BIG RED SON

On the porn industry.

A stark reminder that we are living in a world plagued with deception and folks’ vulnerabilities being severly taken advantage — maybe knowingly — for money.

p3 - The desire for perfect release and the real-world impossibility of perfect, whenever-you-want-it release had together produced a tension that could no longer stand.

p4 - watching an industry congratulate itself on its pretense that it’s still an art form

p4 - the hypocrisy hurts … marketing strategies are now bigger news than the movies themselves

p9 - “A city [Las Vegas] that pretends to be nothing but what it is, an enormous machine of exchange — of spectable for money, of sensation for money, of money for more money, of pleasure for whatever tomorrow’s abstract cost.

p10 - [America] conqueror of it’s own people

p 10 - The Annual AVN Awards are always scheduled to coincide with the International Consumer Electronics Show (a.k.a CES)

p12 - starlets are so heavily made up they look embalmed.

p13 - autograph-and-flesh-press line

p15 - starlets treat the fans with the same absent, rigid-faced courtesy that flight attendants and restaurant hostesses tend to use.

p16 - It is difficult to describe how it feels to gaze at living human beings whom you’ve seen perform in hard-core porn. … the faces … became, suddenly, real people.

p17 - “hidden”, the self locked away someplace far behind the eyes. Surely this hiddenness is the way a human being who’s giving away the very most private parts of himself preserves some sense of dignity and autonomy

p17 - They remain just bodies.

p24 - Because porn films’ worlds are so sexualized … there’s a bizarre unconscious expectation/dread/hope that this is what might happen … this is a delusion

p26 - dramatic porn videos simulate the 100 percent sexualization of real life

p27 - Dark’s and Black’s movies are not for men who want to be aroused and maybe masterbate. They are for men who have problems with women and want to see them humiliated. Whether Bizarro-Sleaze might conceivably help armchair misogynists “work out” some of their anger at females is irrelevant. … Their intent is to capitalize on a market-demand that quite clearly exists.

p28 - We used to be rebels. Now we’re fucking businessmen

p28 - The thing to recognize is that the adult industry’s new respectibility creates a paradox. The more accetable in modern culture it becomes, the further porn will have to go in order to preserve the sense of _un_acceptability that’s so essential to it’s appeal.

p30 - the adult industry takes many of the psychological deformities that Hollywood is famous for — the vanity, the vulgarity, the rank consumerism — and not only makes them overt and grotesque but then seems to revel in that grotesquerie.

p35 - “This business is about engineering fantasies.” (aren’t they all?)

p43 - It’s about the money. Nothing else.

p45 - the AVN Awards is a self-congratulation (based on the awards and celebration)

CERTAINLY THE END OF SOMETHING OR OTHER, ONE WOULD SORT OF HAVE TO THINK; Re John Updike’s Toward the End of Time

Zeke originally introduced me to Updike

This short-story is what inspired me to want to read Updike — have since bought ~10 Updike books. still yet to read — but in order to enjoy and fully appreciate this short-story and Updike’s Toward the End of Time, I feel I would need to read all of Updike’s work.

p52 - exploring, more and more overtly the apocalyptic prospect of his own death.

p52 - The Poorhouse Fair, Of The Farm, and The Centaur are all great books.

p54 - hypocritical conformity and repression of their own parents’ generation … anomie and solpisim and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without even once having loved something more than yourself.

p55 - America, in short, is getting ready to die. … the tragedy of the human condition.

p59 - It never once occurs to him, though, that the reason he’s so unhappy is that he’s an asshole.

SOME REMARKS ON KAFKA’S FUNNINESS FROM WHICH PROBABLY NOT ENOUGH HAS BEEN REMOVED

p61 - compression for both the pressure and the release are already inside the reader. What Kafka seems to do better than just about anyone else is to orchestrate the pressure’s increase in such a way that it becomes intolerable at the precise instant it is released.

p64 - What Kafka’s stories have, rather, is a grotesque, gorgeous, and thoroughly modern complexity… And it is this, I think, that makes Kafka’s wit inaccessible to children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment reassurance… we’ve taught them to see humor as something you get — the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have.

p64 - “self” is defined by one’s struggle

p64 - yearn inside for a return to the same childish oblivion (instead of the less-interesting and less-fulfulling, expected struggles of adult life) which we know involves paying taxes and death.

p64 - College students are adolescents, and they’re terrified, and they’re dealing with their terror in distinctly a US way. Those naked boys hanging upside-down out of their frat house’s windows on Friday night are simply trying to buy a few hours’ escape from the grim adult stuff that any decent school has forced them to think about all week.

p65 - You can tell them that maybe it’s a good thing they don’t “get” Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his stories as all about a kind of door. To envision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desparation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That, finally, the door opens … and it opens outward — we’ve been inside what we wanted all along.

AUTHORITY AND AMERICAN USAGE (*)

p67 - some modern dictionaries are notoriously liberal and others notoriously conservative … Did you know that US lexicography even had a seamy underbelly?

p73 - complicated relationship between Authority and Democracy in what we as a culture have decided is English. … He’s both a lawyer and a usage expert (which seems a bit like being both a narcotics wholesaler and a DEA agent).

p75 - Rarely, however, do we ask ourselves who exactly decides what gets in The Dictionary or what words or spellings or pronounciations get deemed substandard or incorrect. … what’s considered correct changes over time. … Who’s to say which changes are natural and good and which are corruptions?

p76 - The answer, surprisingly often, is that no one does, that when you look into the background of these “rules” there is often little basis for them.

p79 - linguistic conservatives are now formally known as Prescriptivists and linguistic liberals as Descriptivists.

p81 - “journaling” — a view of writing as a self-exploratory and expressive rather than communicative, an abandonment of systematic grammar…

p83 - how many people have to deviate from how many conventions before say the language has actually changed? Fifty percent? Ten percent? Where do you draw the line? Who draws the line?

p87 - there is no such thing as private language … goes on to talk about words with subjective meaning, such as “pain”

p88 - “meaning” self v. rest consistency …. (5) The criterion of consistency-with-my-own-definition is satisfiable only if there exist certain rules that are independent of any one individual language-user. … Without the existence of these external rules, there is no difference between the statement “I am in fact using tree consistently with my own definition” and the statement “I happen to be under the impression that I am using tree consistently with my own definition” … If the distinction between ‘correct’ and ‘seems correct’ has disappeared, then so has the concept correct. … If you are thinking that all this seems not just hideously abstract but also irrelevant to the Usage Wars or to anything you have any interest in at all, I submit that you are mistaken. If words’ and phrases’ meanings depend on transpersonal rules and these rules on community consensus, then language is not only non-private but also irreducibly public, political, and ideological.

p89 - A dictionary can be an “authority” on in the sense in which a book of chemistry or physics or of botany can be an “authority” — by the accuracy and the completeness of its record of the observed facts of the field examined, in accord with the latest principles and techniques of the particular science. … imagine an “authoritative” ethics textbook whose principles were based on what most people actually do. … Grammar and usage conventions are, as it happens, a lot more like ethical principles than like scientific theories. … Let’s keep in mind that language didn’t come into being because our hairy ancestors were sitting around the veldt with nothing better to do. Language was invented to serve certain very specific purposes — “That mushroom is poisonous”

At this point we are like four-layers deep on this thought. This is why I love David Foster Wallace’s writing.

p92 - The point of this version of Descriptivism is to show that the descriptive rules are more fundamental and way more important than the prescriptive rules. … the basic proposition of N. Chomsky’s generative linguistics, which is that there exists a Universal Grammar beneath and common to all languages, pluse that there is probably an actual part of the human brain that’s imprinted with this Universal Grammar the same way birds’ brains are imprinted with Fly South and dogs’ Sniff Genitals.

It’s a waste to spend the effort defining rules for the sake of defining rules or segregation. Focus on the “rules” describing actual usage.

p92 - SWE prescriptions against dangling participles or mixed metaphors are basically the linguistic equivalent of whalebone corsets and short forks for salad.

p96 - When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating. The propositional content (i.e., the verbal information I’m trying to convey) is only one part of it. Another part is stuff about me, the communicator.

p99 - a naked desire to fit in … whether something gets called a “subdialect” or “jargon” seems to depend on how much it annoys people outside its Discourse Community.

p100 - A synthetic lanuage uses gramatical inflections to dictate syntax, whereas an analytic languages uses word order. Latin, German, and Russian are synthetic; English and Chinese are analytic.

p101 - dialects as acceptance

p104 - her beloved SNOOTlet is actually deficient in Language Arts. He has only one dialect. … The point is that the little A+ SNOOTlet is actually in the same dialectal position as the class’s “slow” kid who can’t learn to stop using ain’t or bringed.

p109 - In this country, SWE is perceived as the dialect of education and intelligence and power and prestige, and anybody of any race, ethnicity, religion, or gender who wants to succeed in American culture has got to be able to use SWE. … “if you ever want those arguments to get listened to and taken seriously, you’re going to have to have to communicate them in SWE …

p111 - in particular, mistaking for political efficacy what is really just a language’s political symbolism — enables the bizarre conviction that America ceases to be elitist or unfair simply because Americans stop using certain vocabulary that is historically associated with elitism and unfairness. This is PCE’s core fallacy — that a society’s mode of expression is productive of its attitudes rather than a product of those attitudes.

p112 - PCE (politically-correct English) acts as a form of censorship … part of any speaker’s motive for using a certain vocabulary is always the desire to communicate stuff about himself. … PCE functions primarily to signal and congratulate certain virtues in the speaker … and so serves the self-regarding interests of the PC far more than it serves any of the persons or groups renamed.

p114 - Orwell, who 50 years ago had AE (Academic English) pegged as a “mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence” in which “it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.”

THE VIEW FROM MRS. THOMPSON’S

p131 - How do they know to do this?

HOW TRACY AUSTIN BROKE MY HEART

About athletes “writing” (have written for them) these really bland biographies that just outline historical points. But this is also about death of the sole of young athletes. Or that we treat young athletes as saviors or incredible, yet they have so little to them as human beings yet due to their inexperience / lack of exposure to the “real world”.

p150 - her art … was removed from her at an age when most of us are just starting to think seriously about committing ourselves to some pursuit. This memoir could have been … just like death except you have to go on living afterward … there’s not even a recognizable human being in here. … The book is inanimate because it communicates no real feeling and so gives us no sense of a conscious person. There’s nobody at the other end of the line.

p155 - there’s a cruel paradox involved. It may well be that we spectators, who are not divinely gifted athletes, are the only ones able truly to see, articulate, and animate the experience of the gift we are denied. And that those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it — and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its esssence.

UP, SIMBA; Seven Days on the Trail of an Anticandidate

Anti-marketing marketing or “leadership”. Which is just marketing but without personal interests at the forefront

p162 - it’s hard not to hear it as just one more piece of the carefully scripted bullshit that presidential candidates hand us as they go about the self-interested business of trying to become the most powerful, important, and talked-about human being on earth, which is of course their real “cause” … GOP is in the pocket of pharmaceutical and HMO lobbies and Democrats are funded by trial lawyers’ lobbies, and it is in these backers’ self-interest to see that the current insane US health-care system stays just the way it is.

p188 - Why do these crowds from Detroit and Charleston cheer so wildly at a simple promise not to lie?

p190 - And it’s easy (or at least comparatively easy) to tell the truth when there’s nothing to lose. New Hampshire changed everything. … Now there’s something to lose, or to win. Now it gets complicated… Complication usually has more to do with mixed motives, gray areas, compromise.

p207 - noise about low voter turnouts, nothing substantive ever gets done to make politics less ugly or depressing or to actually induce more people to vote: our elected representatives are incumbents, and low turnouts favor incumbents for the same reason soft money does.

p224 - Another paradox: It is all but impossible to talk about the really important stuff in politics without using terms that have become awful cliches they make your eyes glaze over and are difficult to even hear. One such term is “leader”. … A leader’s true authority is a power you voluntarily give him, and you grant him this authority not in a resigned or resentful way but happily … a real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.

p226 - True, JFK’s audience was in some ways more innocent than we are … The science of sales and marketing was still in its drooling infancy in 1961 when Kennedy was saying, “Ask not…” The young people he inspired had not been skillfully marketed to all their lives. … There is a difference between a great leader and a great salesman. There are also similarities, of course. … a salesman’s ultimate, overriding motivation is self-interest.

p227 - Even in the 80s, most younger Americans, who could smell a marketer a mile away, knew that what Reagan really was was a great saleman. What he was selling was the idea of himself as a leader. And if you’re under, say, 35, this is what pretty much every US president you’ve grown up with has been: a very talented salesman, surrounded by smart, expensive political strategists and media consultants and spinmasters who manage his “campaign” (as in also “advertising campaign”) and help him sell us on the idea that it’s in our interests to vote for him.

p228 - All politicians sell, always have. FDR and JFK and MLK and Gandhi were great salemen. But that’s not all they were. People could smell it. That weird little extra something. It had to do with “character”

p228 - A moment when an anticandidate can be a real candidate … “Polls are bullshit” into a campaign line

p228 - Young Voter … American type of ambivalence, a sort of interior war between your deep need to believe and your deep belief that the need to believe is bullshit, that there’s nothing left anywhere but sales and salesmen.

p233 - gray-area-tolerant … about sincerity vs. marketing, or sincerity plus marketing, or leadership plus the packaging and selling of same.

p234 - it’s less about him and who he is and more about your interpretation of who he was and may still be.

CONSIDER THE LOBSTER

What is pain?

p236 - there’s much more to know than most of us care about

p239 - democratization of lobster … Any one example is no more than a petty inconvience, of course, but the MLF (Maine Lobster Fest) turns out to be full of irksome little downers … consists mainly of endless thanks and tributes to local sponsors.

p240 - two sides of the great coin of US tourism … I have never understood why so many people’s idea of a fun vacation is to don flip-flops and sunglasses and crawl through maddening traffic to loud, hot, crowded tourist venues in order to sample a “local flavor” that is by definition ruined by the presence of tourists. … it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist … Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them-way.

p240 - intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way — hostile to my fantasy of being a true individual, of living somehow outside and above it all.

p243 - Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure? … What does “all right” even mean in this context?

p245 - Do lobsters feel pain? … “There’s a part of the brain in people and animals that lets us feel pain, and lobsters’ brains don’t have this part.” … the fact that it’s incorrect in about nine different ways … more or less echoed by the festival’s own pronouncement on lobsters and pain

p246 - “pain” is challenging. … let’s acknowledge that the questions of whether and how different kinds of animals feel pain, and of whether and why it might be justifiable to inflict pain on them in order to eat them, turn out to be extremely complex and difficult. … metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics.

p247 - the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, which is highlighted as an attraction in the festival’s program, is right out there on the MLF’s north grounds for everyone to see. Try to imagine a Nebraska Beef Festival at which part of the festivities is watching trucks pull up and the live cattle get driven down the ramp and slaughtered right there on the World’s Largest Killing floor

p248 - the lobster very much behaves as you or I would in a boiling kettle

JOSEPH FRANK’S DOSTOEVSKY

p256 - lecture on existentialism … protagonist’s self-diagnosed “disease” … makes him a universal figure in whom we can all see parts of ourselveso

p261 - Is the real point of my life simply to undergo as little pain and as much pleasure as possible?

p262 - if I decide there’s a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, won’t the reason for this decision be my desire to be less lonely, meaning to suffer less overall pain? Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?

p263 - there is real and alienating stuff that stands in the way of our appreciating Dostoevsky and has to be dealt with — either by learning enough about all the unfamiliar stuff that it stops being so confusing, or else by accepting it (the same way we accept racist/sexist elements in some other nineteenth-century books) and just grimacing and reading on anyway. … some art is worth the extra work of getting past all the impediments to its appreciation; and Dostoevsky’s books are definitely worth the work.

I’ve since bought 3(?) Dostoevsky books: Notes from the Underground, The Idiot and ?

p264 - The main thing that keeps Krantz and Grisham and a lot of other gifted storytellers from being artistically good is that they don’t have any talent for (or interest in) characterization — their compelling plots are inhabited by crude and unconvicing stick figures. … Plus others — often among the academic avant-garde — who seem expert/interested in neither plot nor character, whose books’ movement and appeal depend entirely on rarefied meta-aesthetic agendas.) … The best of them live inside us, forever, once we’ve met them.

p264 - without Dostoevsky there would have been no Nietzsche, and yet Dostoevsky is among the most profoundly religious of all writers.

p265 - Dostoevsky’s characters manage to embody whole ideologies, and philosophies of life: Raskolnikov the rational egoism of the 1860’s intelligentsia, Myshkin mystical Christian love, the Underground Man the influence of European positivism on the Russian character, Ippolit the individual will raging against death’s inevitability, Aleksey the perversion of Slavophilic pride in the face of European decadence, and so on and so forth …

p269 - Tolstoy and Hugo and Zola and most of the other nineteeth-century titans were also ideological writers. But the big thing about Dostoevsky’s gift for character and for rendering the deep conflicts within (not just between) people is that it enables him to dramatize extremely heavy, serious themes without ever being preachy or reductive

p272 it’s probably fair to say that Dostoevsky et al. were free or certain cultural expectations that severely constrain our own novelists’ ability to be “serious”.

Everything now needs to make money or be marketable, which doesn’t leave room for “seriousness”.

p274 - who is to blame for the unseriousness of our serious fiction?

HOST

Conservative, political talk radio

p281 - is it even remotely helpful or productive to make huge, sweeping claims about some other region’s/culture’s inferiority to us? What possible effects can such remarks have except to incite hatred? Aren’t they sort of irresponsible?

p282 - “entertainer” vs “journalist”. John Ziegler is not a journalist — he is an entertainer … he is part of a peculiar, modern, and very popular type of news industry, one that manages to enjoy the authority and influence of journalism without stodgy constraints of fairness, objectivity and responsibility that make trying to tell the truth such a drag for everyone involved.

It’s harder to tell the truth than it is to just make up something and have it spread.

p284 - extreme fragmentation of news sources. ideologically based news. “the truth” is wholely a matter of perspective and agenda. partisan news sources that ratify what you want to believe. It’s hard to distinguish real information from spin.

p285 - Why is conservatism so hot right now? … it predates 9/11.

p286 - Assume for a moment that it’s not silly to see things this man’s way

p287 - Whatever the social effects of talk radio or the partisan agendas of certain hosts, it is a fallacy that political talk radio is motivated by ideology. It is not. Political talk radio is a business, and it is motivated by revenue.

p294 - conservatism is easier. Part of the answer to why conservative talk radio works so well might be that extreme conservatism provides a fairly neat, clear, univocal template with which to organize one’s opinions and responses to the world.

p308 - Maybe we’ve just become a more impatient society

p313 - Commercial radio … was supposed to meet a higher standard of social responsibility

p314 - the right’s conflation of “common good” / “public interest” with “what wins in the market” is the conviction that it’s all a scam, that what the deregulation of industries like broadcasting, health care, and energy really amounts to is the subordination of the public’s interest to the financial interests of large corporations.

p327 - “truth” being used synonymously with “how I/we feel”