I’m not sure how to feel about it. I’ve read little snippets and bits of it before. I have had the entire plot spoiled for me by the Internet, but that doesn’t much matter; it’s not one of those books that relies strictly on a twist.
I really wanted to hate it, but I couldn’t, at least at first. The flow of the book is very good—I can’t think of another word for it. It’s that feeling that a book is comfortable to inhabit; that I can suspend my disbelief and settle into it without always thinking how I’m going to word the review.
I liked the first couple of chapters best, because they chronicled the protagonist’s out-of-placeness in a new setting and that’s a feeling I understand well. There’s duct tape and a lake and his crush on Alaska and all of this is great; I was going, man, they’re right: maybe this thing is a classic.
Then he ended up rooming with a clever, funny dude who liked him and fell in immediately with the cigarette-smoking Smart Kids, which seemed almost too easy. Drinks and Kurt Vonnegut in a field; it almost makes you wonder if John Green has ever read Kurt Vonnegut or if he thought, “college thing, gotta have it”. He has his characters archly fling the word “pretentious” around, as if to keep critics from using that word in reviews.
It’s all a part of that tendency—a trademark of John Green novels—for every single character to be so darn clever that it’s almost precious. His writing is always flow-y enough that it’s just barely believable, but the sharp edges of unrealism poke through the fabric. It echoes the epigrammic nature of certain passages of Oscar Wilde; quit it with the fortune cookies already, Oscar.
John Green is a genuinely intelligent guy and it bugs me that he’s putting all his intelligence into the promotion of this kind of coffee-shop philosophy the characters talk, which caffeinates but does not satisfy, which falls just short of the real thing. I like to talk that kind of shop myself because it’s fun to do, but there’s no viable alternative presented in Looking For Alaska, and I guess we’re expected to think that that’s the end of it: that what we read on our Starbucks sleeve or emblazon at the top of a Tumblr blog is just as good as what we’ve learned from history, religion or experience.
Monday, June 17, 2013
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Review: Horse's Neck by Pete Townshend
In the introduction to Horse’s Neck, his mid-80's foray into short fiction, Pete Townshend writes a thesis statement, or perhaps a muttered excuse for authoring fiction instead of the autobiography that fans had long been demanding of him. (It didn’t come to pass until 2012: see Who I Am.) “I have never wanted”, he claims, “simply to tell my own story.”
The irony is that Townshend might, in fact, make quite a decent short-story writer if he would just stop being so autobiographical. In one story he writes about a nameless alcoholic who is obviously him, but who can’t be him because the nameless one is a simple town-dwelling laborer and his dramas happen at football matches and pubs instead of at rock concerts and riotous afterparties. (Also, this man has two sons where Townshend has two daughters—a cover-up doubtless designed to protect Townshend’s cringing offspring, whatever their gender.) In the next story he writes from the point of view of another nameless alcoholic man who can’t possibly not be him, as he’s with a well-known band and trapped in an ongoing riotous afterparty that can be described by no less banal a word than “banal”. (“Layers upon layers of cheap nightclub hypocrisy” is Townshend’s phrase, and later down the page he adds, “The boredom was really quite exquisite.”) In the story after that, he gives up altogether and calls his main character “Pete.” (Sample sentence, written without a shred of irony: “Pete was a singer with a band.” Perhaps he went back and changed “guitarist” to “singer” with the sole purpose of putting a Saran Wrap-thin layer of fiction between himself and the main character.) As a composer, Townshend once spent a whole album, Quadrophenia, diving into the mind of a man with four separate personalities; as a writer, he dips into a thousand meaningless minds, all exactly the same.
It may seem paradoxical to describe the writing as “unpretentiously pretentious”, but that’s exactly what it is. Pete Townshend writes, and has always written, pretentiously; he does so with no pretention, because that’s the way he actually thinks. At times his writing has exactly the awkwardness one might expect from a lyricist clumsily attempting fiction; at other times he pulls a cracking sentence from seemingly nowhere: “He was fulfilled as usual, heart ginger-warm; but the feeling on this particular evening was different, like finding a new finger among the familiar five.”
All this would be fine and curious, even wonderful, except that Townshend has perhaps downed a bit too much James Joyce before the outing and vomited it up the wrong way. He gravitates toward the incomprehensible like a moth toward a candle, seemingly unaware that the power of his interviews and his lyrics always lay in their accessibility. That line about exquisite boredom applies neatly to just about any diversion from the narrative, and Townshend’s main character, like all of us, is easily distracted by any shade or symbol of himself, whether it be a childhood memory or a reflection in the mirror. If any girl, of any make or model whatsoever, enters the story, you may be sure that sex is immediately forthcoming, whether casual, dissatisfied sex or the longed-for encounter with a target of obsessive love. But the line of girls becomes pretty same-ish as Townshend fails to access the soul of a single one of them. In fact, he fails to access the soul of anyone save himself.
And of himself he extracts nothing but the darkest and dreariest. “Each story”, his introduction claims, “deals with some aspect of my struggle to discover what beauty really is.” Of struggle there is plenty, but it’s all personal and mental struggling rather than up-front responses to problems; the book, having confined itself to one psyche, reads something like one of those confused, dissatisfying dreams where the goal is never quite accomplished. The chapter in which he actually discovers beauty is never written. He takes a crack at it in the final “story”, “Laguna: Valentine’s Day 1982”, but the result is embarrassing and deeply off-putting. I can only conclude that Townshend meant the stories—written at a time in his life when he was estranged from his wife and struggling with alcoholism and drug addiction—as personal carthasis, an exorcism of rock-star demons. Maybe they were something he needed to write; most of them are not, by any stretch of the imagination, something we need to read. They should have remained buried somewhere among his private papers, though I suppose I have little room to berate him for the fact that they’ve been out in the open since nearly a decade before I was born; the book has been out of print almost as long. We all make rash decisions, and maybe Pete regretted his.
On that note, the constant graphic sexual references and themes found in Horse’s Neck are disquieting at best and mortifying at worst. The same loose-cannon style of conversation that makes Townshend fascinating and challenging as an interview subject here verges on Tourette’s Syndrome, and if there was any editor in the house, he was asleep. The worst sketch as far as this goes is perhaps the seemingly interminable “Plate”, which starts out as a shallow detective fiction and becomes a disgusting and meaningless tale about watching a girl while she dresses and undresses. A male fan of Townshend might read it without feeling violated. For me, a girl (and not a squeamish one), the story, and one image in particular, have rather spoiled the taste of my Who music for the time being. (See: James Joyce’s gross-out love letters to Nora Barnacle, which I have little doubt Townshend read.)
It isn’t all abstract: Townshend ventures vaguely homeward in “Fish Shop” (the story with the nearest approximation of a plot), refers obscurely to the deaths of manager Keith Lambert and drummer Keith Moon (“Pancho and the Baron”), and recalls past Rolling Stone interviews in “A Death of the Day Of”, which ends on a near-suicidal note that eerily foreshadows the demise of Kurt Cobain.
Quite rightly, the most critically-praised sketch in this distended muddle is a little number called “Champagne on the Terraces”; although, like most sequences in the book, it’s more extended monologue than short story, it does a good job of delving into Townshend’s tortured personal life as a blissful alternative to his tortured thoughts, giving the book some much-needed reality. The gem of the wreck, however, is “Winston”—a Ray Bradbury-styled spilling of words which congeals as a maddening and revealing meditation on the murder of John Lennon.
[I must end this review by noting that, as a musician, Pete Townshend apparently prefers to be known as simply “Pete”: his last straw during the Lifehouse sessions was having fatherly manager Kit Lambert coldly refer to him as “Townshend”. However, the Pete of Horse’s Neck is a Townshend treading, as during Lifehouse, into the wrong waters, and thus well deserves the cold water of his surname to bring him to his senses.]
The irony is that Townshend might, in fact, make quite a decent short-story writer if he would just stop being so autobiographical. In one story he writes about a nameless alcoholic who is obviously him, but who can’t be him because the nameless one is a simple town-dwelling laborer and his dramas happen at football matches and pubs instead of at rock concerts and riotous afterparties. (Also, this man has two sons where Townshend has two daughters—a cover-up doubtless designed to protect Townshend’s cringing offspring, whatever their gender.) In the next story he writes from the point of view of another nameless alcoholic man who can’t possibly not be him, as he’s with a well-known band and trapped in an ongoing riotous afterparty that can be described by no less banal a word than “banal”. (“Layers upon layers of cheap nightclub hypocrisy” is Townshend’s phrase, and later down the page he adds, “The boredom was really quite exquisite.”) In the story after that, he gives up altogether and calls his main character “Pete.” (Sample sentence, written without a shred of irony: “Pete was a singer with a band.” Perhaps he went back and changed “guitarist” to “singer” with the sole purpose of putting a Saran Wrap-thin layer of fiction between himself and the main character.) As a composer, Townshend once spent a whole album, Quadrophenia, diving into the mind of a man with four separate personalities; as a writer, he dips into a thousand meaningless minds, all exactly the same.
It may seem paradoxical to describe the writing as “unpretentiously pretentious”, but that’s exactly what it is. Pete Townshend writes, and has always written, pretentiously; he does so with no pretention, because that’s the way he actually thinks. At times his writing has exactly the awkwardness one might expect from a lyricist clumsily attempting fiction; at other times he pulls a cracking sentence from seemingly nowhere: “He was fulfilled as usual, heart ginger-warm; but the feeling on this particular evening was different, like finding a new finger among the familiar five.”
All this would be fine and curious, even wonderful, except that Townshend has perhaps downed a bit too much James Joyce before the outing and vomited it up the wrong way. He gravitates toward the incomprehensible like a moth toward a candle, seemingly unaware that the power of his interviews and his lyrics always lay in their accessibility. That line about exquisite boredom applies neatly to just about any diversion from the narrative, and Townshend’s main character, like all of us, is easily distracted by any shade or symbol of himself, whether it be a childhood memory or a reflection in the mirror. If any girl, of any make or model whatsoever, enters the story, you may be sure that sex is immediately forthcoming, whether casual, dissatisfied sex or the longed-for encounter with a target of obsessive love. But the line of girls becomes pretty same-ish as Townshend fails to access the soul of a single one of them. In fact, he fails to access the soul of anyone save himself.
And of himself he extracts nothing but the darkest and dreariest. “Each story”, his introduction claims, “deals with some aspect of my struggle to discover what beauty really is.” Of struggle there is plenty, but it’s all personal and mental struggling rather than up-front responses to problems; the book, having confined itself to one psyche, reads something like one of those confused, dissatisfying dreams where the goal is never quite accomplished. The chapter in which he actually discovers beauty is never written. He takes a crack at it in the final “story”, “Laguna: Valentine’s Day 1982”, but the result is embarrassing and deeply off-putting. I can only conclude that Townshend meant the stories—written at a time in his life when he was estranged from his wife and struggling with alcoholism and drug addiction—as personal carthasis, an exorcism of rock-star demons. Maybe they were something he needed to write; most of them are not, by any stretch of the imagination, something we need to read. They should have remained buried somewhere among his private papers, though I suppose I have little room to berate him for the fact that they’ve been out in the open since nearly a decade before I was born; the book has been out of print almost as long. We all make rash decisions, and maybe Pete regretted his.
On that note, the constant graphic sexual references and themes found in Horse’s Neck are disquieting at best and mortifying at worst. The same loose-cannon style of conversation that makes Townshend fascinating and challenging as an interview subject here verges on Tourette’s Syndrome, and if there was any editor in the house, he was asleep. The worst sketch as far as this goes is perhaps the seemingly interminable “Plate”, which starts out as a shallow detective fiction and becomes a disgusting and meaningless tale about watching a girl while she dresses and undresses. A male fan of Townshend might read it without feeling violated. For me, a girl (and not a squeamish one), the story, and one image in particular, have rather spoiled the taste of my Who music for the time being. (See: James Joyce’s gross-out love letters to Nora Barnacle, which I have little doubt Townshend read.)
It isn’t all abstract: Townshend ventures vaguely homeward in “Fish Shop” (the story with the nearest approximation of a plot), refers obscurely to the deaths of manager Keith Lambert and drummer Keith Moon (“Pancho and the Baron”), and recalls past Rolling Stone interviews in “A Death of the Day Of”, which ends on a near-suicidal note that eerily foreshadows the demise of Kurt Cobain.
Quite rightly, the most critically-praised sketch in this distended muddle is a little number called “Champagne on the Terraces”; although, like most sequences in the book, it’s more extended monologue than short story, it does a good job of delving into Townshend’s tortured personal life as a blissful alternative to his tortured thoughts, giving the book some much-needed reality. The gem of the wreck, however, is “Winston”—a Ray Bradbury-styled spilling of words which congeals as a maddening and revealing meditation on the murder of John Lennon.
[I must end this review by noting that, as a musician, Pete Townshend apparently prefers to be known as simply “Pete”: his last straw during the Lifehouse sessions was having fatherly manager Kit Lambert coldly refer to him as “Townshend”. However, the Pete of Horse’s Neck is a Townshend treading, as during Lifehouse, into the wrong waters, and thus well deserves the cold water of his surname to bring him to his senses.]
Thursday, May 23, 2013
Album Review: Oh, Inverted World by The Shins
"You've got to hear this one song, it'll change your life I swear."That's not a Shins lyric. I know it sounds as if it should be, with the scansion and everything, but if you want a second line you'll be left hanging. It's a well-known quote from the film Garden State about The Shins' song "New Slang". "New Slang"--that's a memorable title, right? Just like Oh, Inverted World. In fact, memorable, rhythmic titles are a bit of a thing with our friends The Shins. I run my eyes down the track listing and see, not only "New Slang", but "Caring is Creepy", "Weird Divide", "Know Your Onion!", "Girl Inform Me". In a modernist way, they could almost pass for the names of classic theatrical cartoons. "Lady Play Your Mandolin" would be a good name for a Shins song.
I've got a couple of sisters and a mom who are all cooler than me. They all, at variant times, got into The Shins. I never did, even though we all use the same iTunes. Not even the titles enticed me, and you all know titles are my favorite thing. I didn't know one Shins song. So I lazed through life, listening to cheap stuff like The Killers, while the rest of the womenfolk gushed behind me, as if they were blossoming, about tracks like "Girl on the Wing" and "The Celibate Life."
However, when my sisters go to concerts we go together, and when they obtain concert tickets they get me one, too. Thus it was that I ended up at Green Day directly after midterms just as I was digesting the news of a less-than-satisfactory grade, feeling subway-weary and battered about the skull, and thus it was that Clair ambled up to me one morning less than two weeks ago and told me I had two weeks to get into The Shins. Okay, I'll take it.
They've got four albums, all of which we own, and Oh, Inverted World is only the first. I thought I'd take them in order. Yet here I am, nearly two weeks later, and still I'm listening to Oh, Inverted World. Just listening to it over and over again, like a stoner.
So why, you want to know? Did it change my life?
The opposite, actually. It isn't sticking.
It's sugar on the tongue--I think I like it, but it melts away as soon as I've heard it, and then I forget the way it tasted.
I feel as if I'm cramming for one of those exams where cramming doesn't seem to have any effect. Or maybe I feel as if halfway through a day I remember a great idea I had, and then with a sinking feeling I remember that I only had it in a dream and promptly forgot it when I woke up. No traction, no purchase. If it were a vinyl and I were a needle I'd slide off it without making a sound.
Yet even now as I check the track listing to identify the song currently playing (it's "Know Your Onion"), I can hear Clair singing along in the other room, to words that even her high voice isn't making clear to me.
I thought that was my difficulty at first--the words. Oh, Inverted World has that frustrating Nirvana quality--the vocals are, just barely, too murky to be made out. But at least Kurt Cobain put all his slurred singing on top of leaden tunes so heavy they stuck in your head, so if you didn't know them you could snarl along: "rahrah rah rah, rah rahhh rah rah rah rah rah rah rah rah rah, she's so rah rah, and sellllllf-assuuuured…" And that way, everyone knew Nirvana's songs, even if they never did.
I looked up a few of The Shin's lyrics, and they were lovely stand-alone pieces--rhythmic and abstract, the sort of things that I'd repeat to myself all day long if I read them in a poetry book, or in The New Yorker, or on the back of a Simon and Garfunkel album sleeve. But try as I might, I couldn't connect a single one to a tune.
And it's not as if I don't know the tunes. I can hum snatches of them to myself, little fabric-swatches of melody, but I can't remember what songs they go to. I only know when I can look at my phone while the song is playing and see the title. It's that feeling like when you have a box of fancy chocolates and they give you a little map to identify which is which, but you're holding it backwards and you have the sneaking suspicion that it's your other left, and then you turn it around and reach for one and find yourself wincing as you bite into one of those horrible strawberry things when all you wanted was a truffle.
Only imagine if you bit into those chocolates and all of them were made of thin air, and that'll give you a pretty good idea how I'm feeling right now.
In fact, maybe I'm writing this review just to feel some sense of ownership of the band. If I write the review, I'm thinking, I'll get them on paper and they won't slip through my grasp. I'll be able to go to the concert and actually know them, own them!
(My sister Mary just came in, heard the unidentifiable track I was listening to, said softly, "'Your Algebra'," and sang along in a low voice, too quietly for me to hear.)
I don't know if this is really a review of the album. After all, it's only me to whom this happens. Maybe it's more a review of myself. I've worked okay up until now, but I seem to be a bit defective. Send me back.
Monday, May 20, 2013
I'm learning not to apologize for going through phases on different blogging platforms.
You write in the notebook you've got in front of you, ain't it the truth? You pour your tea into whatever mug is most convenient.
I don't mind it if I've got my brain backed up on a million hard-drives, because you know what? It wouldn't fit into one notebook anyway.
Anyhow, if you're crazy enough to miss me then stagger on over to Tumblr and read this review I wrote of The Who's album Tommy. It's a long-winded and overwrought review, but that's okay. Tommy is a long-winded and overwrought LP.
Clair and I have a nice evening planned with a book to read (probably The Great Gatsby because we want to see the movie next weekend, although East of Eden and In The Woods are also options) and snickerdoodles in honor of Astrid Kirchherr's birthday (one of Clair's favorite photographers--she bought the cookies first and then retroactively made them about Astrid when I informed her of the occasion. We're going to maybe make Kirchherr cookies a yearly tradition now).
I don't mind it if I've got my brain backed up on a million hard-drives, because you know what? It wouldn't fit into one notebook anyway.
Anyhow, if you're crazy enough to miss me then stagger on over to Tumblr and read this review I wrote of The Who's album Tommy. It's a long-winded and overwrought review, but that's okay. Tommy is a long-winded and overwrought LP.
Clair and I have a nice evening planned with a book to read (probably The Great Gatsby because we want to see the movie next weekend, although East of Eden and In The Woods are also options) and snickerdoodles in honor of Astrid Kirchherr's birthday (one of Clair's favorite photographers--she bought the cookies first and then retroactively made them about Astrid when I informed her of the occasion. We're going to maybe make Kirchherr cookies a yearly tradition now).
Saturday, April 27, 2013
Danielle's first suspicion
My sister Danielle, who just turned two: (runs into office) Allie, that a beetle?
Me: (sitting on office floor with my laptop) What?
Danielle: Is that a beetle?
Me: Is what? (Probably worth noting: I had been procrastinating on my essay by looking up pictures of The Beatles and I thought she'd developed some supernatural ability to apprehend my shenanigans.)
Danielle: (bends down and points to floor) Is that a beetle?
Me: No, that's not a beetle, I think you're okay. It's just some dirt on the floor.
Danielle: Okay. (runs out)
Me: Hey, that's the first full sentence you've ever said to me! High five!
Danielle: (giggles delightedly, runs back to meet me, looks down at floor again) …That's a beetle.
Only just talking and already she doesn't trust me.
Me: (sitting on office floor with my laptop) What?
Danielle: Is that a beetle?
Me: Is what? (Probably worth noting: I had been procrastinating on my essay by looking up pictures of The Beatles and I thought she'd developed some supernatural ability to apprehend my shenanigans.)
Danielle: (bends down and points to floor) Is that a beetle?
Me: No, that's not a beetle, I think you're okay. It's just some dirt on the floor.
Danielle: Okay. (runs out)
Me: Hey, that's the first full sentence you've ever said to me! High five!
Danielle: (giggles delightedly, runs back to meet me, looks down at floor again) …That's a beetle.
Only just talking and already she doesn't trust me.
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
This is the limit
Well, I've tried not to obsess over the Gosnell Trial, because I figure plenty of other people are doing that for me. It speaks for itself, though, doesn't it? Your average pro-choicer is very much against late-term abortion, which kills a baby viable outside of the womb, for all intents and purposes ready to be born. There's no room there to argue about when life begins. And besides this guy casually taking a scissors to their spinal cords, you've got him preserving the feet in jars, for no reason that anyone can figure out. That is some deeply, deeply-rooted sadism, and that's without getting into all the woman he put through hell in his horror-house clinic; every time a new article comes out there's a brand-new incomprehensible offense toward humanity that they just discovered. It's that hypothetical alien invasion of earth: something every human being, regardless of ideology, can unite against.
So I haven't said much about it up until now, but then someone linked to the expansively-titled 2009 Salon article How abortion changed the world, which puts on proud display, flags fluttering, exactly the kind of thinking that could justify a Kermit Gosnell. The article provides a brief biography of 50s-to-70s underground abortionist Harvey Karman (a name which, coincidentally, sounds exactly like something they'd invent for a fictional abortionist based on Gosnell if they ever wanted to do a CSI episode). "Much of Karman’s early history is hazy," the article reports, "but one horrific incident stands out. In 1955, one of the women who sought Karman’s help died of an infection, and he was charged with both murder and abortion. A court rejected his insistence that he was a mere middleman between the woman and a doctor, finding that he himself had tried to induce a miscarriage using a speculum and a nutcracker." (Horrifying indeed, but the article doesn't make it clear enough for my liking whether the term "horrific incident" refers to the woman's death or the two years Karman spent in jail for it. If the latter, I can't help remembering those CNN reports of the Steubenville rape case, which all but wept over the destruction of the rapists' rosy futures while ignoring the victim's plight entirely.)
However, you can't keep a good man down: in two years Karman "emerged unfazed to resume the work that had become, for him, a kind of crusade." He took up a few hobbies such as film studies and working with juvenile delinquents, but "abortion remained his consuming passion." (Most pro-choice people would have to take issue with the wording of this: very few people really like abortion, even those who see it as a necessity. Helping women ought to be a consuming passion; abortion is not an appropriate consuming passion for a sane individual.) Eventually, his passion led him to create the prototype manual vacuum aspiration syringe, and this development is reported on with cavalier good humor and a general spirit of fun. Karman, according to his friend Dr. Malcom Potts,"was a very dexterous person. He used to make model airplanes when he was young. I once locked myself out of my car, and I’d never seen anybody break into a car as quickly as Harvey did. And he’s pretty good at breaking into the uterus." At this point, of course, I'm flickering my eyes to the top of the page to make sure this is really Salon.com and not some sick satire website.
"The attempt to liberate half the world’s people from the intertwined tyrannies of culture and biology is one of the least heralded but most ambitious global initiatives in history."
So I haven't said much about it up until now, but then someone linked to the expansively-titled 2009 Salon article How abortion changed the world, which puts on proud display, flags fluttering, exactly the kind of thinking that could justify a Kermit Gosnell. The article provides a brief biography of 50s-to-70s underground abortionist Harvey Karman (a name which, coincidentally, sounds exactly like something they'd invent for a fictional abortionist based on Gosnell if they ever wanted to do a CSI episode). "Much of Karman’s early history is hazy," the article reports, "but one horrific incident stands out. In 1955, one of the women who sought Karman’s help died of an infection, and he was charged with both murder and abortion. A court rejected his insistence that he was a mere middleman between the woman and a doctor, finding that he himself had tried to induce a miscarriage using a speculum and a nutcracker." (Horrifying indeed, but the article doesn't make it clear enough for my liking whether the term "horrific incident" refers to the woman's death or the two years Karman spent in jail for it. If the latter, I can't help remembering those CNN reports of the Steubenville rape case, which all but wept over the destruction of the rapists' rosy futures while ignoring the victim's plight entirely.)
However, you can't keep a good man down: in two years Karman "emerged unfazed to resume the work that had become, for him, a kind of crusade." He took up a few hobbies such as film studies and working with juvenile delinquents, but "abortion remained his consuming passion." (Most pro-choice people would have to take issue with the wording of this: very few people really like abortion, even those who see it as a necessity. Helping women ought to be a consuming passion; abortion is not an appropriate consuming passion for a sane individual.) Eventually, his passion led him to create the prototype manual vacuum aspiration syringe, and this development is reported on with cavalier good humor and a general spirit of fun. Karman, according to his friend Dr. Malcom Potts,"was a very dexterous person. He used to make model airplanes when he was young. I once locked myself out of my car, and I’d never seen anybody break into a car as quickly as Harvey did. And he’s pretty good at breaking into the uterus." At this point, of course, I'm flickering my eyes to the top of the page to make sure this is really Salon.com and not some sick satire website.
Over and over, the article casually admits that Karman, this man with a consuming passion for finding new ways to break into the uterus, might possibly have been a pretty shady figure, however lovable: "He added a Ph.D. to his name, though his degree came from a dubious Swiss diploma mill." Still, we're assured confidently that though "[w]ithout a doubt, there were abundant reasons to be suspicious of him ... he was no mercenary backroom butcher." I am reminded irresistibly of Mark Twain's In Defense of Harriet Shelley, in which Twain rips mercilessly into a contemporary Shelley biography that justified the poet's wrongdoings in broad terms: "The ordinary forms of speech are absent from it. All the pages, all the paragraphs, walk by sedately, elegantly, not to say mincingly, in their Sunday-best, shiny and sleek, perfumed, and with boutonnieres in their button-hole. It is rare even to find a chance sentence that has forgotten to dress."
How do we know that Karman was "no mercenary backroom butcher"? Because "many recall him as more interested in spreading word of his discovery than in profiting from it, giving free demonstrations to interested doctors and health care workers." In the first place, the possibility that spreading word of his discovery might lead to profit seems not to have occurred to the author of the article. But even if we should take the term "mercenary" out, even if we take it upon ourselves to judge on the word of this unnamed "many" that he was not after money, the rest of the phrase remains. No, he was no coy backroom butcher; he was a theatrical butcher, a stage butcher, eager to bring his brand of butchery to the public eye. Perhaps I'm being too broad in my assessment, but hearing his friend wax eloquent about his prophetic skill with model airplanes and his uncanny knack for breaking into cars has me worried. It's as if Dr. Potts were trying to shill his buddy as a Houdini, proud of his stunts and eager for an audience.
Keep in mind that this article was not written as a profile of Harvey Karman, inventor of the manual vacuum aspiration syringe. The article is called "How abortion changed the world." So why, why does this shadowy figure who happened to invent a popular abortion device but whom even the author of the article admits to have been more than a little sleazy receive top billing? Isn't there someone more admirable, perhaps someone more misguidedly geared toward the general goal of helping woman and less passionate about the act of abortion for its own sake, who might be appropriate? What on earth would make us, assuming we were entirely undecided about the issue, get behind this giddy gamer of a non-doctor who treats the womb like a rubic's cube to be accessed with nutcrackers and syringes? Well, the rest of the article will tell you, when it eventually gets to the subject of woman a good five paragraphs later. "[T]he global commitment to reproductive rights represents an important attempt to unite humankind against an ageless scourge: the wholesale devaluation of women."
I'm going to back up all the way to the beginning of the article and find the only Karman quote it contains, the abortionist's only word on the subject that the columnist finds worthy of note (since inventing the manual vacuum aspiration syringe mostly speaks for itself). "It seemed like every guy who got a girlfriend pregnant, everyone who had remotely heard about me, said, 'This guy knows about abortion,' " he told Ms. Magazine in 1975, referring to his days as a psychology student who, according to the article, "helped a number of desperate coeds find ways to terminate their pregnancy".
It's all about the guys, spiriting their girlfriends past the state lines for personal convenience, trusting their girlfriend's lives to the word of some unqualified student who they heard might know a thing or two. And the unqualified student, I might add, is quite proud of his early savvy on the subject, even in retrospect. I would elaborate on this aura of pride, but I'm remembering those little feet, floating in jars.
Still, though, no commentary on this piece would be complete without a mention of its final line, the last hammer-stroke to the nail that drives it home. It appears below, emphasis mine.
I hate to sound like a stereotype of this movement that I'm a part of which, in a better world, would not even be referred to as a "movement". But as long as Salon is going to write things like that without irony, I am going to reply without irony and with all my heart.
God help us.
The intertwined tyrannies of culture and biology.
The intertwined tyrannies of morality and reality.
The intertwined tyrannies of humanity and femininity.
The intertwined tyrannies of the soul and the body.
When a black freethinking man is murdered, it's not a crime against black freethinking men; it's a crime against humanity. When a white Jewish woman is murdered, it's not a crime against white Jewish women; it's a crime against humanity. When a baby, skin unseen, gender unknown, religion uncomprehended, is destroyed in the womb before its birth or snipped with a scissors outside the womb after its birth, it is not a crime against babies or fetuses or even women. It is a crime against humanity itself.
By trying to create a world where, contrary to nature, sex does not get a woman pregnant, we're trying to completely transcend humanity, like those people who say, "Let us build a tower that will go all the way to Heaven." Only at the moment we're striving, with all the scientific and mechanical complexity we're capable of, for something that's already been invented, for something so clever and compartmentalized that Karman could only have dreamed of inventing it, for something that can be accomplished with a swift turn of the knife: suicide, a neat device to dispose of the soul by throwing it away and the body by landing it underground. Then, free forever from the intertwined tyrannies of culture and biology, we'll be able to reap what remains.
The answer to that is "precious little".
Thursday, April 4, 2013
You're living in your own Private Idaho
Look at me, redirecting the chattering stream of Tumblr into the quiet harbor of my Blogger blog!
Here do I vow that I will never write anything on either blog just to get attention.
Here do I vow that I will never write anything on either blog just to get attention.
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