When a man profits from the unacknowledged labor of men, it's exploitation; when a woman profits from the unacknowledged labor of women, it's a feminist victory.

Twentieth Century Ooze: Like any smart science fiction writer, Bernard Wolfe, author of cult-novel Limbo ("I think it is a masterpiece" -- David Pringle, Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels), knew that he was describing the present, not the future: "I am writing... in the guise of 1990 because it would take decades for a year like 1950 to be milked of its implications." Mind-control was a global preoccupation in the novel's birthyear, and so Limbo plays as many variations on lobotomy as Philip K. Dick on hallucinogenic drugs or Rudy Rucker on fatuous preening.

Equally accurate but not quite so self-aware is Wolfe's depiction of sexual attitudes among the educated and heterosexual. In a central episode of the book, the hero undergoes the indignity of having a women straddle him ("only a frigid woman would have to make such an issue of the top billing.... the most difficult of positions, a man-deposing position which for most women would exclude the possibility of any real orgasm at all -- a full vaginal one, not a pale clitoridean substitute") followed by the further indignity of her autonomous movement ("he did not relish that part of him which could be aroused in this passive way.... beholden to no man for her triumph, involved with her partner only insofar as she had momentarily borrowed him as a necessary prop....") and, worst of all, mutual satisfaction ("The most frustrating and humiliating erotic moment of his life, he thought with a grimace.").

And what a waste of time! "You had a full experience, sure, but it took you a hell of a long time to arrive at it: well over thirty minutes, I'd say, whereas the average normal coitus lasts for only a few minutes. And like all women who achieve satisfaction only with great difficulty, and only under special aggressive circumstances and only after prolonged tension and anxiety, you were determined to be the pace-setter. That's quite characteristic of frigid women too -- the men's mechanism must be only a passive reflex of theirs. You'll find this hard to believe, but the normal state of affairs is quite the other way around.... With a kind of warm melting you don't know anything about."

To prove his point, he rapes her. In the proper missionary position.

But she even manages to screw that up! "It was not, although it had started out to be, the genuine full reaction of the wholly yielding, wholly warm woman -- she, or her ornery unconscious, had executed a diversion to defeat him at the last moment, at the price of her own full satisfaction."

If all of the women he meets are either openly frigid or covertly frigid, how can he talk so confidently about "normal" women? Ah, the age-old problem for male pontificators, solved in the age-old way with the invention of a fantasy: the perfectly yielding Gauguinesque island girl, Ooda. Good old puddin'-headed Ooda. Nothing like his first wife....

Much more straightforwardly instructive than work by such old prevaricators as Norman Mailer, Limbo is highly recommended to postfeminists, Lacanians, and the nostalgic.

And only a quarter-century after Limbo's publication, noted heterosexual intellectual male Woody Allen was ready to debunk the two orgasm theory, although, naturally, he had it mouthed by a silly-billy blonde bimbo rather than by a heterosexual intellectual male.

It's humped and scarred and disgustingly hirsute
Hey la, hey la, my boyfriend's back.

Our brain-tickler today is posed by "CL of SF":

I dreamt that Jolita told me a wonderful riddle about three reasons men are like sandwiches. It was so amusing that I asked her to please tell it again so that I might commit it to memory, but she just said, "Well, you know."

It had something to do with bread and truth.

Love turned sour for widow, 77, man, 32: A charity collector left a widow more than twice his age in a pool of blood after a naked attack carried out when their bizarre relationship turned sour, a court heard....

Nothing sums up the 1990s better for me than the remarkable document that follows. (For best results, read aloud.)

Here's hoping that the next decade is less large and more pleasant: cheers! -- Cholly

Finally -- a brand-new right-between-the-eyes, slam dunk men's magazine that lays it all on the table. And shows you how to live smart, live stylishly and live large.

Introducing P.O.V. -- the bold new men's magazine for you and your very best friends. Rolling the dice. Taking chances. Scoring big. And playing it smart in-between.

Dear Friend:

Tired of all those super-slick "men's magazines" that show you toys you can't afford, trips you can't take, and clothes you wouldn't be caught dead in?

Wish you could grab the publishers by the lapels and scream, "Get real!!!"

Well here's good news! Because here's P.O.V. Our kind of magazine. From our point of view. Yours and mine. Real guys. Who want real answers.

The first men's magazine to see things the way you do. Speak your language. And give you what you want to know more about. Careers. Cash. And making your weekends count.

P.O.V. is about taking control. Thinking big. Making some cash. Being your own boss. Starting a business. Investing wisely. Staying in shape. Traveling cheap. Getting it right. And getting it often. Living large. And living an active life.

P.O.V. shows you how to do it. Because it's written by guys who are doing it right now.

It looks different. Feels different. And has a fresh new attitude. Irreverent. Witty. Stylish. With a great sense of humor. And a big set of -- well, you know.

P.O.V. lays it all on the table...

It's interviews with people who matter Like Dave Matthews of the Dave Matthews Band. Matthew Perry of Friends. Seinfeld's Michael Richards. MTV's Idalis. ESPN's Dick Vitale. Governor John Engler. All in P.O.V.

It's sex like you've never had it before What I mean is, our sex columnn is different. We pose the same question to our male guy and our female gal. He-said-she-said kinda thing. We've asked...

Does size matter? Who wants it more? What's your biggest turn-on? Is it possible to have too much? (What?!)

Just bring up (sorry) a few of these eyebrow raisers next time you're on the Net, and see where things go from there.

Plus we delve into music worth hearing. Movies worth seeing. Books you ought to know about. And other things that matter. All in P.O.V. (You're likin' this already, aren't you?)

If you're ready for a new kind of magazine that packs a big wallop and hits you where you live...

Then welcome to P.O.V.! I'm anxious to hear your opinion of your FREE Charter Issue! Act now! And I'll send it pronto!

Sincerely,
Drew Massey

• "What he's looking for in a woman: Easy-going, completely open to anything, tender, giving, down-to-earth, thinks about others first; constantly learning -- fascinated by the world, fresh; fit! And she loves to show it off; a little subversive, she likes to break the rules; outspoken, yet discreet, listens first, then talks; has a spirit and an energy that catches your breath when she walks in the room, you notice her; she accomplishes what she sets out to do, even when things don't turn her way, then she sets her goals higher."
• "Car: BMW M3"
• "Car: Porsche"
• "Car: BMW Z3 and Jeep Grand Cherokee"
• "Car: Land Rover Discovery"
• "Car: Jeep Cherokee"
• "Car: BMW 325 Convertible"
• "Volunteer work? No
  He votes: Republican"
• "Cooking and cleaning: Craig was 13 when his father died, so I did most of the cooking and the cleaning. But he and his brother helped straighten out their rooms."
• "Cooking and cleaning: He was not expected to do it -- I did it."
• "Cooking and cleaning: That was the era when mom did it."

Tonight the Coppola clan strengthens both their position as the Kennedies of Kalifornia Kulture and the local tradition of "You Go, Daddy's Girl!" post-feminism when little Sofia's www.virginsuicides.com gala-ly opens the shmooze-happy SF Int'l (Intel? Internal? Intellectual? as if!) Film Festival. Early blurbs from the critics of Premiere, Vogue, and Flair indicate that she's sticking to the paternal formula of very expensive mediocrity; fittingly, the most sycophantic account to date comes from the festival schedule itself, which swoons over

"the baffling, hidden reality of teenage girls.... Her most astounding feat, however, is going beyond the expected genre conventions, to discover and courageously reveal a romantic, at times mythic power."

Critics rave

"Much may be said on both sides." -- Hark! I hear
A well-known voice that murmurs in my ear:
The voice of Candour. Hail! most solemn sage,
Thou drivelling virtue of this moral age,
Candour, which soften's party's headlong rage.
Candour, which spares its foes, nor e'er descends
With bigot zeal to combat for its friends.
Candour, which loves in see-saw strain to tell
Of acting foolishly, but meaning well;
Too nice to praise by wholesale, or to blame,
Convinced that all men's motives are the same;
And finds, with keen discriminating sight,
Black's not so black; nor white so very white.

Give me the avowed, the erect, the manly foe,
Bold I can meet -- perhaps may turn -- his blow.
But of all plagues, good heaven, thy wrath can send,
Save, save, oh! save me from the Candid Friend!

What Joseph Campbell Didn't Tell You: From 18th Century England's Long Meg ...

It was their misfortune at St. James's Corner to meet with two thieves who were waiting there for them and took an hundred marks from Willis the Carrier, and from the two wenches their gowns and purses. — Meg came up immediately after, and then the thieves, seeing her also in a female habit, thought to take her purse also; but she behaved herself so well that they began to give ground. Then said Meg, Our gowns and purses against your hundred marks; win all and wear all Content, quoth they. — Now, lasses, pray for me, said Meg — With that she buckled with these two knaves, beat one and so hurt the other, that they entreated her to spare their lives — I will, said she, upon conditions. — Upon any condition, said they — Then, said she, it shall be thus :

1. That you never hurt a woman, nor any company she is in.
2. That you never hurt lame or impotent men.
3. That you never hurt any Children or innocents.
4. That you rob no carrier of his money.
5. That you rob no manner of poor or distressed.

Are you content with these conditions? We are, said they. I have no book about me, said she, but will you swear on my smock tail? which they accordingly did, and then she returned the wenches their gowns and purses, and old Father Willis the Carrier an hundred marks.

The men desiring to know who it was had so lustily be-swinged them, said, To alleviate our sorrow pray tell us your name? She smiling, replied, If any one asks you who banged your bones, say Long Meg of Westminster once met with you.

. . . . The Wars in France being over, Meg came to Westminister, and married a soldier, who, hearing of her exploits, took her into a room and making her strip to her petticoat, took one staff, and gave her another, saying, As he had heard of her manhood, he was determined to try her — But Meg held down her head, whereupon he gave her three or four blows, and she in submission fell down upon her knees desiring him to pardon her — For, said she, whatever I do to others, it behoves me to be obedient to you; and it shall never be said, If I cudgel a knave that injures me, Long Meg is her husband's master; and there use me as you please — So they grew friends, and never quarrelled after.

... To 20th Century Hong Kong's Mom of Fong Sai Yuk

From Samuel R. Delany's new book, 1984: Selected Letters

"Thoroughly enjoyed your descriptions of B- A-, though I'm sure you're aware of all the myriad ways academia passively encourages hysterical women -- especially if they truly are intelligent -- and actively discourages level-headed ones, the latter usually by simply saying, truthfully, there are a whole lot of situations other than this one where you'd probably be happier. Underneath the ire that such odd and odious behavior as Ms. A-'s produces in her colleagues, somehow men -- and the overwhelming majority of her colleagues are, certainly, men -- find themselves being protective of this sort of twit. I've had more than one academic woman tell me, with some indignation, that if she tries to play the game by male rules, going entirely on good fellowship and intellectual competence [of course you and I know that someone was just kidding her about those being the male rules! - RD], she's totally ignored -- until one day she decides to get hysterical in a departmental meeting and flees the room in tears from a too-intense reaction to the wallpaper texture or something; whereupon she suddenly finds herself co-chairman of some juicy interinstitutional symposium.

"Somehow university women seldom reap the fruit of prestige and advancement unless the men of these same institutions can feel that they are giving it, graciously, to bright but fragile emotional paraplegics -- otherwise, zilch.... I recently saw a T-shirt that declared, sensibly enough: 'If Reason and Understanding Fail, Bitch!' Well, social evolution being what it is, if you have a situation where reason and understanding aren't given much of a listen, eventually you end up with a small but unprecedented number of bitches."

A Call to Arms

J: They offered me "a documentary about the Dogma movement in filmmaking," but I passed.

R: "The Dogma movement"... sheesh. It's amazing that trick still works: all you have to do is call yourself a movement, and boom!, free publicity forever.

J: Especially if all of your movies sexually degrade women.

R: Hey, that must be where the Weblogs are going wrong!

(Continuing with what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called "that gentle degradation requisite in order to produce the effect of a whole"....)

The 100 Super Movies au maximum: The Married Woman

One of the nice things about works of art, and vacations and drugs, is that they give us delimited events to point to and say, "This -- this was the turning point. This was where my life changed," as opposed to the usual waking up to find yourself in a strange bedroom thousands of miles away with a resculpted nose and no left leg and the phone off the hook and the cops hammering on the door.

For example, I used to be pretty normal about movies. I liked them and so forth. I'd say things like "Wanna see a movie?" and then later on say things like "That was pretty good."

Then, twenty-three years ago, I went to the Temple University Cinematheque (which I guess is closed down now) and saw Jean-Luc Godard's movie from thirteen years earlier, The Married Woman. And by the time it was over, I had turned into me.

An essential aspect of turning into someone is that other people don't simultaneously turn into the same person. Even while I sat there head ringing and sparkle-eyed, comments like "Did you get that?" and "Weird!" began to worm their way through my protective daze. On my shamble out, I stopped to thank the wizened Anglophile who ran the place. "I hate Godard myself," he said, "but someone has to show him."

Yeah. Nowadays I'm just embarrassed when I see those 1960s Godard movies, but I wouldn't blame the old guy for that any more than I would blame my mom for how embarrassing it is to think about toilet training. The only one I enjoy all the way through is his comedy noir, Bande à part, which reminds me of the Coen Bros., who, like Godard, seem to have been raised in some sort of white plastic box from which they take random stabs at what real life might be like -- there's a very thin crust of experience sagging under the weight of all these violent gesticulations, a bouncing on the plywood mood that seems to work best with dimwit comedy. Of Godard's work from the 1970s, I like the TV interviews with "real people" where he sounds like Charles Kuralt from Mars; from the 1980s and 1990s, his crazy old coot self-typecasting in Prénom Carmen. The only serious Godard moments that still work are the ones where he finds himself back in that white plastic box trying to figure out why everyone looks at him funny: for example, staring into a coffee cup while taking a break from trying to show off those supposed Two or Three Things I Know About Her that, nowadays, it seems obvious to me that he never knew at all.

Not that anyone called him on it. There's no safer way for an uncool nerd to show off than by bragging about his up close and personal knowledge of women (or, safer yet, "Woman"). All those nouvelle vague guys leaned on that tactic big time; Godard, being Godard, just did so most explicitly. (As French censors realized, the title's "The" is an important part of The Married Woman's ambition.)

And, to Godard's credit as a forever uncool nerd, he was the only one of the nouvelle vague guys to try to engage equally explicitly with feminism. Unfortunately, he's also forever unable to approach female characters without interposing the clearest (and most brain-dead) demonstration of "inside knowledge": nude photography.

At the time, of course, I was more than willing to fall for such demonstrations; as an eighteen-year-old sex-crazed uncool nerd, they seemed like a darn fine idea.

And at the time, all such considerations seemed completely unrelated to what was most important about the experience, which, the next day, I inadequately described as the realization that "movies can do anything."

At the present time, my inadequate description would be that "movies can combine the discursive and the narrative."

I don't feel as comfortable with either account as I feel with explaining why they differ: It's natural for the individual who's gone through an ecstatic revelation to assume that there must be some relevance to the individual's life.

What's changed in my life is what seems relevant.

Twenty-three years ago, I probably thought of myself as someone who "could do anything," so that's how I was predisposed to understand the experience. Right now, I think of myself as someone who has to drag the discursive into every experience, so I think that the movie just happened to strike a natural-born critic.

You see, even though I promised a couple paragraphs back that I wouldn't bring blame into it, I couldn't just leave the question alone; I felt like I had to try to figure out what happened. For us natural-born critics, it's not enough to say, "My taste changed," or "Can you believe we used to like that stuff?" When we like something, it's a public statement, like pledging our troth.

Not that marriages really do last till the death-do-us part. What marriage means is that, having made a public statement of allegiance, you have to make some correspondingly public statement of divorce.

And then you get to make jokes about your ex for the rest of your life.

Just in time for our Sexual Degradation Special, here's Episode 4 of Juliet Clark's tell-all serial...

Movie Comment: Chuck & Buck

(concluding our Sexual Degradation Special)

So I wanted to finish up with a couple of male sexual degradations, you know, just for variety's sake, but I couldn't remember any, mostly 'cause I don't think it really counts as degradation if the guy is paying for the service. (Feel free to submit your own suggestions in the upper right corner....) There are those great male sex symbols of the 1920s and 1930s, but one of the reasons they're sexy is that they all seem so cheerful, like big happy puppy dogs (ref. yesterday's episode).

The best I can come up with is Hollywood's more-revived-than-ever interest in ugly, sweaty, stupid, disgusting, and utterly isolated homosexual characters. You know, the kind of thing junior high kids and other morons have in mind when they say stuff like "That's so gay." As far as I know, this was re-initiated by Boogie Nights, which posited a 100%-heterosexual porn industry in which an actor with a twelve-inch dick somehow became a star. Huh. Anyway, the one homosexual in the porn industry (heck, in all of California!) was, of course, very lonely.

The tradition continues with Chuck & Buck, which is powered by a lot of pleasing Albert-Brooks-style squirm humor but which wants to show off its indie muscles by going all "dangerous" on us. And what's more dangerous than a gay guy? Gee, how about a gay guy who actually manages to ever encounter even one other gay guy in Los Angeles? Yeah, I know, that would defy credibility....

Personally, I think the story would've worked a lot better if it had been about the degrading relationship between a Hollywood producer and a Hollywood writer.

TV Comment: "The Replacement" - Buffy the Vampire Slayer

There's a type of male bonding that begins with Calibanism and ends in narcissism: The sheer blatancy of the overlap between our faults brings on mutual hostility (possibly due to a mutual fear of disclosure), whereas continued exposure reassures us that these faults are often found not only forgivable but charming. Which is a delightful thing to learn. For a while, anyway; in my experience, this particular type of friendship doesn't have much staying power.

"They say he's a genius. I say he's from Chicago. Saul Bellow! Huh." -- Lou Reed on Nelson Algren

Whether we're talking mainstream poetry (as in the New Criterion) or mainstream fiction (as in the New Republic), it can be embarrassingly hard to describe just what offends you in a piece of art as long as you remain entrenched in the offensive assumptions behind that art.

The reason James Wood was able to make such a hash of Saul Bellow's dopey biographer is that Saul Bellow's dopey biographer made such a muddle of attacking Saul Bellow. Since I dislike Saul Bellow -- not as much as I dislike his dopey biographer and not as much as I dislike Robert Hass, but enough to get by -- my own interest in all this is as a cautionary tale: If you can't stand the smell, get to a different kitchen.

If I felt like revisiting the awful smells, my nose might wrinkle first at Wood's persistent equation of Saul Bellow's "exuberance of detail" with James Joyce. Joyce's "high style," like all his styles, was used structurally -- and it was used rarely after Portrait of the Artist. (Probably where Joyce comes closest to all-out Bellowing is in the Giacomo, an unpublished notebook impossible to confuse with a Joyce novel, much less with a mainstream novel.) In mainstream literary fiction, on the other hand, the structural place of "style" is to cover the burnt bits, and Bellow's slather looks like he's trying to build a meringue from Crisco icing. (This is where I start to think of Restoration "heroic drama" and Romantic "poetic tragedy": If the greatest things in theater are noble soul-stirring quotes from Shakespeare, then the best way to write a play is to restrict yourself to noble soul-stirring quotes, right?)

But the idea of such a revisit fills me with inertia. (An irritable inertia, admittedly.) It's like a couple of years back when I got a chance to contribute to an art project about male heterosexuality, and got very interested in the idea because male heterosexuality is so unexamined and undertheorized, and I made lots of notes and rearranged them and stuff, trying to stumble into an organizing principle, and finally decided that all of my feelings and thoughts could be summed up far too effectively in the single sentence: "Heterosexual men seem funny at first but then they get boring."

The Hotsy Totsy Club doesn't need any stupid old organizing principles, though, so, in honor of President George W. Bush, I think I'll dump more of those notes in here and see what develops.

Movie Comment: Neil LaBute of Salt Lake City, UT, & Harmony Korine of Bolinas, CA

Why is it that wake-up calls to America always happen at 3 AM with lots of heavy breathing?

"His voice was like an organ...."

Contrary to what you might gather from the past two decades of sob brothers, male hysteria far pre-dates 1970s feminism. In fact, the symptoms have stayed pretty much the same since the first hetero guy first realized that he wasn't getting everything he wanted right away; the purported cause merely varies according to which female stereotype's most prevalent at the time.

For example, 1961 seems like a golden age of unthreatening women, some brittle (Julie Harris, Piper Laurie), some pliant (Natalie Wood, Leslie Caron), but none of 'em rigid, or even erect. What's to complain?

But I recently took a look at Judith Merril's 6th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F and found some familiar complaints, including Richard McKenna's Fight-Clubby "Mine Own Ways" ("He walked hard on his left heel to feel the pain and he knew that it is no small thing, to be a man"), Kingsley Amis's "Hemingway in Space" (a Gardner Dozois title if ever I heard one), and, most direct of all, Joseph Whitehill's "In the House, Another" (bafflingly yet pokingly acclaimed by Samuel I. Bellman as "baffling the pieties of political correctness yet poking gentle fun at both sexes"), here reprinted for the benefit of next year's crop of postcultimultifeminitional college students.

Oh well, we only had six more years to wait before Joanna Russ published her first Alyx stories (which, oddly, remain unmentioned by Prof. Bellman)....

And only thirty-four years after that, Gene Wolfe's "Copperhead" shows how far we've come.

(Apology in arrears: Wolfe's polished surfaces and unutterable plots show to better advantage at novel-length, and There Are Doors delivers the "women are weird, dude" message more impressively. At shorter length, by far the best recent example I've seen is John Crowley's "Exogamy." But "Copperhead" is what's linkable....)

Movie Comment

When they say "The world will never be the same" (and they're still saying it quite a lot; just in the past week the California State Auto Association, an alumni group, and a credit union have all mailed their confirmations to me), I really hope they mean that we'll never have to hear anyone ever say nice things about Fight Club again. In a crowded pack of overblown Hollywood indies blinded by self-regard and terminated by horrendously unconvincing "clever twists," it managed to distinguish itself by imagining the deaths of urban thousands (who, naturally, didn't include the hero or his girlfriend and who, therefore, were of no concern) with a smugness that Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger might envy. OK, I admit I wrote that same story myself when I was eighteen, but I felt thoroughly embarrassed by it before reaching nineteen. The idea that those collapsing special effects added moral depth to the movie's obnoxious flattery is like saying that porn becomes socially redeeming when all the secondary characters die of syphilis.

Photos by Juliet Clark

Scariest sight during last month's visit to Los Angeles was the line of normality-starved families waiting to visit The L. Ron Hubbard Winter Wonderland ("Santa's Home in Hollywood").

Department store Santas are disturbing enough; can you imagine the MEST-scarring trauma of a Scientology Santa? "Well, Jimmy, your free personality test indicates that Santa will bring you EVERYTHING YOU WANT FOR THE REST OF ETERNITY if you'll just stuff these copies of Dianetics in your parents' stockings...."

In Hubbard's holiday homily, note his characteristic replacement of wishy-washy "love" with manly paranoid "trust." That was the true meaning of Christmas 2001, all right: No telepathic mind control, no peace!

The nicest sights were at the Getty Museum's Devices of Wonder exhibition. Gadgets through the ages isn't that novel a curatorial idea, but not many curators get to plunge fist-first into Getty-sized pockets: a Chardin, for example, is casually thrown on as illustrative spice....

As usual in high-concept historical surveys, the contemporary work included seems an ill-advised afterthought. I'm not even sure what they were afterthinking: our investment-oriented rhetoric-privileging high art world pointedly shares neither intent nor craft with infotainment manufacturers. Better to just borrow a corner of the Exploratorium, or fill a plastic tub with boing-boing-ed swag.

On the other hand, the Joseph Cornell boxes fit right in, especially the knock-down twist-around pick-me-up gorgeous "Beehive (Thimble Forest)" -- with silver bells/boughs sadly frozen, though, by the conflict typical of such exhibitions: the fine art museum relies on preservation whereas the artifact relies on manipulation, and they compromise in mere display. Perhaps deep pockets somewhere sometime might be persuaded to provide replicas in the gift shop...?

NEVER MIND THE BLOGDEX, HERE'S THE SEX PISTOLS

We'd always maintained that the man who is tired of London is tired of prats. And yet, three argyles (strong ginger tea gently criss-crossed into a tumbler of scotch, thank you, George, you're a wonder) into the wind, his ship of state of mind floundering through the Strait of Doldrums -- yes, even allowing for breeding and physiognomy, Lord Trough was in a ghastly mood.

Not exactly flush with breeding or appearance myself, save for the latter, and then only around the snozz, I wasn't sure I had a strong right arm to offer his hour of need, especially if it lasted the full sixty minutes: I'm not the Oxford crewsman I used to be, nor was I ever. But noblesse obliged, quickest mended; and I set about pummeling his shoulder with a manly open hand: "Here, old blot, what's the cringe about?"

"Hasn't it struck you with somewhat the same annoying persistence with which you're striking me that there's very little decent prose-writing in weblogs? Our Club spirit dwindles, I fear, and the spirit of the Empire with it."

I ruffled his beaver affectionately. "Ah, but there's a new spirit abroad, my dear (in the most manly way) chap. Haven't you tossed a squint at that list of weblogs-I-follow (or weblogs-I-follow-on-IE5) which tops (or sidles) every page I post?"

"To tell truth, in recent years I haven't even seen my own navel."

"That's neither here nor there, which may be why it remains unseen. Our format has recently grown plump and rosy as my very proboscis with interesting essayists. Permit me to single out some writerly compeers. (Although I can't in good faith do so without also singling out the more readerly wood s lot and Follow Me Here, any stout fellow's invariable departure points.) Ruthie's Double has already been around long enough to go on hiatus; other harbingers of dawn included the increasingly (though still not sufficiently) well known Eclogues, Visible Darkness, and UFO Breakfast."

"Perfessors or some such creatures, aren't they?" queried Trough.

"Of good stock, though; of good stock. Also boiling over the academic burners, I suppose, would be Alex Golub, metameat, bhikku, and the delightful Nordic smörgåstrophe of jill/txt, thinking with my fingers, Dust from a Distant Sun, and Field Notes. Not forgetting the specialized study of Philosophical Investigations, or the professionally scholastic but personally diarish Mad Monk, whose serial drama has enthralled me like no other on the web.

"Poot-poot-pootering with him along the diary route are clinkclank and How to Learn Swedish, while a more free-form sort of sphagnum blankets Open Brackets, Eeksy-Peeksy, Fireland, and litter in the streets.

"We can watch editors experience the simple pleasures of the unedited at Splinters, the prickly Electrolite, and the less-prickly and therefore less-prolific Making Light. Utopian web punditry more genteel than the Old Skool is being maintained by a professional pundit at JOHO and a professional parson at AKMA. Speaking of punditry, since the unpleasantness of last September --"

"Unpleasantness? What, did the tabloids catch that awful coney Charles snick-snicking at another wench?"

"A long story, I'm afraid. To return to the more pressing topic of weblogs: the price-conscious consumer will find their political commentary non-euro well spent at Busy Busy, Sideshow, Looking Glass, and tedbarlow -- our benighted American cousins would do well to heed Mr. tedbarlow's recent health-care summary, for example."

"I've always thought the knighting of Americans a disgraceful practice."

"Our own Club's Protocols of Miscellany are upheld to the highest standards by Cheek. And Lagniappe finally fulfills the longstanding need for a weblog of science commentary by a professional scientist -- although there's room for plenty more change in those slots. Also needed: more comedy! misterpants can't keep doing it on his own! Please, won't someone help misterpants?"

"Missing pants, you say? Good heavens, you're right; no wonder I felt debagged. George!"

Vanilla

You can always tell a hetero white male by the inanity of our complaints. (But you can't tell us much! Ha!)

One of my fellows once vented that he felt insulted by the label "vanilla" and wished it could be replaced with something more appealing.

"But it's perfectly appropriate!" I vented back. "Vanilla isn't vanilla because it's bland; it just seems that way to people who don't like vanilla or who do like blandness. Vanilla is vanilla because it's the standard; it's what you expect to find. Just because vanilla is common doesn't keep vanilla from having a very distinctive flavor, and it doesn't keep aficionados from being passionate about their preferences -- for French vanilla, for example."

My vent was longer, so I won.

A Testis of Poetry

Too Cool for School

Men are from Champ de Mars, women are from Picardy

Apollinaire Contra IKEA

What I want in my house is a sane woman, a cat wandering around the books, and friends all the time. Otherwise why bother?

Ba-lue Mun-deii Ba-lues-Are

"She's A Soldier Boy" A New Generation, 1969 She tells lies with her eyes She's not a lady all the time Though she's breaking inside She will only cry at night She's a soldier She's a soldier boy She deceives me and leaves me And then she's back in love with me To my weakness she's blind She always sees the best in me She's a soldier She's a soldier boy Evenings I meet her Make longing sweeter Like a soldier she'll fight Till she's got what she's looking for If it's wrong, if it's right I'll stand by her forever more 'Cause she's a soldier Yes, she's a soldier boy

Another month, another idiotic gender essentialist story:

Scientists say they have discovered what happens in the brain when someone falls in love.

Most of the women showed more activity in the body of the caudate, the septum and the posterior parietal cortex, which are areas linked to reward, emotion and attention. Most of the men in this study showed more activity in visual processing areas, including one associated with sexual arousal.

But scans found women's brains showed emotional responses, while men's showed activity linked to sexual arousal.

Where to start? How about with the original researchers' assumption that "falling in love" is a simple biological universal, free of cultural specifics? Because otherwise they certainly wouldn't be coming up with these fascinating hypotheses about evolution.

Or, sticking to the story's own terms, how about the possibility that most women in New Jersey reach orgasm more slowly than most men in New Jersey, and that New Jersey women have therefore "evolved" to associate sexual arousal with systems of reward and attention? Or that most men in New Jersey have more opportunity to jerk off to porn, and that New Jersey men have therefore "evolved" to associate sexual arousal with visual processing?

And how about those "most"s and "more"s? Given that we're talking about "17 young men and women," in just how many individuals was that played-up distinction incarnated?

If I was a cheerier sort, I might take it as a good sign that essentialists have been more and more forced to rely on the most variable and plastic organ of the human body (no, breast implants don't count) for support. But I'm depressive, so instead I take it as another sign that the government is preparing prenatal genetic tests which, along with universal "Seinfeld" syndication, will replicate the social norms of present-day middle class America forever.

I think my doctor called that "depressive." Sometimes I get those medical words all mixed up.

+ + +

I Love Luana

If you -- particularly you Butlerites -- would be kind enough to shelve those P. K. Dick trade paperbacks for a few minutes, I'd like to direct your attention to the recently reprinted-for-the-first-time-anywhere author's cut of Chandler Davis's 1958 story, "It Walks In Beauty", plucked from the sexist hegemony of 1958 and maybe still of interest to a 2004 where strong female role models feel compelled to sew plastic into the flesh of their lips and breasts.

"It's done tongue-in-cheek, but that doesn't mean I'm kidding."
- "Paradoxa Interview with Chandler Davis"