When life presents problems, reach for an instruction manual

I HAVE HAD cancer-phobia for a while now and I think it is causing all sorts of psychosomatic rashes, IBS, insomnia, teeth grinding, snoring, panic-attacks, weight gain, fatigue, and memory loss. I keep envisioning Chernobyl disasters, mesothelioma, lead poisoning, and world financial meltdowns followed by anarchic coup d’états. It might seem as if I am a living/breathing dossier full of fears, nervousness and phobias, but the combination of all these hypochondriac ailments is attenuated by the fact that I’m an over-caffeinated, under-slumbered walking zombie. My half-awake haze is an insulating comforter, but the negative thoughts are still able to seep through and pollute my mind from whence they spread throughout the rest of my body eventually distilling in various places causing aches, pains and other types of malfunction.

A weak mind has the power to spread its bad energy via the nervous system to all other parts of the body leading to discomfort, organ failure or sometimes even death. Because of my current phobic state, I thought I would try to circumvent any future mind/body catastrophes by purchasing Emmett E. Miller’s book titled Deep Healing. Dr. Miller has been a highly acclaimed pioneer in the field holistic healing for over 25 years. My mom used to work in health care and she had several of his deep relaxation/guided imagery exercises on cassette which she sometimes doled out to nervous and fearful patients. Each one of these exercises was accompanied by a cool synth audio performed by Steven Halpern, and once you tuned out the world and focused on Dr. Miller’s narration, you suddenly felt as free and safe as a strange sea creature feeling its way around inside of a big aquarium.

I can flip to any page in Deep Healing and find the same calming clinical reassurance offered in those deep relaxation cassettes. Check this out: “Our beliefs about the world often have a much greater impact on our health than what actually is true about the world . . . Your inner images, metaphors, and beliefs together constitute your personal myth about your relationship to yourself and the world.” Awesome! Here is some more food for thought: “The degree of disempowerment in our culture is extreme. At a deep level, many of us don’t even feel entitled to the simplest form of self-expression . . . This nameless dread is simply a learned helplessness.” Wow!

I have only been skipping around in the book so far, but I have found each of Emmett E. Miller’s teachings to be very much like a spiritual/philosophical epiphany. The copious sections of the book are framed by little quotations by famous people (e.g., “A person will become what he thinks about all day long,” – Earl Nightingale), and Dr. Miller provides several anecdotes and examples to clarify his analysis.

An affirmation which appears on page 277 that probably best summarizes the self-actualizing optimism in Deep Healing is, “My body belongs to me and ultimately will do what my brain tells it to do.” This truism is apt because what this book is essentially trying to teach to its readers is empowerment. Dr. Miller is trying to make us aware of how the mind/body processes work so that we can better control the intermingling between our thoughts (brain) and body (vehicle).

The mind truly is a treasure yet at the same time it’s an inscrutable mystery. Like all complicated things, we often need experienced people to help us navigate it and instruction manuals for daily maintenance. Deep Healing by Emmett E. Miller, M.D. is a good instruction manual to have in your library.

Don’t Send

The latest commentary in the ongoing new media-old media debate is a book titled The Tyranny of E-mail by John Freeman. Since John Freeman (former National Book Critics Circle president and current Granta editor) also happens to be my older brother, this post will be more or less a puff piece. I posted back in February about a dream I had of my brother starring as a guest on the Today Show being interviewed by Meredith Vieira. This is more or less the second installment to that post.

A portion of Freeman’s book was published in The Wall Street Journal on August, 22nd, and it was called a ‘manifesto.’ Gosh, you would think my brother was the second incarnation of the unabomber or something! Actually, Freeman is quick to point out that he is not a Ludite, but rather a privacy and efficiency advocate. According to Freeman, email is culpable for our shorter attention spans because it interrupts our train of thought every 5 seconds. We are dependent on it the same way we are dependent on the sound bite and textspeak. Email, like all other rapid-fire and truncated forms of communication, gives rise to the Instant Replay and back-to-back commercials. It is part of the chatterbox of sounds and images vying for our senses, and it is both a contributing factor and a symptom of our cubicle existences. It is the zenith of technological progress in the realm of instant communication that cannot be surpassed, and this fact alone makes it worth examining. My brother examines these things in a sort of post-postmodern way (at least that is what I gleaned from the WSJ manifesto). In many ways The Tyranny of E-mail seems to be a segue to the next book John Freeman plans to write, a book about suburbia. Mmmmm, I can’t wait for that one.

But in the meantime, here is some of what we can expect from The Tryanny of E-mail:

“A large part of electronic commu­nication leads us away from the physical world. Our cafes, post offices, parks, cinemas, town centers, main streets and commu­nity meeting halls have suffered as a result of this development. They are beginning to resemble the tidy and lonely bedroom commuter towns created by the expansion of the American interstate system. Sitting in the modern coffee shop, you don’t hear the murmur or rise and fall of conversation but the con­tinuous, insect-like patter of typing. The disuse of real-world commons drives people back into the virtual world, causing a feedback cycle that leads to an ever-deepening isolation and neglect of the tangible commons.

This is a terrible loss. We may rely heavily on the Internet, but we cannot touch it, taste it or experience the indescribable feeling of togetherness that one gleans from face-to-face interac­tion, from the reassuring sensation of being among a crowd of one’s neighbors. Seeing one another in these situations reinforces the importance of sharing resources, of working together, of bal­ancing our own needs with those of others. Online, these values become notions that are much more easily suspended to further our own self-interest. Not surprisingly, political movements that begin online must have a real-world component; otherwise they evaporate and dissolve into the blur of other activities.

It is almost impossible to navigate the Web without having to stutter-step around ads and blinking messages from sponsors. In using this tool so heavily, consumers aren’t just frying their attention spans, they’re forfeiting one of the large sources of information that comes from face-to-face interaction and business. A butcher can tell you which cuts of meat are the freshest; an online grocer may not. That same butcher, if he is good, might not just remember your preferences—which an online retailer can do frighteningly well—but ask you how your mother has been doing, whether you caught the latest football game. These interactions remind us that we are more than con­sumers; they remind us that we are part of the world in a way no amount of online shopping ever will.

If we spend our eve­ning online trading short messages over Facebook with friends thousands of miles away rather than going to our local pub or park with a friend, we are effectively withdrawing from the peo­ple we could turn to for solace, humor and friendship, not to mention the places we could go to do this. We trade the com­plicated reality of friendship for its vacuum-packed idea.”

Wow, cool stuff! Keep in mind that I don’t speak for my brother, nor do I entirely care very much about his moral point of view concerning email - I am more interested in the implications of said moral point of view. I myself happen to enjoy the streamlined efficiency of email and its various applications, and I employ it as frequently (albeit as carefully) as possible. But I admit that I am more easily entertained than my brother is. I like things that are new and shiny, I eat at chain restaurants often because I crave predictability and familiarity. I am part of the Dan Brown herd, the  blind following the blind. I do not necessarily think this is a bad thing, I am merely a product of my era much like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn were products of their eras. But I also think right now is the best time in human history to be alive, and email is no doubt one of the countless reasons for this.

My brother, however, is a private person. I stopped sending him emails a few years ago after most of them went unanswered. He has little patience for communicating casually in this medium when a phone call might suffice. This is unfortunate because now he is a very hard person to reach. But this goes back to the point Freeman is trying to make in The Tyranny of E-mail about how we don’t need to be available to everyone 24-7 just because the technology exists to make us available all the time. In the “old days” of the 1980’s, doctors, statesmen and hommicide detectives were probably the only ones who might expect to get a page or a phone call in the middle of the night. But having an email account with your workplace might result in employees working long after the work day has ended, which induces faster burnout rates. All of this and more is covered in the book.

My brother mentions words like “speed” and “burnout” in his manifesto in a negative way, and this made me think of something. If some people’s brains are capable of working at extremely high rates of speed, is the technology of email necessarily a bad thing for them to incorporate into their lives? I thought of this because John Freeman is a man who never sleeps, and he doesn’t read books so much as he scans them. He is capable of juggling many tasks at once, like being the unpaid president of the NBCC while also making a living in Manhattan as one of the nation’s most prominent book critics. Freeman is capable of doing and performing so much with only one brain that it begs the question: why does he think we all need to slow down?

I do happen to know that John sometimes spent 2 hours per day answering emails during his tenure as the NBCC president. When I would visit him in New York, he spent the wee morning hours wading through a backlog of emails from all types of people ranging from work associates to fans. Obviously, with this kind of responsibility resting on your shoulders, it is necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff. As I watched tv or tried to sleep, I was reminded of my brother’s burden by the constant pattering coming from his keyboard. Often I would hear a tap interrupted by a pause, then another tap and a pause. This sound would repeat itself for several minutes as if played in a loop, signaling the authoritative action of an unnecessary or superfluous email message being deleted. The keyboard pattering, by comparison, sounded more optimistic, as if it was a relief for my brother to finally answer a legitimate email after reading nine wasteful ones.

In defense of my brother’s email tormentors, however, and as further evidence of Freeman’s bionic abilities, one could never anticipate what time-zone he was in at any given moment. Hence sending him an email at 3 am California time didn’t seem like such a sin if you might think he is currently in Germany on a cross-cultural tour to promote literature. What an even bigger surprise it must have been for the senders when they got an almost instantaneous reply too! But I couldn’t help thinking as my brother recounted his email nightmare to his family and talked of the book he planned to write about it, that he was somehow encouraging the inundation of virtual mail that consumed so much of his life by replying to just-received messages at 3 in the morning. Obviously this would tell the sender that he was in fact available 24-7, whereas waiting until the next day to read and respond to a new message might be the more wise thing to do if one doesn’t want to be hounded by email. My brother’s workaholic tendencies made him incapable of turning off, and he essentially became a human octopus. I can only wonder what went through his mind as he answered all those emails, what thoughts his brain formulated. He obviously must have discovered the limits and futility of virtual mail, mapping its paramenters as he sat there glued to his chair while his life whizzed by. He probably became adept at pointing out which emails could have easily been spared with a phone call, which ones were too long, too personal, too short.

The result of all this is The Tyranny of E-mail which not only analyzes the whole email phenomenon and tracks the history of written correspondence, but also seeks to edify email users about responsible use of the technology. It should be a good read with far-reaching implications. My last post was about how we need to put limits on what we say and I think it’s a coincidence that my brother has a forthcoming book about imposing limits on our virtual communication habits as well. This definitely is a time for 30-somethings to think more carefully about what they blurt out either in public or online. After all, we are now adults, and becoming an adult requires a lot of slowing down. Maturity means thinking before you say or do something, and the same rules apply to the virtual world. Fast thinking does not have a premium over slower, careful thinking; and in fact, the opposite may be true.

Pornified: why admitting that you watch a lot of porn is no longer cool

I am very mad at Amazon because I wrote a review for Pamela Paul’s Pornified last night and it still hasn’t appeared with all the other reviews. I’m thinking about boycotting if it doesn’t post because I hate censorship, and any website that would censor the harmless things I write does not deserve my or any other free-speech loving individual’s patronage. Not only was my review harmless, but a lot of intellectual labor went into it. It took me at least an hour to write even though it wasn’t very long. I painstakingly constructed every word and sentence even going so far as to employ a thesaurus at one point. The reason I think my review might not appear is because I carelessly titled it, “I didn’t read the book, but I have some things to say.” This is not a good way to ingratiate yourself with the Amazon algorithms which might search out and try to subvert attention whores who are just trying to use their website as a free platform. But still, I bought and shipped a birthday gift to my brother yesterday using their “platform,” so I feel this entitles me to write at least one free review of a book I didn’t read. Furthermore, I gave the book three stars and deigned to agree with the author when most of the other reviewers ripped her apart.

From what I gleaned from the Amazon and other reviews, Pornified is a poorly researched and passionate (i.e. biased) book which attempts to caustically demonize the adult entertainment industry. Basically, it uses all the old arguments (many of which are feminist arguments) to call attention to this destructive obsession which is reeking havoc on families and marriages, women, children, teens, society as a whole not to mention men’s minds. According to the author, it is a corrupting and perverting force and perhaps the biggest bane of healthy relations in America. Keep in mind, this is inferring a lot from the scant reviews I read, the title and alluring cover of the book, and the fact that the genesis for this commentary had its origins in a TIME magazine story which ran a few years back.

But still, I felt like I had to stand up and say (or write) how I feel about porn. I think my opinion matters more than a lot of people out there who claim to know so much about the genre not least because of the fact that I was raised on pornography. Yes, I am 33 years old and I am a walking study in the long term effects of what more than half a life of getting off to porn will do to a person who is still relatively young. And lucky for me, I turned out normal. Contrary to what a lot of people might expect, I am not promiscuous, I have never contracted an STD, I don’t sexually harass girls or women (although I do stare), and I don’t set demanding expectations for my sexual partners. I have never videotaped myself masturbating and posted it on a tube site, I have never had cyber sex with a stranger, and I do not wear revealing clothing or send any other sartorial signals which might announce to the world that I am a “slut.”

If I am such a walking example of how porn is practically harmless, you might wonder why I side with Pamela Paul’s basic thesis that some things about it are simply ”bad.” Well, my gripe with porn is probably a little more intellectual than her’s and is mostly rooted in the fact that, when I came into contact with adult magazines and films in the early 90’s, porno was still a very private obsession for most people. It was not considered cool or even safe to transparently advertise your preferences for adult film genres and sex toys like it is today. Blabbing on about how much you dig seeing lesbians kiss or how you own a vibrating Fleshlight in the 90’s would quickly earn you the reputation of a pervert, and even worse, it could get you in serious trouble. I guess we all took it for granted back then that most of our friends and associates probably dabbled in porn, but these self-gratifying habits were protected by a sacred fortress of solitude that made engaging in them seem that much more pleasurable and salubrious.

Now when I see these people unabashedly debating the viscosity of lube and spit, or when I hear porn stars announcing the station identifications of local Middle America radio stations, or when I see a CGI John Holmes trying to sell me a taco in a TV commercial - I feel like I’m being violated. When porn oversteps its lecherous boundaries into normal, clothed society, there is a problem. Some people might see this as a lifting of the veil, or an overcoming of our more counterintuitive and destructive puritanical tendencies. But I disagree. I think we need veils in order to live, and we create boundaries to protect and uphold us. When people have no secrets they become vulnerable.  Without rules of eitquette and deportment, life becomes a never-ending bachelor party full of fart and penis jokes. “Hey, Bob. Want to see my dick, I just got it pierced?” “Um, no I don’t.”

I think I began to realize that the recent “coolness” of porn – started in 1999 by Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Corolla back when they did the Man Show together – had burned itself out when I awoke one morning to hear the DJ’s on the local radio station in my small little non-city interviewing Ron Jeremy live on his decision to retire from the porn business (as if porn stars ever retire). To hear the yokels in my backwards little Rust Belt town cajoling the so-called “king of porn” in real time as I went about my morning rituals caused an unsettling feeling. Knowing that every little weasel in the corner of nowhere that I called home had a personal relationship with Ron Jeremy that was similar in nature to mine, this robbed my secret admiration of the smut king of a huge part of its authenticity. I liked to think that by occasionally cranking one out to a scene starring Ron Jeremy and some callow newcomer to the biz was my own little private escape, and this gave these innocent corpulent and hirsute fantasies a sense of sophistication. It was like I was learning from the world master of the quicky himself, and to see a man who is so disgusting yet so confident in action added greatly to my own optimism and self-esteem. I thought of how I might someday employ his little tricks and seductive charms (like when I’m on a Royal Caribbean Cruise for instance). But to look at the world now and see all sorts of people from all walks of life admitting their fawning appreciation for this man and what his existence has meant and done for them, it seemed like a sci-fi movie in which the nation’s drinking water becomes tainted by truth serum.

These sorts of unchecked revelations are careless, reckless and unhealthy to say the least. There is a time for humor and lust, and there is a time for seriousness and professionalism. When the lines between pop culture and porn culture begin to blur, we set ourselves up for potential embarrassment and disaster. We become a society devoid of decorum where anything goes.

Americans’ ubiquitous exposure to porn is no doubt a symtpom of our overall decline in dignity and etiquette. We are rapidly becoming a nation of bad manners. This is evident in the decline of the standard dress code, the increase in the average waist size, and the elevation of numerous tawdry trends to full-blown domination status. People are starting to wear Bermuda shorts and baseball caps to church, foul language is uttered in places where it formerly wasn’t permitted, and tattoo covered skin is displayed everywhere. Despite the widespread awareness of the life-truncating effects of prolonged tobacco use and alcohol consumption, people smoke and drink more than ever now. Corporations don’t help either when they trample tradition in order to make a quick buck by marketing items which, at their core, are generic, garish, offensive and vapid. Entertainers have abandoned the more sophisticated art of tact and subtlety in their acts and now subject us to bombardment after bombardment of hackneyed immaturety (I swear, if one more recycled sitcom employs a reference to porn in order to invoke that single bachelor/ette levity…). And adding fuel to this fire is an ever-increasing trend of laziness. Generation X, spoiled by their Baby Boomer parents, never seemed to learn the value of hard work. They expect and crave the good life, but many of them lack the discipline needed to earn it. After sitting back for decades and having everything handed to them, they have suddenly grown up, and the awareness of their stark mature lives is no small cause for concern for many of them.

It should not be surprising, therefore, that a porn craze should emerge in this sort of early post-postmodern landscape. Many people who profess their love of porn were most likely raised on it like I was, and they’re probably just trying to bring their otherwise healthy obsession into the light as a way of moving out of the dark ages of the more repressed 80’s and 90’s. But progress is not always a good thing, and having a voluminous knowledge of adult cinema is a useless conversation topic in my opinion. Nobody wants to sit around and discuss the merits of Ron Jeremy’s latest directorial feature, or whether Jenny Layne looked better as a D cup instead of an A. This type of chatter belongs in the realm of sci-fi geekery, and any glib revelations about one’s porn viewing habits should be discouraged just as much today as they would have been ten, fifteen or twenty years ago. I hate to envision a newfangled world where keeping up with the Joneses means having a bigger wall of XXX rated DVD’s than they do!

Probably the most ironic thing about all of the professed “coolness” of porn lately is the fact that, despite having seeped out of its mostly inglorious and invisible niche into more respectable culture, the adult entertainment industry still manages to attract the lonely, the socially awkward, the desperate and the depressed. To have a heavy dependence on porn is to turn away from a life of healthy normal relationships and become immersed in a world of unquenchable virtual sex. Porn may always have a few advantages, but for a lot of people it is a heavy millstone, and the addiction comes when one tries to squeeze water from that stone.

I sided with Pamela Paul not because I want to be an old fashioned fuddy-duddy, but because I am a 1980’s fuddy-duddy. Like her, I would like to see porn go away. Not completely, I just want to see it go back in the closet where it belongs. Perhaps I realize that everybody peeks at porn, but to be constantly reminded of this serves no purpose for me and I’m sure a whole lot of other people. And when people try to use the fact that we’re all secret perverts as justification for destroying all barriers in the world, I get especially mad. I am the kind of person who likes to destroy the world each night and awake to it rebuilt again. I can’t fathom living in a world with no laws, no boundaries and no moral point of view.

Finally, I just want to mention that I think it’s funny that despite the fact that nearly limitless porn is now available for FREE to everyone who has a computer and an Internet connection (did I mention it’s FREE!), people still feel the need to divulge and brag about their masterbutory fetishes to the world. It’s funny because I would think this kind of easy accessibility to all the porn our brains and bodies can handle would enable us to get back in touch with enjoying it the way we used to – in the sanctum sanctorum of our own homes, bedrooms and closets.

Dreamscape

Last night I dreamed that my brother was on NBC’s Today Show talking with Meredith Vieira to promote his upcoming book about the tyranny of email. Part of their conversation (the only part I remember) went something like this:

Meredith: Do you recommend keeping separate email accounts for business and family? For instance, I have an email account I use for communicating with personal friends and family members, and then I have an email account that I use for work. Will this help us make sense of the flood of email coming in so that it’s not so overwhelming…and also…and so that the emails we actually want to read don’t get buried in all the…in all of the…deluge.

My bro: Well this might help, but I don’t think compartmentalizing email is going to help us get over our dependence on it. You can certainly have an email account for friends and family members, but if you’re going to do that you may as well get a hotmail or yahoo account for junk mail.

You know, every time you sign up to become a member of a web site they require an email account and a password. If I want to read the New York Times online I have to have an email address to set up an account so they can email me my password. But they are also going to send me a bunch of other stuff that I don’t want. It’s the same way with Amtrak, Greyhound and airlines. When I make train reservations I get about 12 different emails: I get an email telling me that my ticket purchase is processing, I get an email saying that my purchase has been confirmed–and so on.

So, you can find a lot of reasons for justifying having 3 or 4 (and in some cases seven or eight) different email accounts. And so, by relying so heavily on this medium, you basically become  a slave to it. Most people I know spend at least an hour a day reading and replying to emails. Many more people spend 2 or 3 hours a day.

Going back to family–I would rather receive a handwritten letter or a postcard from my family members and close friends instead of an email message. Whatever happened to sending postcards? Now I get emails from my friends saying how beautiful London or Paris is. People are sending their Christmas cards via email now! When I was growing up my parents received more than a hundred Christmas letters from their friends and family members scattered across the globe. It was fun to sit and read through all of the letters and look at the pictures. A lot of times there were handwritten personal postscripts included at the bottom of these annual correspondences. And we still have boxes full of these old letters which we have saved. How are you going to save and store a bunch of Christmas card emails. You don’t. That’s the point. Email is a sterile and ephemeral medium.

Meredith: But it’s so tempting, isn’t it? Because it is so much easier to just send an email rather than writing a letter by hand, putting it in an envelope, attaching a stamp, going to the post office–

My bro: [interrupting] –You know Meredith, I recall reading letters from my friends while I was in college. Recalling those times makes me realize that written correspondence is about more than just communicating information. The handwriting of a person, the tear drops on a page and even the smell of somebody’s perfume–all these things can’t be conveyed in an email. A big problem people have with snail mail is that it’s not instant.  Sure, snail mail might not be instant, but does everything have to be?

See, the problem is we want everything right now. We don’t want to wait. If information isn’t up to the minute it is somehow flawed. The reason so many newspapers are starting to change from a paper format to an online one is because news has to be updated every second to keep people’s interest. Somehow 12 hour old news which can’t be edited to include new information somehow seems archaic to our modern impatience.

This is where the dream started to fade out and blend with the actual Today Show which was airing. I had fallen asleep on the couch last night and was waking up to the sun pouring in through the windows. When I looked at the TV screen my brother wasn’t being interviewed by Meredith Vieira. I was a little bit dismayed but also glad as I wouldn’t want to miss my brother’s first — and possibly only — appearance on the Today Show (since I don’t have Tivo I also wouldn’t be able to go back and save what I had just missed).

Dress your family

This is what I had to say over at goodreads.com on a thread devoted to David Sedaris’s Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. The thread was kicked off with a question about the meaning of the title. Since there is no titular story in the collection–and no mention anywhere in the book about corduroy and denim clothing–it seemed like a good discussion. This is my two 1/2 cents:

“ The title might hint at the fact that DS’s family is quite simple and ordinary as far as American families go. Yet the essays/stories in this collection make his parents and siblings out to be larger than life characters. Finding the heroic and historic in the dailyness of life is what writers do, and this requires an ability to intellectualize (or “dress” up) the facts. Somebody might tell about the time their brother Bob did something funny, but for a writer it’s never that easy. Their version of the story has to have implications that speak to all of humanity and touch at an emotional nerve or two. Otherwise it’s just a story about Bob doing something funny which nobody can relate to except the teller.

Corduroy and denim is the garb of intellectuals (a lot of college professors go for this look). Corduroy pants and a denim shirt, very classic preppy attire. It’s not too loud and not too minimalist, kind of like DS’s story. His stories, like the trademark smart person look, manage to convey a sense of smartness without being overly ostentatious. A look somewhere between populism and snobby elitism.

So, DS is intellectualizing (or “dressing”) his past, but he’s not intellectualizing it so much that he’s trying to write the decade’s Great American novel. No. He’s writing a commercial book which can appeal to a broad group of people gay or straight.”

I wonder what I would dress my family in if I were going to emulate David Sedaris? Leather jackets and burmuda shorts? Nah, too unbelievable for anybody who ever knew me. Bespoke suits and ascots? Khakis and cashmere? Hmmmm…

It’s time I brought the grimy book reviews out of the dungeon

One of the good things about blogs–I’m not sure if Emily Gould would agree–is that any rejected writing which doesn’t make it through the phalanxes of editors, editorial assistants and interns to end up on the hallowed pages of some glossy magazine or alternative newspaper, ends up in the anarchic realm of the blogoshpere. Struggling writers who don’t have the benefit of disseminating their writing to thousands of people by way of Spin or a weekly alternative in St. Louis can at least take solace in the fact that one or two readers might happen upon one of their blog posts randomly. In this way they may still change a mind or two (but probably not a life).

I am now going to take advantage of blogging’s aforementioned function and post a book review I wrote some two years ago. But before I commence with my book review, I would like to give thanks to the great Prometheus that is WordPress. My words were stumbling around in the dark before you brought them to the light and shined them upon my many hungry readers. You wrested away power from the mighty Zeus that is the publishing world and placed it individually in the hands of everybody. For this I thank thee, and dedicate this post (and many more to come) to your preternatural greatness.

And without further ado, here is a belated review for Nathan Englander’s For the Relief of Unbearable Urges:

 

In The Trial, Franz Kafka sets his protagonist Joseph K. in the midst of an absurdly authoritative world where secret courts extend their rule from stuffy and sweltering garrets hidden throughout a fictional city. K. is an otherwise independent and solitary man of the world who suddenly and inexplicably finds himself caught up in the gears of an inscrutable system. The novel’s absurdity begins when Joseph is arbitrarily placed under arrest one morning by agents of the secret courts. Unlike a usual arrest, however, K.’s cell is his home and he is free to come and go as he pleases. He goes to work and keeps his weekly appointments with a “working girl,” but what is most unusual is that the reasons for K.‘s arrest are never fully disclosed to him or the reader. This bizarre and almost sci-fi scenario is what makes The Trial a postmodern parable that carries prophetic implications.

Kafka may have been depicting the isolating conformity imposed by the hierarchical structures of modern life, but given that he was a Jewish writer living in Prague only a few years before the outbreak of WWII, it is hard to see this book as anything but a dark vision of the impending conditions that would be brought about by the Nazis. If we were to place Joseph K. within the larger context of postmodern literature, however, we would see that he is the prototypical antihero. His status as an “arrested man” causes K. no small amount of indignation besides casting a gloomy shadow over his otherwise sterile life. He fights the system for vindication and recognition only to eventually lose. One year after being arrested, K. is taken to an empty lot and executed.

Half a century later another Jewish writer presents modern Jews not as fatalistic individuals trapped in a systematic nightmare, but as men and women with richly salient human qualities. For the Relief of Unbearable Urges is Nathan Englander’s first book of short stories. It includes nine tales told in a breathtakingly flawless prose that flows with poetic liquidity. Nothing is wasted in the dense descriptions and realistic dialogue. The characters contained in these stories seem as real and internally conflicted as if they were made of flesh and blood rather than just words and sentences.

Englander looks back to the past while exploring the complexities of modern Jewish life in Urges. He takes us from Communist Russia where subversive Jewish writers await execution to modern day Israel where witnesses of a terrorist bomb blast are left to deal with the psychological aftermath. Probably the most memorable character in the novel is Dov Binyamin, an Israelite who–acting on the advice of his rabbi–sleeps with a prostitute in order to save his marriage. In another story a woman attempts to have her husband killed so that she can be officially divorced, but the story is propelled by such an undercurrent of humor that it ends up invoking more laughter than gasps. It is this clever balance of levity and somber subject matter which makes For the Relief of Unbearable Urges both gripping and fun to read.

Englander scores as a story-teller most in that he can remain detached enough while telling a story so as not to over-saturate it with melodramatic emotion. Nathan brings a unique perspective to Jewish fiction with his intelligent, funny and unabashed style of story telling. Just what America needs in this age of religious ambiguity.

Ok. I will admit that this review could use a little work (Ok, a lot of work) if it ever wants to grace the pages of a respectable newspaper, zine or journal. But I am in no way trying to suggest by this that the blogoshpere is a receptacle of half-assed, passed-up talent. No. Keep on blogging you bloggers. There are an infinite amount of opinions and perspectives published on so many blogs that would never see the light of day in any agenda-driven publication.

As a blogger you are Rupert Murdoch, Nicole Aragi, John Updike, Charles Dickens and Ann Flanders all rolled into one. So–oops! I’m rambling again. Time to stop. Bye.

Final word on In Persuasion Nation

 

Originally posted on January 31, 2008

I wanted to weigh in with some final thoughts on In Persuasion Nation. In my last post I expressed regret that Saunders, who has a penchant for attacking mass media and consumerism, is able to offer little or no solutions to what he believes is a tenebrous state of myopia gripping the land. Well, perhaps by coincidence (since I didn’t read the stories in this book in order), I just happened to read the three darkest tales in the collection last. And this got me thinking that perhaps we sometimes live in a constant state of disillusionment, far away from the light, without any hope that we will ever not be impotent. Maybe Saunders is saying that there is no other reality for us except for a glitzy, illusion-like world of materialism. If we carve out our internal cacophonies of media-pop-culture “it-ness” we will find a vapid emptiness in our spirits. Maybe–just maybe–the instantly gratifying corporate amenities have hollowed out a collective dearth in our society. A dearth that mirrors not only longing and depression, but insanity and even death. I’m not sure if that is what Saunders is trying to convey in these stories, but I hope it’s not too much of a leap to assert this.

In my own personal life, I do not think I could live without my basic cable subscription, my DSL Internet connection and my iPod (which has become a kind of umbilical chord). When I recently moved apartments and was without Internet and cable for a week, I was overcome by a boredom I had never experienced before. Luckily, I missed out on a lot of the painful feelings associated with being “cut off” from the world due to a severe cold that had me bedridden most of the time. But I still felt like everything that mkes up who I am had been stripped away. Without a computer I could not communicate with the various people with whom I was used to communicating with on a regular basis. Television is one of my main sources of information and entertainment and it also helps me relax (sinec I sometimes fall asleep to 80s Lifetime dramas). I realized during my week of “solitude” that we are a very connected society. We are still connected in the old fashioned sense, but we also remain connected in our private lives as well. I wonder if this constant connection to the world via music, elevator and cab TVs and Blackberries robs us of the life-giving treasure trove of private reflection?

Saunders darkly explores the psychology of cruel indifference, paucity and madness in these latter tales, themes which seemed to strike at the underpinnings of the work as a whole. Overall In Persuasion Nation is a humorous and sometimes snarkyrant about big-business brainwashing. But when the three darkest tales in the collection are taken into account, a new element of Saunders critique takes shape. Saunders is serious about what he says. He does not want to be viewed as another lightweight profit denouncing the evils of the proverbial evil empire.

Finally, when the polarized states of insanity and dearth in Saunders’ darker tales are compared to the comforting pleasures he describes as deriving from materialism, it is possible to see the author revealing another common dilemma of modern life. Could we say that Saunders delineates these two polarizing worlds as way of saying that they are both extreme and, hence, illusions? Materialism dupes us into believing that we our safe and special while it deprives us of the organic joys of life. Conversely, extreme poverty and hopelessness rob of us our sanity and make life a bitter pill to swallow. The safest and most sane mindset would appear to be a marriage of the two lifestyles. If we embrace technology with a non-Luddite appreciation for its power to save, inform, assist and comfort us while delving headfirst into life’s free pleasures, this is where we may reap the most reward. Perhaps this is the desired middle ground Saunders hopes we will yearn for after reading In Persuasion Nation. It can easily be argued that many people, for various and infinite reasons, cling too tightly to either one of the aforementioned extremes.

But enough about Saunders. I want to have a chance to read some other books that won’t make me think as much before I try tackling The Braindead Megaphone.

Still reading Saunders

originally posted on 29 January, 2008

After reading the titular story to George Saunders’ In Persuasion Nation it called to mind some of the disturbing environmental implications of our product-driven culture. A scene describing the torn corner of the wrapper of a Slap-of-Whack bar blowing across the desert, “eventually coming to rest in a cactus” caused me to consider how all the waste that will amass from this generation’s product obsession will be around long after we’re gone. Here is a frightening statistic: 2 million plastic bottles are discarded every hour in America.

Saunders, tapping into his Luddite roots in this story, decries consumerism as a, “false GOD, obsessed with violence and domination!” I will not go so far as to accuse Starbucks and Pepsi of being proverbial false gods, but I will agree that mass consumerism does wreak violence and domination on the environment.

Saunders lost me, however, when he imparted via the character of a Polar Bear that a perfect world would be one “in which the sacred things in life are no longer appropriated in the service of selling.” He also labels consumer marketing/mass media as a form of “brainwashing” (a theme which his essay “The Braindead Megaphone” convincingly tackles). I will not deny that mass media has the power to dumb us all down, but Saunders is expecting too much of us when he asks that we view TV commercials as somehow being an evil form of corporate mind control.

I will admit that it is frightening to consider the average portion of our lives which will be spent staring at TV advertisements, but Saunders forgets that commercials are as much a part of reality as love and death. The cable networks and corporations know that we dread watching their ads and this is why they are designed to be as aesthetically pleasing as taste will allow in the first place. A first kiss, a blooming flower, a bunk bed adrift on flood waters. These are the emotion-invoking images Saunders is offended at seeing time and again in commercials (most likely because they can be construed as being manipulative).

Nobody in their right mind would deny that commercial ephemera or shallow news pundits have real, pure and lasting value. But I wonder what George Saunders’ alternative to all of this is? It is one thing to attack the establishment, but it is quite another to offer a viable alternative to the establishment. Getting people to think is a good thing, and Saunders’ writing is making me think. Free thinking is an essential prerequisite to becoming a good writer.

Obviously “In Persuasion Nation” was not my favorite story in this collection. Oh, well. I guess I’ll keep reading…

CNY Literary Scene

originally posted on 25 January, 2008

One of upstate’s own, George Saunders, is currently receiving national acclaim for his latest collection of essays titled The Braindead Megaphone.  As part of a publicity campaign to tout the book’s liberal agenda, Saunders has been making the rounds on every major television show and radio program across the country. He appeared recently on Letterman where he told a charming anecdote from his childhood, and he proved quite the Shadrach while sitting in the hot seat on the Colbert Report.

His 2006 collection of stories entitled In Persuasion Nation revisits a popular post-modern theme with humorous originality and ingenious creativity. In it, Saunders skewers America’s self-destructive and consumer-driven ways, taking us inside the boxing ring of controversy that propels daily life in America. Once we put this book down we will doubt whether to trust our gut instincts again, and we will also have a keen eye for spotting life’s most ironically humorous transparencies. 

The story “Adams” deals with a man who breaks all the usual social constraints of decorum to protect his family from a neighborhood pedophile only to realize in the end that he has in fact become the predator. “The Red Bow” reveals how the actions of Americans, blinded by self-righteous intentions, can sometimes mirror the qualities of the despotic regimes which we so fervently claim to detest. A scene in the beginning of this story when residents of a small town are shooting rabid dogs in the street is eerily reminiscent of the Nazi pogroms.

“My Flamboyant Grandson” deals with how consumerism can both hinder us from and lead us to achieving our dreams while the story “Jon” reveals how the simple and natural charms of life have become overlooked and buried by the materialistic dichotomy between haves and have-nots.

Kristin Tillotson, reviewing In Persuasion Nation for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, calls George Saunders, “a resistance fighter on the front lines of the war on independent thought, battling those who would numb our minds for profit.”

Saunders teaches Creative Writing in the MFA program at Syracuse University (his alma mater). The success of In Persuasion Nation helped the launch of his most recent book of essays. George Saunders’ status as an intellectual heavy weight has helped boost the reputation of the SU MFA Writing Program. Currently it is reputed to have one of the best programs in the country.