Yalephobia

Firestorm over Yale attack
by Phillip Matier, Andrew Ross
San Francisco Chronicle
Jan. 14, 2007

link

Basically, a male a cappella group from Yale went to a house party in San Francisco on New Year's Eve. They sang a few songs. Some of the other partygoers taunted them, and later two of the singers were beaten up. One of them broke his jaw, and they both got bloody lips.

And this has become a small national scandal.

It happened right in my neighborhood, where I was born and raised. And a bunch of kids from my high school (and our rival high school) attended the party. Who knows: they may have been the culprits. Also, I used to sing in an a cappella group in college, so I know what it's like to be heckled for singing like a girl.

So many things are wrong with this whole fiasco, it's hard to know where to begin.

First, it's not a gay thing, like some people have claimed. The "assailants" (who are actually a bunch of high school kids who picked a fight, let's be honest) called the Yale singers "homos" under their breath, and now the gay rights advocates are saying it was a hate crime. Bullshit. At a certain age, everyone calls everyone else a homo.

Sean Hannity has offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to the capture of the assailants (who are still at large) because he believes this is an American Pride issue. That's because the Yale singers gave a rendition of the Star Spangled Banner early in the evening, before they were beat up. Sean Hannity is calling this a case of rampant anti-Americanism among the San Francisco youth. Again: bullshit. Every choir in America knows the Star Spangled Banner. You can't turn this into a question of patriotism.

But the only reason this event got so out of hand in the first place is because the Yale singers, after they left the city and went home to their East Coast campus and families, decided (after the fact) they had been mistreated. And they raised a stink with the Yale administration and the local papers, who in turn raised a stink with the San Francisco Police Department for not doing enough to protect their boys, and now the Mayor and the Police Chief are giving daily briefings about the status of their manhunt for a couple of high school ruffians. Fuck the Yalies. I hate to see a guy break his jaw, but these undergraduates went home and told their mommies and deans about the mean kids at the party, and now it's a coast-to-coast scandal? There is a serious worry that this event could affect San Francisco's image and damage the tourism industry.

In the articles about this incident, the victims are always refered to as "Yale students," as if it's somehow especially harsh to beat up kids from an Ivy League school. Wookie Kim, a Yale sophomore, is quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle as saying: “I couldn't believe that anyone could do that to a Yale student.” Who gives a fuck, Wookie? Beatings are always a bad thing, even when the victim’s family is not paying tuition at Yale University. As one of the editorials in the SFChron points out, there have been at least 11 homicides in San Francisco since the Yale students were beaten up, and nobody is placing those homicides in the media.

But what really chafes my balls is the way people are talking about my hometown. An assumption is being passed around (among the out-of-towners) that nobody ever gets beaten up in San Francisco. The Chronicle quotes another Yale undergraduate as saying, “You wouldn't expect to find anti-gay sentiment expressed so openly in San Francisco, of all places.”

San Francisco gave birth to the gay rights movement, but that doesn’t mean it has become a liberal paradise. In fact, with so much gay pride in the streets, there is bound to be a backlash. It has always been this way. San Francisco is proud of being gay-friendly, but it’s even more proud of being heterogeneous—a place where anything can be “expressed so openly,” as the Yalie says. In this city, “of all places,” people are free with their opinions. That's why it's so easy for things like common homophobia to turn ugly.

So I want to apologize to the Yale students who got in a fist fight. We should not be subjecting them to the perils of real life (San Francisco house parties! What an underworld) until they are in a better position to insulate themselves from it. But this whole mess is based on stupid assumptions about the nature of my hometown. Once this story dies down, I think somebody is going to need a good punch in the mouth.

Currently Reading: Severance

Severance
by Robert Olen Butler
Chronicle Books 2006

I always believed that getting my head chopped off would inspire me to say “FUCK!” or “HOLY JESUS ON THE CROSS MY BLOOD IS SHOOTING OUT LIKE FIREWORKS,” but apparently there’s more to it.

Severance combines two medical facts (1. you stay conscious for a minute and a half after you’re decapitated; and 2. your brain puts together about 160 words a minute) to create a small book of 240-word stories, written in the voices of people who are recently beheaded. Robert Olen Butler is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a college professor, but this book—in case you haven’t already caught on—is really freaking cool.

Each of these stories plays out as a headlong (ha!) rush of unpunctuated words, but the surprising thing is they don’t always deal with the decapitation itself. A lot of people, in Butler's opinion, spend their last minutes of consciousness remembering the most evocative parts of their life—often a love affair. The sudden thud of their skulls hitting the floor seems to be far from their minds. Butler’s protagonists are concerned with sex, secrets, glory, sex, graphic violence, missed opportunities, and sex. One guy actually uses his last minute and a half to ponder the metaphorical relationship between a guillotine and vaginal penetration. These are brief, punchy stories that remind us to have incredible sex while we’re alive, because it will be the last thing we remember when our necks are bursting open in a wanton explosion of blood. I told you this book was cool.

Severance is strongly biased toward Western culture: beheadings set in Rome, France, and England are the most frequent. But on the whole, the book raises a lot of interesting points without even trying. It reminds us that Western civilization took a turn for the worse after the Roman Empire, and we didn’t recover until…well, there’s still hope. It also shows a remarkable lack of accidental beheadings throughout the middle period of history: after a saber-tooth tiger rips a man’s head off in the first story, all of the killings are perpetrated by other people…until we arrive at the modern era, with its car crashes, train wrecks, and elevator accidents. There’s also a lot of attention paid to current events at the end, with terrorists and their bloodthirsty ilk making a strong appearance.

But after you read a few dozen beheadings in a row, you start to notice the other things, like our tendency to cherish love and regret above all other memories. What I take away from this book is a close network of emotional connections among all kinds of human beings, in all eras of history, who have arbitrarily found themselves robbed of a head. Butler does a great job of letting the gruesome aspects speak for themselves, while drawing our attention back to the beautiful moments that cap off our lives.

As a final note, Chronicle Books did a bang-up job on the design. Chronicle is known for its glossy and artistic books, so I’m pleased to see them bring that same talent to a collection of stories. Each story is held on a single sheet of white paper, and separated from its neighbors by a full spread of completely black pages, so that flipping through the book is like repeatedly opening and shutting your eyes. It’s a great way to visually distinguish between the interconnected stories. I could say more, but basically Chronicle rocked this one, and it would be a shame if other, more established fiction publishers didn’t notice and follow along.

Strikethrough

Gravity's Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon
Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition

After all that fuss, I’m going to have to say “fuck Thomas Pynchon.” I became terribly nauseated trying to read Gravity’s Rainbow on the subway and I had to set it down.

Obviously he’s a virtuoso writer with a stunning intellect, but aside from that I’m not gaining anything from Gravity’s Rainbow. The historical setting feels like a cardboard backdrop. Pynchon's narrative is leading me down an ever-narrowing alley of extravagant minutiae and semi-wacky character traits. He's one of those guys who won’t let you get a word in edgewise, even though you have no idea what he’s talking about.

Here is the paragraph that almost made me void my stomach on a stranger’s shoes.

"St. Veronica’s Downtown Bus Station, their crossroads (newly arrived on this fake parquetry, chewing-gum scuffed charcoal black, slicks of nighttime vomit, pale yellow, clear as the fluids of the gods, waste newspapers or propaganda leaflets no one has read in torn scythe-shaped pieces, old nose-pickings, black grime that blows weakly in when the doors open…)."

Those are Pynchon’s ellipses, not mine.

So goodbye, Gravity’s Rainbow. I don’t believe in seeing a bad book through to the end. We’ll meet again if you can stanch the disgusting word-hemorrhage and stop grossing me out.

Democratic Presidential Candidates

“The Starting Gate”
by Jeffrey Goldberg
from the New Yorker, 15 Jan 2007

Like many people, I have been excited about Barack Obama as a presidential candidate. He speaks brilliantly and with conviction. He embraces the complexities of an argument instead of clinging to a cautious refrain. I love that he got an AIDS test in Africa in order to encourage other Africans to do the same. Senator Obama has smarts and a heart. He feels my pain.

But he’s not right for president.

That’s how I feel after reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in the New Yorker. Goldberg compares the early campaign strategies of Senators Obama, Clinton, and Edwards—where they stand, which votes they’re courting, and what the odds are. Although it doesn’t endorse any of the candidates, the article had a strong effect on my loyalties.

Senator Edwards, first of all, is hardly a serious candidate. His experience with foreign policy is minimal (although Bush got elected on less) and his campaign barely addresses the fiasco in Iraq. Edwards simply insists that we bring our troops home as soon as possible, which is no strategy at all. He is focused almost exclusively on domestic and economic issues—things like increased wages, job protection, and a something vaguely resembling “growth.” Edwards seems to believe the upcoming election will be decided by a single farmer in Iowa—a nearsighted, crotchety old man with an ethanol engine in his tractor. Senator Edwards cannot be taken seriously.

What surprises me is that Senator Obama is only slightly better. We have pinned so many irrational hopes on him that he’s become reluctant to take a stance on the most pressing issues, so that nobody will be disappointed. Obama is cautiously disdainful of Iraq, and he still hasn’t articulated a national security agenda. On other issues, like abortion and health care, he skews toward the extreme left, which is where I stand. But the Senator’s campaign is still not advancing a plan; they is simply offering a person.

But the real kicker is Senator Clinton. At first she supported the war in Iraq and the destruction of personal liberties. She is also responsible for a couple of boneheaded measures like the plan to censor graphic violence in video games. But she knows what she believes in. She has an impressive amount of knowledge at her fingertips, and she explains her arguments in light of current policy and international events. If you ask Clinton a question that she doesn’t like, or if she doesn’t immediately have an answer, she will refuse to respond until she’s been able to investigate the matter.

Clinton supports a radical change in Iraq, which will probably include the withdrawal of our troops, but she views the issue in terms of Vietnam, the Cold War, and international politics. She wants to combine our military solution with a far-sighted plan to foster global stability. It you still think of Senator Clinton as a lightning rod for controversy—which is how salacious pundits like Bill O’Reilly have portrayed her—then you are at odds with her colleagues in both parties of Congress, who consider Clinton a staunch and clear-eyed ally.

I don’t agree with everything on Senator Clinton’s right-leaning domestic agenda. But she is the only candidate who seems capable of fully considering the facts and making a bold, sensible decision. I don’t know what else could possibly matter. She has balls. If the election were held today, she would also have my vote.

Currently Reading: Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity’s Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon
Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition

Nobody can praise Thomas Pynchon anymore without addressing a scathing article by James Wood that appeared in the July 24, 2000 issue of The New Republic. In “The Smallness of the ‘Big’ Novel: Human, All Too Inhuman,” Wood blasted everyone from Pynchon and Don DeLillo to Zadie Smith and David Foster Wallace for pursuing a sort of sprawling, overly researched novel that “knows a thousand things but does not know a single human being.” Wood seemed to believe these novels were destroying the literary arts, and his critique is especially appropriate for Gravity’s Rainbow: the novel employs dense scientific language and an ensemble of thinly drawn characters, with impossible names like Capt. Geoffrey (“Pirate”) Prentice and Lt. Oliver (“Tantivy”) Mucker-Maffick.

Still, Gravity’s Rainbow was named the best novel of the 1970s by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and its blend of historical facts and hyperactive prose has been an inspiration to a generation of highly regarded writers including—who else—Zadie Smith and David Foster Wallace. So why the controversy?

The following paragraph will illuminate.

"He’d got the feeling, stationed east of Suez, places like Bahrein, drinking beer watered with his own falling sweat in the perpetual stink of crude oil across from Muharraq, restricted to quarters after sundown—98% venereal rate anyway—one sunburned, scroungy unit of force preserving the Sheik and the oil money against any threat from east of the English Channel, horny, mad with the itching of lice and heat rash (masturbating under these conditions is exquisite torture), bitter-drunk all the time—even so there had leaked through to Pirate a dim suspicion that life was passing him by."

For me this whole paragraph is a set-up for a punchline at the end. Pynchon runs squarely at the depressing details of Pirate’s experience, elaborating on all the filth and particular tortures of his daily life, making it as hard to keep on reading as it is to look away. And finally, teasing us with the promise of an “even so,” Pynchon takes all of these horrible details and piles them on a character’s conscience, letting us know that Pirate is aware—but dimly—of how pathetic he is.

What Wood described as an emerging style of “hysterical realism,” is often, with Pynchon, an elaborate set-up for characterization. By building these structures and tearing them down, Pynchon is revealing a bias against so-called “hysterical realism”: his goal is to undermine the accumulated weight of his details and reveal his characters’ humanity. In that sense he’s like Joseph Heller, who suffused Catch-22 with frustrating irrationalities, only to show that his main character, by contrast, was utterly sane.

Unfortunately, a subsequent generation of writers has decided to repeat Pynchon’s joke without using the punchline. Authors like Davide Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen are winning priase for enormous novels in which the delivery of accurate information about the world is the main narrative force. Such authors live up to James Wood’s worst fears about “hysterical realism.” I wish they would go back and study the way Pynchon frustrates his own splendid details Gravity’s Rainbow.

Currently Reading: The Aeneid

The Aeneid, by Virgil
trans. Robert Fagles
Viking 2006

Although it’s often mentioned in the same sentence as the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Aeneid is different in three important ways. 1. It was written by a single person, rather than a succession of oral poets. 2. It is a deliberate attempt to glorify Caesar Augustus, by giving him a mythical origin. 3. The story and characters are not as captivating as in the Iliad and the Odyssey. But it hardly matters because the Aeneid is full of gods, soldiers, monsters, the undead, cities burning, and lovers standing in defiance of earth-shaking prophecies.

One of the joys of reading the Aeneid is hearing the rhythm of Virgil’s metaphors. Virgil will compose dozens of lines in stunning clarity, giving us the rigging of a warship, the chambers of Dido’s palace, or the festering of a bloody wound. And then, suddenly, the page will open into a grand Roman metaphor. When Neptune calms a stormy sea, Virgil compares him to a revered statesman wading into an unruly mob to pacify the people. When Aeneas has to make a difficult decision, Virgil offers an oak tree bending, from side to side, in a strong wind. Virgil’s balance of description and metaphor is masterful.

Roman epics are huge right now. Our foreign policy debates often refer to the Roman Empire. HBO is airing the second season of Rome, a dramatic series about the era in which Virgil composed the Aeneid. I had selfish reasons for reading the Aeneid, too—it gave me a deeper understanding of the Classical world, which is something I deal with in my day job. After following Aeneas across the Mediterranean in search of a home for his war-torn people, I would say the greatest similarity between the United States and the Roman Empire is this: we both love to watch our champions suffer.