bookify: a proposal

I went into the park, sat on a bench — I seemed to have developed some variety of what I believe is sometimes called “hysterical” coughing — and then it suddenly hit me that everyone on earth who could read John Donne was now dead. They were all dead. And as I turned this odd fragment of information around in my brain, I realized that I was the only one left who would even be aware of the passing of this particular group, this group which was so special, at least in their own eyes.
–Wallace Shawn, The Designated Mourner

Toward the end of August, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article about Google Books entitled “Google Book Search: A Disaster For Scholars.” It’s still floating around the social networks of academics; it’s very well-researched and amusingly indignant. The author, Geoffrey Nunberg, gives a shockingly long list of problems with Google Books, most of them resulting from Google’s lazy attempts to automate cataloguing by reading off scanned title pages or by taking an institution’s word about a book.

Nunberg continues,

That realization lends a particular urgency to the concerns that people have voiced about the settlement —about pricing, access, and privacy, among other things. But for scholars, it raises another, equally basic question: What assurances do we have that Google will do this right? [...]

Seen in that light, the quality of Google’s book search will be measured by how well it supports the familiar activity that we have come to think of as “googling,” in tribute to the company’s specialty: entering in a string of keywords in an effort to locate specific information, like the dates of the Franco-Prussian War. For those purposes, we don’t really care about metadata—the whos, whats, wheres, and whens provided by a library catalog. It’s enough just to find a chunk of a book that answers our needs and barrel into it sideways.

But we’re sometimes interested in finding a book for reasons that have nothing to do with the information it contains, and for those purposes googling is not a very efficient way to search. If you’re looking for a particular edition of Leaves of Grass and simply punch in, “I contain multitudes,” that’s what you’ll get. For those purposes, you want to be able to come in via the book’s metadata, the same way you do if you’re trying to assemble all the French editions of Rousseau’s Social Contract published before 1800 or books of Victorian sermons that talk about profanity.

Nunberg is right — there’s no question about it — and yet, as my Carrie Bradshaw-like voiceover began to play in my head, I couldn’t help but wonder: Are the primary challenges facing today’s readers really a matter of the books Google now potentially owns, such as “orphan” texts, and specific versions of texts in the public domain?

I don’t think so. The real disaster for scholars continues to be publishing houses, especially (I’m sorry to say) publishers of academic books. Here are the problems they’ve created for us:

1) The public doesn’t have any way to get electronic copies of many important texts. This makes such texts hard to access and search.

2) Books are overpriced. Academic books are unbelievably overpriced. It does not make sense to pay the same amount for a 1MB book that I’m paying to download a 6GB HD movie that cost the studio $60 million to produce. Any book that is more than $40, and does not include individual watercolors and gold leaf, is a crime against humanity.

3) Even available books are done sloppily. iBooks had to ship a new version of Steve Jobs to people who bought Walter Isaacson’s biography OF THE FOUNDER OF APPLE. Amazon had to send me a new version of Doris Goodwin’s Team of Rivals several months after I purchased it, due to “missing content.”

4) Project Gutenberg (and its many, many exploiters) are doing an incredibly valuable public service, but naturally these editions contain errors as well. Often, a serious scholar has to own the professionally edited version of a text, rather than the one that happens to be available via PG.

In many ways, honest-to-God scholars (students and researchers) are less beholden to Google Books than the rest of the public. They have library access. They are less likely to be fooled by bad metadata (presumably, somebody researching Dorothy Parker has at least a vague idea of when she was born). They often need to look at physical artifacts themselves, because even the best scanner has trouble with documents like handwritten proofs or annotations.

For the general public, on the other hand, it’s still basically impossible to become acquainted with an author like Haruki Murakami without a fairly large financial investment. For most of the population, the question is not how they will access French editions of Rousseau, but whether they will ever read a single work by Rousseau in their lifetimes. (Consider the fact that, in a recent study, 71% of Americans identified Jonathan Franzen as “a type of boxed wine.”) The general public deserves to be able to purchase, relatively inexpensively, an authoritatively translated and edited electronic version of any of Rousseau’s works.

That is why I’m proposing a new model for the electronic distribution of text, which I call “Bookify.” For legal reasons, I must tell you that this name has no relation whatsoever to Spotify. The same goes for my company Totally Irrelevant, which is not, as some have claimed, my version of Rhapsody and Napster.

Here is my Bookify Bill of Rights:

1) You have the right to pay a monthly fee, in exchange for the right to borrow books. A consumer should be able to pay $5 a month and read Bender and Lewis in September, and then Eugenides and Isaacson in October. While it may seem awful to have to pay for library rights, even the best public libraries end up with 125 people waiting for 6 copies of any major new release. (The same is true of the UC Irvine library when it comes to an in-demand philosophical text like Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology.) It is ridiculous that we have Spotify/Rdio for music, and Netflix/iTunes/Amazon/Hulu for video, and nothing for books except Amazon Prime.

2) Publishers should stop colluding to fix prices for e-books. Every time I see “this price was set by the publisher,” I want to kill somebody. I know this is how Jeff Bezos wants me to react, but…he’s absolutely right.

3) Every book that is in print should be available in a reasonably-priced, error-free digital download.

4) It should be possible to purchase parts of a book. Amazon already does this with “Amazon Singles,” but the selection is poor. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be able to buy just the essays Adorno wrote about consumerism, adding those to my awesome collection of books, punk albums, and movies critiquing consumerism. Likewise, I should be able to buy Eat without necessarily also buying Pray and Love.

5) E-books should come in one format. I realize that Apple has tried to go its own way with AAC files, but most music downloads are MP3 files, and that’s a good thing.

6) Scholarly bibliographies should accompany books as official recommendations. You just read Moby Dick — congratulations, that is totally great — would you like to buy an article about it? (NB: In a perfect world, readers would actually be able to sponsor articles about newer publications of interest. What if, along with a bunch of other readers, you could bid a contribution of $.25 to have Chuck Klosterman write an article about the Kanye West album? Or $.30 to have Stephen Greenblatt write about anything other than his mother/quantum physics?)

7) Annotations should follow social networks. I could care less what random people highlighted in Greil Marcus’s new book on The Doors, but if my friend Pat marked it up, I’d be interested to see that.

***

I’d also like to see somebody invent “literary remastering,” which would make “deluxe editions” of books more lively, provocative, and relevant, but that’s probably many years away.

Bookify. Music Wants To Be Free. Text Will Settle For Being Affordable.

no effexor for franzen

“This is D. H. Lawrence,” Richard said impatiently.
“Yet another author I need to read.”
“Or not.”
–Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

I’ll say this for Jonathan Franzen. At least his novels aren’t being invaded by five-year olds, and at least they don’t take us on an Important Odyssey through the major events of 20th Century European history. Also, they don’t play around with surreal versions of current events or probable versions of near-future events. In the past few weeks, I’ve read The Imperfectionists, The Ask, A Visit From The Goon Squad, and countless book reviews, and several things have become startlingly apparent to me:

1) Nobody cares, any longer, about the distinction between fantasy and reality, myself included. If you throw a talking panda or something into your novel, there’s no reason that you should be suddenly seized by anxiety about the fact that pandas can’t talk. In your novel, they do, and in every review of your novel, this strange occurrence will be noted. (Not that your novel can’t be about the distinction between fantasy and reality, or the feeling that “real” reality has gone missing. In fact, your novel should be about those things, because the sorts of people who spend money on novels read Lethem and Murakami.)

2) We are living in a post-Sophie’s Choice world. I read Sophie’s Choice as a senior in college, and I didn’t particularly like it, because it’s not a very good novel. The various stories and timelines don’t cohere; Stingo, the narrator, is largely peripheral to the major story. However, if one would like to write a Stunning Debut or one of this year’s Most Anticipated Follow-Ups, it is very important to split your novel between the present day, which is banal and full of cubicles, and the past, which is mysterious, dark (until everything gets illuminated), mythic, Nazi-haunted, and labyrinthine.

3) Writers have kids, and they love their kids, and their kids are precocious. All great things — but just be ready, because the little Egans and Lipsytes of the world are ready to crawl their way across many chapters, inevitably commenting with a sort of wry innocence on whatever makes the major characters most unhappy and/or pathetic.

ANYWAY, this is all a terrible digression away from my topic, which is how it feels to be about halfway through Freedom, which some people, notably Jonathan Franzen, have compared to War and Peace. It feels very strange.

Franzen is an incredibly talented writer. His prose just burns a hole right through the page. I would put him alongside writers like Marilynne Robinson and Jean Genet, who write such crystalline sentences that I always want to assign them in writing classes, were it not for the fact that Genet writes almost exclusively about explicit sex, and Marilynne Robinson writes almost exclusively about things that bore writing students.

The first thing that troubles me about Franzen is that his novels have characters, but weirdly few things or even settings. Sure, things appear for functional reasons — if a character needs to slash some tires, Franzen obliges with a nearby car — but they don’t acquire symbolic properties. The seasons rarely change. A character becomes a wine-swilling alcoholic without ever thinking about wineglasses. I know lots of people who drink enormous quantities of wine, and let me tell you, they think about their wineglasses constantly. I have feelings about my external hard drive, feelings about my iPod case, and feelings about the ancient ziploc bag that contains a dwindling amount of pipe tobacco (“Harbor Island” flavor). Patty reads War and Peace without commenting, even once, on what it feels like to hold and lug around a book of that size. Is it the new translation with the spunky, rough-cut pages? Is she reading it on a first generation Kindle, as appears to be the case? These are things we deserve to know.

This lack of symbolic places and things isn’t, I think, a random feature. It’s the sign of an imagination that, for lack of a better metaphor, isn’t fecund. Franzen’s mind has bad sex with objects.

I know. I’d apologize, but I can’t, because Freedom is a novel so overwhelmingly concerned with good and bad sex, up to and including one of the most offensive rape narratives I have ever encountered. (Poof! …go Kugelmass’s dreams of one day assigning this novel to a class of writing students.) I think that Franzen is trying to be ironic when his character Patty reflects that her rape didn’t hurt as much as some of her daily windsprints. Because, of course, the emotional hurt is invisible, sometimes undetectable, and much worse, and she’s trying to protect herself by emphasizing what did or did not physically hurt. Patty’s emotional hurt is never addressed because of a political conspiracy between her parents and the perpetrator’s parents, both of whom, like most conspirators, ARE DEMOCRATS.

Maybe it’s a little ridiculous to live in a D. H. Lawrence world, where the whole universe is engaged in a sort of randy slow boil, and every meaning that is latent in every place and object seems to have been put there by Sigmund Freud. You don’t really need that kind of overblown vision to simply write, as Jennifer Egan does in Goon Squad, an outstanding scene about eating little flakes of gold. But maybe you do need some kind of Lawrentian/Reichian something to achieve that blessed intimacy with the world that flows through the veins of immortal literature, and to simultaneously be able to stop yourself from writing first this:

Walter tried everything he could think of to make sex better for her except the one thing that might conceivably have worked, which was to stop worrying about making it better for her and just bend her over the kitchen table some night and have at her from behind.

And then this:

One thing the new plan can safely be said not to have included was leaving lunch half-eaten on the table and then finding her jeans on the floor and the crotch of her bathing suit wedged painfully to one side while he banged her into ecstasy against the innocently papered wall of Dorothy’s old living room, in full daylight and as wide awake as a human being could be. [...] This seemed to her, in any case, the first time in her life she’d properly had sex. A real eye-opener, as it were.

As it were. Or, perhaps, as it isn’t. I don’t have a huge issue with Franzen’s how-to manual for good sex, but this love triangle is of critical importance to his novel, and this particular definition of ecstasy seems to be at its core. Accompanying the ecstasy is the Man himself, Richard, who embodies a dialectical mixture of patience and hatred toward women. Franzen sprinkles bonbons like this into all of Richard’s conversations: “She could see his patience with her, his patience with a female, reach its end” or “He shut his eyes and grimaced as if trying to remain patient.”

I was already starting to worry, as I went merrily through the hilarious pages of Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask, that in a sense Lipsyte’s novel was going to end up being an extended love letter to the rich, unselfconscious man who sleeps with supermodels but still enjoys difficult rock albums…and I’m not entirely sure, at the time of this writing, that The Ask was ever more than 40% something else, something better. But at least it was joyful simply because it was so extravagantly, perfectly funny. From the way Franzen writes, it’s obvious that the sunlight in Minnesota doesn’t touch him very deeply, nor even the long months of merciless cold. There’s one scene where he references Goodnight Moon, and the reference just sits there, fitting and correct and witty and all that, but devoid of substance. Franzen is a writer! What does he want from Goodnight Moon that it can’t provide?! If I had to make a list of my favorite books, the list would go something like this:

1. Women in Love, by DH Lawrence
2. In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust
3. Goodnight Moon, by the author of Goodnight Moon

Sure, Patty is miserably depressed, and her life is empty, and in this post-millennial America it may feel quite often as though nothing remains to hope for, especially to well-educated people struggling with the horrors of affluence and job security. But the amazing thing is that, no matter how incredibly bleak existence becomes, the soft, Miles Davis-like melancholy of Goodnight Moon, with its easy rhymes and its clarinet purity, still manages to touch parents and children, and to send out, into those early nights of imposed bedtimes, an unlooked-for tenderness. Does Franzen not see that? I’ve been in cold places on very warm summer days, and let me tell you, the heat is amazing. It soaks into you. You wear it like a shirt. The lakes and ponds come out in all their jewelry.

It’s not Franzen’s obligation to be happy. Happiness doesn’t come just because a good warm day makes all kinds of promises. But at least people do stop and enjoy the possibility. It’s a real eye-opener, as it were. I understand that Franzen will accept nothing less than the total transfiguration of the world, the Richardization of everything occurring in seismic shockwaves until the Gore-Lieberman posters burst into flame, and the fire and the hedge roses are one. I just wish he didn’t confuse it with Patty’s son, Joey, becoming so much like Richard that he starts drifting toward Republicanism (which doesn’t even make sense, since Richard isn’t especially political). There’s always the alternative of Murakami, I guess. Maybe his characters are bigger fans of their iconic children’s book, Goodnight To Both Moons.

forgiveness and the social contract

This is not a story about forgiveness.
-Emily Thorne, Revenge

One of the strangest principles of modern life is that of forgiveness, and the processes of “letting go” and “coming to terms” with major events, which are its complements. Every study that has shown the carcinogenic and pathogenic effects of stress and anger receives enormous publicity: we want to be told that if “you keep carrying that anger, it will eat you up inside,” as Don Henley put it. Freud identified many superstitious beliefs, such as the belief in ghosts, with an inability to accept the death of a loved one, and modern ghost stories are also dramatizations of therapy: when the original traumatic event is successfully worked through, the ghost departs, and everyone is the better for it.

As a reader, though, I’m surrounded by ghosts. It would be a little ridiculous to successfully “work through” the traumas I experienced while watching American Beauty, since none of it was real in the first place. I’m sure that, on some level, listening to an album like Ani Difranco’s Dilate is cathartic, and creates favorable conditions for moving past an old wound. But does that end up being all the album is good for? After all, it’s called Dilate: it seems to be about making the chasms within oneself deeper and wider. John Cusack, in High Fidelity, admitted that he no longer knew whether the heartbreak or the songs about heartbreak had come first. Either way, the two become indissoluble.

Personally, I always liked those moments in television shows where a character suddenly finds themselves beset by an angel on one shoulder, and a devil on the other. That’s a little simplistic, but there is something valuable about having not one or two, but many such figures in my peripheral vision. After all, in the West we feel compelled to put the dead securely away, but in many other cultures they remain present, even to the point of being obstinate. I don’t know that it is always wisest to airbrush those quarrels out of the picture, and to confine to pop music all the emotions we feel for the departed, including for people who are very much alive. It is alright to cry out in defiance, even in anger, across unbridgeable gaps of circumstance and time; to write, in actions, a letter that does not arrive.

Prologue: On Jabba the Hutt and Pizza the Hut

(Edit: This post is dedicated to Tristan, Sage, and Llew, without whom I might never have become a Jedi. To quote Tristan, “You spelled sarlacc wrong.”)

Evidently, the notorious gangster became locked in his car and ate himself to death.
-Spaceballs

While I continue my work on the Quantum-Botticelli Personality Test, I’m also working up a post about modern comedy; this is the prologue, inspired by re-watching Spaceballs last night.

Who, exactly, is Jabba the Hutt? He is, in Star Wars, the embodiment of everything human that technology cannot successfully erase — an ancient and stubborn nexus of atavisms. In a galaxy seemingly ruled by an Emperor with absolute power, Jabba is a reasonably powerful gangster who answers to no-one. He represents primitive violence: his name suggests “jabbing,” and in fact his cronies use ancient weapons and jab with them. He is also a “jabberer,” who makes a hash of an increasingly interconnected galaxy (i.e. a global culture and economy) by speaking in strange, backward tongues. Not only does he require subtitles, but so does Greedo and everybody else around him (the weird imp he keeps as a pet speaks pure gibberish).

Jabba proves that the Force is not an ancient, harmonizing, natural element, but rather a mystification of technological power. Remember that Yoda demonstrates his mastery of the Force by lifting Luke’s spaceship out of the (blatantly symbolic) swamp. Jabba the jabberer resists the universalization of discourse and culture, unlike his translator: “Your tricks will not work on me, boy.” Here he is not only speaking as a “backward” citizen, but also as that part of the psyche that resists being colonized by language or tamed by rationality. Luke defeats Jabba by having a robot lob a technological marvel at him (his lightsaber). Still, there is always the risk that technology gone astray will lose its foothold, and be swallowed up again, in a disgusting regression: Boba Fett being swallowed by the huge mouth of Sarlak.

Jabba also represents the body at its most disgusting (you don’t have to be a toddler to think that Hutt = Butt, but plenty of the people watching Star Wars are). Jabba lives in the bowels of an underground fortress, and forces Luke to defeat the Rancor. The Rancor is not only “wrath” (to go along with “Greedo” and the slaves kept as objects of “lust”) but also, with apologies to Dogma, a shit monster. Jabba is, in a way, the embodiment of waste: he lives on a planet of desert wastes, profits by usury, and enjoys to excess. Thus he represents a slew of infantilisms that Luke must overcome/repress, sinful tendencies that inhabit the unconscious together with objects of repressed guilt (the frozen Solo). Luke has to overcome the deep stains of a planet called, naturally, Tattooine.

In Spaceballs, Mel Brooks satirizes all this by rejecting Lucas’s binary of the appetites, on the one hand, and industrial light and magic on the other. We have entered the age of fast food and home video (at one point, characters actually watch a VHS cassette of Spaceballs). Instead of sequestering Jabba, Brooks turns him into an advertisement for takeout: Pizza the Hut. (In case we missed the point, he promises to kill the hero by “placing an order” for him.) Jabba’s sidekick now looks like Max Headroom and wears Kanye glasses. Instead of a face-to-face encounter, we only see Pizza on a series of television screens. He is drippy and disgusting (what are we excreting? turns into what are we EATING?) and, toward the end of the movie, he eats himself to death in a consumer frenzy.

Of course, faced with the degradation of industrial food, we begin to believe that healthier foods possess magical qualities, and can save us from being digested alive by Fast Food Nation. That is why the heroes in Spaceballs must seek the wisdom and protection of Yogurt, and must prostrate themselves before an enormous statue of Yogurt. But this means that Yogurt actually gets its power from Pizza, which is why Yogurt is living in Jabba’s old quarters, and why his ring of power comes from a Cracker Jacks box. It is from within this stronghold that Yogurt reveals how the Force evolved into the Schwartz: merchandising, merchandising, merchandising.

A Quick Farewell to Stieg Larsson

He thought for a long time before he went back to the landline and called his sister. He chose his words with care.
“How are you doing?”
“I’m fine, Micke.”
“Tell me what happened from the moment you arrived at Sahlgrenska until you were attacked.”
It took ten minutes for Giannini to give him her account. Blomkvist did not say anything about the implications of what she told him, but asked questions until he was satisfied. He sounded like an anxious brother, but his mind was working on a completely different level as he reconstructed the key points.
She had decided to stay in Göteborg at 4:30 that afternoon. She called her friend on her mobile, gotten the address and door code. The robber was waiting for her inside the stairwell at 6:00 on the dot.
Her mobile was being monitored. It was the only possible explanation. Which meant that his was being monitored too.
Foolish to think otherwise.
–The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest

Christ, how I wanted to like this book. Over the course of this summer, whenever my adrenal glands cried out for something involving good guys, bad guys, and attractive punk hackers, I would happily return to my cheap paperback copies of Stieg Larsson’s trilogies, whipping through them like the rest of the populace. My finishing The Girl Who Played With Fire coincided with e-books becoming available through public libraries. Even though I was disgusted by parts of The Girl Who Played With Fire — specifically The Bad Guy Who Can’t Feel Pain, so reminiscent of The Man-Mountain in George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, and also too much like bad guys in video games — I was ready to finish the trilogy. It’s a minor accomplishment, but of some value nonetheless, and the library copy was free. How hard could it be?

I’ve checked out and returned The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest twice now. Look at this passage, quoted up above. This is writing of such a low order that any high school kid wearing Doc Martens or Converse sneakers could edit it successfully. All the well-meaning feminism and left-wing muckraking and anti-racism in the world can’t make this right. Obviously Larsson had a gift for putting his great creation, Lisbeth Salander, into plots lifted from Le Carre, but still.

1. “He chose his words with care.”
No he didn’t. “How are you doing” is a pretty standard thing to say. So is “tell me what happened.” Is Micke having a stroke?
2. “It took ten minutes for Giannini to give him her account.”
We know who he’s talking to — he’s talking to his sister Giannini. Why keep changing how she is described? Using her surname here makes Blomkvist sound even colder.
3. “He sounded like an anxious brother, but his mind was working on a completely different level as he reconstructed the key points.”
No, he doesn’t sound like an anxious brother. On the compassion scale, he ranks somewhere below the blond cyborg in Blade Runner and Data from Star Trek. He sounds like a detective. Larsson, like his readers, cares more about the conflict of good vs. evil than he does, at this moment, about Annika’s well-being. It’s Larsson’s mind, not Blomkvist’s, that is “working on a completely different level.”
4. “6:00 on the dot.”
And thank God. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s muggers who show up late to stuff.
5. “Foolish to think otherwise.”
Absolutely right, Larsson. If something is “the only possible explanation,” then it certainly WOULD be “foolish to think otherwise.” I mean, why stop there? Why not add “Blomkvist knew he’d have to be some kind of absolute fucking moron to even consider alternative scenarios. So he didn’t”?

-Kugelmass

competition and abjection: the end of socializing

(Incredibly, when I opened WordPress to publish this, I saw a link to this blog post.)

And says Bloom:
What I meant about tennis, for example, is the agility and training of the eye.
–James Joyce, Ulysses

For most people, myself included, the notion of “the good life” remains solidly stuck in a previous century. After all, if we think of the good life as consisting of a spacious house, a moderate amount of property, a thriving circle of family and friends, and a stable and rewarding occupation, we are holding to a semi-aristocratic ideal that has existed since at least the 18th Century, and which has not adapted itself to history. The aristocratic ideal is not democratic or egalitarian; not everyone can simultaneously enjoy such a life, and many of its pleasantest conditions absolutely depend (labor and resources being what they are) on the oppression of somebody else, elsewhere in the world. It may seem frustrating that religious fundamentalism has enjoyed such popularity and status in the 21st Century, but it shouldn’t be surprising: it is the socio-political response to an ongoing problem of scarcity. Our situation demands something of us — what, exactly, we don’t know.

Nonetheless, this demand resonates everywhere, and I am struck by the extent to which it affects contemporary socializing. An oppressive sense of superficiality and purposelessness pervades modern socializing. I am not making the old, Romantic critique of socializing, which positions itself on the outside, and complains about the empty noises of the crowd, or the vacuous conversation at a dinner-party, comparing them to the rich rewards of contemplation and solitary labor. Within socializing itself, there is a restlessness and a drive toward essentially anti-social modes — competition and abjection — whenever people can’t find something on which they can collaborate.

Take, for example, the strange case of Settlers of Catan. (If you’ve never heard of it, forgive me; it’s a somewhat nerdy game, but it’s also amazing how mainstream such nerdiness has become.) First of all, it’s an incredibly new game, historically speaking. It is not an isolated phenomenon, either: if a group of friends got together every week, they could probably spend the better part of a year playing all sorts of highly developed, completely novel games, many of which already have expansion packs, without ever playing the same game twice. This is exciting for three reasons: first of all, it allows everyone to collaborate on learning the game and mastering its basic strategies. Second, it implies a level playing field — in theory, nobody has the advantage of experience, so everyone has a chance of winning. Finally, the novelty of the game lends a certain air of importance.

“Settlers” is one of the most anti-climactic games imaginable. It is a race between parallel construction projects: each player tries to build up a simplified version of an empire. When any player reaches a certain level of empire, they win and the game is over. As one would expect in a 21st Century game, the restrictions are all based on resources: players need certain resources to build things, and there is a commodity market that allows them to trade one resource for another. Players also cannot build their empires too close to one another, creating a feeling of crowding/claustrophobia (as well as one of isolation, simultaneously) that lasts throughout the game. There isn’t metaphorical combat, as in chess, or a psychological element of trust/distrust, as in poker; you basically lounge around and pray for sufficient sheep.

Even when there is metaphorical combat, however, as with two people playing Scrabble or Mortal Kombat, there is either too much at stake or too little. The game of Scrabble, as with poker and chess, has become a game where too much is at stake: how you do at Scrabble, relative to your friends and loved ones, demonstrates how literate you are. This is despite the fact that Scrabble is not only a randomized game, but a game that employs a highly specialized vocabulary of its own (hint: anything involving the letter ‘q’), and one in which cheating is easy and rampant (especially if by “Scrabble” one means “Words With Friends”). I almost never play Scrabble, and I still have had many conversations where I’ve had to console friends over tough losses or opponents cheating.

With a game like Mortal Kombat, on the other hand, nothing is at stake: there is no practical relevance or benefit to being skilled at the game, so it’s unclear what it means (if anything) to be better or worse than a friend. The pain this causes is reflected in many, many films, from The Last Starfighter to that Netflix streaming atrocity about beer pong. Regardless, everyone’s expected to be a good sport, but this is frankly pretty difficult, and I can think of at least one person in every social group I’ve passed through who just couldn’t remain chill. I don’t really think this is their fault; in fact, a whole new element of socializing has become managing who can/will play what, how to prevent or negotiate around acts of petty sabotage or people taking personal offense, and the like. If the game requires impractical skills, someone complains that it’s a waste of time, and if it requires practical ones, someone pushes for a switch from Game A to Game B, so they can prove that they’re not a complete idiot.

The outliers here are club sports. These are a little different because they actually help people stay fit, but I think it’s fair to assert that they are tough to afford, and dominated by an extremely intense masculine culture, particularly in the case of racquet sports. Entourage, which was recently awarded The Nobel Prize by Salman Rushdie, satirizes this perfectly in the “ping-pong” episode.

It is the odd adventure of training for some kind of leisure decathlon that will never arrive.

We’ve been raised by television to believe we’ll all be rock stars or movie gods…but we won’t. We’re slowly learning this fact. And we’re very, very pissed off about it.
–”Tyler Durden” in Fight Club

Naturally, a lot of social events aren’t competitive; instead, they’re built around entertainment. I don’t know exactly what it was like to watch a movie 50 years ago, but I do know that a lot of our contemporary encounters with media leave us feeling abject. It’s pretty banal to point out that movie stars look beautiful and experience interesting things in their fictional lives, but it is a little stunning to consider how central that has become to our experience of what are (after all) works of art. The art itself reflects this: Ryan Gosling seduces Emma Stone by re-creating a scene from Dirty Dancing, and Zooey Deschanel bonds with her new roommates when they consent to watching Dirty Dancing with her. In Crazy Stupid Love, the point is how unnerving it is to be seduced by something that everybody finds seductive in the same way; in The New Girl, the point is that Dirty Dancing turns everybody (male and female) into a woman.

The unifying effect of watching Dirty Dancing brings up another point: with college behind them, people share themselves less readily, especially now that the Internet is turning America into a shame society. Therefore we end up having to cry together over the very personal things we know about Swayze and Baby. How long did it take Spotify to start offering “private browsing”? Not long — all this sharing was getting intimidating, since you listen to such stupid music. (I mean, come on, Sublime is not good.) While I respect the intentions behind those flow charts that tell you what to share on Facebook, their real message concerns what you shouldn’t post. We live in a culture dominated by the twin messages “Don’t be that guy” and “Don’t be a crazy bitch.” But in the absence of a project, there’s actually no great reason to submerge the personal so much, especially when doing so produces such a vacuum.

Therefore, the problem with couples making their lists of celebrity exceptions — you know, those lists where couples decide it’s OK for one of them to have a one-night stand with Tim Riggins or Lady Gaga or etc — is not that it shows a lack of fidelity. It has no effect on fidelity or commitment at all. The problem is how powerfully it suggests that our whole lives are, in effect, derailed versions of some sort of celebrity existence we ought to have had.

The Internet facilitates this trend by making background information exponentially more accessible. It’s not just that people want to be Don Draper or Nancy from Weeds; it’s that they can watch a show where none of the characters are “aspirational” and still aspire to be the show’s creator. I’ve seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by a desire to be David Simon. Part of the reason this will never happen is that David Simon isn’t what he seems to be: we attribute all sorts of things to him (i.e. The Wire) that were actually the result of a massive team effort.

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Do people hold “Glee” theme nights? Of course they do. Not only are the actors pretty, the sets colorful, and the sexual tension palpable, but the characters on Glee are perpetually engaged in something larger than themselves, something that gives them an opportunity to work together: performing musical numbers. This gives them a reason to find common ground, even when their personalities conflict, and to devise creative ways of resolving those conflicts and making use of everyone’s talent. It’s a corny show, but that’s the core that makes it so strong. “Community” is equally revealing: early in the show, the idea of a “study group” starts to wear thin, and now most of the episodes consist of the characters desperately trying to have fun (“scary” storytelling, playing Yahtzee) and/or nearly coming to blows.

Naturally, I’ve been to a few social events where people tried to get me to do arts and crafts, to create paintings on the spot, and that sort of thing, and of course I found them overly precious. There isn’t an immediate, obvious solution to these trends, at least as far as I can see. The Occupy movement is meaningful and social, but it won’t last forever. Moneyball was about collaboration, but working together on the job isn’t necessarily anything new. I’m not going to wander into the next game of Catan or the next group viewing of The Office and demand reform. Still, I know that there must be a sea-change. I love watching my friends play music, give readings, present conference papers, even more (admittedly) when it’s something I can do myself. I feel something I never feel when I play Catan: settled.

Sorrow implores: Go! — but all joy wants eternity.
-Nietzsche