Savannah Lee

...that I just don't know how I get anything done. Some days, I don't.

Here's an article about the use of beta blockers in sports. Beta blockers help nervous athletes by tamping down the physiological signs of their nerves (the shaking hands, etc). Some people say this is cheating, but author Carl Elliott argues that beta blockers level the playing field. Rather than conferring an extra advantage, they make up for a deficiency, bringing nervous athletes up to the level of calm ones.

This anti-nostalgia article features an astonishing portrait of the author as a young woman in the 1950s. She is walking through what looks like a dystopian fantasy London--empty streets, dense pollution, an unleashed and unattended dog running like a wolf into the silent road. Further down, a picture of indifferently-cared-for children standing in a trash-strewn street help make her point that "if things aren't what they used to be, then thank heavens for that."

And here's Michael Dirda's review of Julian Barnes' new book about death. I don't think this is a good topic for people to write about. I don't think it helps them. Somehow these things always reek of neurosis to me. The problem is, books about death are inevitably books about life--or more precisely, about the frantic fear that we're not getting enough out of it. Enough experience, enough delight--but really, finally, enough status. Very few people who write this kind of thing ever weep over the tragedy that they'll never understand particle physics or Wittgenstein. Barnes, by contrast, wallows in the indifference that "those who have never heard of you--which is, after all, almost everybody" will feel towards his passing. That's meant to seem stoical. In my opinion, it's a narcissistic complaint.

The line between wanting to do something meaningful in the world, to touch whoever you can in whatever way your fate or your gifts allow, versus wanting to be known or regarded in a neurotic/narcissistic way, is bright but unsteady. Contemplating death as such does not help our easily-confused minds and emotions stay on the right side of it.

But the second-to-last paragraph of this review is actually quite beautiful and haunting. It describes people whose last words were of the moment--a famous critic telling his nurse "You have beautiful hands;" A.E. Houseman assessing his last shot as "Beautifully done."

Anna Pavlova is reported to have said "Bring me my swan costume." Some people say that it was, "Play that last measure softly."

A very dear friend of mine died a good fourteen years ago now, but he was just at a party I attended in July. I kept seeing him in the corner of my eye. I would turn towards him, not in shock or disbelief but in the calm knowledge that I was going to find his eyes. Of course, I could never quite reach him; but he was there.

I felt a pleasant lightness around him, an everyday radiance. He's doing well. Happy.

Should I say how green the trees are outside my window.

Should I say how sweet the air feels today, for some reason.

Should I say I've been drinking way too much diet caffeine-free Coke.

Should I say that I recently found a tiny button that popped off an old top of mine from anthropologie that I bought back when they were even more boho than they are now. There's no way I should have found this thing, but there it was.

Should I say that my husband and daughter both got the exact same fortunes in their fortune cookies two days ago.

Or that I've gone back to using Ivory soap...I need breaks from time to time because it can be a bit drying, especially in the winter. But nothing else feels or smells so much like clean to me.

Yardley's English Lavender is my other favorite. English Lavender and Ivory. (One time, however, finding myself Noxzema-less in an isolated farmhouse close to midnight, I did make the dire mistake of washing my face with English Lavender. This might work for some people, but not for me. You have never seen so many cystic zits come up so fast, so dark, or so angry. If I'd been anywhere near the vicinity of caring about how I looked, I would have impaled myself on the sink fixtures then and there.)

Maybe I should say more about that farmhouse. It belonged to two dear friends of our family, before they built a bigger one a few miles down the road. This is the place that I especially remember, though, and love. A patchwork little place. Part of the mountain it lived in. Sheltered by such dense tree growth that it was cold in midsummer.

That same night in the bathroom, a tiny mouse peeked out at me from under the vanity. It didn't seem terribly concerned by me, or the light in the room. It nosed around a bit before deciding that it wouldn't come in after all. It slipped back out the way it had come, a glorified crack that seemed much too small for the plump creature it had been.

Should I say that I don't know why I've remembered that, all these years.

We never called it "jumping rope." Instead, very sensibly, we called it "jump-roping."

By "we" I mean the kids at my tiny middle school.

And I do mean tiny. Weensy. There was only one classroom per grade. It was so small that even someone as dedicated as myself was not able to fully maintain recluse status. In fact I think those years were the most social interaction I've ever had, before or since. Not that that's saying much. Mostly I kept to myself, because that was what I w.a.n.t.e.d. and that degree of determination can't be entirely thwarted. But there were a couple of occasions where I found myself doing stuff with other humans. Like jump-roping.

Every time I sit down at the keyboard, I see the dirty rope smacking the asphalt. Even if only in the background, it's there. It's there as I open up all the documents I'm working on, poise my fingers above the keys, and start reading my way back into them. It's all about knowing when to jump. You have to wait...wait...wait...there!

And if you misjudge your moment, everything gets tangled up.

So there was this guy at my college. Walking home late one night, I saw him spying on a floormate of mine, standing on a railing outside and peering in her window. Now maybe he was just checking to see if she was home, but...still. There are, you know, easier and less invasive ways to do that.

I never told my floormate what I'd seen, but she got the picture in other ways and sort of gently floated and wriggled away from him like a guppy.

A few years later, I saw that he'd married a different classmate--a foreign-exchange student.

I learned a major lesson.

Think not just twice, but three, four and five times before you marry someone from another country. There is an extremely large chance that they're at least slightly creepy. And unless it's at Charles Manson levels, you're not gonna be able to tell.

Why, you may ask, is that relevant to this fascinating review of a book comparing British and American culture? Well, because I watch "Doctor Who," of course.

(Folks, I'm a card-carrying Green Personality Color/Quick-Start-Insistent [that'd be the bottom section, "Improvise," on the green cylinder] crunchy flaky artist hippie type. Do not try this sort of reasoning at home. Or, like, work or school.)

But seriously, it really does make sense. See, I think I understand that show. When, in "The Parting of the Ways," the Dalek taunts the Doctor with the question of whether he wants to be a coward or a destroyer of worlds, and he defiantly says "Coward. Any day" and refuses to carry through his genocide of the Daleks, I thought that was about the Doctor. But no! It's actually British culture carrying on an argument with itself! Because look here:

"The world wars, she continues, created generations of men with a horror of cowardice [emphasis mine] and the strong connection between emotional repression and manliness."

Who knew!? That single moment represents Britain trying to pry itself away from values that don't really serve it anymore, trying to wake up from a trauma-induced nightmare, trying to say that "cowardice"--pathologically defined as a refusal to kill--is better than the alternative. (In "Family of Blood," too, one boarding-school student calls another, more intelligent one "a miserable coward." "Oh yes, every time," he responds, slipping away to save the day behind the scenes.)

The real significance of those moments was totally lost on me until, completely by accident, I stumbled on that article.

Similarly, the real significance of the moods and sayings and affect of even very "close" sets of foreigners (Austrians and Germans, British and Americans, Belgians and French, Uruguayans and Argentines, Russians and Ukrainians) is almost certainly lost as well. Context is so subtle. So deceptive. There's just enough overlap to get us all in trouble. Make us marry a creep.

Or maybe save us. Who knows.

...with the otherwise delightful review of 'The Anglo Files' to which I linked you yesterday.

Author Sarah Lyall discusses British sexuality--a chapter which, in my opinion, could have been written just by pasting in a bunch of pictures of Daniel Craig, David Tennant, Christopher Eccleston, Sting, George Michael, John Simm, Hugh Laurie, Alan Rickman, Keith Richards and Craig Charles. And a defibrillator. We'd definitely be needing one of those. What is it with these criminally hot British men? Do you see the sheer diversity of human affect represented by that list? You got rough necks, soft lips, hard eyes, mocking calm, antic promise, dark wit, trembling soul, skull-sight, puppy-dog, oncoming-storm, and so much else all up in there, not only among them but within them, each of them, behind whatever quality they foreground in the world. I mean, there's so much to...so much to...

Where was I?

Oh yes. The book. Right. She covers such topics as the apparently pervasive male-male sexual harassment, the spanking thing, and so on. What caught my eye, though, is that she sums it all up as follows:

"Is it any wonder that Englishmen--particularly British men of a certain class--are so mixed up about sex?"

Um...as opposed to who? Is Lyall trying to imply that Americans, by contrast, are somehow not mixed up about sex? (ED.: I should probably, you know, read the book and find out. Which I think will be a ton of fun! Off to the library...And now, back to my rant.) We are a country that cannot even bring ourselves to tell our teenagers what's what. We just scream at them to wait, then send them home to watch TV, aka The Human Sexuality Exploitation Machine. We silently order them to behave irrationally, then blame them when they do.

And that's just us. We haven't even gotten started on all the other nearly 200 countries out there on this little green football. EVERYPLACE is mixed up about sex. And everything else. Humans are the stupidest species on earth. Our brilliance has arisen out of our stupidity, our inability to operate ourselves properly in any sphere whatsoever. Our brilliance is our compensation. And it isn't half good enough. We're still stoop-shouldered, weak in the core, locked in old patterns, pointlessly argumentative, riddled with disease, governed by fascists, victimized by our childhoods (most insidiously in the ways we can't even perceive), personally unfulfilled, and fundamentally confused. We're not even smart enough to stop inflicting war and crime on ourselves. How do we manage this much wrongness? It should be physically impossible.

Yet here we are, writing books comparing Britain and America.

Yeahhhh, yesterday. Between the unexpected sleeping late, the unexpected trip to Denny's, the unexpected tour of my area's antique stores and galleries, and so forth, I kinda didn't blog. Or even manage to announce that I wasn't going to blog. Sorry.

The reason I'm so totally excited is because I read this essay by Cynthia Ozick. It actually, imho, starts off kind of shaky, but then breaks into flight like an escaped falcon. Which is to say that the best part of it is its self-remembering, oh yes, this is what it feels like, this is what I am. This is what I can do.

Along about paragraph six is when the wings really start to stretch on the air. To act like they're going somewhere instead of back to the jesses. "You have never met [a writer]," Ozick declares with the chilling truth of a Stephen King. "[If you have], then you can be sure it is all a mistake."

And why have we never met a writer?

Well, it involves telling a campfire tale, but what it boils down to is: writers only exist in the dark. Where they can be "at home among the ghosts."

So those people who walk around "industriously chatting on the terrace," well, they ARE real, in the sense that you can touch them (Ozick calls them a "palpable effigy"), but nonetheless they are not...well, they're beside the point, is what Ozick is saying. They're completely beside the point.

There's something deeply and wonderfully Buddhist about that.

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In and around these beautiful words, I'm afraid you are going to encounter the particularly maddening sort of reverse narcissism which leads Ozick to boast about her low sales and her "invisibility." Just ignore that. Ignore the stuff that's about fame, an even worse subject for humans to write about than death. Tear those bones out of the metaphor; ghosts don't need 'em anyhow. Leave only the milk-light in the darkness, the kindly glow by which the writer works.

The moon by which the falcon makes its escape.

Here is my Enneagram-typing of my favorite science fiction characters.

"Your what, sweetheart?"

The Enneagram is a traditional personality grid. I follow the Riso-Hudson system, to which the link goes.

There are nine types in the Enneagram, designated by numbers. According to Riso/Hudson, whose work I admire to such a degree that I nearly become apoplectic just thinking about it, the Enneagram breaks down by threes: there are three "assertive" types (3, 7 and 8), three "withdrawn" types (4, 5 and 9) and three "compliant" types (1, 2 and 6). ("Compliant" does not mean "doormat" or "obedient," it means that those folks are primarily conscience-driven, as in, "I'm really tired but I have to go to Jan's party because I said I would and people are expecting me to." And not that other types wouldn't feel/act that way, but it's more so with the compliant types.)

Beyond that, the nature of each type is neatly summarized by the names Riso and Hudson pick for them (printed right on their front page):

1) The Reformer (I'd say "the Ethicist" or "the Crusader" or "the Idealist" could work too)
2) The Helper
3) The Achiever
4) The Individualist
5) The Investigator
6) The Loyalist (also known as The Troubleshooter, and should, imho, also be known as The Rebel)
7) The Enthusiast
8) The Challenger
9) The Peacemaker

If you read Riso/Hudson, they give detailed descriptions of all of these types. What's amazing is the degree to which these descriptions re-created themselves for me in reverse when I turned my attention to some of my favorite science fiction characters. I'd be like, "Well, okay, what is (say) Rose Tyler like? Overall, in all the episodes I've seen, how does she come across?" And I'd write my observations down: "highly emotional, leads with her feelings, self-absorbed in both the good and bad sense of the term, alienated from her original world." And then I'd start reading through Riso/Hudson's descriptions of the Types to see where my observations would fit. (It's important to do that without any preconceived notions.) Lo and behold, I came across this, from "Personality Types:"

"The Four is the personality type which emphasizes the subjective world of feelings, in creativity and individualism, in introversion and self-absorption, and in self-torment and self-hatred."

See, that is not just a match, that is a MAAAAATCH. My notes about Rose flung its arms around Riso/Hudson's description of the Four and the two of them danced ecstatically about the room, thrilled to have found each other. In a sense, to describe a person at all is to describe their type.

NOTE: Riso and Hudson posit "Levels" of psychological health to the Types. You can be Healthy, Average or Unhealthy. The traits of the types differ subtly depending what level you're talking about. I am typing to the Average. None of these characters are healthy; they're all unfulfilled and lack certain crucial kinds of self-awareness and control. That's what makes 'em fun.

Onward. Let's do Star Trek first.

Captain Kirk. Somewhere in the archives of the marvelous literotica site [GROWNUPS ONLY PLEASE] Clean Sheets, where I have been fortunate enough to place some stories, there is an essay on kink and Star Trek. Is it still there? Can I find it?...Yes!! Here we go, Alyn Walsh's delightful "Future Submission." She delivers herself of the most insightful two words anyone has ever, ever, ever said about James Tiberius Kirk: "Closet submissive."

Doesn't that explain everything?

I don't think, however, that the signs quite lie where Walsh says they do ("the constant need to prove himself, the posturing, the rebellious attitude towards authority figures"). Those are not the things that make him submissive. They ARE, however, the things that make him a Six. Specifically a "counterphobic" one. Read Riso/Hudson! It's all there.

Add in his impulsiveness, spontaneity, wanderlust, sensuality, and love of adventure and experience, and I'd say he's a 6/7.

(A wha? Let me explain. Each type is more or less influenced by one of the types right next to it, called the "wing." So Type Two, for example, is either going to have a One-wing or a Three-wing. That is, they're going to be your BFF who will show up at 2am in a blizzard to help you fix your furnace--even though you just met them last Tuesday--but they will do this EITHER through the lens of a highly ethical, self-controlled One OR the lens of a more glamorous Three. So...once I decide James Kirk is a Six, I'll be looking at Five and Seven to see which of their traits he has more of. Well, the Five is an intellectual loner, so that's out. But as it happens, Sevens are sensuous, spontaneous swashbucklers, so there you go.)

...As for what makes him submissive, I think that's pure poetry. It's the shadow behind the eyes. It's the ghost haunting his lips, it's the elisions, the pauses, the sudden softness of his voice where you'd expect him to be loud, the hint of a plea inside every command.

Mister Spock. Actually, Riso and Hudson mention Mr. Spock in their book "Personality Types." They've got him as a 1/9, a cerebral idealist. Hmm, I wonder if they've got Captain Kirk. I don't remember seeing him. I'll have to check. It'd be interesting if Riso and Hudson saw him differently from me. Back to Spock! Typing him as a One means R/H think his sense of morality and ethics dominates his character. I dunno. I have watched a lot of "Star Trek" in my time--though not nearly as much as the hardcore fans, so I could be wrong. But Spock, iirc, doesn't concern himself with the right thing to do, but rather, the logical thing to do. There can be a difference.

If you notice, on the show, it's actually Dr. McCoy who's the conscience, who badgers Kirk and Spock about what's right and wrong, who's always going "How can you even consider that, you cold-blooded blah blah blah." Of course, Dr. McCoy's sense of ethics is personal, whereas Spock's ethics are theoretical and detached, which Riso and Hudson say is true of many Ones. But Spock has no moral vanity; that's not where he's going to stand or fall. He's not tempted by hypocrisy or secret lives or Jekyll-Hyde dualities, all typical pitfalls for Ones according to R/H. Those are not Spock's shadows. Rather, feelings of inadequacy and being flawed are what dog him. And his fascination with newness, discovery, science, always stands out for me. Left to my own devices, I'd tentatively call him a Five ("The Investigator"). See, if you read Riso and Hudson, Ones tend to feel that they KNOW what is right. To the extent that Spock is concerned with what's "right" (as opposed to what's logical), he is always seeking to DISCOVER that, to study the evidence and think it through, reaching new conclusions as necessary. Given my understanding of R/H, I'd say that makes him a Five.

As for the wing, I'd pick Four, because of the intuitive aspect of him. He's always melding with people.

Dr. McCoy. I'd say he's a 2/1 where the One-wing is strong, lifting him somewhat above the Two's focus on individuals and the personal.

Tomorrow: perhaps we will continue this little game. I find it amusing.

So. I did actually post something today. However, I have just discovered that I put it in the scheduler wrong. So it loaded *behind* the one for yesterday. Just scroll down, if you want to read it.

Sorry about that. If I can figure out how to fix it, I will....

ED. Okay, it should be fixed soon.

ED. ED. Yep, it's fixed; look below. It's still dated 9/8 instead of 9/9, but it's in the right spot. Phew.

So if you were with me yesterday, you found yourself dragged along like an exhausted dog-walker as I ran around pointing out the various features of my favorite mental chew toy, the Riso/Hudson Enneagram system of personality typology. Nor did I stop there, but went on to bend your ear about how I personally felt these types applied to some of the characters from my favorite science fiction shows (because what else would a girl like me watch, really). Yesterday we did Star Trek.

Today, I will be grabbing your hand again and dragging you through.......

DOCTOR WHO (new series)

The Doctor. What's the diagnosis here? He's always excited about the next adventure, the next possibility, the next experience. He's greedy, even gluttonous for event and sensation and wonders to behold. He's quick, facile (in the best sense of the word), spontaneous. He prefers activity to any sort of reflection. He likes to have companions travel with him, but only on his terms; it's his way or the highway. They join him on his adventures, not the other way around. If they want to leave, he'll miss them, but someone else (and the next amazement) will be just over the horizon. If you've read Riso/Hudson, that's a textbook Seven. And then...oh, then. If you piss him off in just the wrong way, god better help you, 'cause nobody else can. Yep, he's got a hefty and fairly dangerous Eight-wing there.

Rose Tyler. 4/5. It's all about feelings for Rose. Wants. She wants her Doctor. She wants her daddy. She wants chips. She wants to be special (and takes it badly when she discovers that the Doctor has had companions before her). Her touching inability to get outside of herself, to ask if those feelings and wants might be illusions, to table them for once, lead her to her worst-yet-greatest moments. Add to this her deep feelings of alienation from her own world ("there's nothing for me here"), and yeah, I'm pretty sure we've got a Four on our hands. I went with the Five-wing subtype because the 4/5 subtype is called the "bohemian," and Rose definitely has a bohemian streak; she cares nothing for society or her place in it, preferring to follow her passions alone.

Martha Jones. 9/1. In fact, if you've read the description of the Nine type, the way Martha matches up is almost eerie. She's the listener and mediator of her family, ignoring slights to herself for the sake of stopping others from fighting. Strife between people seems to upset her. She rarely if ever causes it herself, although when she does have something she needs to say, she says it flat out. Mostly, however, she accepts things and people as they are, even to the point of letting others take the credit that she has a claim to. She doesn't ask for much. Of all the companions of the new series, she does the hardest, longest and most drudgery-laden work for the Doctor. Yep, that's her, scrubbing floors in "Human Nature," working in a shop in "Blink," and trudging alone and exhausted through the bitter cold of a destroyed Earth in "Last of the Time Lords." All for the sake of the Doctor. Yet she asks for (and gets) the least from him in return. Poignantly, she wishes the Doctor would love her, but never tries to make him. All her gifts to him are free. (That disqualifies her from average Two-hood.) When she finally decides to value herself enough to politely kick him to the curb and move on with her life, it's a real victory--and exactly what Nines need to do, value themselves and stake a claim on their own lives. Seriously, it's like somebody READ Riso/Hudson before they invented Martha, although of course they didn't...which is an incredible validation of the collective unconscious, the idea that we all KNOW this, we just don't know we do. We steer by type (and archetype) most surely when least consciously.

Donna Noble. Let's just put it this way. It is not every woman who, finding herself sucked onto a spaceship where she is at the absolute mercy of a strange man, would think it was a good idea to slap and threaten him. Yet this is how Donna and the Doctor meet. Yes, Donna is loud, pushy, and externalizing--and I mean all that in a good way. But what does it add up to? Let's look further. Let's check out her dark side. She's haunted by the fear that she's insignificant, nothing, a disappointment, nobody. In Riso/Hudson, these fears are associated with types Three and Four, but I think that's a red herring. Donna is too brazen, too in-your-face, and too comfortable with the world as it is to be an alienated Four like Rose. And she's too willing to take the heat to be a comparatively fragile Three. According to Riso/Hudson, Threes worry what people think about them; they try to lead with charm. Not Donna. She barges right in and starts smacking Time Lords. She and she alone can directly, aggressively MAKE the Doctor listen to her, stand toe-to-toe and eye-to-eye with mister "fire and ice and rage...the night and the storm in the heart of the sun" ("Family of Blood") and say "YOU CAN STOP NOW" ("The Runaway Bride"). And not because she doesn't know. No, right off the bat, she's also the only one with the brains to tell him, "And then you made it snow! You scare me to death." ("Runaway Bride" again.) But still she faces him down when she has to. Nor does this go unnoticed, except on our stupid planet. Elsewhere, they're smarter, and variously create celestial songs for her or crawl away from her in terror screaming "What ARE you? What are you going to BE?" ("Turn Left") I'd have to say that that kind of mojo, recognized or not, adds up to an Eight. Given her frivolous obsession with celebrity gossip and fun nights on the town, I'll put her wing at Seven.

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What's really fascinating about all this, again, is that it's unintentional. I really, really doubt that Gene Roddenberry was sitting there in 1965 (before the Riso/Hudson version of the Enneagram even existed) going "What we need is a charismatic, counterphobic Six for our captain! With a good strong Seven wing to give him adventure!" Similarly, I doubt Russell T Davies, repositioning the Doctor to ride again in 2005, consulted "Personality Types." ("And THEN we need a companion who's too gentle and longsuffering for her own good...") If nothing else, someone who did that almost certainly wouldn't have created two "withdrawn" companions--Rose the Four and Martha the Nine--in a row. Besides, there's a lack of self-consciousness to it all that's telling. It's not about who they are, they just are who they are...like life.

Also, consider this. By rights, the Enneagram shouldn't apply to fictional characters, who, after all, are made up--and more to the point, whose actions are subject to the dictates of plot, entertainment and authorial Weltanschauung. Yet it does. Even through those situational distortions, Martha sings out loud and clear as a Nine. Donna slaps and badgers her way to tragically misunderstood and ignored Eight-hood. The perpetually amused and curious Doctor leaps and bounds and hops in Seven-ish pursuit of ever new and more intense experiences. It's not the whole truth of who they are (just as with real people). But it's there. On the edges, whispering.

The huz (h/t Tenaya Darlington for that vast improvement on 'hubby') got Fun With The Enneagram posted to the right day at last. It was very nice of him and I thank him; as for me, I was already asleep.

Yep. I got the kid home from school yesterday, told her "Honey, I gotta take a nap," and was not meaningfully awake again until about an hour ago. There was a brief interlude where I called in a pizza from bed, then actually went down to pick it up, nuke some green beans to go with it, and, apparently, eat it. The next thing I knew, it was after midnight and I was snuggled up under a blanket on the couch. I certainly hope my family had a good evening. I spent this morning dreaming--vividly--that I was talking to them instead of actually doing it.

So now I'm sitting here eating a banana and some peanuts and wondering if I can still get the license plate of whatever hit me.

The one with Den Dennys. The one with the CD where one of the tracks was titled "Vim Is Angry." The one with "You overdubbed my bass line."

"Bad News"! That's it. (I think. Maybe. Yeah, I'm pretty sure.)

Okay, so I was thinking about that because I saw a book in the bookstore yesterday. I saw a book in the bookstore yesterday, and Vim is angry. Oh yes.

This thing was a misfire for me. Wherever it needed me to be in order to meet it properly, I wasn't there. All I saw was a book, described as a (literary) "erotic novel" and with a cover to match, which was...polite. Yes, it was polite, and not even deliberately so. No, this politeness was (imho) unintentional, the result of smallness of vision and an inner flame the size of a penlight. Its erotic scenes, which were actually few, did not rise to the level of a Harlequin historical. It had neither the drive nor clarity of purpose of such an animal. Nor the insight which is supposed to be the province of literature. Plus, it was negative, fearful of what it touched. In a sour rather than a holy way.

I was left thinking: why did this author write this book? I felt no joy or urgency in it. Not even a simple thrill at crashing through convention. It didn't crash through convention, it shored convention up. I walked away not just disappointed but feeling tricked. Vim was angry. Very angry.

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I am mindful that these things are what I saw in the book. Literature is largely subjective. As perfume critics Turin and Sanchez remind us, we all smell the same stuff--but we interpret it very differently. So I don't want to say this was a bad book. It might not be. I will say, however, that it was the wrong book for me. I felt angry at it on behalf of all written erotica everywhere.

I needed an antidote. Maybe you do too. For whatever reason. Maybe you need an antidote today.

So if you're over twenty-one, and the place where you live has a sense of humor about this kind of thing, may I suggest reading Allen Ginsberg's Please Master. Valiant and unashamed, the nakedness of the mind, this is the real thing. This is eros. Aphrodite. Tremble in the face of the goddess.

Yesterday I said that Allen Ginsberg's only-read-it-if-you're-legally-of-age erotic masterwork "Please Master" was unashamed. I was of course completely wrong. The whole thing reeks of shame, and that's exactly the point. As we are all instructed to do with regards to fear, he stands in the full heat of his demon-est emotion and does exactly what it's telling him not to do. He shouts in the face of his chains.

I saw Allen Ginsberg once, walking down one of the paths of the Omega Institute. He was wearing a pair of white shorts, if I remember correctly, and had knobby knees. He was every bit as flagrantly, outrageously, tremblingly human as you'd expect him to be from his poems--and every bit as sanctified.

....about these things.

That's what stands out right away (imho) about Anaïs Nin's "Delta of Venus" and "Little Birds," her two erotic classics.

(You think I was kidding about being enraged by that 'erotic novel' in the bookstore. Here's how not kidding I was: I am going to keep going on the real erotica, the deep-vein, necessary stuff, until further notice, pausing only to make those random observations or useless Enneagram-typings of Tolkien and Rowling characters as I may deem necessary for recreational purposes.)

But anyhow--that's what stands out to me, really, about "Delta of Venus" and "Little Birds"--the silences between the lovers. The silences within them. Their sexual worlds are made out of whispers overheard in darkness, rumors, stories, things they've glimpsed when they were where they shouldn't be. They keep these totems of found experience hidden most completely from each other; they come together less like lovers than like raindrops and thunder pelting at the behest of larger, unseen forces. They rarely dream of speaking the resulting revelations.

In this world of sex columnists and polyamory websites, where even fundamentalists are on the sex-positive, wholesome-frankness, work-on-it-together-for-joy bandwagon, the silences of Nin's people in their moments of communion are what mark them as belonging to another age. Another world, really. All the more so, the fact that they don't even see themselves that way. They think they are communicating. But only sometimes, very rarely, and by accident, are they right.

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I wonder if Nin's use of proper words (penis, vulva) in her stories was radical in a time when euphemisms were required for any careful public speech. It seems that, today, those words have sadly been reserved for "proper," clinical, official speech, and only their anti-euphemisms, their meaner sisters, are left for off-label use. Too bad. There's something naked about the 'real' words. Naked and vulnerable, stripping in an interesting way. De-mythologizing. That's helpful. You wouldn't want them for every single context...but you do want them.

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Interestingly, in her preface to "Little Birds," Nin herself claimed that writing erotica is inherently distorting: "It is one thing to include eroticism in a novel or a story and quite another to focus one's whole attention on it. The first is like life itself. It is, I might say, natural...But focusing wholly on the sexual life is not natural...[it is] an abnormal activity that ends by turning [the doer] away from the sexual."

Well, she and her friends were doing it for money, so that's her problem right there. Any kind of creative writing that you undertake solely for money, regardless of your feelings or inspiration, is going to take it out of you.

But there is a larger (and less negative) point lurking in there.

If you read Nin's brief, Calvino-like portraits, each of them hauntingly inconclusive, if you spend time with these imaginary people, you do come away covered with the dust of their souls. All their thunderous rolling does point beyond itself, taking you "away from the sexual" in a downright provocative way. Yes.

Humanism takes many forms. Tantra is a spiritual path.

The room was dank, chill and atrociously lit with fluorescent bulbs that appeared to have been constructed by anti-environmentalists for the ugliness of their light. Outside it was dark too soon. I'd been on campus all day. My feet were damp and freezing and I was counting the minutes--hundreds of them, all in a dismal row--until I could get home.

It was, in other words, a standard graduate English seminar. I was the lone outsider, an art historian fulfilling some PhD coursework requirements.

In came the professor, who told us to open to some such page or other in our giant textbooks that we all bought used and brown-oiled with the thumbs of those who came before us. The fluorescent light made the marks look even dirtier.

We found a poem called "The Imperfect Enjoyment." It was by a writer I hadn't yet heard of...John Wilmot ("Birds feed on birds, beasts on each other prey/But savage man alone does man betray").

If you're a legal adult, you can find "The Imperfect Enjoyment" here; it's the third poem down.

What is good writing? An aspect of it is to combine insight, economy and loveliness. Hopefully in a way that both confirms and expands what we know. Here's John Wilmot on his penis:

"...that part/which should convey my soul up to her heart."

That ought to be in the Bible. We need to add a new chapter to the Song of Songs.

Or perhaps create our own. (Modern Tantra is striving towards such a thing, a cobbled-together bible of eros, "so ancient and so new" as Saint Augustine said of Beauty.)

As "The Imperfect Enjoyment" goes on, our intrepid poet runs into what today we would call performance issues and launches a tirade against the offending member that has to be read to be believed. "It was a libertine age," explained our professor. No doubt!

Or as Wilmot tells it in (legal adult, blah blah, you know the drill) "The Disabled Debauchee:"

"Or should some cold-complexioned set forbid/With his dull morals, our night's brisk alarms/I'll fire his blood by telling what I did/When I was strong and able to bear arms."

Wry, elegiac, and possessed of a quite serious morality of its own...the work of John Wilmot is a treasure.

(P.S. It gets better. He was bisexual, and Johnny Depp did the movie about him.)

David Foster Wallace has died, apparently by suicide.

Here are the thoughts of Nation writer Christopher Hayes.

This is a terrible and devastating loss.

In the library once during my graduate studies I came across a reconstruction of a series of erotic drawings by Giuliano Romano, a pupil of Raphael.

The mostly-lost original (church, burning, you know how it goes) featured poems by a writer named Pietro Aretino. The poems, and Aretino's introduction, were reprinted in the reconstruction.

I read the introduction, which, if you scroll down, you can find here. (You know the deal, this is explicit material, you should only access it if you know good and well that you're old enough and it's okay where you live.)

I never forgot Aretino's central, beautifully simple, powerful and irrefutable demand, which I remembered as: "Why should we not look upon what pleases us?"

The facing plate was a lovely drawing, extravagantly fleshy and heavy in the Renaissance way, of a couple in sex; I seem to remember that the artist had drawn what was going on inside too, so we could see what made their faces burn from within with such intensity and exaltation. As I studied it, Aretino's question hung over me: "Why should we not look upon what pleases us?"

There are moments that forge us, that make us more conscious and intentional. For me, this was one of them. I lived in a time and place where that question was not really necessary to ask; after all, there I was, looking at this book in a university library in perfect freedom. But Aretino hadn't lived in such a time or place. He'd put that question down on paper at grave personal risk. And that imperiled, almost extinguished act had helped to open the small doorway to this place and time. Our place and time. I felt moved and morally convicted.

See if you do too. Here is more of the introduction, as reprinted on the website:

"...and let the hypocrites take a flying leap; I'm sick of their thieving justice and their filthy traditions that forbid the eyes to see what most delights them. What harm is there in seeing a man mounted atop a woman? Must beasts be more free than we are?"

Oh, amen.

It's a gorgeous day. The woods are beckoning. Later...

said my husband, disapprovingly.

"I'm sorry," I cringed. Sometimes things just get away from you. I did start a post--I put it in the scheduler just now, it should pop up fairly soon--but didn't finish it until just now.

But fear not. I will try to make up for my dereliction of bloggy duty by continuing the until-I-can't-think-of-anything-else-to-say-or-just-pass-out Eros Matters series forthwith. Maybe even today, if the stars and meridians smile on me.

There I was, innocently checking the daily entertainment headlines on the Internet Movie Database, when under the Studio Briefings header I saw the words "Brokeback Mountain Author Says Fans Pester Her."

I clicked on it to discover a peevish E. Annie Proulx complaining about how fans of her story "constantly send ghastly manuscripts and pornish rewrites of the story to me" because they "think the story is an open range to explore their fantasies and to correct what they see as an unbearably disappointing story."

Since this is my blog, I should probably find a more writer-y way to say this, but I felt personally offended and actually wounded and humiliated by those remarks. Not because I give a shit about the, imho, staggeringly overrated Brokeback Mountain (if I'm going to slash hot guys in my head, we're currently doing the Doctor and the Master, thank you)...

...but because I have loved stories. God, I have loved stories. I have pressed copies of The Tombs of Atuan and The Great Gilly Hopkins and The Virginian ("My little, little Pedro!") to my chest and cried. They WERE open ranges for me to explore my fantasies, Ms. Proulx, and a lot else besides. And though I happened to grow up in the kind of household where I was aware that sending Ursula K. LeGuin my personal Arha stories was not the thing to do, you can be good and goddamn sure I wrote them.

I really don't understand how Proulx could fail to be moved by the fact that, my god, here are human beings spending hours and hours with her characters. Caring enough about them to want to tell and re-tell and re-re-tell their stories.

Who knows, maybe they're being kind of obnoxious about it; Proulx claims that they are "expecting me to reply with praise and applause for 'fixing' the story." I can see where that would be annoying, if true.

But can't she just ignore that, in favor of the staggering fact that people care that much about Jack and Ennis? At the very least, can't she keep her mouth shut in public and be gracious?

You'll need to register (it's free) to read this article about personality testing, gender differences, and society in the New York Times.

Basically, men and women appear to be more divergent in "personality" (and I'll get to that in a minute) in societies that are more egalitarian. I.e., ancient hunter-gatherers and us.

Surveys and tests appear to show that women in such societies are, despite, or perhaps because of, their freedom, more timid and nurturing. Men remain more strutty and competitive.

In societies that are more rigid, women are timid all right...but so are men.

This is a perfectly interesting point as far as it goes, but it rests on so many conceptual problems that I don't even know where to start.

First of all. Anyone who thinks women aren't competitive doesn't know any women. We are insanely competitive. Just in a different way from men. And for the significant minority of women (and men!) who really aren't competitive...that doesn't mean they don't want to achieve stuff. Just that they're not interested in "winning," which is a totally different thing. As any female person knows, if your stomach happens to be looking flatter than that other woman's today, you "win." But you haven't achieved anything. See how that works?

And this is why most women, I am convinced, skew their own personality tests to make themselves look less competitive. First of all, we're competing to be nicest. Second of all, the questions measure male-style competition rather than female-style, so we can lie by telling the truth. Third of all, we know that competition is contingent, empty, and very different from actually doing something meaningful. The difference is in the words. Doing something meaningful, versus being first/best/whatever. See? BEING nicest. BEING thinnest. BEING prettiest. BEING youngest. Competition aims for static goals. You run and run and run, bake and kiss and serve, diet and crunch and paint, to go nowhere; only to be.

And that means male competition too. All that "I ran faster" and "I've got a bigger SUV/shotgun/bicep" crap is about dick. BEING biggest. Most men, however, seem to labor under the delusion that that's meaningful, or that they can make it meaningful through the literalization of their metaphors. And again, "I ran faster." Or more precisely, "I ran faster within the wildly exaggerated reward framework that my idiot species invented to legitimize the concept of running faster." This is what testosterone will do to you.

Second of all. What they're measuring there--competitiveness, boldness, aggression, risk-taking, timidity, nurturance--isn't really personality. I.e. it's not motive, it's not worldview. It's not essence. It's just how those things (sometimes) get expressed.

As Riso and Hudson remind us, personality traits are neither male nor female. It's not the trait, it's how it gets expressed that's masculine or feminine. Plus, you need to understand the context anyhow.

Take the stereotypical competitive, driven man. It's lazy and stupid to take that at face value and say "His drivenness is masculine and his masculinity shows in his being driven." HOW is he driven? Is he driven because of the insecurity of the Six, who needs to prove himself, establish security, and live up to perceived social ideals? Is he driven by the narcissism of the Three, telling him that without "success" he is nothing? Is he driven by the will of the Eight, who wants to run things? By the scrupulousness of the One, who might be fixated on Calvinist ideas of proving his moral standing by achieving social/professional standing? (Oh, and yeah, that whole "Do you come from a WASP background" thing adds even more complications in.) He might even be driven by the counterphobia of the Seven, who will run and run and run--sometimes even continually in the same direction--to avoid ever having to be alone inside himself.

Now...isn't it obvious how women can have the exact same context and motives? Insecurity, jealousy, ego, pride, will, vanity, dogmatism, self-distraction?

I mean...duh.

You just have to make sure you're comparing apples to apples. Which these people may not be. They studied male runners and female runners. Seeing that middling male runners ran harder than middling female runners, they concluded that men are more competitive. Uh...no? See, they're assuming that running has the same meaning, the same metaphorical import, the same sense of what's at stake, the same symbolism to women that it does to men. Not necessarily. It might! But it might not. You might need to compare male runners to female competitive pie-bakers in order to really get an accurate bead.

Men, for example, might run because on some level they believe it expresses their manliness, so they're going to fight for every inch (as it were). Women, by contrast, might run because they like it and they're good at it. But if they're middle-of-the-pack, then they're middle-of-the-pack. No real big. Whereas female competitive bakers might have that symbolic feeling that this is their womanliness on the line, so they'll become as irrational as male runners, fighting as hard as they can for relative rather than absolute gains because that IS the absolute gain. Because they, and not the only-moderately-competitive runner, are really the ones who are competing against themselves....proving something to themselves about themselves.

Or just not able to STAND the thought of that goddamned Betty Lou winning the banana-cream category one more time.

On the TV, Pokemon battled for our attention with bursts of light and color and the admittedly memorable line "Now I will fight to get our lunch back." (I'm pretty sure that's what was said and not a random aural hallucination on my part.)

Meanwhile, the kid was busy reading The Tale of Despereaux and not eating her pancakes. "Honey," I said every five minutes. "Finish eating. You have to leave for dance in [insert ever-diminishing wedge of time here]." The huz was reading slashdot. And I was reading House Beautiful magazine.

I really don't know how this has happened to me, by the way. The House Beautiful thing. It's not like me. You know how you wake up in the middle of the night screaming 'oh my god, I've become my mother'? See, I already had that moment, only it was 'oh my god, I've become my father.' And I have. Even down to the unpredictable flashes of temper. Mine are not nearly as impressive, given my relative lack of (A) testosterone and (B) childhood instability, but I definitely have his nice-nice-nice-nice-PIRANHA-nice-nice rhythm. Mine just has longer, softer, more languid arcs, and I nip instead of bite.

But yeah, in terms of the question of which parent you become, I have become my dad. I've broken lean at midlife, my hair is a mess, I'm currently going around bothering people about yoga and Ayurveda, and I do all the errands, drive everybody everywhere, and carry everything. Yep. Dad.

And yet, here I am cooing over the pictures in House Beautiful, to which I have actually subscribed....which is a total mom thing.

I'VE BECOME BOTH OF THEMMMMMMMM!!!!

In the midst of the giddy existential terror of this, I stumbled over the following statement from interior designer Jim Howard. Right there on page 126 of House Beautiful. It epochally shut me up and trapped me, to my own benefit, in the silence of its wake:

"People want [every aspect of their home interior] to be great--but when it's all great, then it's all a failure [emphasis mine]. Design is ebb and flow. Make vignettes that are powerful and stunning, and allow the eye to pass over the ordinary and unremarkable."

Now that's something both mom and dad, and even that trail of smoke around the corner which might be me, can agree on.

P.S. I just have to finish re-reading my D.H. Lawrence and we will return to the tender meadows of eros.

And now we are going to discuss Casanova (the 2005 Heath Ledger theatrical release) and Casanova (the 2005 David Tennant Masterpiece Theatre two-parter).

First of all, the fact that Ledger's Casanova barely flickered onto the movie screens of our nation before dying like a consumptive Camille is absolute proof that something has gone deeply wrong with the world. This was a delightful, life-affirming, poignant, humorous romp whose only problem was that it had about three too many false endings.

The BBC Casanova, which was a huge success, gave us a delightful, poignant, humorous (I'm not entirely sure I'd go so far as to say life-affirming, but close) romp in the first part...then, like some vengeful 1930s woman's film, punished us for it in the second. And not even in a fun way.

What did the BBC Casanova do...okay, wait a minute, not everybody might have seen this. So: SPOILER ALERT! If you've already seen both of these works (and I do hope you have), or you don't care, follow me over the jump.

Yep, I'm sick again.

And determined not to let it go any further. Mindful of the ongoing health disaster that was this past winter, which came about in part because I was stretched too thin, I am going to take not one but two sick days and really try to knock this thing out.

I'll be back on Wednesday morning.

Meanwhile, we are going to be upping the health food ante with probiotics.

I am so pissed.

In other news, I submit to you that D.H. Lawrence is one of the most misunderstood writers of the 20th century. Whether this is (A) because people are taking him too literally--an admittedly easy mistake because his worlds feel so concrete and actual that it's easy to brush off his continual outbreaks of poetry as distractions when in fact they're the key to the whole kingdom, or (B) because he wrote erotic novels and the erotic novel itself needs to be defined and understood as a separate genre before anything he wrote in it can be properly understood, I haven't decided. I'll get back to you. But I do know that when Connie and Hilda argue about whether Connie has "a slave nature" with regards to Mellors, that could definitely be a shock if you were under the impression you were reading a "normal" book. (Although, by that time, you should not be under the impression you're reading a "normal" book. Yet people have managed to get all bent out of shape about it anyway. Never mind that "slavery" is such a well-understood and common erotic trope that Britney Spears is able to release songs with titles like "Slave 4 U" without causing undue confusion. Good Christ, as my old battleship-nun Latin teacher used to wither out whenever there was an unusually large amount of stupid in evidence.)

Okay. I'll be back.

Marooned in college one year, I was lazing around with my fr....hmm. I don't think I've found a pseudonym for this friend yet. Better get one, just for convenience's sake.

Who was she? Well, she spoke Polish. She told me that "pies," a sound-alike to the French "piece" (which I was constantly muttering as I put the accent marks on it for my hand-typed papers), meant "dog."

She'd been to Egypt as well. Interestingly, she was not the only person I knew on that campus of whom that was the case. My roommate that year, in fact, had lived in Egypt. Here's a life-lesson for you: never assume that that stranger walking towards you on the street hasn't been to Egypt.

So she wasn't the only one who'd been to Egypt...but she was the only one who was that funny. And she had a spectacular pair of tie-dyed harem pants.

I think I am going to call her Euphrosyne. It would make her bust out that subversive, smart laugh of hers...and I'm pretty sure there's a Euphrosyne somewhere in Allen Ginsberg's oeuvre, the most important part of which I discovered, quite by accident, in Euphrosyne's room.

She had a great huge anthology of his work which I grabbed one day and started reading.

At first I was just passing time. Yes, yes, "Howl," classic, you can lose your perspective a little bit where classics are concerned when your life is a blizzard of Ionesco and Handke and Weiss and Goethe and Sartre and Duras and such. Beckett. Genet. ("Solange?" "Mon ange?") (Because when Genet brings tenderness to the batshit-crazy bouquet, you do remember.)

Oh hello, speaking of tenderness, what...what have we here?

"Come all you young men that proudly display/Your torsos to the Sun on upper Broadway"

What I remember most about the sweet, shocking lines that followed was my sheer astonishment at them. Though solidly twenty years old at that time, I hadn't actually grasped that erotic poetry, erotic art, existed. I'd made my way past shoals of terrifying half-hidden Penthouse covers sticking up out of a bath of acrid silence. With romance novels spitting pink frosting here and there.

"You'll die in your life, wake up in my arms/Sobbing and hugging and showing your charms"

I knew I was going to cry. I knew I was going to cry just that this existed. And with the word "cock." Right there, five lines up. Not only did this thing exist, it existed in the scorch of profanity and did not succumb. No, it just got stronger and more transcendent. Everybody went on and on about subversive artists, subversive art. This was that.

"Turn over spread your strong legs like a lass...Come sweet delicate strong minded men/I'll take you thru graveyards & kiss you again"

Take you thru graveyards & kiss you again. Heavy metal.

And sweetness.

Metal and sweet. That's what this was. Metal and sweet. Unafraid either of roughness or tenderness, accepting of both the hard words and the soft breaths. The feelings.

It was the bravest thing I'd ever seen.

Literature is dead; never mind that I write it. I'm not worried about it, you understand; it will go on. But it is dead. (Undead.)

It's dead because [most of] the official gatekeepers--the conference-givers, the college teachers, the commercial publishers--don't understand what it is anymore.

A simple sign of this is that Faulkner could never get published today. Well, Faulkner could barely get published then. But you know what he did? He sold out. He wrote a potboiler. I've read it. It would never get published today. Faulkner's capitulation, his prostitution of his talents to the market, is too damn literary.

(Actually I completely disagree with Faulkner's obscurity, his not-saying-of-things, which has often been confused with his greatness. I think he was great in spite of that, not because of it. But he was great.)

Anyhow: writing teachers no longer understand what Faulkner is after, or more precisely, why he has to get it the way that he does. By which I do NOT mean the obscurity. Um, let me pick a different example. Victor Hugo. All that obsessive scene-setting, those digressions into the tiniest minutiae of the life story of someone who turns out to just say "My God, man!" to the main character and then disappear, and now we've got to read hundreds of pages of minutiae about the main character.

Today's writing teachers, commercial publishers, you name it, no longer understand that. They no longer grasp what Victor Hugo is trying to do, or, more precisely, why he's trying to get there the way that he is.

Here's the problem. Art lies in the margins. It's in the corners of moments. But when your medium is words, that margin has to become your center, because whatever you want, you have to describe it or it isn't there. So you have to shift your focus. Why? Because writers--this sounds so stupid, but it has to be said--writers can only describe one thing at a time. Yes, we can create multiple layers of simultaneous meaning--but we can only DO one thing at a time.

Unlike a movie or TV show, which can do, if I've counted right, SIX things at a time.

For those keeping score at home, that would be: Change the light, surge the music, run the dialogue over physical action, and move the camera in and around the space, i.e. the setting, which, of course, is a story of its own. So yes, the humble movie/TV setup stacks SIX LEVELS DEEP. Seven, if you count costumes separately from background. But I don't, so: It can do six things at once, hit us with six levels of information and six levels of meaning at one time.

Literature has got: one.

What does this mean?

This means that, if I want to show you a motherless girl dressed in motley at one of those godforsaken bus stations eating a Mars bar while a tiny secret dances on her mysterious lips, you are going to have to wait considerably longer for the stranger over there (the one whose shabby coat doesn't at all match his expensive eyes) to start walking towards her saying "You stole that yellow bag, I know you did" than you would if this was a TV show. If I'm doing my job, I can make you not care that you have to wait longer...but you do have to wait longer. And we haven't even gotten STARTED on the emotional cuing (the 'music' and 'light,' whether the 'camera' is jittery or calm). The sense of why we're taking this trip. Our tiny secret, our fortuitously-shared ineffability.

If ineffability is what an author is after, therefore, it can make a book seem odd: What was the point of that scene where the maid walks in and announces that tea is served while the dust troubles the sunbeams?

So prose writers are being told to adopt a screenwriting model, where the maid walks in and says "Rodrigo is here, but there's a problem; he's got Arthur with him," and Jennifer's happy smile freezes on her face and she clutches her stomach. "Oh no!" she cries. "But that means...that means they KNOW! How will I get to the train station now?" "Well maybe it's time you faced that YOU ARE JUST GOING TO FAIL, LIKE I FAILED TO SAVE MY BOBBY, THAT'S RIGHT, I FAILED, I FAILED, I FAILED," yells the maid. Jennifer collapses in tears on the divan as the maid's furious exit whips the dust into bullets through the sun.

More is happening in that scene--conflict, a raising of stakes, forward motion in the protagonist's emotional state (she starts happy and changes to devastated), and a cataclysmic revolution in the subplot (in which the maid finally admits to herself that her Bobby is really dead despite all that praying).

But the problem is...less is also happening in it too. There's less room for...well, don't let me tell you. Let me show you.

Let's look at this scene from the magnificent New Series Doctor Who episode "The Sound of Drums." On the surface, it just advances the plot: "The Master," a rogue Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey, receives a visit in his study here on earth by one of his evil friends. He chats a bit to the evil friend, but the evil friend is impatient. She demands to know when "the rift" (iirc) will open so she can come through and escape "the terrible dark, and cold." Annoyed at her pushiness, the Master snaps "Tomorrow, eight o'clock."

So what is this scene doing? Well, it's following Da Roolz. It's upping the stakes. We already know that the Master has taken over Great Britain under false pretenses and is not planning to do it any favors. Now, we know that things are even worse than we believed. Something truly scary and terrible will happen soon; the stakes have been properly upped and a deadline established to boot. Over and out.

But look what's happening in the margins.

When the evil friend arrives, she finds the Master sitting at his computer and drinking.

He is watching "Teletubbies."

Not as a joke, either, but with intense concentration. He's fascinated by it, maybe even delighted.

Tinky Winky is wearing his tutu and twirling around. Then the pinwheel turns and the Tubbies assemble on the hill, giggling, to receive their daily transmission.

The Master is riveted. "Look at that," he says. "They've got televisions in their stomachs. Now that is evolution."

(That quote is approximate. I'm going on memory here.)

Let's unpack the levels here.

First, we've got the setting; the pleasant yet anonymous power chamber. Then we've got the light, golden but also somewhat harsh, partially obscuring our view of the show by throwing the Master's face onto the screen in reflection. The music is the tinny, cheery sounds of the show itself. Action: we do note that the Master is drinking, an interesting thing for a total control freak like himself to be doing. (No surprise that he does it alone.) Dialogue: against the complete indifference of the Evil Thing, the Master insists on analyzing the Teletubbies. It shows his power--he makes the thing listen to him, ignoring her concerns for as long as possible. It gives us political commentary--of course a dictatorial megalomaniac would key in on the stomach-TVs; he'd see himself broadcasting into them. Then, whoops, I guess this would be Level 7 after all, there's the way the dialogue is delivered, which can support or undercut or complicate its meaning. Actor John Simm sounds slightly bemused, not at all mocking or cynical. He's sincere, which opens all kinds of doorways into imagining that maybe there's something else beneath his appreciation of the propaganda potential of the embedded televisions. Maybe he...you know, maybe he's taking some kind of comfort from watching the Tubbies, not that he'd ever admit it. But he is drinking (alone) and...he did just have that unsettling conversation with the Doctor, which obviously affected him emotionally in some mysterious way even beyond finding out that his home planet was destroyed...and...

And here comes the result of it all, the unspoken poetry: the sight, the sight of this lonely alien watching a children's show.

This is wholly mysterious and ineffable. It's sad. It's wonderful. It's art. And because of the nature of the medium, that art, that moment, is able to rise up and swallow the flimsy exposition going on in front of it. It becomes a perpetually unfolding flower, petal after petal after petal, expanding so far beyond its borders that its borders fold back on themselves and disappear.

#

Without costing you any time.

#

That's the miracle. The flower unfolds and unfolds and unfolds in a perpetuity that only lasts two minutes. A two-minute perpetuity. Movies and TV shows are a series of two-minute perpetuities.

Technically, the borders, the structure, the exposition, all the things beneath the perpetually-unfolding flower, are still holding. Why? Because the scene only takes as long as the expository dialogue needs. Technically, therefore, all that exists in that scene is its structure. You're getting extra meaning for nothing. No extra investment on your part. No extra time.

THAT is what prose cannot do. It cannot tell you all that stuff about the drinking and the reflection on the screen and the echoes in the room and the odd sincerity in his voice and everything I just told you...it cannot tell you all that in just the time it takes to say "oh look televisions in their stomachs" "yes but when can we come through" "tomorrow" "but we need to come through" "TOMORROW" done.

But visual storytelling can.

So the Doctor Who people didn't have to choose. In about a minute and a half, they were able to leverage the six (seven) levels of visual media to give us Faulkner under cover of Buck Rogers.

Without sacrificing either.

And that's why literature is dead.

Because these days, it's being told to be something it's not. It's being told to pretend to be a screenplay.

But a screenplay is only one level of a seven-level beast. A screenplay is just a piece of a larger whole. We're mistaking it for that whole. It's not. The other parts will be added later.

Well, THERE IS NO LATER for prose. There is no later for literature. It is the whole.

Literature is ancient and hard like the rock that lurks beneath the velvety earth. Literature doesn't give you any outs. You can't collapse Buck and Faulk together in that way. You can get a scene with all the elements I just described, including the upping of the stakes and the establishing of a deadline...but you are going to have to get it word by word, which means you will know that you are getting it. In that Doctor Who scene, you don't have to notice the art happening. It can stay within the structure--which in this case is a four-dimensional structure that includes time.

Yep. That scene, like the TARDIS on the show itself, is "bigger on the inside." And that's where the art goes.

Right now, word-art cannot hide like that. It has to build machines of its own.

When you impose a screenwriting model on it, you wreck those machines.

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Something else is coming. Something which will split the word-atom and enable the fusion of speed and depth, the fusion of one kind of focus with the other, the concealment of art within structure alone so that (like on television) only the structure is really there. It will be beautiful. I love it already. It will do many things. Things we've never dreamed of.

But it will never do what happens on page five hundred and sixty two of any random Dickens novel...you know, that secret, that tiny secret on my mysterious lips. That bullet in the sun.

We're going to start with science fiction.

We're going to start with one writer's idea: that in a future age, children born with physical deformities shall be neuro-wired into the hulls of spaceships, which become their bodies. Trapped inside a central column, they look at the world through cameras, speak to it on amplified sound systems, and move in it on titanium wings...while thinking and feeling about it as the humans they are.

"The Ship Who Sang" is the story of one Helva, born disastrously malformed and then reborn as a sleek and beautiful spaceship.

Helva falls in love with her "brawn," her human pilot, and he returns the favor. Yet although he quite literally lives in her, he can't touch her.

So here they are, separate but apart. They can talk to each other, sing to each other, even look at each other--there's noplace on the ship where he can escape her mechanical eyes, and as for him, he ordered a "chromosomal extrap" of her and discovered the secret face inside the metal. They can know each other to that depth, they can rest in each other.

They can have untold adventures together.

But they can't touch.

Human emotion being what it is, the man (I can't remember his name) finally maddens. In his need for Helva, he considers the radical step of breaking into her protective column. This could have dire consequences, but their enforced separation already has. And so we come down to it: the woman's lover is her destroyer; his helpless, natural desire to have her puts everything on the line.

"Hey," you're saying. "That's, like, so deep and tragic and profound. That's the stuff of classics. Why haven't I heard of that?"

Because it's the invention of a woman writer. Anne McCaffrey.

Anyhow! I come not to bury sexism, etc. Back to Helva and her lover's dilemma.

Impregnable yet vulnerable, faced with the worst of both worlds, Helva has needs of her own; in a line that blew my thirteen-year-old mind totally out of the water, she finally screams out to her savior-destroyer, "I would rather die at your hands than remain an inviolate virgin without you!"

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And that. My friends. Is what D.H. Lawrence was getting at.

"It might come with the thrust of a sword in her softly-opened body, and that would be death. She clung in a sudden anguish of terror. But it came with a strange slow thrust of peace, the dark thrust of peace and a ponderous, primordial tenderness, such as made the world in the beginning."

(Lady Chatterley's Lover)

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Lawrence was an imperfect vessel of his art. You are going to have to ignore all that stuff about Connie and Hilda's shallow world in the first few chapters of "Lady Chatterley"--the pejorative description of what looks to us like heaven, these girls ("free," he sneers, in quotes) and their sex play with men to whom they are bonded primarily through thought and ideas and reams of glorious talk. Lawrence thinks he hates all that, but only insofar as he hates himself. (And he does.) He runs so far away from it only to bring us right back to it; what do Connie and her beloved Mellors do, after all, but talk and share ideas about life and sex. And what is Connie but free.

So yes, you are going to have to be smarter than him at first. But you're also going to have to recognize where he's smarter than you. ("Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.")

This is, after all, an eros, a seduction. A mutuality.

And so you have to understand the terms as well. Notice the difference in the light. "Lady Chatterley" seems at first to be a manifesto, but it's not at all, it's an anti-manifesto. Lawrence seems to be talking about society in those first chapters, and you have to forgive him and be smarter than him. Then when you're done, you have to re-read them, and realize that he didn't mean it that way anyhow. There was something else going on, he was talking about something else, that's why it seemed so wrong. You have to understand it like a poem, which is what it is. Secretly. Connie sitting in Hilda's car disguised in goggles and veil.

Helva trapped inside a metal column.

Connie and Mellors, existential and modern as they are (and they are modern; however much Lawrence believed he disliked modernity, he was a creature of it, and the conflict in "Chatterley" between 'today' and the leafy green days of old has to be understood as symbolic), choose to change what they live for. (They live for something, and can choose what it is; modernity.) "Summat else," says Mellors. This: "'I love thee that I can go into thee,' he said. ...'I love thee that tha opened to me. I love thee that I came into thee like that.'"

This is what kills us, symbolically and often enough literally, this is what we have to give up everything for, cry out the terrible words for, "I would rather die." This is what kills us, but the lack of it kills us worse. That. That's what he's trying to say. It's right there. Right there on the page.

In the age of repression, we needed him. In the age of liberation, we needed to fight him. In the age of threat and danger, we need to re-read him.

And finally, through the lens of erotic art as its own beautiful genre, we need to understand him.

(No offense to anyone who does. Just a matter of taste.)

But William Deresiewicz's description of it here--this description should win some kind of award. He calls it:

"The bone-hard, lake-cold, moon-lonely Housekeeping."

Isn't that. AWESOME!? "Bone-hard, lake-cold, moon-lonely." That made my day.

Now if only he'd said it about the Blue Ridge Mountains. Or Johnny Cash.

From "The Love Poems of Marichiko" by Kenneth Rexroth:

"How many lives ago/I first entered the torrent of love/At last to discover/There is no further shore."

Sometimes I wonder if almost everything we do is an effort to deny this.

Let's take a look at one writer's reaction to Sarah Palin, because I think it explains why the McCain campaign chose her.

Judith Warner feels sorry for her.

Warner takes care to explain that this is more of an emotional reaction than an actual analysis (she blames it on having recently had to care for her ill mother, who I hope is doing well).

But don't you see--that's exactly it.

The McCain campaign does appear to have gravely misjudged Sarah Palin's ability to rise the occasion; I'm sure they were appalled at her instantly-infamous Katie Couric interview.

But there's one thing they did NOT misjudge: they knew a star when they saw one. Someone who would seem alive to people, who would invite identification and interpretation, who would bring a kind of ready-made story with her that everyone could relate to in their own (even oppositional) way. Who would involve people's emotions.

Sarah Palin has those qualities. She's telegenic. She's charismatic. She's a natural television star.

The Republican Party runs on image and has been running on image since Ronald Reagan. They run on stardom. They run on "he's the one I'd rather have a beer with." 'Cause yeah, George W. Bush is a star too. Love him or hate him--and, one or the other, you will--he goes straight to the brainstem, just like George Clooney, just like Brad Pitt, just like a star. Just like Sarah Palin.

For everyone out there wondering why on earth the McCain campaign picked this woman, may I offer you a vintage 1980s DUH with eye-roll. In my opinion, it's obvious: they were looking for a potential star. Not a potential leader or thinker or doer, but a potential star. I wouldn't be surprised if they had their eye on her for a long time.

In other words: all these people snorting that Palin was a panic choice, showing impulsiveness and irresponsibility on McCain's part--I don't agree. I think she was a very deliberate and considered choice. We should have known they'd go for someone like her, it should have been obvious.

And for those who dismiss her charisma as a side-issue, something that simply can't be a serious factor in light of her lack of knowledge: I wouldn't. This is what people used to think about Reagan before November 1980. It matters that Palin seems alive on camera, she seems to bring a story with her in her very bearing. She should have been--and, for all her recent disasters, may still be--the perfect candidate for a party that depends on voters forming gut-level, fan-like, not-even-necessarily-positive-but-indelible attachments to its main figures.

Warner's response to Palin, for example, was not rational. It was entirely based on the emotions Palin invoked in her--the belief that she saw "pleading" in Palin's "eager-to-please" eyes, poignantly contrasting with "her hopeful, yet sinking posture."

THIS IS HOW PEOPLE TALK ABOUT ACTORS. And that's the point. Warner's gut response, confused, conflicting, yet powerful, was based on the story Palin's cues invoked in her. A story that led to a sense of identification. "[She's our] inner Elle Woods," cried Warner onto the page.

Does Warner think the McCain campaign didn't plan for her (and everyone else) to have exactly that reaction? Hello. The Republican machine has sold George W. Bush as a fighter pilot and a cowboy. They're trying to sell John McCain as a maverick (but they should watch 'Top Gun' again--'Mav' has to eat a huge plate of well-deserved crow by the end, he loses, while the calm and steady Iceman gets everything he ever wanted. Lord GOD, let Hollywood repeat itself). Anyhow, the point is, they have been brilliant at finding charismatic candidates and supplying them with an irresistible conceptual hook...i.e., they have been brilliant at finding and developing stars. (And doing the opposite to Democrats, diminishing and de-starring them with contrasting negative conceptual hooks.) Why would they not be ten steps ahead of us and ready to sell this mediagenic pageant veteran as a plucky can-do Elle Woods/Flashdance/Star Is Born/Shirley Temple/Pick Your Generation's Version Of The Type?

If I was on the McCain team, I'd be a lot less upset than you'd think I would be, given the Couric disaster. Sarah Palin may have blown that interview, which is bad...but she's still connecting on the visceral level, still "speaking" silently with the power of a Johnny Depp. People are discovering her implicit narrative all on their own, becoming bound to her through it, feeling the same kind of fascination-fueled, insight-based stake in her story--her meaning--that they feel with stars.

Andrew Sullivan has been screaming from the rooftops that, because of her relative press silence, we don't know anything meaningful about her.

But if you look at essays like Warner's...we're reading into her. We're creating her. That (besides her apparent massive inability to hold a decent interview) is why, imho, the McCain campaign is holding her back. They want US to define her, to see her as the MILF or the pleading Elle Woods or the plucky moose-hunter or the noble mother or the victim of cynical Rovian manipulation or whatever we want.

That may yet win the day.

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Further proof via Sadly,No!: Apparently, the McCain campaign is thrilled at the chance to stage America's very own right-wing Royal Wedding right before the election:

"You would have every TV camera there," an "insider" is quoted as saying in the original Times UK online article. "The entire country would be watching. It would shut down the race for a week."

Now tell me. Tell me American politics is anything but "American Idol."

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And a final political note: I've said all along that this was not the moment for hope or idealism in America. Rather, it was the moment to start the long, hard road back.

Unfortunately, I turned out to be dismally right.

Have we ever been here before? I mean, we've had our spectacular banking/economic failures...although none so large as the failure of Washington Mutual, or so close to other massive collapses like AIG. And we've had our disastrous, draining wars. But wow, both at the same time? Plus a crisis in civil liberties? I don't think we've ever faced blowout on ALL those fronts before. Pretty exciting, huh.

Better give the last word to D.H. Lawrence:

"The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habits, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen."

I was a vegetarian from ages 18-26. During that time period, I tried to go vegan and failed with extreme prejudice, because I (a) couldn't figure out how much protein/B12/yada I needed or (b) how to get it plus (c) I didn't want to pay that much attention to food anyhow and (d) I loved cheese. A lot.

I might, however, have been significantly more motivated if there had been blogs back then.

Because then I would have seen, ohmigod, THIS and THIS and THESE CUPCAKES (which I hope I linked to properly). All of which I want to eat. Right now. Right now!!

Want. WANT!! Sorry. I'm too hungry to be any more articulate than that.

Hmm...vegans might be healthier because they get less protein. Interesting. I never really thought about protein before. But if I'm going to possibly drift in that direction, I should.

Says here in the article that the government RDA of protein is about .7 to .8 grams of protein per kilograms of weight per individual. Kilograms!! Don't give me this kilogram crap, I iz a ignorunt American. Oh well, Google Is My Friend. Here's a converter. Ooh, turns out I weigh about 53 kilograms. So I should be getting between 37 and 42 grams of protein per day to meet the RDA.

So I mosey downstairs to check all the stats on my touchingly habitual foods and see how I'm doing. Half a serving of kefir (that's actually a new addition now that we're doing probiotics), 5.5 grams of protein. Corn flakes, 2. Crackers, 1. Laughing Cow cheese, 2.5. Split pea soup, 16 (I eat a double serving). So about 28 grams. Well then. At this rate, I should be at or even slightly under the recommendations. Let's take a look at the nutritional breakdown of those oh-so-cheap-and-easy dinners I pulled off the Kraft website for this week and see what they...

YOU'RE KIDDING ME!! 22 grams of protein per serving! 28! 30! Jesus Christ, where is it all coming from!? Does meat really have *that* much protein in it? Jeez, apparently so.

So, quite the eye-opener. To experiment with actually eating the recommended amount of protein instead of Way The Hell More, I either need to tweak my dinners, or majorly change my breakfasts and lunches to make room for dinner. Right now I'd rather tweak my dinners. I'll figure out exactly how