I’m not so sure.  Besides supporting automated driving and all it might one day offer—really, continuing to allow humans to pilot automobiles would be insane in a society with a viable alternative—I’m inclined to think a driverless society is a foregone conclusion, whether by law or choice, though I hope the latter prevails.  Provided cheap, efficient, and reliable technology, I see no logical reason (though I can think of a few illogical ones) that Americans as drivers would forcefully oppose a transition away from self-piloted vehicles.  (My argument here, it should be said, assumes a technology that meets those conditions.)  The upside is simply too great;  just as many folks at first rejected the automobile, eventually the advantages it provided made previous technologies obsolete.  The same, I think, will be true for automated cars.

Wired has an interesting piece regarding the myriad legal questions we will need to grapple with, and I have no doubt that there will be a number of growing pains as we struggle to adapt to the shift.  But safety and economic considerations will, after a time, decide the matter.  One day, the excuses will simply run out.

It means, for another thing, that the humanities as disciplines, while they might still (barely) be a way of teaching certain forms of reasoning, don’t provide “content” in the intellectual reproduction of commercial culture – at least, not at the fundamental level, at the level of science and applied science. They are not part of the production of new knowledge. Success and advance for society lie in the innovations of technical and applied sciences alone – and the humanities lose a place in the production of these innovations, and become relegated to the status of mere items of consumption. Literature, the arts, criticism, the essay – their social significance lies solely in their role as entertainment. Entertainment is what one does in one’s free time, for fun. It is dispensable, and the humanities, too, their raw materials and their analytic products, likewise are dispensable. We didn’t use to think this about the humanities, its products, disciplines, and academic efforts. But that’s where we are now: fantastically produced and expensive, but their deliverances no longer can claim to reveal anything very important about the world. That role has been ceded to STEM; and, well, The Rest is Noise.

I’m still uncertain, after reading the post a couple of times, whether Anderson believes there is still a place for the humanities in academia at all:  at times he appears to offer a bit of backhanded support, though it is clear he does not hold them in high regard.  He is quite right, I think, that the humanities—in my case, English—do not provide the sort of critical thinking or reasoning skills necessary for survival (or to be very useful) in an increasingly technologically and intellectually complex world.  On the other hand, I’m inclined to believe there is a nebulous and probably small benefit to cultural scholarship; what that benefit is, I can’t say exactly, except to note that I’m a proponent of wide knowledge bases, whatever their nature.  As a friend of mine commonly complains to incurious people, “How could you not want more information?”

Still, the charge that our fictions, essays, and criticisms fail to provide truth in the way the STEM disciplines do is well taken, unavoidable, really.  Literature relies on anecdote instead of data, and criticism on philosophical constructs bereft of objective, usable information.  The more we learn about social systems, human behavior, and free will, the more we see in our supposedly “human” qualities a machine-like consistency in the aggregate.

Anderson:

It’s only the humanities that gave up on the search for truths about human beings in the world. The economists and the geeks of social science never gave up the search, and they (and we) seem to have concluded that the answers are located in purely technical subjects through purely technical thinking.

He is spot on here.  The implication, of course, demands that we in the humanities begin to accept and admit that we do what we do because we like it, not because it is of any intrinsic value to anyone else.  In our blind stretch for truth, to produce truth, we fell upon the illusion of it, and maybe even a few of us did so without the customary hubris of the artist dribbling out the corners of our mouths.  But make no mistake, we have slipped through the backdoor of the entertainment industry believing we were reaching for something higher.

We can learn true and marketable skills in the humanities:  communication, for instance, is of premium importance in many fields, including STEM, some of which are not known for their stable of able messengers.  If you want to help humanity as a humanities student, start there.  If not, I’m certainly not saying the humanities are worthless—not while we’re all nice and comfy, anyway.

Always fear the reader who accuses smugness or arrogance simply upon coming across a quiver of big words or inaccessible references.

Is being cerebral a bad thing in writing?  Presumably this is a Master’s course and we should be aspiring to the intelligent.  If your primary criticism is that the author of whatever you’re reading is smarter than you, go pick up a fucking book, or a dictionary, and get cracking.

Are the points these people want our writers to make simply arguments to reinforce the points as we already imagine them to be?  The very act of an author’s teasing a hidden meaning—or even an observation that is not immediately apparent—out of a scene is scoffed at by this ilk.  That Joan Didion might have an objection to a culture immediately calls upon her the charge of elitism.  It is as if people are offended by the simple act of being challenged; even where criticisms of Didion might exist, those that are substantive are never mentioned, but stem rather from this lack of confidence, or perhaps a simple ruefulness at the mere suggestion that things may not be as they seem.

I remember the precipitating incident only vaguely, though the experience as such is not uncommon in writing and literature courses.  A student will, after having read a piece of writing, judge it based on their own personal, ideological, and emotional reactions.  Now, of course our biases inform our interpretations and opinions of literature constantly as we read; that’s the way literature works:  we react (or don’t) according to the impressions we’ve come to accept through the culmination of our experience and, using only this hard-won but uneven palette of information, like or dislike a work based on whether we think it feels true.  By true, I mean that we laugh at a joke because it feels genuinely funny, grimace at a dramatic turn because it genuinely hurts, or shrink in horror at a science fiction story because the paths to dystopia and slavery become frighteningly hard to ignore (Logan’s Run, anyone?).

But the situation becomes a bit discouraging, especially during a group discussion, when a student decides a work is either good or bad because what they as a reader wanted to happen either did or didn’t.  Sometimes readers want revenge and get angry when the villain escapes; sometimes they get red in the face when an author fails to subject a character to some sort of poetic or ironic comeuppance that either reinforces or disintegrates that character’s primary flaw.  We want carnivores to be devoured by plants, rapists to lose their sexual organs, bigots to renounce their petty hatred.  We seem to be programmed to want these sorts of neat, little endings; we seem to want things to be easy, to watch whomever we’re rooting for win out.

But, of course, life isn’t easy.  The good folks don’t always win.  Sometimes the bad guys win because there is a point to be made—which doesn’t mean, of course, that we have to side with the rapist or the bigot (I hope none of us do), just that we shouldn’t shut off our brains at the first sign of discord.

Granted, we have many lenses through which we can examine a piece of literature, and many different reasons to read as well (enjoyment, “enlightenment,” perspective, etc.).  If your critique, however, can be restated to approximate in form a statement like “I didn’t like it because I wanted him to die,” it may be best to consider reassessing your critical methods or else finding another line of work.

To address my little found ramble again, Didion upsets some readers because she is almost unfailingly indecisive.  It’s sort of her thing.  Furthermore, back in the 1970s she rubbed elbows with some pretty famous people, and, every now and then, her accounts of ritzy parties and political functions read as if written partially for the purpose of name-dropping.  Personally, I think Didion is a fantastic writer, and yes, part of my estimation stems from the fact that I can appreciate her radical uncertainty in all things—a bias-informed position on my part, to be sure.  At times she writes presuming a level of education from her readership; if I remember correctly, it was this sort of writing, in a 1970-something piece criticizing zeitgeisty anti-womanhood feminists, that rankled a few of my classmates.  Surely some of the more specific cultural and political references, namely those local to California, are lost upon my generation, and the reading required some extratextual engagement, which is to say you had to look a few things up if you wanted to understand the article.  Plus, Didion (uncharacteristically, for her) used some big, scary words.

It is well known in some circles (maybe) that, when presented with big, scary words, writing and literature students who don’t already know those big, scary words tend to feel, well, inadequate.  Often this gnawing sense of inferiority leads to a lashing out, a heated, uncontrollable hatred for the writer, and comments like “I just think the writing is unclear, you know, like, she could have, like, used shorter words to get her point across,” have been known to pass the lips of some otherwise reasonable people. On these occasions, most of the other students nod knowingly, and those who would love to publicly pillory the statement either buck up and look like assholes or swallow the temptation and sit there seething, perhaps scribbling down a few choice words in silent protest.

I really don’t mean to be caustic.  I’m just a bit shocked at the resistance to being challenged.  Morally or politically, ideologically or intellectually, the instinct, when a person is presented with a potentially problematic viewpoint, seems to be to circle the wagons at all costs.

Do we really want everyone to write in short, pithy sentences?  Do we want the reductive “truth” or the complex amorphism?  Should we spurn literature that doesn’t agree with the simplistic mottoes we’ve all no doubt pinned inside our jackets?  Obviously all such considerations can and should be made case by case, work by work.  And, yes, sometimes we will decide we are not willing to make certain concessions.

But consider, next time, that maybe, just maybe, if you don’t like something, you weren’t meant to like it.  Perhaps we’d be a bit better off if we didn’t feel so comfortable all the time, if we sought what upset us rather than avoiding anything that threatens to break our little bubbles.  Furthermore, and regardless of the previous points, don’t dismiss the notion that personal and intellectual growth are probably watered more by chaos than harmony.

Hitchens at The Amazing Meeting in Las Vegas, NV (January 2007)*

This will be as useless and banal as any obituary or tribute, not only because memorializing a person’s life is, in its own way, an act of barbarism, but because I am limited in what I’ve read of Hitchens’s work to his last eight or so years’ worth of essays.  I’ve not read God is Not Great, nor have I read Arguably.  I will, but that’s not the point.  Reading one Christopher Hitchens essay should be enough for any reader to realize, without doubt, that they are drinking deep the work of a virtuoso, a true master of written English, and a wit unparalleled by any of his contemporaries.  When he died last night, the world lost perhaps its finest living prose writer.

I have always marveled at Hitchens’s fearlessness.  A person can be born with intelligence, can then cultivate that intelligence with the requisite hours of reading, writing, and deep thinking; Hitchens certainly exhibited both this staggering raw intellect as well as the drive to put it to good use.  But it was his bellowing confidence in the soundness of his position that, I think, proved his most important trait.  Atheists like me will never forget his unapologetic challenges to the very concept of religion, the ferocity of his defense of reason and reality in the face of a world that mostly didn’t want to hear it.  It is important to note that on the night Christopher Hitchens died, for good, without promise of Heaven or Hell, well over 6 billion people on the planet earth went to sleep that very same night believing in a god.  Such was, and is, the sheer force against the realities of our existence.

From a political standpoint, Hitchens was always challenging, and often frustrating.  As an unapologetic liberal during my college years, having bought wholesale many myths peddled by the Left that held any supporter of the Iraq War as a blithering dolt, reading Hitchens’s cogent and informed (and yes, sometimes troubling)  affirmations of U.S.-led armed conflict in the Middle East spurred the first tremors of my own crisis of opinion, a radical uncertainty in all the moral shibboleths I had, up until that time, taken for granted.  I still don’t agree with Hitchens on Iraq.  I never will.  But dissent is the whetstone upon which logic is honed… and hell, let’s just up and throw progress in there as well.  For, to calcify ideologically to the point of surrendering to the nearest and most convenient pair of blinders is to render oneself irrelevant.  It is to die before dying.

There is little else for me to say about the man that won’t be said in much more worthy fashion by those who knew him well.  His death has been picking at me since last night, though, and I’ve been walking around fending off small panicked waves of sadness.  The world seems a slightly emptier place without Christopher Hitchens.  To think that he will never write another word, a loathsome realization in a land that badly needs the sort of perspective Hitch dealt regularly, with seeming ease.

Yes, Hitchens is gone now, and with him goes an irreplaceable force.  It’s almost surreal, really:  I always half-expected him to beat the odds, to emerge from the harrowing shroud of cancer a physical exception as well as an intellectual one, a corpus of raw and honest essays about his own flirtation with death nestled underneath his arm as a reminder of his trial instead of a self-composed requiem.  I thought he would make it.  But he didn’t.  He was just a human being, after all, and our chaotic universe, unlike gods, does not bestow its favor upon any person.

Still, who can believe it when a titan falls?

UPDATE (12/17/2011): Having now reread this thing with the benefit of a little distance, I realize my third paragraph comes off as a bit fawning, and perhaps dismissive of the subject it deals with.  I thought some of Hitchens’s writing on Iraq and Islam bordered on jingoism, even if I sympathized with those strains of his criticism that had more to do with atheism than with a hawkish war machine.  I feel just about as badly about Iraq now as I did six years ago, and, while I meant what I said about his opinions forcing me to reevaluate my own, I do regard his views on the war as a major chink in his armor.  He was a flawed human being—too sure of his own opinions, arrogant and dismissive, at times even unduly caustic.  Regardless, my other comments stand.  I will miss the hell out of him.

* Photo by ensceptico (CC-BY-2.0)

Carry on...*

A friend of mine posted a link to Adbusters.org, a site promoting a holiday season in which people buy nothing.  This season, of course, begins with Buy Nothing Day, today, Black Friday.  If you scroll down the page to which I linked, you’ll notice a number of, frankly, hilarious pictures of protesters criticizing the consumerist rampages of the day.  While I empathize with the anti-consumerist sentiment, while I think it utterly sick and disgusting that people are trampled and pepper sprayed in the mad rush for Deals, I have trouble with the idea of a Buy Nothing season.  (But I may drop “Everything is fine, keep shopping” a few times.  Some of these people do deserve it, after all.)

The ostensible aim would be to make our voices echo down the avaricious halls of corporate offices everywhere, to wrench the suits out of their greed comas just long enough to realize that what they’re doing is Wrong.  I have my personal corporate boycotts:  Nike, McDonald’s, Wal-Mart,  etc.  I don’t pretend my actions make a difference, but for whatever it’s worth, I try to avoid buying anything from these and other corporations if I can.  I may have snagged a Nike headband over the summer because that’s all the store carried; I ate a chicken sandwich from a train-station McDonald’s because the other restaurants were closed.  These things happen.

What would  happen, though, if we dogmatically heeded the Buy Nothing campaign?  By asking this question I’m not suggesting that Buy Nothing demands we stop purchasing groceries or other essentials; that’s not what they’re on about.  Rather,  I’m assuming they want a gift-free holiday.   They want people to stop gobbling up electronics and toys and all those other giftables stores mark down during the holidays in order to clear their inventory for the next year.  And more power to them.  After all, the holidays do seem to ignite some atavistic resource-competitive instinct in the shopper, an insatiable urge to drive an ice pick through the eye socket of whoever just snagged the last 42-inch HDTV at a 60% discount and walked out of the store clutching  their claim check like a mother gorilla holds her nursing baby, eyes darting around suspiciously, looking for any sign of trouble.

Materialism can be destructive.  It can lead someone to grow addicted to acquisition and to prioritize this acquisition over what most people would consider more important resources—namely, personal relationships and forms of self actualization (intellectual, political, etc.).  Materialism can blind us to poverty, slavery, and corruption; it can mute our willingness to upset the status quo.  We all know it, and we’ve all allowed ourselves, at one point or another, to be blinded in this way.  I sincerely commiserate with the Buy Nothing crowd on this count.

But to support crippling the holiday shopping season would mean implicitly supporting a form of collateral damage that should give Buy Nothingers and Occupiers pause.  Seasonal workers will suffer first; they will lose their jobs very quickly if stores have no reason to hire them—a somewhat troublesome issue, then, as those most likely to suffer at the hands of a widespread anti-corporatist holiday movement are likely to belong to the demographic the Occupy movement is purportedly attempting to defend.  Executives are tougher to root out; they weather boycotts and economic hardship much better than do the working class.

Perhaps this collateral damage is acceptable to some people.  Maybe the net gain in “consciousness” will be worth it, but I’m not sure there will be such a paradigmatic shift if the Buy Nothing camp succeeds (unlikely, but still).  It seems to me that the holidays will simply grow leaner for many people, perhaps even catastrophically for some of the less fortunate folks, and an economic system already destabilized by corporate malfeasance and political bickering will teeter more precariously on the edge of… well, we don’t really know.

These are just my impressions, and I make them as someone who is conflicted over the issue, partly because I agree with the core anti-consumerist message, partly because I don’t see material want as an entirely bad thing, as long as a person can keep it under control.  Because here is the other issue during the holidays:  I love my family and friends, and I enjoy surprising them with a gift they will truly enjoy (but I’m a notoriously unimaginative gift-giver, so take that as you will).  Are there other ways to make people happy?  Of course.  But giving a good gift means that you’ve taken the time to try to consider someone as a person, to weigh their quirks and personal obsessions and give them something they will cherish.  It need not be expensive at all.  Remember that gift-giving also calls into play a purely social element, a drive that doesn’t necessarily draw its power from consumerist greed.  To paint all shoppers as driven by such impulses is disingenuous, I think,  and doesn’t adequately address the issue.

So should we buy less?  Yeah.  I’m for that.  Should we expect less?  Absolutely.  We may even want to ask our family to give charitable donations instead of gifts; I love that idea, too.  But I’ll be buying gifts for people, hopefully gifts they actually need, and if I’m a consumer whore in Buy Nothing’s eyes, so be it.  The goal, for me, is not to unplug entirely but to be reasonable about consumption and to be as conscientious as possible.

For the record, I refused to have anything to do with this Black Friday nonsense today, but Cyber Monday may be a different story.  It’s time to put my current machine (an overpriced Black Friday burn from two years ago) to sleep.  Seriously.

* Image Credit:  Adbusters.org

(This post is very closely related to this post, but it takes a bit of a different tack.  I may get some shit if any of my classmates happen across this thing, but it’s meant to open an honest, reflective dialogue about what the fuck we’re doing here.  Most of this advice, while addressed to “you,” is also addressed to me, and to be sure, there are classmates of mine who would not be included, like I would be, as “part of the problem.”)

I have spent most of my scholastic life studying English—writing, literature, pretense, ego—and, mostly, it’s all garbage.  The English degree should not impress (not that most people consider us English majors with any special reverence), despite the fervent protestations from budding writers everywhere.  But to my fellow English punks, you Bachelors and Masters alike, know this:  we’re not worth a goddamned thing.  For all the erudite brilliance of Saul Bellow, the visceral sickness of Vladimir Nabokov, the absolute mastery of Dorothy Parker, their work and that like it amounts to very little—or, if my suspicions are correct, nothing.  Something about wishing in one hand and crapping in the other…

The hours we have spent analyzing such works are wasted hours, hours we could have spent doing something useful like smoking cigarettes, or fucking. We have emulated the wrong people, idolized them without justification.  Our attempts to forge our own ways into that echelon of writers good enough, or lucky enough, to serially hoodwink publishers into forking over hefty advances—and readers into sopping up whatever literary poisons we serve—have been exercises not only in futility but in insincerity.

It is the writer’s charge these days to write cynical, sociopathic ad copy for Budweiser by day and by night to affect a sniveling egoism toward anyone who hasn’t considered the synchystic merits of Finnegan’s Wake.  (I learned the word synchisis in class a couple of quarters ago.  How impressive that I’ve used it in my own personal ramblings, eh?  Extra credit!  Furthermore, I haven’t read more than a chapter of Finnegan’s Wake; but since I am an English person, that is to say, a person engaged in the study of English, I am allowed to speculate regarding Joyce’s novel without qualification, having considered at least the vague impressions of the English hive mind, which itself is made up of other consciousnesses that have also not bothered to read the entire book.)

We writers don’t write for you; we write for us.

A potentially harmful machine.*

But that’s an old rant, a holdover from my undergrad years.  A graduate student, especially one at the tail end of his Masters degree, should know better than to throw around frivolous accusations and gross generalities, yes?  Besides, the anti-writer writer is a bit of a cliché in and of itself; and, these days, I’m loath to call myself a writer at all.  Writers write, after all.  (Or, as I said more than a few years ago, “Writers write and shut the fuck up about it.”)

But here’s the nut of this thing:  writing, in itself, is not the point.  The point, of course, has more to do with what we write and, these days, whether we are qualified to write it.  I’ve veered away from fiction recently precisely because it says less and less to me as time goes on (though it is a form I will probably always love).  The echelon of great fiction writers, past and present, certainly have It, whatever It is—that mix of wit, perception, foresight, whatever.  Most of us, however, don’t have a thing to say because we haven’t ever studied anything besides literature and writing:  we haven’t, you know, attempted to look at the world as it is and come to our own conclusions; we’ve filtered everything we know through our hero authors, who’ve parsed love, loss, pain, elation, reconciliation, and disgusting sex into neat little packets, which we consume greedily, believing we’ve gained something from the endeavor.  And many times we have, but I suspect we overestimate the value of art in a vacuum.

We would almost certainly be better writers had we been forced—prior to ever enrolling in a writing course—to major in physics or history or geology, or dropped into the middle of a shark-infested reef with a nasty gash in one leg and a rusted Bowie knife strapped to the other.  Those are the sorts of experiences that give you, well, experience, and furthermore, they provide what is perhaps the most lacking feature in my demographic of mediocre wordsmiths:  frame of reference.

Do you really have anything to say about reality if you’ve spent your own steeped in abstractions and simplifications, both of which are inherently necessary to make any work of literature operate as a unit?  What if you’re like me?  What if you’ve had it pretty easy relative to many of your peers, the well-cared-for life, so to speak, and had little more responsibility than to whip up eloquent-sounding papers on the Wife of Bath or on metaphor in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, which you never even finished?  Do you, then, have any perspective that will help your fellow human?  Maybe, in a very limited sense.  But I’m not so sure.

Writing and literature students should be plucked from their cheap plastic seats, their pens violently wrenched from their hopeful fingers, their self-important smirks wiped off with the business end of a broad, hairy-knuckled hand.  They should be put on a farm for braindead rejects, where, with a bit of luck and some elbow grease, they can work their way back into society—but not before being trapped in a pen with a rutting elk.  Fight your way out of that, kid, and we’ll set you up with a cushier gig in the kitchen, where you’ll spend the next four years licking the plates clean and massaging antibiotic ointment into the fry cook’s grease burns.  Don’t worry, though.  You’ll be able to put all of this on your resumé.

Because the sad thing is, most of us will not make a living doing this.  Most of us won’t even run a successful blog doing this (case in point).  But you wouldn’t know that with all the hopeful eyes about.  If we’re studying writing for our own personal edification or because we simply love it, that’s fine; if we are taking a cue from my proposed Torture Farm Scenario, just in reverse—using writing to gain a skill set that complements our life in business or taxidermy—okay.  My suspicion, however, is that we all think we’ve got something special to say, and probably a few of us (you) do.  But I’d be willing to bet that number is much smaller than enrollment.

This is not a plea for anyone to stop writing—I’d feel rotten if it was—but it most certainly is a request to consider why we’re in this racket at all and, if we’re truly serious, what we’re going to do about it.  My advice:  get interested in something else.  We’ll be better writers.

* Photo by seychelles88 (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0):  Underwood Portable Typewriter (1926)

Cookie.  John Lennon

My smoking has kicked up again; and my mental health is easily at a five-year low.  Over the past month or two I have lost close to twenty-five pounds and averaged about one meal, three hours of sleep, five hours of stomach pain, fourteen hours of lumbago, and 0.7 grim and disappointing ejaculations per day.  Add to this hideous menagerie my various other physical maladies: an aching leg on account of a self-suspected deep vein thrombosis, constant tinnitus in my right ear, strange pseudoseizures on the left side of my body, an impinged peripheral nerve (or brachial plexus), and general physical atrophy.

The picture gets pretty bleak.  But things are about as well as can be expected.

It’s important that anything I say prior to and after this sentence be taken with a grain of salt—not a very big one, but a grain nonetheless.  My glucose levels are likely perilously low.  If I hadn’t have choked down a veggie patty sandwich in the car, I might very well be unconscious on the floor at my office right now—eyes lolling about, tongue wagging uncontrollably in the small puddle of oil that has leaked out of this antique space heater next to me.  The paramedics wouldn’t come until tomorrow morning when my boss would stroll in to find me comatose, a bull’s-eye carved into my forehead and a note stapled to my chest.  Please Throw Out.

I look like a strung-out hooker with these dark bags under my eyes.  I am perilously dehydrated.

This week in particular has been marked by tremendous scholastic and personal failures.  It used to be that I could pull any old wad of written garbage out of my ass and have it fawned over by a classroom full of students, most of whom were better suited for jobs as spitshiners or doorstops at a roadside motel.  Not anymore.  Not these days.  Mostly because the professors have gotten better, even if most of the students have not. No, it appears I will need to work (a little) to make the grade this time around, which is an idea that is at once exciting and anathema to me.

It’s the human interest story, though, that gets to me.  A sub-par grade I can cope with, here or there, and professional woes generally prove to be transient.  But there is some encoded malfunction in my brain that seems entirely unable to navigate the strange and tortuous passageways that make up human interaction.  My signalling functions are working properly, I’m sure.  I don’t doubt that I am sufficiently able to convey my messages, both spoken and unspoken, to any given person.  My signal recognition, however, is on the fritz.

I will not go into the details, because they are boring and would unfairly implicate a vast number of parties who don’t deserve to be half-assedly and ineffectually veiled in my depressed rantings.  I’ve changed my Standard Operating Procedure in this regard.  Besides, if I were to be bluntly honest about the strained emotional logic that has possessed my brain for weeks now, it would be embarrassing for all of us—for me, in the way one must be embarrassed when caught singing along to Dolly Parton songs in the bathroom—for you, in the way one is embarrassed when watching reality TV.  It will suffice to say that I am grossly mistaken about many things. Not only that, but there was never any indication otherwise save for those abstractions of truth produced by my hunger- and fatigue-addled brain.

Could I have been so deluded?  So hopelessly lacking any kind of practical filter that would have prevented this not-so-wholly private meltdown?  I try my damndest to be logical, to recognize and counteract my own confirmation biases, but the possibility that I ignored every bit of evidence contradicting my desired conclusion is not only very real, it is undeniable.

To a point, I am comfortable with that assertion. I am not comfortable with that assertion, not in the least.  It means that every fouled up algorithm and faulty rule set in my head must be razed and constructed again from scratch.  The entire machine needs to be rebooted or, better yet, scrapped for new hardware.

Even now, a few shadowy echoes are trickling back into my accessible memory.  Clues I should have registered and evaluated.  Bits of pertinent data foolishly omitted during analysis.  It has become clear to me that this whole series of malfunctions was preventable, and utterly so.  I am mortified, and the more I run and re-run the numbers, the clearer the picture becomes.  Not only was I delusional, I was absolutely clueless.

Too many questions.  Too many hard answers to stomach.  Just over a quarter century on this blighted rock has not prepared me for anything: some damn thing about jumping into the ocean, and sharks…

Failure is not a rare commodity in my life.  I export it the way Saudi Arabia exports oil or America exports mercenaries.  Still, such massive miscalculations are rare, such catastrophic shutdowns merely theoretical.  If only there was some maligned geek to pin this on and shove out the door in front of the entire office: I could rest easily knowing that I’d made a scapegoat out of the poor, guiltless schmuck and ruined him and his family.  But I’ve got no one to blame but myself on this one. I simply should have known better.

The cookie jar is empty, John.  The dream is over.

From the top of the Red Cross Hospital in Hiroshima looking northwest. Frame buildings recently erected. 1945*

I’m taking a class on New Journalism, and our reading assignment this week was John Hersey’s famous article, published in The New Yorker on August 31, 1946, simply titled “Hiroshima”.  (You can access the article here, but it’s behind a paywall.)  Hersey’s piece  is a truly harrowing tale told from the perspective of a handful of citizens who lived through the bombing—their actions in the direct aftermath, and their struggles a year after.  Hersey’s prose is matter-of-fact:  he does not proselytize; he does not interpret; he simply tells the story and stays out of the way.

One passage in particular struck me:  Mr. Tanimoto, a Methodist pastor who has been ferrying the wounded and dying across a river for hours in a small punt, using a bamboo pole in place of an oar, sees a group of people huddled on a sandbar, about to be drowned by the rising tide:

Mr. Tanimoto found about twenty men and women on the sandspit.  He drove the boat onto the bank and urged them to get aboard.  They did not move and he realized that they were too weak to lift themselves.  He reached down and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge, glove-like pieces. He was so sickened by this that he had to sit down for a moment.  Then he got out into the water and, though a small man, lifted several of the men and women, who were naked, into his boat.  Their backs and breasts were clammy, and he remembered uneasily what the great burns he had seen during the day had been like:  yellow at first, then red and swollen, with the skin sloughed off, and finally, in the evening, suppurated and smelly.  With the tide risen, his bamboo pole was now too short and he had to paddle most of the way across with it. On the other side, at a higher spit, he lifted the slimy living bodies out and carried them up the slope away from the tide.  He had to keep consciously repeating to himself, “These are human beings.”  It took him three trips to get them all across the river.  When he had finished, he decided he had to have a rest,and he went back to the park.

The appeal to humanity in this passage strikes me as especially haunting, the fact that one must remind himself that these mangled bodies he carries are, in fact, people, and that he must not recoil, that he must treat them with due dignity.  If there is a larger message about the dehumanizing effect of war, you can mull that one over yourself; that’s not what makes this passage so interesting or appalling to me.  For me, the scene stands alone as a stark and visceral moment in which the pure fact of humanity must be affirmed, against all revulsion and shock, and while we may consider broader issues, we should never forget the bare existence of our personal breaking points.  Mr. Tanimoto girds himself against his own in this case.  Would that we could all be so certain we would react as admirably.

* Picture is a public domain image from Wikimedia Commons. I took the caption from the Wikimedia summary as well.

Google+, after a little initial hiccup, rolled out a highly functional mobile app (Android’s was more functional than the iPhone’s, from what I hear) with resharing, user tagging, and a nice interface. Facebook now responds with v1.7 for Android  after a number of incremental updates, albeit slowly, with tagging, a photo swipe interface, and a slightly more functional design, the former of which features should have been available a long time ago. Maybe Facebook would have done this eventually anyway, but their app has been notoriously mediocre for quite awhile now, until  today.

The more users Google or any other social network can siphon from Facebook the better.  If Facebook continues to feel meaningful pressure from its competitors, Zuckerberg’s crew will continue to add features and improve their own service.

Now if Google would only integrate Reader with Google+ I’d be ecstatic.

I can’t remember if the quote above appears in this exact form in Michael Chabon’s novel, but Rip Torn delivers it perfectly in the film adaptation.  Q, of course, is the pretentious, vocally flatulent writer “friend” of Grady’s who gives a speech to an auditorium of rapt students eager to lap up his every word.

No writer has cause for this sort of hubris or even confidence, really.  Writing is of very little worth to a practical person—at least fiction, certainly poetry, and most journalism.  Sure, writing was the primary driver behind just about every information revolution dating back to the Neanderthal, but when I consider my own forays into the art form, as well as my continuing formal education which revolves around it, I’m struck with a tremendous sense of failure.  Not because I’m a bad writer;  I am, but that’s not the point.  Quite simply, I feel that the contributions to be made through fiction are no longer relevant.  If they ever were, they assisted social movements at times in which the public opinion could be sufficiently galvanized through such means.  The most socially important fiction book of our generation is The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.  Don’t think too hard about this one; you’ll depress yourself; but it’s probably fair to say that no novel of the past fifteen years has spurred the sort of widespread social introspection that The Da Vinci Code did.  Was it a good book?  No.  Were Dan Brown’s arguments accurate?  Who cares.  Regardless of the latter answer, the post-publication wave of self-proclaimed Gnostic experts who attempted to dismantle the Vatican’s very foundation speaks to a perhaps higher-than-normal level of religious reconsideration among the general public at that time.

But that’s it.  That’s all we’ve got.  The most important (mass-appealing) novel of a generation led to little more than an impotent quasi-intellectual orgy and two Hollywood “blockbusters” that were even worse than the books upon which they were based.

Art is fruitless.  Its intrinsic value, or worth, is measured only by the effectiveness of its illusion, and on that count, I suppose I’m still trapped by it.  I love stories—reading them, watching them, listening to them.  Stories help to parse some of the big questions into manageable bite-sized pieces.  Of course, this impression is little more than a mirage of understanding, just as perhaps all of our pretenses toward knowledge are.

I don’t mean to say art is meaningless, but its benefits are intangible and woefully subjective.  A breakthrough drug will save lives; a plasma engine may one day take us to deep space; carbon nanotubes could give us clean, long-term battery power.  These contributions are more easily weighed and more important to the well-being of the human race than something as trivial as Moby Dick or War and Peace—the intellectual rigor required to see their success, greater and more demanding.  The artistic mind is a disorganized one, a mind that succumbs to its every flight of fancy and one that is often beholden, almost specifically, to its biases, preferring instead to substitute fantasy for reality, folk philosophy for physical reality.  Right?

Maybe.

But then I think of Nabokov and Orwell, even Vonnegut, who always struck me as a profoundly humane person, and decide otherwise.  I think of Dali and Van Gogh, two artists with almost purely artistic intelligence, and Jimi Hendrix, who likely could do nothing else but play the guitar like a motherfucker.  They all did tremendous work that I love.

I suppose that’s all worth something, but who’s to say what?  Love, sadly, is not a good marker of utility.