De-selected Cities

(Note to Steve: I have a response to your latest comment in the works. Alas, it is on my iBook at home and I am using a work computer right now, so that will have to wait. I have not forgotten you, though.)

My friend Ali (she used to be “dipped in chocolate,” now uses the alias “Ms. Bean,” but still identifies by her first name on her blog, so I’m assuming it’s okay to call her Ali here) commented on the post below asking if I had seen the movie Sideways. As of 1:00 PM on Sunday, January 29, 2005, I have not, even though this film has been in general release for over a week, and had a “limited release” back in October. My local theater just does not screen such films, so I’ll have to make a cinematic expedition, probably with one of my brothers.

But this got me thinking about something that really annoys me about our popular culture. Why is it that Los Angeles, San Francisco, to some extent Chicago, and especially New York control what the rest of us get to see and read and hear? They decide what books get published, which movies get made, how many books are printed, when and where movies are shown, and so on. (For the music industry, of course, you have to include Nashville as a major power center.) When I was younger, I completely bought into the popular mythology: If you want to do something important, if you want to be a part of the action, if you want to go where all the best ideas are, you have to go to the Big City. But now that scheme is leaving a major sour taste in my metaphorical mouth. Why should people have to capitulate to geography and power structures? (I’m probably preaching to the choir, though, because this is the “blogosphere”–will somebody please invent a better word for it?–and the freedom of decentralization is what we’re all about.)

For me, the biggest rub in the standard Big City mythology is the publishing industry, because I work in a bookstore. This is the industry where a few people in Manhattan (and one lady in Chicago) decide what gets published and what the rest of us are supposed to think about it. We out here in the sticks are expected to read Manhattanite tripe like the New York Review of Books, or follow Publishers Weekly, or the New York Times bestseller lists to know what to buy, sell, and read. Oprah (who is in Chicago) tells millions of people what to read (and they listen), and the Today Show (back in New York) on NBC has a “book club” that tells people what to read (and around here almost no one listens). But here in our store we have discovered that what Manhattanites (and one lady in Chicago) think is good, well, it doesn’t always play out here in the sticks.

Then there is the film industry, which loves to give movies a “limited release” in “selected cities” (and, as Dave Letterman always says, “I pray your city is selected”). (Of course, we all know that places like Fresno, Fargo, or Frederick will never be selected.) That way if you live in the sticks, you’ll see reviews in magazines, newspapers, and television shows for months before your local cinema gets a print of the movie, thereby making you salivate in anticipation while all those jerks in the Big Cities like SF, LA, and NY (your city just isn’t cool enough if you can’t abbreviate it with two letters) get to see the desired movie for months before you’re allowed in the door. This, of course, is nothing more than a marketing trick to drum up publicity for smallish films that can’t swing Burger King tie-ins and whatnot. Because in today’s fast-paced world of entertainment, it’s cost effective to run a limited release and let the Big City people spread their “word-of-mouth” by writing in all the publications they control, ranting and raving about how good such-and-such little movie is, so that all us rubes out here in, say, the San Joaquin Valley of California, will be exposed to their critical acclaim for long enough to ensure that we show up at the ticket window at least once to “see what the big deal is.” When you’re using up screening rooms and time slots in theaters, it just would not do to give your small movie a wide release and let the rest of us see it for ourselves and spread our own word-of-mouth.

So I have a chip on my shoulder. I’m tired of people expecting that small towns out here where the real work of the nation gets done (this Valley where I live is often called “The Breadbasket of the World,” because we produce so much food), need Big City people telling them what to think, read, say, etc. When I was younger, I thought the solution was to just move away from this little town (as many of our high school graduates have done), but now I’m angry. Why should a person need to leave his or her hometown to “make something” of his or her life? This is just another instance of our stupid, stupid culture pushing people around, refusing to acknowledge the value of localism, making people buy into the mythology of the Big City where everything Happens.

This has been an abiding myth of American history, by the way. People came out west, frontiersmen, speculators, settlers, and so on, and they were only seen as providers of raw materials for Eastern industries, and a market for Eastern products. We out here in the so-called Heartland are treated with about as much respect as the people of “developing nations,” which are often seen as wells of resources and vast markets for products.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m no Red-State-Republican, not by a long-shot, and I’m not complaining about politics so much as I am about culture. I’m just tired of little things like, for instance, that almost every children’s book I’ve ever seen is set in a Big City. Why? Because that’s where all the writers and illustrators go. They ditch their hometowns (we call this “brain drain”) and give in to the forces of the Big City, further reinforcing the myth that everything good comes from the Big City, and nothing worthwhile can come from out here in the sticks.

So, up with decentralization, up with the internet, and down with centralized power brokers. A nation as big and as powerful and as rich as this one should have artists and authors and filmmakers in every little town, and not just the “Big City reject” kind, the ones who are “not good enough” to make it in New York or Los Angeles. Why does my local newspaper have to be so lame? Is it because all the good reporters and writers have decided to work for Big City firms? Is it because people who are “left behind” out here in the sticks just don’t see the point of being every bit as thoughtful and creative and interesting as people in the Big City?

Maybe I’m inflating the problem with my anger, but there’s certainly some truth in the center. What do you think?

Welcome to Bizarro World

Some people might find this interesting. (That link will take you to a compendium of the “opening crawls” for all the Star Wars movies, including the one that’s not out yet.)

Equally interesting, but far more pathetic is this. Here are some of my favorite ridiculous fan comments:

“I love it. It’s an incredible way to open the movie.”

“No sir… I don’t like it.”

“OMG I am stunned………I like it!!!!!!”

“This will be a day long remembered…the last crawl is out.”

“COOLIO! Mesa likes dis.”

Last, and certainly least, the bizarre stream-of-consciousness one. . .

“WOW best scroll ever….. That first stanza is unbeleivably awesome: WAR!! ha ha ha ha!!!!!!!!!! can’t freakin wait…. is it May 19th yet????? AHHHHHHHH!!!”

Could we be any more overwrought?

Personally, I can’t wait until George Lucas (or “GL,” as the hardcore fans call him, because they love initials and acronyms even more than the federal government does) is finished with all this Star Wars business. He keeps claiming he’s going to make more movies like THX-1138 that no one will like. I certainly hope so, because if there’s anything I like, it’s science fiction movies that nobody else likes (e.g., Soderbergh’s Solaris or Spielberg’s A.I.).

Stephen King and the Human Experience

After eight workdays in a row, I decided to make this a Weekend Wednesday, to stay home and read. Now it is raining outside and I have an insulated carafe of coffee, Philip Glass on the stereo, and a stack of books to chew on. A few minutes ago I finished reading The Gunslinger, which is the first in Stephen King’s “Dark Tower” series. This, for me, was a bit of literary slumming, which smacks of elitism, I suppose.

Working in a bookstore has led me into this kind of reading. After selling so many Stephen King books to so many strange, poorly dressed, tattooed, perhaps trailer-dwelling people, many of whom carry a lingering odor of stale cigarette smoke that makes my eyes water from a surprising distance, and hearing their enthusiastic reports on the wonder and brilliance of the Maine Bandit (who made off with “The National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters” in 2003), I feel remiss in maintaining that gap in my literary experience.

Actually, the gap is not so gaping as I make it sound. Two years ago I read the “expanded” version of The Stand and came away glad, at least, that King could admit in the preface his consciousness of accusations that the expanded book might be the “indulgence by an author whose works have been successful enough to allow it.” Four years ago I tried to read The Shining, the beginning of a failed attempt to take in the entire King oeuvre from start to finish, but never made it past a couple dozen pages, astonished that so many people could be taken in by such lousy writing. When King’s book On Writing (whose title is self-explanatory) hit paperback, I read most of it by skipping around the chapters during multiple visits to the bookstore. If anything, I came to admire King’s candor about his own ambitions, shortcomings, and success. As a person, he has my greatest respect. It takes enormous talent and hard work to be so successful as a mediocre writer. Finally, rounding out my prior experience with Stephen King, I have come to love his back page column in Entertainment Weekly, a disgustingly shallow and commercial rag which is not worth reading otherwise.

As you can see, I have been attempting to integrate the works of Stephen King into my reading rotation for quite some time.

Now, The Gunslinger. This one came from a young author who was trying to be stylish and classy, but who was a pop-fictionalist at heart. (A fact which King admits freely in his foreword: “The Gunslinger had been written by a very young man and had all the problems of a very young man’s book. . . . That young man had been exposed to far too many writing seminars, and had grown far too used to the ideas those seminars promulgated: that one is writing for other people rather than one’s self; that language is more important than story; that ambiguity is to be preferred over clarity and simplicity, which are usually signs of a thick and literal mind.” See what I mean about candor? He’s a good guy, really.) But even a very young man’s book, with all its congenital problems, can pass from the shadows of a cultish underground genesis and attain a popular acclaim that completely negates its critical shortcomings. Somehow, The Gunslinger and the entire “Dark Tower” series has managed to do this. (See also William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which is also a very young man’s book–though a better one than King’s, in my opinion. That one has lived, via multimedia reincarnation, to capture our collective imagination without most people even knowing that it exists.)

Why does the “Dark Tower” series (and the related book, The Stand) garner so much popularity? Why do most of my King-buying customers come from the lower rungs of our socioeconomic ladder? Why was there such a furor among more “literary” types when King was awarded that medal from the National Book Foundation? After reading The Gunslinger (and yes, I do plan to read the entire series–the second book, The Drawing of the Three is sitting here next to me, waiting with all the other books I plan to read), and further reflecting on The Stand, I have decided that Stephen King portrays to his readers a meditation on the underlying (and often unconscious) despair they feel about our society by using a post-apocalyptic setting where our greatest achievements are as gone to his characters as the achievements of the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans are to us. In The Stand, King destroyed our world and made its ruins the setting for a mythical realignment of Good and Evil; in The Gunslinger, our world is so far gone that no one remembers it:

“Gunslinger, our many-times-great grandfathers conquered the-disease-which-rots, which they called cancer, almost conquered aging, walked on the moon–”

“I don’t believe that,” the gunslinger said flatly.

To this the man in black merely smiled and answered, “You needn’t. Yet it was so. They made or discovered a hundred other marvelous baubles. But this wealth of information produced little or no insight. There were no great odes written to the wonders of artificial insemination–having babies from frozen mansperm–or to the cars that ran on power from the sun. Few if any seemed to have grasped the truest principle of reality: new knowledge leads always to yet more awesome mysteries.”

Of course, King being a supernaturalist who “does believe in God and reads the Bible,” shares the strange misunderstanding of thoroughgoing materialism that is characteristic to religious believers and props up the tired and spurious mutually exclusive polarity between “information” and “insight,” as though scientific knowledge and technical prowess require the diminishing of insight, the solution of mystery, and the thinning of humanity. But I would never suggest we ought to lose our healthy fear of these things; even the pop-mantra of Spider-Man is useful, With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility.

However, at the root of things, King speaks most deeply to those members of our society who, despite their enormous freedom and liberty, despite the great opportunities available to them, nevertheless feel profound dissatisfaction with the order of society, and desire most fervently and even more secretly for the kind of destruction meted out in The Stand. All of us, I think, in our comfortable, padded, climate-controlled lives have a mostly unspoken yearning to see the mighty topple so that we can get a chance to prove ourselves on a leveled and vastly more dangerous playing field. We like our air conditioning and our social security, but our evolution is in our genes, and we know that while our teeth and claws may still be white, sometimes we really want to bloody them. Especially when we’re sitting in traffic, or when we’re at the mercy of banks and credit card companies, or when the government raises our taxes. We may have enormous freedom and liberty, and great opportunities, too, but to achieve those things we’ve largely given up our ability to express that dynamism that has driven human evolution and society for tens of thousands of years. King expresses that dynamism with supernatural powers and his stories of post-apocalyptic psychics finally unconstrained by the strictures of society.

This is pretty basic stuff in literature and Western thought. We have always had this terrible dialectic between our simian bodies and our sapiential minds. Christianity is one big battle between spirit and flesh, inaugurated by Paul and Augustine. It shows up in our scientific culture, too, most recently in the concept of “memes” and “meme complexes,” ideas that, from our animal perspective, seem to have a life of their own, pushing us around and making us do things that don’t feel good. We see it in the pitting of reason against emotion, where emotion represents those things that come naturally to “the flesh” and reason represents those things that come naturally to “the mind” or “the spirit.” Philosophy has it, too, with mind-body dualism, epitomized by Descartes. Even medicine, with its drugs to ward off personality and social disorders and maintain an apparently arbitrary standard of normalcy, reveals the dualist dilemma. We teach our children to learn “self-control” and restraint, but who is controlling whom, and who sets the goals? Why is it better to “use your words” than it is to beat someone in the face? It is not hard to rationalize the need to bring our emotions under the reign of reason–society with all its benefits would fall apart otherwise–but for those to whom emotionalism and the demonstrative life come easily, it is difficult to say that what feels natural, what is natural, is also harmful.

I’m not going on about this to argue that there is a “real” dualism, that there are ghosts in the machines, or that spiritualism and supernaturalism have something right. Rather, I’m trying to demonstrate that the fundamental human experience that is shared by everyone (and I’ve probably cut things too narrowly by speaking only of Christianity and Western civilization, but I know them better than anything else), our inner struggles at keeping a straight face or a stiff upper lip or a best foot forward despite the demands of our biology (what I’ve elsewhere called “the harsh caprice of neurochemistry”), that it is not difficult to see how this subjective experience could lead to a belief in “real” dualism, dreams of ghosts in machines, spiritualism, and supernaturalism.

Furthermore, I think that Stephen King, despite being a mediocre writer, has managed to parlay his modest talents into a wildly successful career because he understands, either consciously or unconsciously, I do not know, that people need a meditation on the thinness of our social veneer. So he wears it thin, pokes holes, or destroys it completely, and sets empathetic characters in the spaces. We also need to remember not just the fragility of our own lives, but of the structures we build, both physical and mental. As the bushido, the samurai code, exhorts,

One who is supposed to be a warrior considers it his foremost concern to keep death in mind at all times, every day and every night, from the morning of New Year’s Day through the night of New Year’s Eve.

As long as you keep death in mind at all times, you will also fulfill the ways of loyalty and familial duty. You will also avoid myriad evils and calamities, you will be physically sound and healthy, and you will live a long life. What is more, your character will improve and your virtue will grow.

Indeed, the Maine Bandit, the Master of Macabre, Mr. Diarrhea-of-the-Pen Himself, Stephen King has made a career of keeping death, both individual and civilizational, in the minds of his readers at all times. I suspect that’s why his legions of readers, most of whom are not lovers and critics of The English Language, are able to look past his stylistic shortcomings and feel such a deep affinity for his stories and characters (which he says are more important anyway).

(And yes, following the candor of Mr. King himself, I have to admit that these are all painfully commonplace observations that others have made thousands of times over. However, I think that civilization, being human, and living well require us to perpetually rediscover the commonplace. What are blogs if not a baroque repetition of basic truths?)

At any rate, now that I’ve carved two hours out of my reading day to write, I’m yearning to get back to the task at hand.

Being Inhuman

A mass of Hindu pilgrims stampeded and killed maybe as many as 300 people today. Lovely. Or how about all the Muslim pilgrims who have been trampled at the Ka’bah in Saudi Arabia? Soccer fans in the grip of their bizarre ecstasy who trample their own? This is what happens when people forget the sapiens in Homo sapiens. Want to be human? Don’t act like a herd animal. Leave religion and ideology in history, where enough blood has already been shed.

Don’t Use the Force, Be a Force

A six-year-old girl has a brain tumor and you can help with the cost of her care and treatment. I did, and everyone wants to do what I do, right? After all, as the website says, “faith and strength can only go so far with mounting bills.” Indeed. So, rather than sitting around and thinking good thoughts or praying or whatever one might do in lieu of actual participation, why not make a real difference?

Marriage Schmarraige

A buddy of mine is getting divorced after a little more than six years of marriage. I have known his wife since kindergarten and she used to be a good friend, until a couple years ago when we lost touch. Now she’s divorcing him. Apparently she caught him off guard, while those of us on the outside of the relationship have seen it coming since Day One. He’s pretty down about the whole thing, and not himself at all, which is understandable.

So this evening my brother and I took him out for drinks, some killer cheeseburgers, and billiards. We played a few rounds, threw a few back, and did the standard “Yeah, women are unpredictable, secretive, back-stabbing jerks” thing that comes naturally to guys when one of their own has been struck down. (I don’t apologize for it because women do the same thing when guys dump them; it’s just part of the grieving process, which always involves being a little irrational for a while, then coming to your senses.) For a few hours I was actually glad to be single–not just resigned, but altogether glad.

Having become fairly well acquainted with divorce these last few years (my parents threw in the towel a while back), I have turned into a rather cynical and suspicious observer of marriage. I notice those couples I never see together, or the ones who sit in restaurants without talking to each other, or the ones who look happy but eerily disconnected, even when they’re right next to each other. Then there are the ones who seem like they’ve collapsed on each other, given in and given up, lacking the will to change anything–if it ain’t fixed, why break it? To be honest, I can count on one hand the marriages I’ve seen that look healthy and happy.

I suppose it’s pretty easy to see where I’m going with this. Just another young person fed up and disillusioned. Angry. Annoyed. Fed up. Did I say fed up? There’s no real point here. I’m just annoyed and disillusioned, venting.

Update: Now this evening, a day after writing the bulk of this post, I have the pleasure of being here at work and watching a divorcing couple meet with their lawyers in the cafe section of the bookstore where I work. Watch as the wife tactfully shows up at the meeting with her new beau, and the husband looks like he would rather be locked up, er, I mean, “detained” at Gitmo. Poor guy radiates pain. Then, watch when the husband leaves–he’s the first one out the door–and the wife, her new guy, and her lawyer sit and giggle at him now that he’s gone. Sacred institution indeed. Just in case, here is the opening monologue from one of my favorite recent movies:

Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there–fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge–they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you’ll find that love actually is all around.

One can hope, I suppose.

Cutting Through the Treacle

Are you irritated by creationists? Read this. If you don’t like four-letter words, consider yourself warned. Sometimes I worry that Tom’s blood pressure is going to put him under, but he’s a pretty smart guy. Makes me feel like a muddling, middling amateur.

Bishop vs. Doctor

A 66-year-old woman in Romania is artificially inseminated and gives birth. An Orthodox Bishop says: “This case has shocked us all. This was a selfish act.”

So we have Catholic Christians on the one hand telling us that abortion is wrong, and now Orthodox Christians on the other saying that women shouldn’t be allowed to have children via artificial insemination past their natural reproduction age. All I can see are church authorities who want to keep a firm handle on when, how, and why those uterus-bearing members of the species are allowed to use their plumbing. (Meanwhile, an alarming number of those authorities have been using their plumbing for some rather unsavory activities.)

However, the doctor, who is not explicitly linked to any religion in the article, says: “It should remain an exception. It is at the limit of ethical guidelines because it is at the limit of nature. . . . We all get old. Healthwise, it is risky for both the mother and the child who deserves to have parents to raise her.” That’s reasonable. The doctor is just laying out real, potential consequences while the Bishop is assigning a moral judgment upon the woman. That’s the difference between what Western society expects from its religious versus its secular authorities. Religious authorities can make bald judgments like “This was a selfish act” without giving any reasoning. But if secular authorities do that, religious people are ready to keel-haul them. In fact, secular authorities have been making astoundingly detailed and reasoned defenses of a particular scientific theory for almost 150 years now, and still religious people are ready to keel-haul them.

“Something Stupid”

By request from L. You don’t need to twist my arm if you’re a Brainy Girl.

Name three things you are wearing right now:
1. A white sock.
2. The other white sock.
3. A mischievous grin.

Name 3 of your favorite bands/artists:
1. Miles Davis
2. The Kronos Quartet
3. The Polyphonic Spree
4. Tool
(This January, Four is the New Three.)

Name 3 of your favorite songs:
1. Your Song (sung by Ewan McGregor, not Sir Elton)
2. It’s Not Easy Being Green (Kermit the Frog)
3. O Canada! (anybody but Celine Dion)

Name 3 things you want to do in the next 12 months:
1. Write a book.
2. Get it published.
3. Go on Oprah then rub my hands together and cackle villainously as her millions of mindless minions run out to the nearest bookstore and buy my book.

Name 3 things you want in a relationship:
1. Love.
2. Companionship.
3. Any activities that will fool my ever-present Biological Imperative into thinking I’m reproducing.

Name two truths and one lie:
1. R-O-L-A-I-D-S spells relief.
2. Life tastes good.
3. It’s not easy being green.

Name 3 physical things in a love interest that appeal to you:
1. Green eyes behind glasses, peeking over the top of a book.
2. Long, dark hair pulled behind an ear.
3. “An itty-bitty waist with a big round thing in your face.”

Name 3 things you just can’t do:
1. Play the guitar.
2. Appreciate tattoos.
3. Engage in swordplay while flying through a bamboo forest.

Name 3 of your favorite hobbies:
1. Playing the piano.
2. Writing “Very Serious” things on my blog.
3. Buying more books than I can read or afford.

Name 3 things you want to do right now:
1. Finish this quiz so I can watch the rest of The Day the Earth Stood Still.
2. Jump out my window and fly like Superman.
3. Figure out something to write in this third space. Oh, wait, does this count?

Name 3 careers you are considering:
1. Ruler of the World
2. King of the Universe
3. Bestselling Author

Name 3 places you want to go on vacation:
1. Newfoundland
2. China
3. Iraq, after all the theocracy-loving lunatics have been destroyed and the “Cradle of Civilization” is actually civilized again, because it is absolutely tragic that such an important and fascinating place as the Middle East has to be so ruined by religion. My own personal standard for “success” in Iraq: When Baghdad can be a tourist destination.

Name 3 kids names:
1. William
2. Leonard
3. DeForest

Name 3 things you want to do before you die:
1. Get elected to public office.
2. Write a book that makes me famous enough that when I google my own name I don’t get thousands of links about other people.
3. Be interviewed on Fresh Air with Terry Gross.
4. Have a child that surpasses me in every way.

Name 3 other people who have to take this quiz right now:
1. The Pope
2. The Queen
3. Colonel Sanders

[insert title here]

In case you are wondering (and surely you are not), I am willfully neglecting my blog (and my participation on others’ blogs) for a few days. Fear not; I shall return.

Note to L at Random_Speak: Tomorrow, I will stop being “Very Serious” long enough to take your quiz. It might kill me though.

Now, where can I find a friendly neighborhood coffeehouse that’s owned by a vast, international corporation? Hmm…