Sine! Cosine! Yeah!!

I teach at a university, and this week we have orientation. We orient. We get the students, you know, "oriented."

Yesterday outside my office I heard the frail but organized shouts of forced group interaction. It was not a happy sound. Students were told to yell "yeah" or "go" or whatever at certain moments, and they did so, but you could tell they were ambivalent about it.

This morning the first thing I saw on campus were little gangs of students in yellow hard hats. The little gang that I encountered first was carrying a huge papier-mache key -- you know, like a highly-stylized skeleton key, about six feet long and a foot in diameter.

The funny thing is, the key had been fashioned to look an awful lot like a penis. It had twin spheres at the base, and the kid carrying it had it sticking out at about hip level. It was painted gold. A giant painted gold penis. Awesome.

The penis was really the only bright spot of the morning. The yellow hard hat kids, it turns out, are engineers, and their orientation required them to march around in groups and then converge on a hill, shouting rhythmically. It creeped me out: the forced conformity, the militaristic aspect, the expressions on the students' faces.

I know there are worries about the number of women interested in engineering. The Extraordinary Women Engineers website complains that only 20 percent of engineering students are women. I looked at the hard hat gangs: yep, there were a few women there, not very many, lurking in the back.

I don't know how guys feel, but if I'd been forced to march around like that I would have been like, "Excuse me, but where's the art department? I'm out of here."

And as long as we're doing papier-mache, could we please have a giant vulva for equal time? Something, maybe, like this?

Photo by Flickr user texas_mustang, here.

I see on the WEW webpage that Laura Bush is the honorary chair. Maybe she can get the ball rolling. Thanks Laura!

If Patrick Ewing Wanted To Talk To You, He Would Have Called You Himself

It's ungodly hot here at the corner of Commonwealth and Commonwealth. My blinds are drawn and the air-conditioning's on full blast.

Nevertheless, I am a creature of habit, so I went to the 7-11 to get coffee and breakfast food. It may have been Donettes; it may have been Pop-Tarts -- I'd rather not talk about it, really.

The coffee cups at the 7-11 have taken to sticking together. Normally, I twist them apart, cursing softly under my breath, bending them a little bit, taking, in the end, the cup that I've gotten fewer dirty paw-prints on. It makes me feel a little bad, leaving a cup that I've touched for somebody else to take -- oddly, it makes me feel bad although I could care less if somebody else has previously touched my cup.

Today, beat up by the heat, I didn't notice that I had two cups until I was pouring in the coffee. And, given my general levels of coordination, I didn't think trying to separate two cups while one of them was half full of hot coffee fell into the 90th percentile, good-idea-wise. So I just went up to the counter.

Anyway, the cashier said that 7-11 charged for each cup. I told my story; I pointed out that I didn't want two cups -- one cup would have been a.o.k. by me. And she sighed and looked mournful and tested the cups to see that, in fact, they didn't pull easily apart and she only charged me for one.

There was, back at the coffee station, a whole pile of unused cups. Other people, it appears, have been having the same problem. And I'm sure these 7-11 franchisees are paying the 7-11 corporation for these stupid cups and it's not their fault that the cups stick together. And I imagined them teetering on the brink of losing money from the 7-11 and the defective cups pushing them over the edge and I started feeling a little bad about the whole thing.

Given the profit margin on coffee, I think we can all agree that that's dumb. But it's also something I wonder about a lot: to what extent does the ability to understand the difficulty you're causing other people translate into an obligation to do something about it, i.e. to not cause them that difficulty?

The example that I always think of when I'm thinking about this is kind of embarrassing. Namely, there are some people who call a lot that you don't really want to talk to. (If you are reading this, you are not one of those people in my life.) And for me, there's a certain level of mental irritation that comes with dodging those people, getting off the phone, whatever. So then when I'm calling somebody, and let's say I've called a couple of times without getting a response, I start to think that I'm probably causing the person I'm calling that same level of mental irritation.

Does that mean I shouldn't do it?

Dear X: U R My Favrite Riter.

Some novels make you feel like you absolutely must become friends with the novelist. You start to daydream: I know, I'll write a letter. The letter will be so charming and funny, so insightful and interesting, the novelist will write back. We still strike up a correspondence, and eventually meet. We'll finally have a chance to discuss the really important things in life.

I get this feeling powerfully about some living writers. I never get it about dead ones, which suggests I have absorbed the non-existence of an after-life pretty deeply. Generally, I only have the feeling while I'm in the middle of reading a novel. Let me be clear: I've never actually written a letter to a novelist at all.

The impulse strikes me as benign, even good, except for one thing: if you want to be friends with someone these days, and you don't know them, what's the first thing you do? You google them. Before you know it, you're inundated with information: biographical information, interpretive information, critical studies, information about things the author said in interviews, and, of course, contact information.

Some of this may be stuff you just didn't want to know. But, you know, you can't go back.

The novelist who first gave me a powerful feeling in this direction is Philip Roth. Roth's first-person, highly emotional, ranting narrative style gives me an inescapable feeling that I am getting Roth himself, right there on the page. When I encounter some familiar feeling or thought on the page, as I frequently do, I think, "Oh! Yes! I know what you mean! I'm like that too! Let me tell you all about it."

I had the feeling recently with Alicia Erian, whose book Towelhead has lingered in my mind. I was overwhelmed by the feeling reading Julie Doucet (not exactly novels but close enough; see previous post here). And my recent literary infatuation with Michel Houellebecq has this quality, too.

I had a stranger reaction recently to Bret Easton Ellis: reading Lunar Park last summer, I felt not that I wanted to know him but rather that I already did. Very strange. I can't explain.

The feeling doesn't correlate with my liking for a book, necessarily: there are books by Don DeLillo that I love, but I've never had the impulse to invite the author to cocktails. And I know, rationally, that the self on the pages is not the self of the author. Obviously. This knowledge, though, doesn't make the feeling go away.

Through Herculean self-control, I've managed to google each of these folks only once or twice, ever, and to have read very little of what I've found there. So nothing bad has happened.

"What bad things could happen?" you ask. I've always thought that there was danger in too much curiosity about a novel-writer. Once you get thinking about the author and his life, it's almost impossible not to think about the events in the book as they relate to events in the author's life. And then it becomes impossible to really experience the novel in its proper form: as its own little made-up novel-world.

This mix of the biographical and the fictional detracts from the power of the fictional, by creating false explanations, and making the artwork into a kind of commentary. In the worst case, the biography and the fiction fuse in one's mind, and the fiction can no longer exist there.

So there's reason not to know.

In a purely practical sense, the internet has made such ignorance harder to maintain, since the knowledge is all right there.

In a more complicated sense, the internet has made not-getting-in-touch more difficult, too, and thus more artificial. Everyone has an email address; everyone is reachable; even famous people who live in other countries are often just a click away. This means writing that fantasy letter is not a matter of finding paper and pen, and looking up an obscure address. Instead it may be ten seconds of typing.

So the choice not to know, and the choice not to write, they have to be real choices. You can't rely on laziness and inertia to save you. Not anymore.

A Night Of Revemption

It is very hot this week in Hollywood, California. I came home one night to find a neighbor in the courtyard, shirtless, smoking, and whirling around a set of nunchucks. This sort of thing, in the wrong frame of mind, can make the world ominous and unpleasant.

Tonight I went to the Valley to watch Cal's first football game. On my way to the subway this guy driving an old woman around rolled down his window to ask me where the Crossroads of the World was. Fortunately, I could tell him.

The game was against Tennessee. Last year Cal lost to Tennessee; this year Cal's coach kept saying "It's not about revenge; it's about redemption." After the first gin and tonic that became revemption. I will not confirm or deny any rumors that Doug Flutie, appearing on the halftime show, was called Doug Cutie. If it happened it would have been wrong and bad.

At the orientation for UC Berkeley I attended many years ago the student leader types kept talking about Cal. This bothered me. I had never heard of such a thing. What the hell is this? I thought. At the time I believed that the institutions of marriage and high-level college athletics had peaked, and would entirely disappear within the next fifteen to twenty years. It turns out I was wrong.

I have some Cal sports fan credentials. In my sophomore year I had season tickets to the basketball team; I can still churn out a credible "grrr rah" kind of noise when the spirit moves me. Just yesterday I saw an Abdur-Rahim jersey and it took me back. I do harbor a genuine distaste for Stanford as an institution. Plus it's easy to fake predictive ability with a Cal sports team. If they are expected to do well they will fall apart in a critical game. I like that.

But am I really a Cal sports fan? I am, inasmuch as I am an admirer of anything, an admirer of the UC system and of Berkeley in particular. It's a nice thing, a genuinely good thing, the public university. And I spent a year in a Big 12 city with a very serious college football obsession, which is a good way to develop a certain enthusiasm for even the least likable of the Pac 10 schools. By the end of my time there the USC students (televised at the football games!) started looking like hippies to me, people ready at any moment to dart up a tree for a sit-in.

And I have kind of a fan-like personality. I like rooting for things. I like watching a team I identify with win. It makes me happy. I'll do some fist-pumping. I hugged strangers during the Lakers run in the playoffs against Phoenix a couple of years back.

But I'm not sure I like Cal as a football powerhouse. I don't like it being nationally ranked. I don't like the idea of alumni who give money to support the team. I don't like the idea that rooting for Cal actually means something. If Cal loses to San Jose State every year, you can split the difference between being a real fan and being a jokey fan. That's not really true these days, at least before the inevitable mid-season collapse.

On the upside, it's the best marching band going, so there's at least that.

Cal won the game. I got a ride back into Hollywood; we passed all the kids lining up for the nightclubs. A different neighbor was standing in the courtyard smoking wearing those pajamas that are flannel and plaid, but shorts and short sleeves.

Men Are From, Um . . . Where Exactly?

I was the kind of little girl who basically regarded little boys as aliens from another planet. I felt basically the same way about boys I did about dogs: there you'd be, trying to play some civilized game or have a conversation, and these creatures would be jumping around, making noise, scaring the bejeezus out of you for nothing.

Eventually I grew up. And I remember in college, and for a long time after, it was almost the opposite: all my friends were guys. Not because I spent all my time with people I was having sex with, or had had sex with, or wanted to have sex with, but just because I liked guys better. I even felt more at home with them.

At that time, it seemed to me that guys were funny while girls were humorless; guys were lighthearted while girls were brooding; guys were interested in talking about stuff while girls were just interested in talking about each other.

More time passed, and now I am a little older. And I realized recently with surprise that even though my close friends are about evenly divided, the people I am just, you know, friends with, are mostly women. I even have a bit of that old childhood feeling with men: what part of the universe did these people drop in from?

At first, I thought: how weird that I have changed. And then thinking it over, it started to dawn to me that I hadn't changed, that what had changed wasn't me, or men, but just the way people interact as they get older.

When you're 20-something, and maybe for a while after, men and women share a lot of the same interests: music, movies, books, a sort of "what am I going to do with my life" feeling. And there's a harmlessness, too, to cross-gender friendship and casual flirting at that age. The desire to seem attractive to the opposite sex makes people interact. And there's no gender-baggage either: you're just, you know, feeling your way.

But in middle-age, these things seem to change. The harmlessness feeling goes away. If an attached woman goes out for drinks or dinner with a male colleague, it's assumed that something fishy is going on. If she goes out with a female colleague, no one cares.

Since a lot of people this age are parents, they're not as interested in discussing movies, music, books, and so on. And when it comes to other topics, I relate to women much more easily. I'm not into sports; I don't want to argue about politics. I do want to talk about the details of our lives, and about clothes, and I want to gossip about the people we know in common. It doesn't get much more girly than that.

Interestingly, the women I know have gotten more funny and lighthearted as they've grown older, while the men have gotten more serious. I don't know why, but I have a partial theory: women start out wary and become resigned, whereas men start out optimistic and become sad as things fail to work out.

Finally, it seems the experience of life just becomes so gendered as life goes on that it becomes harder and harder to understand the feelings of the other sex. I feel like men spend a lot of time thinking about women in a way they can't share with me, and women spend a lot of time thinking about men in a way they can't share with men.

So while I like men as much as I ever did, they've gone back to being kind of a mystery to me. It makes me sad. I miss them.

K.I.T.

If I have met you and you have made an impression on me, and you possess a relatively distinctive name and some internet presence (who doesn't, these days?) I have probably looked you up on Google. Not once, several times.

This is something the people I know and like do as a matter of course. Last night a friend said something about what if Google started telling people who had searched for them and then we both said something about how we would be screwed, unable to hold up our heads for the embarrassment of it all.

(There is a historical precedent for this. Friendster, the pioneering social networking site, switched, without notification, to allowing people to see who had viewed their profile. I spent the first fifteen minutes after I found out trying to remember who the hell I had looked at recently. Then, of course, I dove for the computer to see who had looked me up.)

This is probably something that everyone does; it's why social networking sites exist, after all.

So why am I so embarrassed by it?

(When I looked to see who had been viewing my profile on Friendster I found, strangely enough, that I assumed of other people what I knew to be (mostly) true about myself -- that they were bored and mildly curious to see what I had been up to. This surprised me; I had expected to assume that they were totally obsessed with me.)

I do take it to extremes. A friend once hinted that he might have a blog and armed with no more than what I knew about him, which was not that much, and that fact, I went hunting for that blog. Four hours later I found it.

Also, a little embarrassing is that a lot of the time, having found someone, I make contact. I couldn't exactly tell you why.

But even when I just do a quick two-minute Google search, no varying the terms, no pages viewed past two or three, no contact to be made, still I feel odd about it. Odd to be carrying around this desire to know exactly what happened to that guy in college that I never liked because he thought he was cooler than anyone. Also odd given the people I am in touch with, the people I like and fail -- why spend time on people I didn't know that well even when I knew them?

My Narrative Needs

Last weekend I read Haruki Murakami's new novel, After Dark. He's the Japanese novelist whose books are sometimes described as "metaphysical" -- though actually the metaphysical parts of the books aren't really the parts I like.

What I do like in Murakami are the characters and their conversations. Even though I rarely feel a sense of kinship with the people in these books, I do feel very interested in them, right away. They're interesting people.

Also the feeling of reading Murakami is great. I wrote recently of rereading Platform to try to say something comprehensive about it. I read it with a pencil, marking up passages, realizing to my amazement that it may have been the first time I had ever read a novel that way. Obviously, I didn't take a lot of literature courses in college.

I found it a real chore. It's funny, because often when I'm reading novels I'm struck by particular passages, and I'm excited at the thought that I might go back to them. My experience with the pencil suggests that not making the note is part of the pleasure, which I don't understand, but there it is.

That feeling of momentary delight in sentences or phrases -- that's great in Murakami.

And another thing is: Murakami writes about women who seem like real people. Ages ago there was a strip in the comic Dykes to Watch Out For that featured one character explaining to another that she never went to a movie unless there was a scene featuring one woman talking to another, about something other than a man. The punch line was the last movie she'd been able to see was Alien -- Sigourney Weaver and someone else talk about the monster.

This has stuck with me for years. If you apply it to contemporary narrative art products you get depressed fast. But Murakami's books often feature complex, strange, girls and women, doing stuff, talking about things. I like it.

The narrative structure -- or lack of it -- though, in most of his books leaves me frustrated and weirded out. The story wanders, the details come and go, lots of threads are introduced that never get resolved. I realize this is part of the point. And I realize it may be part of an interesting and good point: that the experience of life is not narratively tidy. Details come and go. That's the humanity for you.

Even knowing that, I don't like it. I yearn for narrative. I want to know: why did that guy do that horrible thing? What's going to happen to him? And the guy's wife, we know she's sitting at home, what's going to happen with her? What's the story?

This is an alternate cover for the book, with itself a much greater implicit narrative punch than the cover I'm familiar with, up at the top.

Probably this desire is partly from having spent my life reading narratively tidy books. But still, I don't think it's unreasonable. The story of a novel creates a tension, and part of what's exciting about reading is seeing how that tension gets resolved. To make a decision about an ending requires an author to make a choice, himself. The choice recasts the rest of the book.

Leaving it open-ended is a choice too, but it's not one we ever get to make in our lives, since stuff just keeps happening, and we can't help trying to make sense of it. Even if we don't know about the narratives of others, they're there. There was some reason that guy did the bad thing he did, and something's going to happen to him, even if it's nothing. And his wife either will or won't find out.

So in some ways the experience of life is narrative. Probably we impose narrative structure on events, but that doesn't make it any less real as part of our experience.

I'm childishly needy for this same kind of thing in my reading life. The one book of Murakami's that struck me as utterly different in this respect was The Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. And when I finished it I actually burst into tears. I think it's his best book.

I Am A Klutz

Last night I was walking idly around my apartment chatting on the phone and I looked down and noticed that my toe was bleeding. Kind of a lot.

I have no idea how that happened.

It did not startle me, particularly, because I am not a graceful person and am used to banging into things. When I was a child I would come back from every excursion dirtier than the children around me. Today there are relatively few occasions for getting covered in dirt, but I pick up stray bruises. I bump my head on things. I bang my elbow against walls. I trip, a little bit, walking down the street.

I am self-conscious about it. The ability to move smoothly through space seems like a desirable human attribute.
On the other hand, if it really mattered to me I could probably fix it. Be one of those people who takes up fencing or ballet late in life. Only some of my clumsiness is innate. Enough to keep me out of contention in competitive sporting events, but probably not enough to make me fall on my face.

The rest is lack of attention. I don't think about those things. I think about things that I'm good at, like smoking or sleeping. And lost in that haze, I knock over my coffee cup, and curse.


In some ways I wish it weren't fixable, that I could say, "well, I'm left-handed," or "I lacked proper training as a child." There seems something strange about deciding that I admire gracefulness in other people, think it a good thing in the abstract, but refuse, in the particular, to take the steps needed for me to obtain it.

Women Happy At Home, Says Famous Psychologist

Last July, Roy Baumeister (of ego depletion C+C fame) gave an invited address to the American Psychological Association titled, "Is There Anything Good About Men?" His answer is "Yes": men are good for making culture and for getting chewed up and spit out by it.

There are some interesting things in this talk. Baumeister points out that on lots of scales, men do both better and worse than women: there are more men at the top of power structures, but also more men in prison. There are more men with really high IQs but also more men with really low ones.

Some of the conclusions, though, are troubling. And some of the elements of the argument seem forced. The main claims are 1) that the difference between the sexes has to do not with abilities but with motivation, and 2) that men are motivated to take risks, aim high, and engage with the world at large -- often only to fail -- while women are motivated to be mostly pleasant and nice and to engage with small groups. Men are good for creating culture, society, and anything on a grand scale, and are also useful in that they are relatively expendable.

Baumeister starts by pointing out that the variety of male achievement is an important and unavoidable aspect of human reproduction. Women can't have lots of children, but by playing it safe they can have a few. Men can maybe have lots and lots if they are successful, or may have none if they're failures. Our ancestors, then, were women who played it safe and men who took risks.

Then, too, studies show that women prefer small groups to large ones in lots of ways.

So "perhaps nature designed women to seek to be lovable, whereas men were designed to strive, mostly unsuccessfully, for greatness." Men are good for risk-taking ventures, like discovering continents, and large-scale projects, like creating art and medicine. Women can do these things too, but they're not, in the nature of things, motivated to do them.

Arguments about nature's design can't fail to be structured in a funny way, since the link between evidence and conclusion is always so weird. Here we have a speculative claim about historical development of humans, together with facts about how actual men and women behave. It's the fit, presumably, that is supposed to make the argument convincing.

Of course, one always worries that the facts about actual people can't show anything about nature's design, since people are the way they are for so many reasons. One place Baumeister tries to respond to such a doubt is in his discussion about music.

In music, he says, both women and men are proficient, but only men are motivated to create and improvise. That this is nature, not culture, he says, is shown by the fact that in the 19th-century, wealthy women played instruments but created nothing, while at the same time powerless black men with no resources created blues and then jazz.

It's just a small example, and who knows what the answer is. But there seem to me to be a lot of other explanations. It was greatly in these women's interest to be passive. And plenty of women seem to be creating music now. Indeed, the incredible surge of women's involvement in the public domain over the last forty or so years seems to suggest more a pent-up desire to create, and be in public life, than a lack of desire.

In the 19th century, wealthy women were discouraged from creative production not by lack of resources but by an entire social structure. Trollope's late 19th-century novels are filled with women who bristle at their narrow life roles, and long to make a mark on the wider world. They find it impossible, because they have no practical or social independence, and because their roles are so narrowly defined. And Trollope was a conservative, against women's rights. So it's not like he was trying to make a point.

In my post about the Bonobo controversy, I said that questions about nature's design ought to receive the suspicious reply: Who wants to know? Don't go too fast with conclusions about men and women's motivation. Because the next step -- though Baumeister is careful not to make it -- is obviously: Chill out gals, if you're not getting anywhere, it's not our fault. You're probably not really trying.

Anatomy Of A Plot Twist

Certain artistic devices always work. A montage, for example, is always all right by me.

But today I'm concerned with books, not movies, and with the most profoundly soothing plot device ever found in a second rate thriller.

(There will be spoilers, but most of these spoilers will apply to books from the early sixties that you have either already read or weren't ever going to read. If you are sitting there at home reading this just before turning (with bated breath) to Mary Stewart's The Ivy Tree for the first time ever, you might want to skip it. Similar rules apply if you're reading your first novel by Alistair MacLean.)

It is the first person narration where the narrator presents her (or him) self to the reader as ignoble or evil or incompetent or clueless in some important respect only to throw off his (or her) cloak somewhere between a quarter and three quarters of the way in. At its best (and for best read most comforting, most like a warm bath) the reader is given some time to appreciate the discrepancy between the outward seeming of the narrator and his (or her) true nature before the other characters are clued in. I am more or less past the age where I would chuckle warmly at the comedy to be gotten from such a situation -- I'm not ashamed to admit, though, that once upon a time I did.

Last night, I read Fear Is The Key by Alistair MacLean. The book tips its hand; in the prologue the narrator undergoes a personal tragedy and the back cover tells you that he will be fending off villains. Leading one to suspect that he's a good guy. Still, in the first twenty pages or so he shoots a policeman, is provided with a criminal record as long as your arm, takes a hostage, etc.

I have read Alistair MacLean before and remained calm. One character mentioned that the cop shot by the narrator had died -- I didn't bat an eyelash because I knew it couldn't be true.

So it wasn't surprising, when the supposed bad cop and our supposedly villainous narrator shake hands and beam at each other inside the villain's stronghold. It was, however, deeply comforting.

The Ivy Tree does not telegraph its punches; it is more subtle (in, and only in, its plotting). It looks to be a straight up rip-off of Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar: a person who looks like a disappeared claimant to a fortune is talked into pretending to be that person. Sinister things happen.

But about three quarters of the way through it turns out that, in this version, the imposter is no imposter. And then you go through the previous chapters again and work out how it all makes sense.

I don't think that it's exactly random that the book tells us again and again that the imposter can't ride, while the claimant is an almost supernaturally excellent rider. The narrator, it turns out, is not only not an asshole; she's got skills. Horse-whispering skills.

Drabble is pound for pound the least funny comic strip known to man. (That was exaggeration for comic effect. Marmaduke is less funny.) Still, I sometimes think about the strip in which Norm wanders through the mall. People stop, look at him, titter. At the end, he says, "It's more fun to be a people-watcher than to be people watched."

The good-guy-narrator-plot-twist is comforting in the protection it gives from being people watched. The people watching are working under wrong assumptions.

There are things you do that you don't talk about. Some because you'd genuinely rather other people not know that particular fact about you. But others because, secrets, whatever their content, provide a shield of factual confusion against any outside judgment.

You may think, reading this, that I'm harping once again on sub-literary books, inventing a school of plot twist out of a couple semi-esoteric examples.

But you don't know the truth about me, just like nobody knows the truth about Bruce Wayne, playboy, or Clark Kent, klutz. So, go ahead, judge me as you will.