean the narrative style is consistent whether he is writing in the voice of a character or as himself, and even that distinction is meaningless. The "I" of the memoirs The Invention of Solitude and Hand to Mouth sound like the "I" of The Book of Illusions. In Part 2 of The Invention of Solitude, Auster writes in the third person, so that "A." is both Auster and not Auster. The generic distinctions don't matter to Auster because a story is a story, because the best fiction is drawn from the unpredictabilities and bizarre coincidences of real life, and because meaning is possible only when we're willing to see the resonances among random events. It's Surrealism in an American idiom. In The Book of Illusions, Auster seems to be asking, how many contrivances of chance can a narrative tolerate before the thread of coherence snaps.

Ultimately, the two writers seem to come at the same issue of craft from slightly different angles of approach. The effects of memory and loss, of chance and coincidence are ways of figuring the act of storytelling—each novel an experiment in narrative constraint and narrative license. These are always stories within stories (within stories), and the story of the frame narrative is the event of the narration itself.

My discussion of this self-reflexivity that runs throughout Ishiguro’s and Auster’s work may make their works sound like tedious rehashings of the modernist novel, but the trick of it is that they're able to serve the interests of plot and generate suspense even when not much in the way of action actually happens. Both novels turned out to be page-turners that stayed with me. That's lately been my criterion for a good read—does it hold my interest while I’m reading it, and does it hold my interest after I'm done?

I’m constantly reading things online, and there’s always a magazine at hand. But even the lengthy New Yorker articles are ephemeral, and I have a hard time recalling what I’ve read from one week to the next. There’s nothing like sinking into a good book, stretching out the reading experience across days and even weeks, the story like a dreamworld waiting for you whenever you can steal a half hour here, an hour there. I’m slightly surprised each time I get back into the habit of reading for pleasure, wondering how I could have let myself go for so long without a good read, marveling at the enjoyableness of thinking about worlds and people that don’t exist except in words.

One of the small pleasures professional football can offer to the non-fan is its wealth of Faulkneresque names: Alge Crumpler, Major Applewhite, Simeon Rice, Jerame Tuman, Bo Scaife, Zeron Flemister, and on and on. My current favorite: Takeo Spikes, a 242 pound linebacker from Georgia whose first job was working in a chalk mining plant and whose father named him “Takeo” after hearing the Japanese word for “great general” on television. He, in turn, named his daughter Jakai, which, according to his website, means “beautiful flower” in Japanese.

In part this is an effect of the NFL’s being a little more ethnically diverse than most might think: there are increasing, if still relatively small, numbers of African and Pacific Islander players rubbing elbows and smashing helmets with the Dallas Clarks, Tom Bradys and Lance Briggses of the league. But the most obvious explanation is the explosive diversification of African-American names over the past few decades, a diversification that increasingly seems more and more anticipatory of a broader national tendency.

In the small town school I attended, I was the only Bush. There was another guy with the name Busch, which was clearly cooler because it was vaguely associated with beer. Bush, on the other hand, was a plant: “Are you a tree?” Brilliant!

Things hardly improved when I found myself attending an otherwise all-black school right around the time the late disco band Chic was at the height of its fame. They are probably best known for “Le Freak” and “Good Times,” but they also had a song with the chorus “push, push in the bush.” Remember that one? I do.

Then came the presidents, two and counting. Including the vice presidency of the first Bush, twenty years of hard time. I’m constantly asked if I’m related, even in the most absurd of circumstances –like the time I was asked by a bank teller when I was cashing my minimum wage paycheck from the Fotomat. More recently, an Air Canada attendant looked at my boarding pass and angrily said, showing it to her co-worker, “Nice name!” I laughed and said I wasn’t related, made a few jokes, but both maintained smile-free icy stares, and silence, until I got on the plane. Brr.

I’m hardly the first person to notice this, but names are funny things. One of my favorite name-themed cinematic moments comes in Godard’s Le Weekend (I write from memory, so I’ll have to fudge the details). The leader of a group of radical Maoists roaming the French countryside asks the bourgeoise they have kidnapped what her name is and she replies “Corinne Girard.” “No! That’s your husband’s name. What is your name?” “Corinne Dupont” “No, that’s your father’s name! How can I help you if you don’t even know your own name?” The surface level of the humor comes from this being a kind of feminist koan about names being patrilineal (Le Weekend was released in 1967), but beneath that is the almost existential absurdity of the rebel’s desire to know the true names of things. For me this is obliquely connected to the fact that by the end of the movie the whole group descends into cannibalism.

A close second favorite is a moment (also requiring a little fudging) in Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999). A group of older Italian mobsters are sitting around talking about the bizarreness and violence of rap culture, speculating that “Ghost Dog” must be one of those rap names, you know, like Biggie Smalls or Snoop Dog. One of the men responds that “Ghost Dog” sounds sort of Indian, like Little Wolf or Running Bear. “Fucking savages!” responds the elder statesmen. A messenger enters announcing that Jimmy the Shark and Big Angie have arrived.

For much of Western modernity the name is characterized precisely by the effacement of any kind of referential meaning, so much so that names with a clearly referential character seemed odd, archaic, quaint or fucking savage. A lot of great work has been done on names, of course, ever since Saussure put that tree inside that little football, but much of it is characterized by thin description. On the other end of the spectrum, there are data-driven pieces like “A Roshanda by Any Other Name.” A study of names, of attitudes toward names, would be one way to tell the history of modernity as a history self-effacing ethnicity.

For me, ontogeny recapitulated, well, something. I hear the name on French radio, Chinese television, see it on the front page of every newspaper –a veritable forest. It makes me nostaglic for the days when “Bush” made people think of trees. Good times, good times . . .

The recent creation of mice with human brain cells has got a few people excited about the possible legitimation of Don Bluth––director of The Secret of NIMH––'s cult following, and lots of other people very, very worried.

Now, this study is not simply a foray into genetic mixing for its own sake, nor an attempt to form a pack of lovable, super-intelligent philosophermice. Rather the addition of human brain cells to the genetic makeup of mice constitutes the first step toward finding a cure for Parkinson's and other neurological diseases and disorders. In general this kind of research is called for in service of humans' quality or extension of life. Justifications for stem cell research and human cloning also generally follow this logic. But as Leon Kass, chair of the President's Council on Bioethics from 2001-2005, tells us, there are concerns about how this kind of research, and more specifically human cloning, may potentially damage humans

Interesting that both sides of this bioethical quandary are folded into a typical discourse of anthropocentric environmentalism, a “human-centered” ethics that focuses on the effects of environmental degradation on human life and human interests. It is in this mode of environmentalism that we most often encounter the rhetorical gesture in which the moral obligation humans have to the environment expresses itself through their moral obligation to each other. This generally takes the form of an argument for treating the environment with care in order to benefit “our children and our grandchildren."

My favorite counterpoint to this rhetoric, is, of course, Jack Handey's:

But while aiming to cure our children, or our children's children, of Parkinson's, the mixing of human and animal cells causes ethical concerns among those who, according to David Magnus, the director of the Stanford Medical Center for Biomedical Ethics, believe that "if you humanize them [the mice] too much you cross certain boundaries." The boundaries are already precarious, as mice are 97.5% genetically identical to humans. But as Dr. Evan Snyder, another researcher who is doing similar experiments with embryonic stem cells and monkeys reminds us,

The "little human" here reminds one of the many debates over what "the human" is and where it begins; now we have the homunculus of the dot which snuggles in the mother's "nest," not so long ago, in the scheme of things, we had the argument that a little human already resided in the sperm.

The "little human" we imagine trapped in the mouse is not a human body-within-an-animal-body, however, but a human brain. Philosopher Jeff McMahon argues that we are "embodied minds" not bodies which "happen to have minds." Moral status, or "life" status, for him, then, is tied to conscious experience. So, by his logic, fetuses gain moral status whenever they grow enough neurons to have a conscious experience (apparently sometime in the fifth month of gestation). Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation challenges this idea by displacing its anthropocentric assumptions, asking if a dog has consciousness and can, say, understand a certain number of commands, why does a human fetus, when capable of only a tiny glimmer of consciousness, get more moral status?

Maggie Little, a bioethicist at Georgetown, claims, essentially, that we should value the fetus not because of its moral status exactly, not as a bearer of human-rights from dot or 5-months or what have you, but because people have warm and fuzzy feelings for them. Because people like to imagine them snuggling, if you will. The "warm and fuzzy" reaction is the opposite, I suppose, to what bioethicists call (and this term is kicked around a lot, believe it or not) the "yuck factor." The mouse with human brain cells is yucky because it is some kind of mutant. The clone is "yucky" if we imagine that it lacks a "soul" and thus is just a pile of organs. Nobody wants to hug a monkey with a human brain or a soulless clone. Not even to comfort them in their trauma at being trapped in an animal's body or to help them cope with the feeling of purposelessness which comes from having the exact genetic makeup of someone else.

But what about when warm and fuzzy gets too warm and fuzzy? In June of 2002 an edition of the NPR radio program All Things Considereddiscussed the ethical issues involved in human cloning, sampling quotes from Kass and others. On the program Kass introduced a possible outcome of one of the most typical imagined situations, the infertile couple cloning one of themselves to produce a biological child:

As E. Hayot pointed out yesterday in the comments under his post, "the opposite of Life, for those who care so much about it, is not Death but Sex." Here the danger in this form of life, cloning, is also sexual. Apparently, once the dot comes to be the mirror image of the young mother, the father will want to snuggle that dot, to possibly "take liberties"; and that's a problem. (Kass, by the way, seems to be the sole male figure in his biological extended family, having two daughters and four granddaughters).

One last spin on the question of Life. A friend of mine and I recently had a very unethical, or at least ungenerous, conversation about those people we encounter that we find it hard to imagine doing anything when they aren't in our immediate presence. Apparently, in our estimation, exceedingly boring people cease to exist when we're not speaking to them. Do they go home? What do their apartments look like? Do they listen to music? Do they read books? The only thing that we think we can extrapolate from our experience of them is that they probably like vanilla ice cream, probably own a couple of pairs of jeans and most likely complain if it is too cold or too hot.

It's not that they cease to exist, exactly, and certainly our understanding of them is not as solipsistic as it sounds (though it is as obnoxious and pompous). It isn't our presence that determines their existence, it's just hard to imagine them when they aren't immediately in front of us, becuase they don't seem to be alive. What we were toying with in this conversation was the difference between living and existing. "I'd like to learn to live finally" sounds the phrase that begins Derrida's introduction to Specters of Marx. Though Derrida certainly goes in another direction--learning to live from others, specifically dead ones, that is learning to live with and through ghosts--I see in this phrase a notion of "living" as a bildung, the idea that one learns to live, we might even link this to the Kantian idea that one comes into the form of life when faced with an aesthetic experience (or is called into an aesthetic ideology, as another friend would have it).

So my friend and my rather unfair understanding of life in this situation is that we are living, they (the people we find boring) are not. But, then again, they seem to be having a good enough time, and for all our "culture," for all our "living life," they seem to have it figured out, while we can hardly imagine making it to next week.

On Comedy Central's celebration of the year in comedy, which aired Sunday night, Lewis Black (who I find kind of shouty) spent some time joking about the Terri Schiavo case. We can't figure out when life ends, Black complained, and we can't figure out when life begins, either; Schiavo and the abortion debate thus illustrate, he said, that we're so stupid we can't even figure out the most basic information about who we are.

This was comedically put, of course, but like all comedy, it was funny because it's true: on one hand you'd think that life, being the single experience all creatures great and small have in common, would be among the first things that got settled in the great discussions that take us from the state of nature to the state of nurture. And yet it turns out that "life" and its meaning--not the meaning of life, which is another thing, but rather what "life" exactly is, how we would decide when and where it's happening, and how we might adjudicate it responsibly--is exactly what we don't know, and exactly the thing that's at the source of a number of cultural conflicts today.

In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben makes the comatose, brain-dead person one figure for the degree to which the question of life's beginning and ending has moved from being a "personal" or at least culturally incontrovertible question to one whose most fundamental adjudications are now political. The archetypical figure for this shift Agamben declares to be the "Mussulman," a slang term used by Jews living in concentration camps to describe one of their number who had absolutely given up hope and was essentially a zombie, a member of the living dead (that the nickname is "Musselman" in particular just goes to show that living death is always a culturally relative concept). For Agamben, the concentration camp is the perfect synecdoche for the contemporary political scene, since it represents (and is) the apotheosis of a certain management of the forces of life and death by a political order ostensibly organized for the good of the lives it manages.

One of the effects of this slow transformation of political control over "life"--a transformation that has been coming for thousands of years but which accelerates dramatically after the Enlightenment and is now reaching a kind of totality, Agamben argues--is that political power can now be obtained, at least pragmatically, by winning arguments over whether life has begun or not; thus the government's assertion of its sovereignty over life in general (and therefore death in general) trickles down into the ideological environment, where people realize that if you can win at the level of the axiom, subsequent legal theorems will simply prove themselves.

Defense exhibit #234 in the battle over when life begins is this exerpt from a federally funded, abstinence-only sex education program: "At conception, the baby comes into being. About the sixth to tenth day after conception, when the baby is no bigger than this dot (.), the baby snuggles into the soft nest in the lining of the mother's uterus."

So much is wrong with this that it's hard to think straight, but I'll settle for asking why they didn't point out that even though it's the size of a dot, that dot is almost certainly baby-shaped.

I understand why, for political reasons, someone might want to convince other people that a uterus is a "nest" or that cells "snuggle," but what strikes me as amazing is the way in which the debates about the beginnings and endings of life produce a startling relation to human animality. If life begins at conception (and really, why not begin with the glint in the milkman's eye?) and ends only when Bill Frist has given up on you, two things follow:

1. A state whose citizens have more or less agreed to allow it to adjudicate life will find no room inside living that is free of state intervention. This is true even if the state decides that life only begins at delivery or in the third trimester, of course, but then at least there's some small internal space carved out in which "being" and "living" are not identical, a space that offers the possibility of imagining an outside to the political life-world (even if it would only exist for the bodies of fetuses).

2. Human beings are never animals. Insofar as the political adjudication of life sacralizes it, human life is split off from animal or plant life (unless we anthropomorphize the animals--dogs, whales, etc.) and fundamentally alienated from the planet. Axiomatically, this makes environmentalism organized around anything other than self-interest impossible; in fact it makes any attention to the planet or to animal life simply an aggressive form of temporary self-interest. (In this context Homer Simpson speaks, as he does so often, the logic of the modern totalitarian state when he thanks God for making animals out of meat.)

Though those of us who want to hold the ecology of thought as open as possible will do well to take up and fight the kinds of specific arguments designed to make as much life as possible subject to the state (in this case the declaration that some people can be held without any rights at all, and that any person can at any time be declared one of those people--"enemy combatants"--is simply the complete expression of the state's right to burn the people in order to save them). To fight for "human rights" is already to be complicit with this kind of state power, though I still think we need to fight for human rights--it may be the only language that registers. But it is also vital, I think, to look for alternatives to the field of "life," to attempt to think modes of personal being, and of social being, that are not beholden to the notion that the state's work is to defend "life," either its own or those of its citizens. For me trying to even think these things is mindboggling, but it seems incumbent upon us all to try in any case, with the hopes that via some kind of accident or stroke of genius someone will happen upon something that will save us from the present.

In 1969, a young British woman named Vashti Bunyan recorded a modest folk album called "Just Another Diamond Day." About 25 years old at the time, she had dropped out of art school at Oxford to try to become a pop singer, hooked up with the Stones' manager and released a few decent singles that went nowhere, including a Jagger-Richards cover.

I thought Vashti was a Hindu name, but it is in fact an Elamite name from the Book of Esther. Queen Vashti was Ahasuerus' wife who refused to show her beauty to the public at his command and was subsequently dethroned lest she set an example for disobedient wives; Esther was her replacement. As for the Bunyan, yes, she is a direct descendant of John Bunyan, the Puritan author of the 17th-century Pilgrim’s Progress, a popular religious allegory told in the form of a dream.

Most of the material for her full-length album was written over a period of several months during which she and her boyfriend were driving a horse and cart straight up Britain's main highway on their way to the Scottish Hebrides. The couple intended to go back to the land, to take up farming in the hopes of becoming economically self-sufficient and free of participation in a society which they disapproved of. When they finally arrived, the conditions they found were harsh and the residents mostly unwelcoming. Vashti declined the chance to come all the way back to London and do promotion when her album was released, and it soon vanished as if it had never been.

One way to deny time is by fleeing into the past. It seems timeless because it is vague now, but of course it was rather definite at the time, overpoweringly so, as the present is now. The past seems safe from time only because it has totally surrendered to it.

British Folk often seems more lost in mists of time than our own, perhaps from having more history to get lost in. If folk is in some fundamental way about vanishing into tradition, Vashti's lyrics do precisely that. They speak lullingly of the weather and the seasons, fairies, gypsies and shepherds, the sadness of love and the sadness of joy, but without intruding enough to draw attention to themselves.

Pastoral, as Johnson remarks in his Life of Cowley, "requires no acquaintance with the living world." It is indeed strange how little of real life got into her dreamy little songs. She wrote them on her way to the farm, not after arriving; they are wishes rather than experiences.

In 1997, Vashti Bunyan, mother of three, typed her name into something called a search engine and discovered her long out-of-print vinyl record was now a highly prized collector's item on something called eBay. It seemed the puritan virtue of modesty had ill served her. She put in months of steady calls and at last succeeded in getting it reissued on CD, where it was discovered by a new generation of listeners and hailed as a lost classic.

Deservedly. She had been compared in her youth to Marianne Faithfull but she is a much better singer. In her early folk ballads, Marianne Faithfull's emotion seems to come on cue, early and from somewhere other than the words, as if the lyric were merely a choker to show her throat to advantage, the song a sonic steeplechase. Vashti is closer to the Nico of 1967's stellar "Chelsea Girl," but while Nico's voice is cold and masculine -- it gets its pathos from dramatizing an inability to feel, one that leaves her paradoxically vulnerable in a grand and wintry isolation -- Vashti's voice is so soft and pure it's ghostly, as if a reed were musing to itself in its own private language. Its pathos is that of lace in Mallarmé, something so delicate it almost isn't there, a substance on the verge of nothingness.

"Just Another Diamond Day" was produced by Joe Boyd, who famously worked with Fairport Convention and Nick Drake, and he used some of the same excellent musicians for these sessions. The guitar work, which is not hers, is nicely supplemented by mandolin and banjo, and many of the key creative decisions were made by him in the studio after she had already gone home.

On the scale of folk purity, we have 1, historic recordings of traditional songs, best when anonymous, 2, recreations of traditional songs on old instruments, 3, traditional-sounding songs that are in fact new, and 4, new-sounding new songs. Vashti sounds like a 2 but is in fact a 3; she wrote these. This was not pure enough for some, apparently. Folk cultishness can be like Leninism at times, with few limits to its dogmatic harshness. As Vashti later commented, "My contemporaries didn't think I was authentic because I didn't want to be a traditional folk singer."

It's odd an undeniable folk classic should be by someone who didn't really consider herself a folk singer, but at the same time it makes sense. Her pop background -- she grew up on Ricky Nelson and Buddy Holly -- kept her from being stifled by traditional folk strictures. Unfortunately it may also have kept her from finding an audience at the time.

Vashti was crushed by the lack of response. Her boyfriend's stern advice was to stop looking inward and focus on the real world, tending to children and farm animals. When she heard Joni Mitchell, she felt it was time to fold her hand, and she hung her old Martin guitar on the wall for twenty-five years, during which she didn't sing for her kids or even listen to music much. Every time she heard herself try to play, it filled her ears with the sound of failure.

How many artists have been able to return from silence? With the money from the reissue she bought a Mac and set up a home studio, and this year she came out with her second album, thirty-five years after the first. She wrote the songs on an electronic keyboard and had even wanted to record them that way instead of on guitar. She seems to have learned at last that technology is only a means to an end. If you know what you are trying to do, it can't harm you.

“Lookaftering,” which runs only 35 minutes long, is almost the ghost of a ghost. According to her, it’s about looking after a family and looking back on life after living it, and also about finally finding a community of musicians who look after one another.

Her voice hasn’t changed much, and the songs are as good or better. Her singing sounds a little more labored but I think it's a deliberate choice. Her vocals seem to be mixed slightly behind the music rather than in front of it. The effect is like glimpsing a beautiful silhouette through a veil of gauze, closer to Salomé than Queen Vashti.

The music -- largely arpeggios on piano, guitar, harp, etc. -- is mainly accompaniment to the voice. Her stiff, spindly guitar playing is on almost every track, clicking along like a metronome; perhaps it served as a crutch for her singing, or a talisman. The producer seems too awed to drop it or at least mix it down. Overall the album has a tinkly, pokey music box feeling, perhaps a conscious attempt to be stark and modernist. When elements of the old sound are brought in for continuity, they sound tired and out of place.

In short, the first has something the second doesn't. More variety, a touch more jauntiness, less vanguardism. Listening to the new album at home in the living room while sorting mail and changing diapers, it didn’t engage me, but on a slow day at work wearing headphones I felt the enchantment a little more.

What are you looking for in an album? Something peaceful for the dinner hour, something to soothe a child, something universal: here you are. Something to make you feel you’re still a tough kid, or give you energy on a long car trip, look elsewhere.

If people dream because they choose to dream, life alone can't wake them. On the last track, Vashti hums to herself as if withdrawing back into the seeming safety of interiority, a little rawer than before. It ends with clear, church-like bells that gently rouse you from the album’s hypnotic spell. They may signify a kind of self-forgiveness.

The end of another year begins to roll around and, as usual, folks start to get a little reflective. Stock gets taken. Progress is measured. Questions are asked. How to sum up our times, 2005? GQ started early, dubbing Jennifer Aniston the “woman of the year” all the way back in mid-November.

Collected statements by President Bush on Iraq:
 

 
Collected excerpts from reporting on the shooting of Rigoberto Alpizar:
 
 
It’s a dangerous thing to be commenting on cultural logics that you’re in the midst of, but it’s hard not to feel like there’s some important framework of thought and practice that unites these two events.
 
Clearly, both involve threats explicitly recognized under the new equation of the post 9/11 world. Both are stories of weapons feared but not found, possessed, or in the end, not possessed by non-white men. In both, madness plays a part, though Bush’s diagnosis prompts action, whereas Alpizar might have been saved by one.
 
It is, though, those last two quotes from reports on the shooting that are most unnerving. The first of them, noting the “horrific situation” faced by the air marshals is persuasive to a point. If air marshals are armed, the government presumably imagines circumstances in which they should shoot passengers. Assuming (though a matter being questioned to some extent in reports) that Alpizar made claims to have a bomb and was running toward the cockpit of the plane, when else is the right time for them to shoot?
 
Repeated shows of support in the press have stressed that their behavior was “by the book,” which is to say automatic, the implementation of rules made in advance and followed so instinctively that individual subjectivity in the present is displaced. It was the rule of law made material, there was no time – and indeed no one – to think.
 
I’m less worried about the specific training offered air marshals or other issues at that level of detail than I am with one of the broader connections between this shooting and Bush’s casting of the invasion of Iraq. Time and time again, Bush stresses that we are in a moment in which we couldn’t wait for proof, couldn’t afford to underestimate a threat, in which, simply, “we have every reason to assume the worst.” In so doing, the marshals who shot Alpizar were doing their job.
 
The last quote above about the Alpizar shooting, in which his neighbor “called the shooting ‘a huge mistake,’ but added, ‘I know how very careful we have to be,’” sounds more like something out of a Ray Bradbury novel than I’d prefer to read in the newspaper. Nothing against that woman in particular – who knows what a person might say to a reporter in that circumstance – but the repetition of that warning in the media, whatever its intention, ends up being a convincing articulation of what it would sound like if the doctrine of preemption were sufficiently infused that we start to imagine ourselves as worthy targets of preemption.

The New York Times has a reputation for being a liberal if not downright lefty newspaper, tough on Republicans, but I have a hard time verifying that report. (“Trust, but verify.”) Today’s reporting on the fallout from the fallout from the fallout of the torture practiced under the auspices of the US government seemed to have been written by a specialist in assertion-free discourse. It starts with the headline and trickles on down: “Skepticism Seems to Erode Europeans’ Faith in Rice” (NYT, 7 December 2005).

Now let’s appreciate that rhetorical craftsmanship.

OK, so, I had a few other ideas for my printculture post this week, but the overwhelming response to S Shirazi’s “Death to Bright Eyes” caught my attention. The responses (and similar music threads found elsewhere) seemed to confirm for me a general hunch I’ve had for a while about boys and their music, so call me a fool and allow me to theorize wildly where angels fear to tread.

Here’s the thing: The extent to which so many boys take their music so seriously and so personally is, for a girl like me, a tad puzzling. To put the most positive spin on it, my musical tastes are eclectic and far-ranging; I like pop, rock, folk, hip hop, country (Cash, not Chesney), jazz (boppy, not smooth), soul, and so on. I am not “up” on the latest bands and their influences. I’d seen Oberst once on TV and knew him only as the Bright Eyes guy until I read Shirazi’s review, which I enjoyed very much. I’m not completely in the dark, but in music listening time, I’m light years behind. From my vantage point, distanced from the “now” of pop music, I’ve made a few observations, come to a few conclusions.

It’s not that girls don’t care about music, of course, or about parsing which music is worth listening to and which not. It’s just that more boys than girls care enough to write snarky comments on blogs and music sites. And care enough to argue about the finer points with each other on said sites. It seems more important to them to make public their opinions on this band or that, and to be listening to the next hot thing before anybody else.

Certainly, youth, hipness, and musical taste form a pretty powerful pop culture trifecta. If, as Shirazi himself has surmised in “Old Ears,” another fine post, “finding bands and worshipping them is how young people search for their identity,” why does this youthful pursuit matter more to boys than girls, and for longer? Male identities seem much more deeply bound up with professing one’s musical tastes, and with how forcefully or cleverly those tastes can be defended. If you can’t be that musician, you can show how well you get him. The musician—the ultimate Romantic man-child icon of our times—has a stronger pull on men perhaps because there are so few culturally sanctioned modes of masculinity in America, and music, even more than film, is the least suspect of the art forms straight men can appreciate (unless it’s Opera).

In this way, an obvious analogy exists with sports fandom. I don’t mean the fandom that expresses itself in body paint and tailgates and drunken chants, but the discursive realm of armchair commentaries and endless analyses of Monday morning quarterbacks (think “Stump the Schwab” or “Pardon the Interruption”). If sports appreciation and music appreciation are the two available discursive domains for the sharing of irrational cultural attachments, to borrow C Bush’s phrasing, and therefore for male sociality, any guy who doesn’t like sports must, by default, turn to music. Is it just a coincidence that so many male academics are also huge music aficionados?

But music fandom seems a more complicated terrain of loyalties and allegiances than sports, precisely because there aren’t as many obvious rivalries or explicit competitive stakes among the musicians themselves as there is with sports teams. If you’re a Bills fan, you must hate the Dolphins. If you’re a Red Sox fan, the Yankees always suck, especially when they win. But if the sports fan’s competitive urges are satisfied vicariously through the athletes’ play, the competition in the music world happens on the page, not the stage. The competitive impulse has nowhere to go but into the sparring of words. And because the question of taste is much more a matter of interpretation than which is the better team, the realm of music discussion seems that much more treacherous. When one person throws down an opinion about a band or a song, there’s always someone ready to pounce.

But what’s interesting is that—like gossip (coded feminine)—the competitive aggression can’t be indiscriminate or simple or resort to name calling. To reply “you’re a moron!” or “Only an asshole would like that song!” is already to have lost the fight. Because it’s a discursive activity, it must be fought on discursive terms—who really knows more about the chord changes or appropriations in a song, who can more deftly defend a song writer’s authenticity, who can rattle off more obscure references and intertexts? Like all criticism to some extent, the contest is about knowledge production—who knows more about the things that matter, and who gets there first, mapping the territory for others to follow? It’s clear, too, that all this competition among men is for men. As they say about women and fashion, men are out to impress as much as outdo each other. Implicit in all this commenting about music, then, is a desire to be admired—not so different, I suppose, from any other striving to demonstrate what we know and be loved for it by those who are in a position to judge. Seen in that light, I guess all the snarkiness is kind of sweet. Kind of.

Distracted by more pressing concerns, I forewent my fairly regular Sunday pleasure of looking in on the National Football League. Like an accent that never quite goes away, my affection for the ill-starred Buffalo Bills keeps me tuned in, often long after that year’s playoff hopes have passed.

Good thing I missed it. About 10 minutes into the game, the Bills were up 21-0 against their arch-rival Miami Dolphins; with a little over 10 minutes left in the game they led 23-3. Final score: Bills 23, Dolphins 24. Just for extra laughs, the woeful Dolphins were led in their miracle comeback by an undrafted back-up quarterback with the less-than-Johnny Unitas-like name Sage Rosenfels. Seriously.

Ah, but it wasn’t always that way!

The comedian Bill Maher once cracked that with players changing teams as often as they do, today’s sports fan is rooting for laundry. Well, yes; or, to put a bit more nostalgically, it can also be a little like rooting for ghosts –of players past, of course, but also of all that comes with them, from early instruction, however implicit, in masculinity, to tryptophan-induced stupors, drunken Super Bowl parties, or accidental glimpses caught in hotel lobbies. The ways in which fans’ hopes, dreams, and frustrations become intertwined with those totemic eagle wings, arrowheads, horseshoes, or charging buffalo can, of course, become annoying and even pathological, but on the whole the relationship isn’t any less rational than the majority of cultural attachments. Seriously.

For the Bills there was, and what a time it was, a Golden Age, or rather an age of Blue and Red with White accents, coloring not just t-shirts and baseball caps, but elaborate light displays at Christmas-time, birthday cakes . . . four trips to the Super Bowl in four years (1989-1992). Since this was just prior to the total dominance of Jordan’s Bulls in the NBA, no team in any of the major American sports had made it to the championship game of their sport four years running, much less win. Win? Well, funny thing that. The Bills’ first Super Bowl loss was a classic, the closest Super Bowl ever (20-19), decided when Buffalo kicker Scott Norwood, who almost never missed, missed field-goal in the final seconds of the game. (For some sense of the traumatic impact of this event on the history of the United States, see Vincent Gallo’s pre-porn Buffalo 66.) But they made it back the following year, falling that 37-24 to Washington. And then again, losing by a humiliating 52 to 17 to Dallas. If there were any jokes left unmade before that third trip, they had all been made by the time Buffalo returned for a fourth and, to date, final trip, losing 30-12 to the same Dallas team.. The Bills returned briefly to mainstream memory once again in 2000 on the wrong end of another classic, the “Music City Miracle” loss to Tennessee.

What was particularly cruel about that whole ordeal was less the losing than the response to it. The Bills, anyone could tell you, sucked. Losers. After all, they lost Super Bowl after Super Bowl. The fact that they got there year after year (as a small market team, no less), that no one had ever had such a string of play-off success, that the team was full of future Hall of Famers, etc. mattered not at all. Number two, a.k.a. shit, was worse than being, say, number five, or number eight. No transitive property of goodness seemed to apply in the general frustration that the crappy team kept beating all those better teams, thereby setting up another crappy Super Bowl.

So too, alas, with so many things in America, as if the value of number-oneness can only be preserved by digging a very deep trench between one and two. Very few of us –no more than one or two of us—are number one or two, so number two has the job of being the Loser, a number worse than five or eight or eight-thousand and five. Starting with three, it’s just regular guys all the way down, watching the struggle between One and Two, waiting to find out which one is absolutely awesome and which one a total failure.

Perhaps the two greatest American Losers of recent memory are John Kerry, losing by a score of 286-252, and it seemed closer than that; almost as bad as Al Gore, that ultimate loser, an eight-year VP who received more votes than presidential candidate in history to that point. Final score: 271-266. In America it can be better to finish close to last than close to first. After all, you get better draft picks the next time around.

A couple of years ago I picked up a copy of The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right in the 25 cent bin of a used bookstore. The book has sat in the “educational” section of my home library––shelved alongside German for Business and my copy of Strunk & White––for as long. This weekend I got curious and finally cracked the spine.

Wanting to see how the other half lives, I also borrowed from a friend How to Succeed with Women. Having absorbed a lot of information in my readings last night, this post will be mostly show-and-tell.

The offerings from each book are both qualitative and quantitative. The Rules gives 35 rules (with myriad sub-rules) and 12 bonus final hints. The back cover of How to Succeed advertises “11 foolproof ice-breakers for any situation, 10 secret places to meet women, 8 great 'babe baits' that bring women to you, 8 keys to successful flirting, 7 habits of highly successful seducers,” etc. Ultimately, however, How to Succeed is more preoccupied with the quantitative and The Rules with the qualitative, as one offers “happily ever after,” while the other “seduction every time.”

Not surprisingly, the “goal” of The Rules is to get you married, the goal of How to Succeed is to get you to bed with a woman. Success in one is to bed without marriage, success in the other is marriage, and, coincidentally, requires not going to bed. No wonder we need books to tell us what to do, it’s a totally antithetical struggle this dating!

The Rules devotes all of its almost 200 pages to the ultimate goal of marriage, while only 20 out of almost 450 pages of How to Succeed deal with “committed” relationships.

Of course, being a young, single academic, I tried to find myself in both books. Though Rule #28 is specifically for high school students, I felt hailed: “Always be out, mingling, not indoors, worrying. Go out to the beach, to the movies, to parties, not in your room dwelling on your flaws or quoting Sylvia Plath.” Also, wear what the cool kids are wearing even if you have to fork over all your babysitting money. Rule #29 is for college girls, which I think approximated my position a little better. I managed to take away: Do: read Glamour, other popular fashion magazines, and The Rules. Don’t: “sit in your room alone on Friday and Saturday nights reading Jean-Paul Sartre. Friday and Saturday nights are for mingling. You can read Sartre on Monday.”

I also found some encouraging information in How to Succeed. In the “most obvious places to meet women” section, I learned I’m already doing something right:

Indeed.

Okay, in the spirit of show-and-tell, my favorites:

My favorite Rules have to be #27 and #31, for their deliciously cultish creepiness:

My favorite advice from How to Succeed:

Important subrules I learned:
-Never initiate sex with your boyfriend or husband.
-If you follow The Rules your husband is guaranteed not to beat you.
-No one likes short hair.
-Therapists can’t help you. Your “only hope is The Rules.”

So, check them out:

Copeland, David and Ron Louis. How to Succeed With Women. Paramus, NJ: Parker Publishing Company, 1998.

Fein, Ellen and Sherrie Schneider. The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right. New York: Warner Books, 1996.

One last nugget from How to Succeed, which may remind one of E Hayot’s offset post about the “How to Date Asian/White Women” books:

Anyone who bothers reading the forums over at the Chronicle of Higher Education's website will eventually come across discussions about teacher-student relationships. Most of these begin with an apparently naive poster saying something like, "I find myself becoming friends with a student and want to meet her [it's always a her] outside of the office. I don't think my wife will mind, and I don't have any feelings towards the student; she's just smart and fun. Am I crazy?"

The answer is inevitably "yes," coupled with someone accusing the poster of just trying to start a fight on the Chronicle forums. But the way the answer is gotten to interests me, since the debate inevitably turns into a larger one on student-teacher relationships.

The larger debate runs this way: some people think that any student-teacher contact outside the strictly professional is morally wrong because it produces relationships across a power divide ("get your friendships elsewhere," they say). Some people (a much smaller number) respond that they had personal relationships with their teachers (or their students) and that it's never turned into sex; they only became academics, they say, because of those relationships. Finally, there's the third, pragmatic group, which basically argues, "look, you can get into too much trouble even being seen with a student outside of class, so, right or wrong, just don't do it, especially if you don't have tenure."

Worth noting is that no one is ever for teacher-student sex; what's at stake is the way in which the "personal" functions as an intermediary term between the "professional" and the "sexual." I teach at a university that has recently proposed a new policy governing all "personal relationships" among its employees (it already bans teacher-student sex; here the attempt is to extend a policy to the employees and to keep power from operating across relationships in the form of quid pro quo sexual harrassment, or favoritism). "Personal" may be a euphemism for "sexual" in the minds of the people who drafted the policy, but of course the very fact that "personal" can be a euphemism for "sexual" tells us something about the way the personal has come to operate as a category.

(For a hilarious allegory of the entire teacher-student discussion, see Shari Wilson's absurd column at Inside Higher Ed arguing that professors also shouldn't drink or do drugs:

When sipping an imported beer becomes the moral equivalent of locking your child in the bedroom (every night!!), you're so clearly in the world of the gothic that it's hard to believe Wilson isn't writing a parody.)

And now to the question debated at the Chronicle only a few days ago about whether it was ok to meet students at a coffeeshop. Though the original poster tried to forestall the inevitable by noting that his question explicitly wasn't about "dating students," the discussion took the predictable turn: meeting students outside the office is wrong; I met my professors outside the office and I'm fine; and finally, right or wrong, don't do it, and stay out of trouble.

What strikes me most about the debates is how non-academic they are. You have lots of people with PhDs, each of them presumably able to do a good amount of thinking about politics, sociology, interpersonal relationships, instititutional structure, health issues, and so on--that is, each of them presumably capable of publishing articles in their chosen fields in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. But when it comes to this set of questions all you get are the same three answers you'd see on a television talk show: the popular "sex across power boundaries is wrong" moral critique, the "are we going too far?" defense, and the professional "take care of your career."

That last answer, crucially, always trumps the other two, because it points out that it doesn't matter what's actually right or wrong, but rather what a certain very small group of people with power think is right or wrong, so you'd better be careful.

The pragmatic answer of course makes sense. But is it really the best answer to the question? Or rather, is it the best answer academics can come up with?

I don't think so, so let me end by proposing some other questions that I think would make for more interesting discussions, ones that might among other things produce grounds other than felt ones for having arguments about the personal and the professional.

1. How have the boundaries of "the personal" shifted over the past few decades? How do we get from the late 1960s and early 1970s in which teacher-student sex was, by all accounts, frequent (though this frequently made claim would itself have to be investigated), to one in which people are afraid to hold office hours in coffee shops? How does the extension of the field of the personal into new realms correspond with larger social shifts, and what are its effects outside the academy or outside the specifically sexual question?

2. What is the relationship between personal relationships across teacher-student boundaries and personal relationships across other kinds of power boundaries, whether those boundaries are sociological in nature (rich-poor, black-white, native-immigrant, young-old) or professionally defined (doctor-patient, boss-subordinate)? Of course laws against certain kinds of sociological boundary-crossing have existed (mainly in the form of anti-miscegenation laws), but they did not seem to be about crossing "power" boundaries, exactly. It clearly makes many people uncomfortable when a richer older person (usually male) dates a poor but attractive younger person--that discomfort clearly a measure of the broader taboo on relationships across power boundaries--but no one wants to make such relationships illegal.

3. Many posters at the Chronicle argue that there can be no relationship between teachers and students that is not colored by sex or sexual desire. This effectively makes banning all such relationships reasonable, since every relationship is simply a case of the banned sexual relationship waiting to happen. (You get this same argument when people say that "men and women can't be friends.") Presumably this is true at some level, and untrue at another, but those levels and their relative truths would need to be seriously studied, so that you could know, for instance, what kinds of differences tend to exist inside these relationships, and how they might correlate to other kinds of sociological facts (race, sexuality, class, gender, and so on).

4. That last question assumes, of course, that there is something called "the personal" that can be separated out from other kinds of things, that there are definitive boundaries between things like the personal and the professional (and the sexual) that would make these questions reasonable. But as the first question suggested, of course, the "personal" is both a historical and a cultural concept, one whose rhetoric functions differently in different places and times. In the current moment the personal almost inevitably means the sexual; try saying "I have a personal relationship with" someone and tell me if it doesn't sound like you're intimating that you had a sexual one. (Compare to "I'm friends with," where "friends" defines the non-sexual personal.)

5. The defenders of personal relationships often claim that the ban on personal relationships hurts teacher-student mentoring, especially for female students, since they cannot be mentored (mentoring is a "personal" relationship) by male professors afraid of getting in trouble. No one seems to have tried to figure out whether this is actually true.

It's not that no one has ever tried to answer any of these questions (Jane Gallop's book is interesting both as a set of arguments and as a sociological document tracing shifts in thinking about these relationships since the 1970s). But what strikes me is how quickly people who've apparently built their lives around the fact of their owh higher education cease, when it comes to the relation between their person and their profession, to think in the terms their higher education has given them. That is, I suppose, they think "personally" rather than "professionally." Until there are professional questions, and better answers for them--that is, in some sense, until people understand teaching better, understand its similarities to and differences from other kinds of relationships, and can begin to explain, beyond the anecdotal (which is an artifact of the personal), though perhaps beginning there, what it does and can do (which will have to include the possibility that it can profoundly damage people, as well as profoundly benefit them), it seems hard to imagine the debate around these issues as anything other than a kind of performance. That debate again: Falstaff's makeup done, he puts down his script. Polonius and Desdemona, sharing a cigarette, shake hands and walk back onstage, Tybalt plucks the sword from his breast, and the old players--friends now, after all these years, take up their lines for another run.

My wife recently requested I put the hurt on Sufjan Stevens. Out of contrariness, I defended him. His music is mild but inoffensive, entirely suitable for sweater shopping or hanging Christmas ornaments down at the old folks’ home, and he has clearly put some thought into choosing his arrangements and instrumentation. Why not live and let live? Where’s the harm? But no husband or natural-born son could be spiteful enough to defend Bright Eyes.

Part of the pain of listening to Bright Eyes is being unable to find terms adequate to its awfulness. After all, I don’t regularly listen to bad music. There is no one, really no one, to compare it to. To name any name would be to call allies to a mistaken cause.

His music is like clove cigarettes, or a drippings-covered Chianti bottle used as a candle holder, or a sophomore dorm room hung with embroidered gypsy cloths over the doorways, or all three at once while being forced to listen to his music. It is music for people who buy Jake Gyllenhaal DVDs. It is a fondue of smarm.

Audioscrobbler, Gnod and Amazon are not very helpful tools in placing him because the people who listen to Bright Eyes otherwise mostly listen to good music (with exceptions -- Coldplay, Spiritualized and late Ryan Adams). With the same ears they are listening to The Postal Service, The Flaming Lips, Elliott Smith -- oddly, no Leonard Cohen.

To compare Bright Eyes to Bob Dylan or Nick Drake, as I believe some journalists have been doing, is truly criminal. Bob Dylan writes good lyrics and Nick Drake played guitar beautifully. He is like them only in that he would like to be like them, only in that he does very badly what they do well.

Let us proceed calmly to make our case, point by point. First of all, he is unbelievably pretentious. The very name of his band is insufferable, whether taken as vanity or unctuous flattery, as is the title of his most recent album, “I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning” and the monologue it opens with, about two people seated next to each other on a plane who nonetheless are unable to connect emotionally. Then, surprise, the plane crashes.

Second, his voice is incredibly annoying, as he mewls over hackneyed bar band changes and country-western musical hash still cold in the shape of the can. When Emmylou Harris is piped in to fill things out, the contrast is highly unflattering; only one person is singing.

Third, his songs are mere sketches and unoriginal. He plucks his guitar idly like a ukelele through ponderously slow tempos and old melodies lifted from the radio. Glorious Noise suggests "Lua" is stolen from "You Can't Always Get What You Want," SF Weekly thinks it's the Replacements. Step right up, reader, name that tune and win a prize.

Colin Meloy, the leader of the Decemberists, slams him hard in an interview with Mark Baumgarten of Seattle Weekly. It’s one of those excellent old-fashioned-style music pieces where they sit down with an artist and play them some stuff and get their comments. Meloy has good taste, he likes Robyn Hitchcock. Guess who he doesn’t like?

A very nice diss, all in all: Meloy wouldn’t listen to the album even after he’d paid money for it, he knew the money was gone and didn’t want to throw away his time on top of it. He is precise, “half of two songs,” meaning he hit skip on the first song, gave the album one more chance and then that was it. He wards off the accusation of petty envy by admitting without being pressed that the guy’s attractive to women, which is a much bigger deal to concede.

The interview’s kind of a set-up, though, which I object to. Baumgarten knows Meloy will take the bait and do his hipster dirty work for him while his own hands stay clean. If he is ever introduced to Bright Eyes at a festival somewhere, he can still shake his hand.

Perhaps the benchmark for bad lyrics was set by Bono when he sang: A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle/ when you’re trying to throw your arms around the world. In his defense, he is Irish and may have heard or seen the popular feminist slogan in passing and not realized it was already a worn-out bumpersticker staple. That nadir is at last matched by Bright Eyes when he bursts out with, This is the first day of my life, I’m glad I didn’t die before I met you.

He’s actually better taken on paper, which really says something about his croaky, crying voice. His good lines aren't bad but his bad ones are really terrible. The failures fall mainly into two categories, self-pity and unworldliness. #1: I’m happy just because I found out I am really no one… When everything gets lonely I can be my own best friend…

From “Road to Joy”: I have my drugs, I have my woman/ They keep away my loneliness/ My parents they have their religion/ But sleep in separate houses. Poor baby, too melancholy to rouse himself and give us a rhyme, too self-involved to want to know that divorced parents are adults with their own problems or that the woman he thinks he possesses is a person in her own right. Looks like the fuck-me-I’m-sensitive school has a new prince.

Of course, the cheap self-pity is precisely what appeals to his devotees, as you can see from the shitstorm of angry reader comments following the BBC's pan of the album. The ghoulish perfume of suffering (though not real suffering) draws in the Oprah heads and the therapy casualties, the vultures of pain; it seems to validate their own pseudo-suffering, much like the smiley heartsongs of the terminally ill boy-poet Mattie Stepanek did. In order to protect their own false innocence, they will only take wisdom from an untainted man-child, and the only wisdom they will hear is to remain a child.

#2: From “Landlocked Blues”: We made love on the living room floor/ With the noise in background of a televised war/ And in the deafening pleasure I thought I heard someone say/ “If we walk away, they’ll walk away.” Complaining that war is shown on television is an empty cliché now; is the point supposed to be that it shouldn’t be? In fact, it should be but isn't. To address the current war in Iraq by saying they will walk away if we do makes absolutely no sense. We have invaded and occupied their homeland; where are they going to walk to? It is not a war between equals, like the Cold War was, not a scenario where both sides must stand down.

From “Road to Joy”: So when you’re asked to fight a war that’s over nothing/ It’s best to join the side that’s gonna win/ And no one’s sure how all of this got started/ But we’re gonna make them goddamn certain how it’s gonna end. Of course, it’s not a war over nothing and anyone who reads the newspapers knows how it got started: a terrorist attack, followed by an Anglo-American campaign of official lies and misdirection that is currently unraveling.

Bright Eyes even makes anti-war songs look bad. He does what a lot of soft liberals do, mocks the toughness of the tough by mimicking it with a whoop and a fake We and a hearty goddamn for emphasis. It’s the safest way to criticize; I have done it myself. He is being pretend-cynical when he says join the winning side and later when he says: If you’re still free start running away/ Cause we’re coming for you! But pretend-cynicism is not effective and people adopt it because they know it will not be. They don’t want to draw fire.

When you first put on Sufjan Stevens, nothing seems to be happening; it feels like background music. Many of the songs on his recent album “Illinois” would not be out of place played at the Gap, some even sound like they could have been written there, while folding and restocking. I hear Peanuts and Dave Brubeck; my wife hears Philip Glass and -- ouch -- "Rent." Probably two or three times playing the album I said, This track’s not so bad. Several of the tunes could go on a gentle mix tape for someone who is bereaved or in mourning; they’re soothing like moisturizing bath beads or gift soap.

The aspirations to symphonic composition don’t bother me, nor does the Wallace-Eggers verbosity of the song titles. About a third of the titles, particularly the longer ones, are just brief musical reprises that pass without notice; of the 22 tracks, only 15 or so are actual songs (which is still a lot). I'm not annoyed by the mad Michenerian-Vollmanesque plan he has announced to do an album for each of the fifty states and I don't even mind the faint whiff of Jesus sauce under his minty breath. He seems like a nice young man who would bring your daughter home on time, the kind of Christian I'm happy to live next to.

It's a little harder to respect the fact that he's never even lived in Illinois. When you look up Chicago in the Faker’s Encyclopedia the first thing it says must be that they had a World’s Fair there once. Judging by all the names of towns in the lyrics, Sufjan seems to have gotten his hands on a map or train schedule as well. As he has revealed on stage, some of the childhood events he sings about have been transposed from his own home state of Michigan. Much of "Illinois" reads like the cribbed history book report of a spastic seventh grader, but it’s hardly worth criticizing the words because his half-whispered choir boy singing is so innocuous they barely register. A lyric like “the house we got at Sears” shows he doesn’t take history seriously except as fodder; it’s interesting to know that Sears used to make houses but of course they were ordered from a blueprint in the catalog and then delivered and assembled, you didn’t get them at a store.

The stand-out charmer “Chicago” reworks a catchy melody from the final track on his last album. It has an engaging chorus, “All things go,” arguably trite but true enough to bear repeating, and a nice secondary refrain, “I made a lot of mistakes.” Telling us on Track 11 that “We have a lot to give one another” is maybe taking the earnestness too far. Sufjan’s not a poseur so much as forgiveably a wuss, something I can support in a time when it seems a man has to fight for the right to be weak.

He and Bright Eyes both write very quickly, apparently under the illusion that they are prodigies. They don’t seem to understand that the creative process should involve culling only the best of one’s output and reworking it obsessively until it makes you too sick to even look at.

Both are often classed by the press as leading lights in a new folk movement that includes two albums I would highly recommend to anyone who enjoys the naked sound of acoustic guitar picking, Devendra Banhart's Rejoicing In the Hands and Iron and Wine's The Creek Drank The Cradle. Another interesting new folkster is Joanna Newsom, whose Sarah Vowell-meets-Bjork-in-Middle-Earth harp stylings should appeal to Kate Bush's more out-there fans. The L.A. Times Magazine describes them all as "using a similar tool set—quiet voices, acoustic instruments and a fondness for mystery." They all have odd vocal styles that require a little adjustment on the listener's part before they can be appreciated. Lastly, let me also mention here Six Organs of Admittance, an accomplished guitarist influenced by both traditional Indian music and noise-rock. Three of these four lived in the Bay Area (the exception being Iron and Wine, who teaches film in Tallahassee) so it's kind of an SF scene as well as a folk one.

Why try to put the hurt on anyone? Why say something not nice? Because sometimes you have to. Because the first person to speak is not always right, so the second must bear the burden of seeming disagreeable.

Praise is a kiss that needs a little bite, to prove it’s sincere. There is a place for destructive criticism in our understanding of the arts, a desperate need for it, actually. The aggregate effect of individual cautions is general vacuity. Perhaps routinely brutal and heavy-handed literary critics like Dale Peck and William Logan are right this is no golden age or perhaps they are just foxes crying sour grapes. But in hyped-up times, under a heavy barrage of buddy-buddy blurbing, the harsh and the negative is our best gauge of the true.

In a New Yorker interview Bright Eyes says he “feels spiritual” when reading Garcia Marquez. Basically, he’s a kid. He should be handled with kid gloves, right? Actually, kid gloves are gloves made out of a supple young goat.

So let’s make ourselves some new gloves out of the kid.