Sexuality, Pop Culture, and Magic: The Prelude Starring Buffy

You are my sweetest downfall
I loved you first , I loved you first
Beneath the stars came falling on our heads
But there just soft light, there just soft light
Your hair was long when we first met

Samson came to my bed
Told me that my hair was red
He told me i was beautiful and came into my bed
Oh I cut his hair myself one night
A pair of dull scissors and the yellow light
And he told me that I’d done alright
and kissed me till the morning light
–Regina Spektor

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Now that I’ve watched my way almost to the end of Buffy’s third season, I’m ready to write the sequel to my first post, which was Buffy The Social Anxiety Slayer. (Note: if you don’t want the larger context, just skip to after the break. But you probably do.) (Update: link fixed.)

This is a post about what the show does with sex. It is not about how the show caves in to goth-lite alternative rock at every opportunity, culminating in a prom scene where the cover of “Wild Horses” by the Rolling Stones made me so angry that I had to set one of my Mazzy Star records on fire. More generally, it isn’t really about the show’s alleged insight into the high school experience. Buffy is comfortably devoid of any such insight. Particularly annoying is the show’s equation of talking about studying with actual studying, and its helpful decision to reinforce the popular idea that SAT scores + money determine college admissions.

This isn’t insider criticism for fans of the show. It would be a huge mistake to think of Buffy as a cult phenomenon. It is the prelude to a larger blog project on sexuality and popular culture, tentatively scheduled to post this August. There I will take a look at the trickle that’s become a torrent: Swingers, Sex and the City (again), The Tao of Steve, Rodger Dodger, The Rules, The Game, Wedding Crashers, and so on. (It will come to light in a few years that Zizek was the only theorist ahead of the curve, since he actually does write about The Rules and seduction in his newer books.)

These works, which are collectively raising the bar for alienation, emotionlessness, and insincerity, are what is happening right now in sexuality. They totally subsume the “metrosexual.” The only significant sexual events they don’t enfold are at the frontiers of gender: transsexuality, transgendered individuals, and related phenomena. It’s really no surprise that the most controversial and, often, the most exciting things being written in the feminist blogosphere right now are by, for, or about “trans” persons.

So this post really continues the work I began in my TWFB posts on cowboys, strippers, and astrology. Ultimately, I’ll be putting together a whole book on magic and popular culture, tentatively titled Willing Fictions, which I see partly as an update of Weber.

One final note, before we get down to brass tacks: you can’t go home again. It’s a huge relief to be writing about Buffy, since last week I also watched Notting Hill and tried to watch The Notebook. No, I don’t know why I’m that dumb either. I insist that nobody told me that Notting Hill was going to be about a pitiable little whiner, played gamely by Hugh Grant, following around Julia Roberts despite her astounding self-absorption until she finally gives him a painting. In essence, it was the story of a guy trying to act out the ridiculous expectations of subservience and continual forgiveness that are usually imposed on women.

The Notebook was even more unfair, because it’s one of those films that tries to whisk us away to a more innocent time. The problem with films like that is that they always fall back on anachronistic tricks from the corrupt old present: the Ryan Gosling character is essentially a modern scammer, except that he really means it because, after all, this was a different America where you could say “aw, shucks” and mean it.

Enough with the classic-style romances. Let’s get to the vampires. Apologies in advance: somebody recalled my Zizek, so I’m gonna have to paraphrase instead of quoting.

1. The Red Herring

The word on the street about Buffy is that the show broke ground for alternative sexualities. As Brandon wrote in a comment to my first post, “The show may do more to ‘bring to light’ marginalized sexual predilections than it does marginalized members of the D&D club.”

I see this issue differently. While the show’s references to “safety words” and so on may be confusing or shocking to somebody who has been living under a rock for ten years, these references never go beyond the status of jokes for 98% of the characters, with the exception of the vampires Spike and Drusilla. Sado-masochism comes up as repartee when characters are being actually tortured or imprisoned. That is just pure sadism. It’s not the contractual relationships that have enabled these kinds of desires to become semi-mainstream. Likewise, erotic asphyxiation is just a goofy way for the show to joke about nerdy sidekick Xander almost getting strangled.

I am, however, interested in the fact that these perversions function as a kind of red herring, in part because that is the larger social function of perversion, outlined persuasively by Zizek in The Ticklish Subject. For Zizek, sado-masochism and other such complexes serve their function by making the requirements of sexuality so concrete and complicated that they provide the illusion of solid ground: the problem becomes the immediate practical problem of tying up one’s lover properly, rather than the anxiety-producing question of what one actually desires. The specificity of fetish simultaneously obscures the relationship between the fetish and the rest of life, and provides an illusory sanctuary from those other fourteen waking hours in the day.

On the show, the references to perverse or fetishistic behavior, which are always made as jokes and thus always refer to somebody else besides the principals, draws our attention away from the fact that the relationships of the principals are not what they seem, and aren’t reducible to “real” perversions like sado-masochism either. For example, the Television Without Pity recap of one show goes like this: “Does it mean anything that Angel shows the most personality we’ve seen from him after torture and bondage? Best not to read too much into that.” This skips over the fact that the Angel/Buffy relationship, which has no medieval props, isn’t ice creams and lockets, and isn’t just a case of the badass older guy either.

2. The Spell: Seduction and the Death Drive

In the very Freudian world of the show, desire is produced by the id. The vampires are id-mirrors of the human beings, and even the vampires have id-eclipses where they turn into ravenous Klingons (if you haven’t seen the show, I can summarize by saying this is when they turn from evil Jekyll into evil Hyde). The really bad vampires (usually henchmen), who don’t repress at all, always look like Klingons.

The id is the repressed truth of the person. The vampire form of Willow gives us the first clue that Willow is gay. When Buffy gets infected by demon blood, she acquires the ability to hear what everybody’s “really” thinking, except for Angel, who she can’t hear because he’s already id (being a vampire and all).

Desire is not a two-way street in Buffy. It is either active desire, which is the desire to kill, or passive desire, which is the desire to die. (Jean Baudrillard was the first to identify seduction with the desire for death, I believe, in his book on the subject.) The id aligns itself with the death drive. As the vampire Spike puts it, in amusing allegorical fashion, “I found her on a bench, making out with a chaos demon.” This is actually what is happening every time anybody in the show makes out with anybody else. Thus a vampire always interrupts trysts in Sunnydale, and rock shows at “the Bronze” are always under threat of vampires.

The active half of this equation should be pretty familiar: the satisfaction of desire equals the erasure of the other person, who is merely a means, and who is “sacrificed” on the altar of that instrumentality. (That’s why it’s so dangerous to be desired. When every woman in town is bewitched by Xander, they nearly kill him.) The greater the agency of the other, the greater the victory, and that makes Buffy the Slayer the object of disproportionate lust. This is an utterly masculine dynamic. Both men and women on the show are concerned about threats to their masculinity, a topic I’ll cover in more detail under the heading of castration.

Meanwhile, what about the desire to die? Why such a profusion of spells, hypnotic trances, and possessions? As Kenneth Burke argues in The Rhetoric of Motive, the “desire to die” appears frequently in artworks, and is very rarely literal, even if it sometimes expresses itself as literal (i.e. suicidal) intentions. In Buffy, the desire to die is the unconscious articulation of a desire for the interruption of normalcy.

Sometimes this takes the form of adultery, like the adulterous relationship between Xander and Willow that Willow tries to ward off with a Pez dispenser her boyfriend gave her (standing in for a cross). Here the normal romantic relationship is invaded by chaos.

In general, the desire for interruption is the desire to enter a world of different and greater bliss. Xander, the unpopular kid, wants the popular girl Cordelia. Willow, the studious nerd, wants Oz the rocker. Potential love interests for Buffy are criticized for being thrillseekers, but their real problem is that what is excitingly different for them is more of the same for her. Buffy’s dream world is made up of the fables surrounding normal events like the prom.

Buffy’s the most interesting case, because her predicament sheds light on the intersection between desire and duty (the work ethic). She doesn’t want to be a Slayer: she says so at the beginning of the show, and reiterates the point approximately twice per episode for seven seasons, except at the end of certain episodes where she realizes that being a Slayer is her job yadda yadda yadda. I say “yadda yadda yadda” because, after another fifteen minutes of screentime, we’re always back to the Buffy who doesn’t like the color of her parachute.

Her love for Angel suspends her obligation to her Slayer duties: here’s a vampire she doesn’t have to kill. This is the respite she cherishes in his company.

The reason she wants this respite, as she makes clear in the pilot episode, is that her destiny has been imposed on her, just the way studying is imposed on all the high school students, and the way work is imposed on adults. Being a Slayer is a “forced choice,” and the result is that she’s bound to want to express her freedom by subverting that choice. In general, just as the agency of the Slayer is the forced choice of the employee, the freedom offered by the vampire merges with the passive spectacle of entertainment and celebrity. Celebrities are the ones who got away, like Roxy Carmichael did: we assume their lives are more interesting and glamorous than our own, so we ambivalently either want them to return to our level, or we want to be consumed by them. We stalk them innocuously through magazines and celebrity gossip sites, and we are consumed by them in the mediocre mode of distraction.

Even the celebrities themselves don’t know how to escape this dynamic, so they mirror us back to ourselves in works like Eminem’s “Stan” or Sarah McLachlan’s “Possession.” The power of fascination is really a projection born of unhappiness.

The most hypnotically compelling vampire on the show, Dracula himself, is also the most famous, his legend stretching far beyond the limits of the show.

3. Love on Buffy: Don’t Blame Boreanaz

You can’t understand Buffy until you put it in reverse: Buffy loves Angel because he’s a vampire, Willow loves Oz because he’s a werewolf, Giles is a good Watcher because he was once a teddy boy named “The Ripper.”

The key to the love relationship is sublimation: most of the time, Oz’s werewolf nature is sublimated into his rock music. Giles and Angel both revert to their bad old selves on the occasions where they have to fight, at which times Buffy and the viewers alike are delighted by the show of machismo.

In other words, the love relationship is a fiction that keeps a lid on the real source of attraction, the lurking power in the other. When Drusilla hypnotizes Giles into thinking she’s Jenny Calendar, he’s really seeing Jenny as she actually was: he was in love with a computer teacher who was also a “technopagan” and occultist, but the only reason Ms. Calendar was a technopagan was that she was actually a Gypsy (with some other, silly “gypsy” name) sent to make sure Angel continued to suffer. Drusilla is only doing what Ms. Calendar did first. Ms. Calendar was the woman Giles loved because of her secret identity as a Gypsy witch.

If you’re one of those unfortunate types who happens not to have any obvious lurking chaos, you’re basically out of luck until magic comes to your aid. Xander’s two shots at attractiveness come when he’s possessed by demonic hyenas, and later when he is transformed by a magical costume into an actual soldier. He wins the right to Cordelia’s love on that one magical night. Willow is a different story: she’s just very repressed. Her tone of voice, her sense of style, and her luck all change as her desiring id (her Wicca powers and homosexuality) gradually surfaces.

If all this sounds a little less than romantic, well, don’t worry, it gets worse. The show is less sanguine than Freud about the virtues of sublimation, and invariably portrays love as a form of castration that affects men and women alike.

The funniest kinds of castration affect Buffy. Dracula, when he’s seducing her, commands her to put down her stake. In the same episode where Xander turns martial, Buffy dresses in period costume to impress Angel, and ends up transformed into a passive woman incapable of protecting herself. Angel, in a characteristic scene, tells her that he was always bored of helpless women like that. Later, he will tell her that he always gets bored of women who are like the wild child Faith. You can’t go one way or the other in Buffy: you have to be the voluntary Samson whose hair could always grow back.

That’s why David Boreanaz gets an unfair deal when he is criticized for playing Angel with the sensitivity of a cardboard cutout. It’s pretty hard to play a character whose inner conflicts are in a state of perfect equilibrium, and that’s what you get with Angel, since he’s both more powerful and more crippled than any other principal. He’s a vampire, but he has a soul. He’s wracked with guilt, but he has a reason to live because of Buffy. The impulses neutralize one another so perfectly that he’s left with no room for emotion. The slightest actual happiness will turn him evil, since it will break the spell of repression.

4. The Stakes

So what about the stakes? They’re sexual, right? They’re pointy (sometimes Buffy calls her stake “Mr. Pointy”) and both Faith and Giles make terrible jokes comparing killing vampires to having sex.

The moment of the staking is the moment of conquest and disillusion. The vampire is literally “seen through,” in that he or she turns to dust and disappears. When Buffy snaps out of her hypnotic trances (when she’s fighting the Master and later when she’s fighting Dracula), she gets down to the business of staking. Faith’s lust for the act is the mirror and complement of her completely cynical appropriation of her own desires, a la Samantha in Sex and the City. Angel has sex with Buffy, loses his soul, and begins to taunt her by saying the relationship meant nothing. Buffy is never fully disillusioned with Angel, though, so he gets stabbed with a mere sword and returns later, intact.

The vampire at the moment of its death is also the symbol of the betrayed lover, which is why the staking is so frequently dramatized as a surprise. Mr. Trick has the same look when he’s staked as Buffy has when she sees Angel with Faith.

When Cordelia realizes that Xander is cheating on her, she almost immediately falls through a rickety stair onto a metal rod. She sends Xander away as she lies in the hospital, recovering from being staked.

5. The End Scene Where We Look Wistfully Back And Sometimes Do A Voice-Over

This is the properly tragic dimension of the show: without the vampires, there is nothing, because according to the logic of the show, desire is what bodies forth the world. Willow can’t allow her vampire döppelganger to be killed, because that would mean a living death for her.

Duty and reasonableness are a vacuum, empty as the dusty air after a slaying. Desire teems with creation, but its law is kill and be killed, or else wear a false and crippling mask. That is our world through the eyes of this show. That is its spell, and its disenchantment.

Admin Update: Comments

Dear readers,

A mentally ill person has decided to sabotage this blog. As a result, I’m changing the comment policy so that new comments by new users have to be approved. Once I’ve approved one comment from you, the rest should be posted with no problem, unless you change logins (WordPress users) or computers (everybody else).

Sorry for the inconvenience!

Best,

Kugelmass

Sir, That’s Not How It Works

Here’s a blog worth checking out: I Am Livid. I don’t have a perfect sense of the man and his manner yet — sometimes he comes across as just your ordinary grumpy wanker — but in his most recent post, which is a possibly true transcript of a phone call to the National Health Service, he is reaching for the dizzy heights of a Céline or a Jonathan Swift, and getting there. Or maybe the dizzy heights of a Chappelle.

Here’s a blog that has been on my blogroll for a while, but is really back on its feet thanks to an “energy healing.” It’s called The Oh Zone, and the newest post ends with a link to Tiga’s cover of the NIN song “Down In It.” You should probably download that song, and risk having miso get sued, because it brings back all those great memories from when industrial music was new and dirty and menacing, except it does it with the jaded-yet-nasal-yet-sensual vocals that everyone is doing now in imitation of Albarn (see also “Young Folks,” the song with whistling).

The key moment from Mr. Reznor:

Try to laugh about it now
But isn’t it funny how everything works out
“I guess the joke’s on me,” she said

I remember discovering, in my first year of grad school, the field of “object relations” psychoanalysis, which was invented by Melanie Klein. Klein would write these astonishing mini-plays with two characters, the Infant and the Object, where the Infant would say things like: “I hate you object. I will try to destroy you! I cannot destroy you! So now I love you, object.”

Obviously, infants are not thinking this. If you want to know what an infant is thinking, watch an episode of Teletubbies (Rueful hindsight: you should probably arrange to get paid for doing this, or else your friends will think you are very strange). Adults, however, do think this way about more abstract objects like ideals. In three lines, Reznor manages to sketch out a whole relationship in which the woman has made him cynical, and left them both bereft, because her cynicism was actually meant as a test similar to the Infant’s test of the Object. (This doesn’t have to be a heterosexual dynamic, or even a romantic one. In NIN it always is, in Tiga probably not, judging by his all-male call-and-response on “Hot in Herre.”) “Down In It” ends up being a story about a failed exorcism; Reznor comes to share her demons, and neither of them can manage a sincere laugh about it, with the repetition of “laugh…funny…joke” getting more and more disheartening.

There is some kind of subterranean sympathy, then, between miso ending the post with “Down In It,” and beginning with the actual account of an exorcism via the laying-on of hands, and the rising up of demons. The religious turn, and the placebo effect, are getting awfully close to one another: thanks, pantheistic self-help!

Finally, via Truly Outrageous, an analysis of Justin Timberlake by somebody in Florida, comparing him to Frank Sinatra. The style overlaps, quite deliberately, but I do object to this line: “ditching youth-oriented bands, embracing muscular pop.” First of all, Justin is not ditching the youth of America, and if Sinatra did so, it was a very mutual ditch. Second, you have to give Justin credit for using Timbaland, who is a certifiable genius and passably close to the cutting edge. Part of the appeal of Songs for Swingin’ Lovers was that it avoided the R&B influences that were crystallizing as the new rock sound, and I don’t like appeals made on that conservative basis.

It’s the wee small hours of the morning, so goodnight for now.

On The Accusation Of Totalitarianism

(x-posted to The Valve)

(Update: all links should be working now.)

It has become commonplace, these days, to associate numerous kinds of thought with totalitarianism. This, in itself, is remarkable, considering the legacy of totalitarianism. To call a thinker totalitarian is to suggest a close sympathy between their work and the history of genocide and bloody repression that includes the Holocaust and the Stalinist gulags.

Truly totalitarian writing is an accessory to violence, to murder, and to every other kind of misery that a governed people can undergo. If a substantial allegation of this kind were made about my writing, I would have no choice except to submit to the most painful and unrelenting kind of self-scrutiny, in the face of the possibility that I had turned out to be the monstrous inverse of my hopes and values. Do not imagine that this kind of anguish has anything to do with ordinary self-awareness: we are talking about a slim chance of escaping lifelong purgatory.

Instead, the accusation is becoming devalued, as if it was a coin minted too plentifully, and distributed too widely. It is nothing besides a standard tool for winning academic arguments. That does not mean that it is ineffectual, however. The cheap, inflated form of the argument about totalitarianism has very successfully undermined the academy’s ability to create functional alternatives to violence and oppression.

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The charge of totalitarianism was recently leveled against Scott Kaufman in a response to his article on the history of the codification of “theory” as a field of study and an adjunct to literary criticism. Eileen Joy, writing at In The Middle, wrote:

There is something eerily totalitarian in this wish—that, somehow, all theoretical discourses could be drawn under one eye, where everyone would be responsible and accountable to everyone else, but this also assumes a kind of high arbiter, or set of “higher” value judgments that would structure the inevitable debates. (Of course, the fact that Scott also invokes Hegel over and over again in the most positive of ways is also telling in this respect.)

Joy is referring to Scott’s desire (which she represents accurately) to re-create

a place/site, in other words, such as Critical Inquiry’s “Critical Responses” section, nostalgically drawn by Scott as lamentably “past,” where everyone could somehow gather and voice strong, yet weakly held, opinions and hold each other accountable.

I am happy to report that Joy almost immediately backed away from the term “totalitarian” in her subsequent comments, indicating that it was the result of writing under time pressure (inevitable, given the avocational nature of blogging). However, she did not back away from identifying Hegel with totalitarianism, and she did not cease to identify Scott’s project with a worrisome desire for a totality that seems still to be related to totalitarianism.

Joy’s post inspired Jodi Dean, at the blog Long Sunday, to write a response to Scott’s ideas despite (by her own admission) not having read Scott’s work in progress. In that post, Jodi wrote:

When one’s opponents are possessed of an inhuman certainty, when they are motivated to realize their vision of the world, to respond by saying that, really, they need to demonstrate more humility is inadequate. That is not the way to defeat them. Instead, one needs to affirm the contest aspect of contestability, the aspect of struggle–force decides.

For Jodi, the necessary recourse to force is a consequence of the irreducibly incommensurate nature of belief, as it happens in the world:

For me, incommensurability isn’t something one is committed to or not. It’s a description of the world (I prefer the term collapse of symbolic efficiency) that one can try to refute, resolve, deny, or accommodate. Generosity toward incommensurable views or positions is one mode of accommodation. In the political world, this is rarely possible.

Joy was impressed by Dean’s post, and annotated, in the comments section, the nature of the argument about force (sorry for the long quote, it’s necessary here):

But I would also say, to Rich, that while “we” literary critics, whether over at Acephalous or In The Middle or The Valve or elsewhere in the blogosphere are debating the importance of contestability or “strong opinions, weakly held” or incommensurability, that political theory scholars such as Jodi are engaged in debates about questions that pertain to situations with more [possibly fiercely detrimental] material effects: actual local and more globalized politics. I cannot speak for Jodi, but I have read her writings elsewhere and know that she has been willing to launch some critiques of weak ontology’s “weaknesses” [forgive the pun--is it even a pun?]. How, as political philosophy with [hopefully] real-world applications [never mind its utlity for the purposes of a more progressive set of theoretical debates among intellectuals] can it confront persons & groups who wield power and hold, often forcefully, “strong opinions, strongly held,” without humility, without postmodern forms of theoretical generosity? How, for example, would weak ontology, whether in White’s or Connolly’s terms, help us to argue with, even overturn, neoconservatism? How could it confront or alleviate the Russian government’s treatment of Chechens seeking redress for their “disappeared” [likely tortured and killed in secret] relatives? And so on and so forth.

I am reminded of a really funny scene in Woody Allen’s “Manhattan,” where Allen’s character is at a benefit party with a group of very sophisticated, artistic & intellectual types, and he asks if everyone has heard that a neo-Nazi supremacist-type group is going to be marching somewhere in New Jersey, and maybe they should all go there with bricks and bats, and this very obviously anemically pinched intellectual comments that he read a “really satirical” piece about it in the “Times,” really “biting satire,” etc., and Allen replies that he doesn’t know about “biting satire,” but he thinks bricks and bats would be a good idea.

Jodi responded thus:

Eileen–I like the Woody Allen example; sometimes there is a place for satire; sometimes for bricks and bats. In fact, I probably am taking the example too seriously (but I really like it), yet it seems that in politics we can’t actually choose between them categorically, that no matter what there arise times for each, despite and because of our best intentions.

In other words, this line of reasoning leads in a straight line from a denunciation of Scott’s imagined site of argumentation as totalitarian, to a fantasy of street violence as an effective response to hate speech.

Scott is accused, in Joy’s original post, of hoping to see the day when “certain geniuses would emerge out of this tensile field of discussion, theoretical muscles rippling,” the perpetrator of a masculinist ideal of “strength or lack thereof” (from a follow-up comment in which she demurs on “masculinist,” then immediately re-instates it in different words). However, in the comments at Long Sunday, Joy is accusing Scott of a “weak ontology” that is much too weak, and her final description of his article as “anemic” (in the comments section at In The Middle) echoes the “anemic” and “pinched” reader of satire from Manhattan. In the end, Scott is accused both of being too weak (via his anemic and weak ontology), and of being too strong, because of his supposed desire for totality.

Scott is advocating for the creation of new forums where academics with differing views can debate each other on the well-established, humanistic ground of reasoned argument. He would like to see them articulate their positions without their feeling obliged to assume a crippling deference to all prior theorists who have proved “useful” to this or that piece of literary criticism. When he says that such views should be “weakly held,” he means that all participants should recognize their obligation to admit the error if a logical inconsistency in their argument is exposed.

The response he has received is characteristic of the contemporary practical application of the ethical thought of Derrida and Levinas. Academics hazily define the opposition by conflating Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, the ascendant American far right, and smaller instances of terror around the world: “How, for example, would weak ontology, whether in White’s or Connolly’s terms, help us to argue with, even overturn, neoconservatism? How could it confront or alleviate the Russian government’s treatment of Chechens seeking redress for their “disappeared” [likely tortured and killed in secret] relatives? And so on and so forth” (from Joy’s comment at Long Sunday). Many academics try to formulate a response in terms of a practical ethics of alterity and incommensurability, drawing on the work of Derrida and Levinas, among others.

However, the provocative force of American conservatism, and of persistent totalitarian practices around the world, has distorted the meaning of a politics of alterity, whose only real ethical possibility was as an ever-more gentle mode of deference towards others, of the sort disclosed in the poetry of e. e. cummings. As it is used now, incommensurability is the foundation of a hysterical academic ideology that proposes violence as a means of compensating for its own self-contempt and uncertainty. The apparent vigor of “force decides” and “bricks and bats” covers for the definitive anxiety “of saying that nothing is certain, that certainty is an inhuman element” (from Jodi’s post).

Force decides nothing, if we are to understand force in terms of the bloody destruction of human beings, with bricks and bats, or any other way. That is certainly how the Bush Administration understands force: the use of force indicates where the line is drawn between those with whom we can communicate, and those others whose beliefs are simply incommensurate with ours.

I see force a little differently. I see force as the proper term for the willingness to endure in belief in the face of terror, and the refusal to be goaded into a symmetrical response. In that sense, Allen’s character is wrong about satire, which is not surprising since he is a character in a satiric film. The satires of homophobia by Jean Genet have force. The satires of racism within the African-American community have force. The Master and the Margarita, a satire of the Soviet state by Mikhail Bulgakov, has force.

I don’t believe for a moment that any of the respondents in this debate hold racist or anti-Semitic views. However, the larger debate over universality, of which this particular dispute is merely a symptom, brings clearly into focus the shape of the argument that sites of rational contestation are both too strong (because totalizing) and too weak (because anemic). Homologous to that argument, in anti-Semitic societies, is the argument that Jews are too strong (because they have secret power) and too weak (because they are parasites, moneylenders, and so forth). In racist societies, it is the person of color who is too strong, because primitive and brutal, and also too weak, because uneducable and servile. In all of these cases, the contradiction of “too weak and too strong” is necessary, in order to maintain a philosophy based on a false notion of the difference between oneself and the Other.

The reaction against universalist ideals of discourse is founded on an ontological claim about incommensurability, a fact which leads me back to Derrida’s essay on Levinas, “Violence and Metaphysics”:

Incapable of respecting the Being and meaning of the other, phenomenology and ontology would be philosophies of violence. Through them, the entire philosophical tradition, in its meaning and at bottom, would make common cause with oppression and with the totalitarianism of the same. (Writing and Difference 91)

Derrida’s words, in my opinion, still have tremendous force. Ultimately, however, we decide how to understand them. We decide how to define genuine resistance in an uncertain and violent time, and how to avoid making common cause with oppression. Bricks and bats are not a means of defending in the “real world” a valid ideology that stands apart from them – they are ideology, and so are the true acts of defiance that put on weakness like a mask.

Sweetness

I am opposed to dry wines, dark chocolate, unadulterated coffees, astringent music (like Clinic or Schoenberg), “cheese plates” for dessert, the entire life’s work of Mondrian, Scotch as opposed to bourbon, paradoxes, Marianne Moore as opposed to Elizabeth Browning, and nightspots that don’t capitalize their names and put little dots in between each letter. Against a black background.

s • w • e • e • t • n • e • s • s is the new black.

“Just try it,” I said, of the ice wine.

“It tastes like pears,” she said, going back to the glass of stout, which was the color of chocolate or coffee.

“Isn’t that good?” I said.

“Is it natural to drink dissolved pears?” she asked me.

Dancing, Playing Scrabble, and Fighting Dirty

It’s good to be back.

I mentioned that I’d like to write aphoristic posts from time to time; this will be my first shot at doing that.

Thanks to alert reader A.R., I added a new blog called apophenia to the blogroll. It’s Danah Boyd’s blog about digital life, with a particular focus on social networking sites like MySpace. Since, of course, Boyd has a MySpace page, I figured it was worth seeing how she tackled the problem of doing what she writes about.

Here’s the important quote:

I like to dance, play Scrabble and goof around with friends.

The question is, why do people who do post-undergraduate work of some kind (grad school, law school, etc.) always emphasize that they love to dance? First of all, let’s be clear about what they mean: they mean mostly solo dancing, either in ironic situations (small-scale house parties) or in alternative clubs. They don’t mean dancing at “The Rage,” the club where I used to sit in Sacramento, wondering how slowly I could drink my drink, listening with an increasing feeling of hatred of Sacramento to “In Heaven” by DJ Sammy.

Of course, hedonism draws a lot of water. But something else is at stake, too: the association of pleasure with continual movement. Irony is really a kind of dance, expressed in the graceful movement from the articulation of a position, to the ironic disavowal of that position. The love of irony means taking pleasure in the movement between one gesture and the next.

The last time that gesture, irony, and dancing was fused so tightly was the 18th century. Which means that electroclash is hiding Mozart inside its rusty metal heart.

***

Scrabble is the most popular game among people I know. Why? Is it only because all of them make their living using words (as lawyers, journalists, grantwriters, Ph.D. candidates, etc.)? Partly that, and partly because “making a living using words” itself means playing language games — looking for the word that fits the frame. For example, several of my friends have had to scale their writing to a particular level of reading proficiency.

***

Here’s a wonderful piece of illogic from Chuck Klosterman (via Chuck Klosterman IV). It reminded me of the issues circling around my Lolita post and its children:

Don’t get pissed off because the Yeah Yeah Yeahs aren’t on the radio enough; you can buy the goddamn record and play “Maps” all goddamn day (if that’s what you want)….Basically, don’t get pissed off over the fact that the way you feel about culture isn’t some kind of universal consensus.

This, as you might expect, is the thundering conclusion to an essay about how scared Klosterman was to discover that most people “don’t merely want to hold their values; they want their values to win,” something he discovered when he heard somebody celebrating the amount of radioplay Nirvana got for making difficult, alienated music.

No matter how much anybody says against young Harry Potter, or in favor of Joanna Newsom, it will still be possible to listen to the new Beyoncé album and to read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows. That is the ironic thing about Klosterman’s statement: he puts the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on the margins, and tries to shove their outspoken fan inside a pair of headphones, as though opinions themselves were dangerous to everyone’s happiness unless those opinions are reduced to the sign language of playing something over and over. I read all kinds of nasty things about the new Gwen Stefani album, most of them accurate, and still found a place in my heart for “4 in the Morning.”

Live in an apartment with thin floors, as I do, and you definitely cannot play the Yeah Yeah Yeahs all goddamn day without making the neighbors seriously angry. Meanwhile, everything that is currently on rotation will not survive 20 years. There will be a cull. In 2027, people will want to know that when you heard “O Valencia” come on the radio, as I did this weekend, you felt for a second that all was right with the world. Albums like that are worth hearing, and anything else is a disappointment. Or, to put it another way, if you don’t want your values to win, then they aren’t your values.

What’s On

Dear readers,

I will be going on a vacation without going anywhere. Petitpoussin is visiting from her native country of Hawaii, and although we will be gathering the materials for many great blog posts by singing karaoke and drinking coffee in the sunlight, I for one will not be writing very much. Possibly an occasional aphorism or something. I’ve been meaning to be more aphoristic.

I hope you enjoyed yourself thoroughly yesterday. I did. Out on the beach, looking up at a cloudless sky, I saw somebody skywrite a marriage proposal. I thought they might be proposing to me, but no, my name isn’t Lisa.

Have an excellent weekend and I’ll see you Monday.

-Kugelmass

Invitations and Promises, or Irony vs. Irony

(x-posted to The Valve)

This piece is a response to a series of posts at Oublié Sur La Carte that send up (“roast” was his term) my essay on Paul de Man. It is possible to understand what follows without reading them, but to do so would be a shame, because they are fiercely and marvelously argued.

In his first post, surlacarte argues that my rhetorical reading of Paul de Man is illegitimate because of de Man’s explicit opposition to the rhetoric of persuasion. It is also about bad puns.

In his second post, surlacarte compares my hypothetical versions of authorship, selfhood, and meaning, to Pascal’s wager on the question of belief. It is also about poker.

I’m writing here about the way language works, the relationship between uncertainty and irony, and the role of the reader in the interpretation of texts. It is also about Mother Night and a birthday disaster. You can find an extended dialogue with surlacarte on de Man’s analysis of Pascal’s geometry in the comments thread here.

*

To begin with, let me expand upon the question of de Man’s rhetoric. When I wrote that de Man imagined irony to contain “Dionysian energies,” I was specifically referring to the ecstatic practice of destruction. Nietzsche makes clear in The Birth of Tragedy that Dionysian revelry is not merely an alternative to the ordered conduct of life that characterizes the majority of Greek sociality and art; rather, it is bent on the destruction of this order. One of the important references is to the myth of The Bacchae, when Pentheus’s body is torn apart by the maenads, whose ranks include his own mother Agave. The idea of going “beyond one’s limits” suggests a valuable, almost sentimental expansion of horizons, much too gentle for what I had in mind.

In surlacarte’s post, he argues that my reading of de Man’s rhetoric is “odd,” because it isn’t in keeping with de Man’s own stated positions on rhetoric in other essays. He claims that de Man is “really much closer, at least in this case to a logical philosopher….He’s particularly concerned with a certain kind of intellectual rigor.”

In order for this to function as a defense of de Man, we have to assume a correspondence between the explicit meanings of his texts (what he says he wants and is doing), and its implicit meanings (the totality of what we can say about the way his texts work). We also have to assume that de Man is internally consistent, such that different essays or books by him will not contradict one another.

This is just the sort of policing that de Man finds so objectionable in the work of the American ironists. Not every poet who is read in a deconstructionist fashion would support such a reading, but the critic is not obliged to change his mode at their request.

Let me explain why I claimed that, for de Man, irony has “Dionysian energies” that “bear a remarkable resemblance to bliss.” De Man claims that the American critics “would want to put themselves on their guard” against irony. This is an ambiguous statement. We don’t know whether they need to guard their own thinking against the implications of irony, or whether they need to guard their readers against it. We are thus forced to presume both. What kind of thing would tempt an interpreter of literature away from a position that they know is more practical and essential to keeping a job? The answer, of course, is “an inconvenient truth.” Because truth here inspires the interpreters of literature to abandon their livelihood and salty wisdom, it has the quality of seduction. (Thus Socrates was accused of “seducing” the youth of Greece.) One of the startling insights of analysts of jouissance, like Barthes and Lacan, was that bliss implied the rupture of order. The destructive nature of seduction (e.g. the mythical Sirens) was actually one of the reasons for its attractiveness.

The seductiveness of irony is part of its “very threatening” nature. It is in de Man’s interest to portray infinite irony as something powerful, to counteract the fact that most lay readers and many literary critics do not consider infinite irony to be a property of texts. So, first he separates literary critics from himself and his readers: “interpreters of literature, who have a stake in the understandability of literature” (167). Note that neither writers, nor readers who do not explicitly trouble themselves to produce “readings,” nor any person uninterested in literature, gets a mention here. Thus the reason for the watch on irony turns out to be sordid professional self-interest. That’s why it’s entirely appropriate to make “livelihood” the first entry in an equation representing de Man’s argument.

Having isolated the critics, de Man ventriloquizes them as stutterers: “very legitimate to want, as Booth wants, to stop, to stabilize, to control the trope” (167). The word “legitimate” is an extremely weak endorsement, suggesting the punctiliousness of a businessman. More important, the repetition of “want,” followed by the insecure slippage of “stop….stabilize….control,” implies an impotent desire to keep the dam from breaking. What appears to be humble sympathy constrained by the truth functions rhetorically as a form of mockery.

To be sure, Booth appears to be helpless in just the manner de Man suggests. When he writes that the appeal to finite irony is a practical necessity, he has already given the game away. Who knows what worser things we might call practical necessities, if we endorsed this kind of logic? One of the great virtues of Kierkegaard’s judge, who is utterly trapped, is that he finds himself tempted by the ironist he is trying to educate.

For my part, I do not find myself trying to set limits on the irony I encounter in texts; instead, I find in Paul de Man a barren insistence on undecidability that tries to compensate for its lack of substance with appeals to shame, to fantasies of discursive power, and to a love of truth and rigor. In other words, regardless of whether this forces me to part ways with Wayne Booth, my quarrel isn’t with irony.

*

For the second part of my response, I’ll be moving back and forth between surlacarte’s two posts, before finally returning to Pascal and the question of his wager and his faith.

In order to clear up the question of the so-called “appeal to consequences,” we have to ask a more fundamental question: what are the constituents of a truth? What makes something true in language?

Surlacarte assigns two properties to language: the constative, and the performative. Constative statements are statements about the way things are. They represent what might be called our personal obligation to impersonal truth. I am free to deny the fact of my mortality, or the fact of my gender, or the global phenomenon of hunger, but these things are facts whether I like it or not, and denying them is likely to create problems in my world.

De Man’s argument about infinite irony is based on constative statements. He perhaps wishes that irony had a limit, but there’s nothing he can do to alter its infinity. In his mind, we are as obligated to recognize infinite irony as we are obligated to accept the germ theory of disease.

The counter-claim, naturally, is that literature is performative. In order to understand this counter-claim, we need a more refined definition of performativity.

When Columbus claims Hispaniola for Spain, he does so through an intersubjective agreement between all the powers of Europe. In other words, the only thing that makes his statement into an “action” that instantiates a fact (the fact that “Hispaniola belongs to Spain”) is the willingness of France and England to abide by that claim. The idea that such performative claims were made on unclaimed and uninhabited land is historically inaccurate, which is relevant because the performative utterance was forced on the non-compliant indigenous tribes who lived there. The utterance has to be backed up with steel.

The same thing is true of marriage vows. It used to be commonly accepted that marriage vows were performative: the couple was married as soon as the priest performed the ceremony (with them playing a part), and their marriage had the ontological effect of fusing two beings into one. That is why divorce was originally a ridiculous concept, and why things like annulments performed by the Pope, which might seem ridiculous to us now, were actually the only way to undo the magical effects of the ceremony.

At this point, however, marriage is understood to be a mutual promise that has to be honored by both parties. If it withstands the test of time, then it retroactively becomes performatively true. If it ends in divorce, then it was a failed experiment. In other words, it is not true unless both people honor it over the course of time.

Surlacarte writes, perceptively,

One is never really certain whether the speaker means “God exists” (the “I” being, ultimately, redundant, already implied by the fact that the statement has been uttered by someone) or something like “I promise to believe in God,” a sort of prayer by which one places faith not only in God, but in the power of the speech act to overcome a gap in one’s actual belief.

This is precisely the situation of the potential suicide, and then the gambler, who face anguish in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness:

Fortunately these motives in their turn, from the sole fact that they are motives of a possibility, present themselves as ineffective, as non-determinant: they can no more produce the suicide than my horror of the fall can determine me to avoid it. It is this counter-anguish which generally puts an end to anguish by transmuting it into indecision. Indecision in its turn calls for decision. I abruptly put myself at a distance from the edge of the precipice and resume my way.

The example which we have just analyzed has shown us what we could call “anguish in the fact of the future.” There exists another: anguish in the face of the past. It is that of the gambler who has freely and sincerely decided not to gamble anymore and who, when he approaches the gaming table, suddenly sees all his resolutions melt away….What he apprehends then in anguish is precisely the total inefficacy of the past resolution. (70-71, trans. Hazel Barnes)

In other words, the “gap in one’s actual belief” is not some personal failure of sincerity or nerve. It is a gap present in the very nature of resolute language. Not only do we not know whether a promise is true or false, until we see whether or not it has been performed, we do not even know to what the promise refers until we see how it is performed. Fundamental concepts like “love,” “friendship,” “belief in God,” and the like are likely to entail entirely different complexes of emotion, thought, and action, for different people.

One finds in response, first in de Man, and then ably represented in surlacarte’s posts, a disgust with the uncertain and frequently ineffectual nature of language. surlacarte writes, with a discernible trace of nostalgia, that

This is a long way of saying that as soon as one adopts a belief on the basis of an appeal to consequence, one posits, in writing, a self which is bound to say certain things and to explore their consequences, but which is never certain whether it means any of the things that it says…One faces undecidability in language by positing a “self,” an “I” which is not really a self, because it has nothing to do with the concept of genuine belief…All statements that follow…are said inauthentically, almost in jest, out of a sense of decorum…the only possibility of ever saying anything unironically is to abandon, from the start, these utopian projections of belief, these things that we claim to believe in because we must, these hypothetical worlds we posit for very noble reasons, in response to real exigencies.

In response, I would like to know where, besides religious tracts or in the most sentimental narratives, one finds a self constituted in these miraculous ways. If by genuine belief the critic comes to mean a belief which is not only in earnest, but which is actually an inviolable, changeless kernel inside the subject, then we are talking about the spark of divinity itself. We are talking about a soul.

This helps us understand why de Man should take such a strong position against the revelatory powers of “experience.” Experience is the anchor of pragmatic uncertainty, but it can do nothing except cloud the soul, in a fashion reminiscent of Wordsworth’s ode on intimations of immortality. When surlacarte writes that the self “is never certain whether it means any of the things that it says,” he is right on several levels. First of all, the speaker is never certain whether she herself is capable of making good on her own claims. She encounters the anguish of language when she realizes that time will interpose itself between her claim and her self, making them non-identical. It may be that she will simply break her promises. More sympathetically, she may meet with accidents that make the performance of the claim impossible (as with unfinished final novels). Above all, she may have an experience that shatters the essential context of the claim.

This shattering experience can happen entirely within language, based on the way a piece of communication is received. In other words, the speaker is never sure if she means what she says, because what she means is based on a guess about the reception of her words. In the Kurt Vonnegut novel Mother Night, Howard W. Campbell, Jr. believes that he is helping the Allied war effort, because he is secretly giving information to the Allies in anti-Semitic radio broadcasts that rally support for the Nazis. He assumes that rhetoric is less powerful than military secrets. By the end of the novel, Howard has come to realize that the effect of his overt propaganda was much greater than that of his coded messages. That means, ironically, that he must finally be held accountable for not “saying what he meant” – that is, for making a foolish judgement about his own words, and aiding the cause of fascism.

This leads us to the answer to de Man’s question: “Why is it that the furthest-reaching truths about ourselves and the world have to be stated in such a lopsided, referentially indirect mode?” (Aesthetic Ideology 52). The answer is that without allegory, which is already a kind of performance of one thing through the reference to another, there is no hope of creating mutual agreements about what we mean when we use phrases like “genuine belief.” There is literally no truth to any statement, or to the larger compounds of whole texts, until they have been acted out in some way. Before that, they signify nothing, which is why an appeal to interpretation is not an “appeal to consequences.” The Ten Commandments, the direct utterances of God to Moses, are more substantial for having been interpreted in the course of Kieslowski’s Decalogue.

Because the text must be completed, and thus simultaneously risked in some way by a reader, Nietzsche was able to claim that the essence of nobility was the capacity to fulfill promises – that is, to renew one’s words across a span of time. Beliefs themselves are promises of just this sort. Such nobility is only possible through integrity, meaning an awareness of the conditions of possibility for the promise, and a willingness to accept that that those conditions might change. That is what a scientist means when she says that any scientific theory is liable to revisions. This awareness and critical acceptance of uncertainty was expressed beautifully by Foucault in an aside to The Use of Pleasure:

As to those for whom to work hard, to begin and begin again, to attempt and be mistaken, to go back and rework everything from top to bottom, and still find reason to hesitate from one step to the next—as to those, in short, for whom to work in the midst of uncertainty and apprehension is tantamount to failure, all I can say is that clearly we are not from the same planet. (10)

If the language in which we speak about ourselves has the nature of a promise, the texts we produce for others have the nature of invitations. The invitation is not necessarily a summons; sometimes nothing more is offered than a shared pleasure, or a common moment of clarity. That is the religious moment in the Pascalian wager of belief; the moment of acceptance undertaken in freedom, in spite of the perverse possibility of refusal.

The problem with Pascal’s wager is that Pascal pretends that only one text (i.e. the Christian Bible) makes a claim to authority, and therefore that it is the only text to be either refused or embraced. The problem certainly is not the supposed coldness of the gesture, for two reasons. First, Pascal believes in performativity: “Kneel, and you will believe.” Second, it is only from within a particular version of Romanticism, influenced heavily by the Reformation, that one would speak of the insufficiency of reason in anti-Pascalian terms. In Pascal’s account, reason is capable of recognizing its own limits and choosing faith, and thus in a sense retains its original agency.

Similarly, the integral uncertainty codified in the scientific method is not a frigid wager. It comprehends the full pathos of a choice undertaken without a guarantee, precisely because it is guaranteed by the fallible record of experience. Each reading, and each justified action, is based on a hypothesis, and it is impossible to privilege any reading over another on transcendental grounds. The only admissible means of judging a reading is through references to the fuzzy intersubjective ground of linguistic convention.

Ludwig Wittgenstein responds to the answering charge of lack of rigor thus, in his Philosophical Investigations, while trying to describe the “family resemblance” of all games:

One might say that the concept ‘game’ is a concept with blurred edges.—“But is a blurred concept a concept at all?”—Is an indistinct photograph a picture of a person at all? Is it even always an advantage to eplace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn’t the indistinct one often exactly what we need?
Frege compares a concept to an areas and says that an area with vague boundaries cannot be called an area at all. This presumably means we cannot do anything with it.—But is it senseless to say: “Stand roughly there”?

So, then, a text is an invitation that produces a variety of responses, all of which bear a family resemblance to each other. It does not refer back to its author; once written, it refers to the blurred linguistic consensus of its time.

But this is not merely to re-state the now-conventional claim that the author is dead. The invitation is accepted, and the author herself is interpellated by it in some way. I will conclude my own investigation with a real example.

This November, I sent out a series of invitations to my birthday party. Its design was somewhat ponderous: there would be a reading, then there would be a dinner, and then drinks at a local bar, and then an after-party. Naturally, there were some people who could only come for part of the event, rather than the whole thing.

What I did not expect was that some people would read the invitation and — like those readers who will tolerate only Volume 1 of The History of Sexuality — decide only to attend the after-party.

When they arrived, having followed the directions in my invitation, I wasn’t there yet. They stood around for a while, considering, and then finally let themselves in and began having a party. Many things that I had been saving for a rainy day were consumed. The police were called, and were appeased by people who, once again, were not myself.

In short, the text created a gathering, despite the fact that the author was nowhere to be found (nor dead). This happened in absolute defiance of authorial intention; and yet, it happened coherently, hampered not at all by the specter of infinite irony. The next day, by talking to people, I was able to confirm what the state of my house made abundantly clear. They had had a marvelous time.

From the archives: The Aquarium (short story)

Dear readers,

For those of you who missed it: my story from an event the MFAs at Irvine held for MFAs and Ph.D. candidates alike. Our assignment was to write something about a car crash, either as a poem, or as a story.

For those of you who were there, and already know this story, here’s the other blog post I was going to write. I’ll give the title: “I Don’t Believe In Evil.” C-r-a-z-y! Metaphysical!

Have fun this weekend. I’ll be updating this blog, doing class prep, and reading exam materials, so you better have enough fun for us both. Story follows.

-Kugelmass

****

The Aquarium

He had fallen asleep at the wheel after a long intermediary period where he was turning onto the wrong streets, muttering to himself, and flirting with the idea of the steering wheel as a pillow. The steering wheel was pretty well ready to be a pillow, as it had rabbit fur glued onto it in a haphazard and shocking way. He also had fuzzy dice, although these were not directly involved in the accident – irony had taken a blowtorch to the car. When I say he I’m referring to the guy named Steven who fell asleep and crashed into the house of a woman with whom he had had an affair back when he was called “Steve” and listened to records about cars. The wife still lived there; so did her whole family.

There were several layers of construction material between the outside, which was painted a blue-grey color, and the inside, which was tastefully off-white. The construction material included pasteboard, which disintegrated on impact, and layers of plaster that crumbled. The plaster made the whole catastrophe wintry. The car was utterly wrecked, although it didn’t catch on fire. The lawn didn’t recover. The lawn was shaven and tarred and stayed that way a long time.

Men and gods had their say. The gods staged a red sunset that was like a painting about blood and fire. Sixty fishermen saw it, and went out for the most fruitless voyage of their lives, trolling in the dark for things that didn’t glow and might be cookable with garlic. Steven, needless to say, was writing letters in his dining room on his computer with the shutters drawn. Even if he had seen it, the omen wouldn’t have struck him as a personal one; he was terrifically unassuming. That night thousands of bored demons tempted Steven to sin, warm milk, and the advice section of the newspaper, all of which made him tired as he tried to drive. Angels with small, pale hands, and the freckles of God, saved him from certain death. They folded him inside the crinkled car like a cherry surviving inside chocolate.

The family made Steven pay for everything, which wasn’t impossible for him. Nobody was seriously hurt, although Steven had a breathing pain. The family had all been sleeping; where Steven went through the wall was just a dining table, plain brown, and dishes, white with green slashes of undercooked asparagus. He paid them everything he had and stopped going on cruises. The wife looked at him – she had a name, too, Irma – and bit her lip, and said sensible things to her husband when Steven wasn’t looking. She and the husband had married over common principles. They were both merciful.

The local newspaper covered it. The local television station went there with a crew. AAA wouldn’t touch it, but Steven got the fire department to pull the car out of the dining room. At one point there was a fire engine, a television van, and a lemonade stand (unrelated, but refreshing) which made the street impassable. The Wallace family – Irma, Valiant, and the two children Rex and Sunshine – hired a huckster to sell them a scheme for rebuilding the wall. He didn’t look like a confidence man. He had big, trustworthy horse’s teeth, and wore modern suits. All the same, Valiant had hired him on the basis of the following statement: “Walls are for morons.” He convinced them to replace the wall with a gigantic piece of transparent Plexiglass.

The house became famous and the local newspapers dubbed it “The Aquarium.” There was nothing avaricious in the family’s nature, so they did not charge money to be observed, though fifty people came every day and night. The lemonade stand prospered and made dark compromises with artificial flavors and impure waters. The street became a single congested lane, and Steven had to drive by in his new car very slowly, in deepest fear of being seen. He had a green sedan with all the windows covered in a very thin tinting made out of plastic, the tinting peeling slightly, like the labels on bananas.

He could not understand his fears. The family knew about him – after all, he paid for the fourth wall, and there was a great deal of paperwork and phonework.

The family started to change. They stopped having fights, all at once, as if by secret ballot. The old tensions were there – Sunshine was still listening to alienated music which has to be played loud – but now the fights were fairly choreographed, happened at about eight every evening, and were managed in a gruff, friendly way by Valiant, who was really starting to resemble Alan Alda. Valiant would say something to Sunshine, she would respond by writing commentary backwards on the inside of the glass, the crowd would cheer, Steven would bleat his horn, and Valiant would raise his eyes comically to the still-opaque ceiling.

Sunshine wrote things on the glass with a dry erase marker, and Rex would erase them with soap and water in order to earn his allowance. She wrote things like “Cereals and Sodas are Designed to be Painful,” capitalizing nouns freely. She also wrote questions, such as “What is the nature of the cheetah?” and a painfully shy girl who looked up to her, and had access to school supplies through a sympathetic teacher, would write the answer on large poster: “A proud, intermittent solitude.”

When the family would leave their house to go to work, people would talk to them familiarly, and Steven began to feel that he had been forgotten. He went back to work, where he was cubicled but idle, and from his computer returned to writing letters. Once a week he wrote a letter of apology and encouragement to Irma and Valiant.

After a few weeks, he received a reply from Valiant, counter-signed with a crown, a sun, and Irma’s loopy script, inviting him to dinner. “We have so few visitors, or friends,” the letter began. Valiant assured him that he knew about the affair. Irma wrote in the corner, “I didn’t know he knew.” Valiant suggested Steven wear dark eyeshadow, and rouge, as this looked better through the Plexiglass, which wasn’t as transparent anymore, and dreadfully expensive to maintain.

The dinners were a great success. Steven, Valiant, and Sunshine would play a game where they would pretend to talk about one thing, using their hands, and actually talk about something else that none of the bystanders could hear. This frustrated their son, who had ideals, and provoked Rex to write letters to the editor absolving his family of their hand gestures. Irma smoked a pipe and read the paper. Steven went back to listening to his old records about cars because they reminded him of his salad days. At the same time, he stopped driving his own car. Every Thursday, when it was dinnertime, he would walk about five miles through the purple summer dusk to the aquarium.

Sunshine wrote on the wall, “He no longer drives.” The crowd outside murmured in approval, and Steven’s family was relieved. He was, in fact, a terrible driver. Sunshine’s protégé wrote on a poster, “Sacrifice is noble.”

Steven continued to write letters of apology and encouragement, even now that he knew the whole family well. “I am giving up my car,” he wrote to Valiant, before anyone else knew. “I cannot drive.” He added, “It seems I have ceased believing in roads.”

The deep down crazies, the wet willies, the screaming moist!

My sheets were taken from the dryer before the cycle finished.

Oh, Lord
Don’t take me from that dryer before my time

My sheets are a light grey, a Target superstore grey, an oatmeal grey. The kind of grey that just lounges around, like grey-eyed people in the afternoon. Right now they are a dark grey. They are the color of grade school embarrassment. Because somebody took them from the dryer before their time.

Oh, Lord
Someday I’ll be ready
Someday I won’t be clammy

They are so cold that when I lay between them I dreamt, for five minutes, the furious dreams of a betrayed Eskimo. They are slowly evaporating all the heat from my body and my room. I woke up thinking somebody was trying to cure me of malaria, after only the least bit of dreaming. I dreamt I showed up to class wearing nothing but a parka, long underwear, earmuffs, a ski mask, mittens, and Uggs.

Oh, Lord
Don’t steal the money from my laundry card
Don’t sleep with my baby or put salt in my yogurt
Don’t take me from that dryer before my time

My jeans are wringing wet. My socks are like sponges. My shirts have been to the gym without me. My grocery list is soggy. My ideas are beginning to mildew. If God exists, why is there evil? And why laundry evil? I’ve had to compensate by dragging down all my winter and summer blankets and piling them on top of each other. I’m going to sleep wrapped in a big blue tie-dye sheet for Thailand. It’s finely woven but it looks ridiculous. This is its big moment. It’s like a second-string quarterback. It’s still cold. I can feel the marine, wintry cold of my undried sheets just below, stealthy the mattress, laughing silently at me, like pitiless, moist adversaries.

I’ll shed my lint and say my lonesomes
Permanent press but I am ready
Don’t take me from that dryer before my time!