MEN IN BOOKS AND REALITY

A Major Influence in its Time

My life has been lived more through books and film than through any institutions, such as family or church, but because school is a matter of books and because of the Forties when I was forming while so many existential questions were debated, the books had a skew towards what was respected by scholars and the arts.  They weren’t just romantic novels.

At the Portland branch library a couple of blocks away from our house, as soon as I was allowed to go there by myself, I started at one end of the myths and fairy tales section, read through the shelves until I’d read them all and the librarian moved me to the young adult sci-fi, just developing out of the conversion from war to space exploration.  "Red Planet Mars," the seed for "Star Wars."  From there I took myself to historical novels and the Dewey Decimal category of 700, the arts, in pursuit of ballet.

People criticize me for having my head in the clouds, being unreal, but actually there is an edge where reality is more intense in books and movies.  We now know from neurology and clinical psychology just how unreal all our lives can be, over-interpreted by cultural channels and family convenience, edited beliefs about our own relatives and daily practices.  We won’t accept anything as reality except what we already know, unless there are special circumstances.  We’re now facing the consequences -- those circumstances -- for instance, a psychotic president.  But I don’t want to talk about him.

For the last ten years I’ve been exploring the idea of “gay” from my usual non-personal, non-experiential, book-centered point of view.  Maybe I keep distance because gay is often conflated with pornography.  The first porn I read was Bocaccio’s Decameron, stories told during the time Plague was sweeping Europe and wealthy young people had sequestered themselves for safety.  In order to entertain each other, they told dirty stories.  The only one I remember was about a man whose wife cheated on him, so he shut up her lovers in a tower made of one room on top of another, each lover in a room, none of them with a bathroom.  Eventually they all peed on each other’s heads, which I thought was hilarious.  

I was probably ten and only found the book because it was part of a leather-bound set of iconic authors like Shakespeare, good examples of book worship.  No one ever read them but me.  They were too valuable and had very thin pages that were unpleasant to turn for fear of tearing them.  So that was the status of porn in my mind.

“Gay” as a problematic category didn’t really register until “Tea and Sympathy,” (1953), the year I graduated from the 8th grade.  Christine Jorgenson had her gender change in 1952.  About the same time a new translation of the Bible was published and I decided to read it right straight through.  I was fine until I came to Noah’s daughters getting him drunk so he’d inseminate them and the family would go on.  I was just beginning puberty in those years and in a sense so was the United States, because the intense adrenaline/ testosterone years overseas for so many men had awakened them to European and Asian culture and values.  Magazines like Time and Life that had been dedicated to death and dominance were now exploring the new world we’d created through destruction, including the arts — which approached sexual matters.

Masters and Johnson began their work in 1957.  Kinsey had already been working since 1947 when many men discovered that sex wasn’t always “done” the way they’d been taught in Kansas.  Some had sat through many a lecture on what was then called “VD” with many ghastly illustrations of affliction.  Some had had terrible wounds: their families, if they managed marriage, would not continue through them.  Maleness and sons had the high cross-generational value they always have during war and in the repopulation afterwards.

Some say the beginnings of the legitimation of homosexuality started in San Francisco because of the all-male culture of gold-prospecting along the coast.  Others link it to the veterans who re-entered civilian life there, gradually finding each other and sharing a hunger for man-on-man intimacy.  Their bodies were attuned to pain, strife, and confrontation, so it was a hard-bodied, leather-bound version of sex, Hell’s Fucking Angels.  Women rode pillion, if at all.

This is far from the foppish Oscar Wilde lampooning of society and the prancing follies of burlesque.  But it had direct access to the bitter existentialism and moral outrage of oppressed and ravaged Europe.  In the US maybe the “punk” movement was close, and then the harder versions of rock and roll.  None of this is like today's gay films on Netflix where the pattern is the same as for heterosexual adolescence, as much about attachment and bonding as about actual coitus of any kind.  In fact, some of the innovations of same sex people are now standard practice in hetero-combinations.

It will be obvious to any gay person reading this that I only know what I find in books.  (I’m straight.)  But real testimony also can be vivid and sometimes disturbing as people struggle out of the cocoons of stigma.  Strangely, it’s also universal, so the appeal of the soft-core “The Fancy Dancer” or “The Fast Runner” or “The Persian Boy” is across adolescents, regardless of orientation or culture.  By now, the generous anthropology that came out of wartime awareness of the variety of human beings has morphed into the linguistic complexities of human minds and the Mary Douglas/Eliade/ Lakoff, understanding of metaphor at the core of minds.  This is one of our sources of hope for the future.

In high school I had lesbian teachers but thought nothing of it.  In college I had gay classmates but even they didn’t know what that meant.  (They tell me so now.)  HIV arrived just as I started seminary.  That means at the same time the tough lovers in San Francisco were suffering combat deaths of a different sort, elusive and irremedial.  It changed the survivors forever.

And now the survivors, having created an institution called “Let’s Kick Ass”, (consult Google) is meeting across the country to share stories and figure out what they have learned.  More than anything else, they have a sharp understanding of practical compassion and a contempt for failure to act on behalf of the whole.  They are an antidote for pantywaist politicians and their oligarchic prompters who are hungry for war again because of the profits.  You can watch vids of them telling their stories.  It helps despair.

Tez Anderson

THE SHADOW OF THE CHIMP

The idea of humans evolving from “apes” is horrifying in particular to the Abrahamic religions. One of the insults meant to control unwanted behavior is to call it “bestial”  Religion says that God chose only humans (and only the ones who are members of the sponsoring institution, namely theirs) to have souls and go to heaven.  It is heresy to deny that; it is worrying if some people don’t care.  But we like the shiver of considering it in movies.

It’s more arousing if the male half of a couple is the ape.  As a gift for my husband, I once bought a tiny ivory Japanese figure of an ape clasping a nude woman.  He loved it, esp. since it was so easily hidden.  Bears, which can be seen as humanoid, fill the same role, but a bear might be the female, maternal.  Japanese are quite frank about such matters.

If Jane Goodall had been less of a nun-like figure, she might have been in trouble, living with chimps as though they were human, even though they were in family groups. Indeed Dian Fossey, a more passionate sort of woman, got into trouble that caused her death by machete in her bedroom, imposed by emotionally threatened human males acting bestial.

Jane Goodall and friend

______________

From Wikipedia:

The humanzee (Homo sapiens sapiens × Pan troglodytes) (also known as the Chuman or Manpanzee) is a hypothetical chimpanzee/human hybrid. Chimpanzees and humans are closely related (sharing 95% of their DNA sequence and 99% of coding DNA sequences^[1]), leading to contested speculation that a hybrid is possible. However, such a human-animal hybrid has not actually existed outside of fictional works that have explored the concept.

Humans have one pair fewer chromosomes than other apes, with ape chromosomes 2 and 4 fusing into a large chromosome. 

_________________

A mix of human and primate would almost certainly require artificial insemination such as using a pipette to insert a sperm into an ovum in a petri dish.  No hot sex.  (Anyway, primates and bears have small penises.)  However, when the chimps and humans diverged from a common ancestor sometime between 8 million and 25 million years ago, they could produce fertile hybrids for another million years or so.  This is not linear descent, evolution is a bush rather than a tree, and we’re working on fossil bone morphology more than DNA, with almost unimaginable time spans.  It’s barely short of fantasy.

But chimps themselves are such compelling personalities and interact with us in such humanoid ways, that they are always suspected of knowing more than they let on.  The point is that if HIV had been a disease of ungulates or big cats, the dynamics would have been entirely different.  Of course the blood machinery of those animals is entirely different.  You can’t catch HIV from a sheep, nor would it catch HIV from you.  There are plenty of other diseases a human could catch from a sheep, most of them bacterial zoonoses.  Leprosy can be caught from an armadillo and is stigmatized not from its source but from its ability to reduce a human to looking like a strange animal with eerie human qualities.  Un-treated AIDS is along those lines, with emaciation and Kaposi’s sarcoma acting as disfiguring markers, though they are not directly caused by HIV -- they are opportunists, like pneumocystis pneumonia fungus.

Bonobos are even more humanoid than chimps and have the added feature of using sexual intercourse as a social element: greeting, comforting, just fooling around.  Film of them acting like humans -- walking through the door on two feet, wearing clothes, getting a beer out of the fridge, sitting on the sofa with legs crossed . . .  eeks!  What might they do next?  Adult male apes are so much stronger than humans that they could tear a person limb-from-limb.  Maybe you’ve seen a photo of a woman whose face was snatched off by a friend’s “pet”.  Therefore, what you see interacting with humans is mostly immature apes, kids.

There are cultures and “sub-cultures” that consider women sub-human and feel free to confine, abuse, and infect them -- then not allow them medical care.  Children likewise. These are cultures of HIV death, often based in drugs as much as sex.  Isolated, alienated people might turn to needles for comfort.  “Chemsex” combines drugs with sex, trying to go “over the top”.  It’s a steep drop on the other side.  

The fantasy is that somehow there must be a way to escape the troublesome social and emotional consequences of sexual relationships, which are not just a matter of desire -- though they are that, too.  In fact, they are a strong drive and it’s lucky that most human arms are just long enough to reach the crotch.  I’m working on a followup about sexual emotions derived from the recent Mark Holms lecture about the unconscious.  This link will take you to the lecture I’m trying to digest.

https://npsa-association.org/videos/mark-solms-consciousness-and-the-unconscious-pt-1/

This post is meant to illustrate that a big part of our panic over HIV-AIDS is worry that it might mean we are not human, or that being human is NOT being chosen, being elevated among other animals, but having to suffer the same consequences as being just mammals, another kind of ape.  It was a big shock to find out that at some point Neanderthals, always considered barely superior to gorillas, interbred with modern humans.  We do have some neanderthal genes.

Richard Sapolsky

Going back to chimp genes, it is said that we are separated only by 2% of genes.  I’ve added a chart. The following quote is by Sapolsky, a male expert hairy enough to compete with orangutans but smarter by far.

http://discovermagazine.com/2006/apr/chimp-genome

“Yet that tiny portion of unshared DNA makes a world of difference: it gives us, for instance, our bipedal stance and the ability to plan missions to Mars. Scientists do not yet know how most of the DNA that is uniquely ours affects gene function. But they can conduct whole-genome analyses—with intriguing results. For example, comparing the 33 percent of our genome that codes for proteins with our relatives' genomes reveals that although the sum total of our genetic differences is small, the individual differences pervade the genome, affecting each of our chromosomes in numerous ways.”

When we read that humans have only 2% more genes than chimps or bonobos, we think of a line (maybe a chromosome?) in which the last 2 units of measurement are a different color and we try to think which 2% makes us superior: bipedalism?  less hair?  reading?  But genes don’t code for such things.  Genes are about proteins that interact, making more proteins (the proteome) producing different results in different situations (epigenomes can record results), and different results if there is more than one copy of the gene, or if it’s in a different place on the chromosome, or if the epigenome has turned it off or if a gene that codes for timing turns the gene for, say, a prominent larynx on or off at the wrong time.  

The proteome (list of possible proteins) is so long and complex we may never complete it, computer or no computer.  Then beyond that, there is the impact of social systems and the plain old environment.  And now we add the biome of parasites on and in us.  There seems to be no end to it, but that’s not what we want anyway, is it?  HIV and the pressure of AIDS can take us on a journey.  Far along the human path, or maybe we are evolving as we go.

The point remains that we are animals, a specialized sort of primate, which we have not sorted out yet.  Therefore we get excessively worried over issues that mix our essential molecular plan with religious rules from ancient times and also sexual desire, no matter the object.  The larger culture is vitally interested and entitled to interfere in order to preserve their own existence.

"HI THERE! WANNA . . .?"

This month’s Vanity Fair includes an article describing hook-up culture in terms of the new sortware programs.  The idea is a pic, thirty words or less of self-description, and an address.  Maybe it starts out a date, maybe it starts frankly with a question about whether things normally considered perversions are okay with you.  It sounds like prostitution, but without any money.

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/08/tinder-hook-up-culture-end-of-dating.   “Tinder and the Dawn of the “Dating Apocalypse” by Nancy Jo Sales.  According to their own computer records, some of these men have slept with a hundred women a year.

What echoed in my head all the way through the article was San Francisco in the first wild gay freedom days after penicillin and before HIV.  Someone asked, “How much sex would men have if they could?”  The answer was “more than you can imagine.”  

Close contact (I’m not saying “intimate”) is related to disease because the best vector for human diseases is another human.  That’s sort of like the best food for humans, the one that includes all the basic elements, is other humans.  But cannibals end up eating the other person’s diseases as well as their vitamins.  So the brain disease called Kuru was not cured but was avoided when people stopped eating human brains.

Scientists are working hard to find ways to eliminate HIV virus from the human body.  They can do it with monkeys’ parallel SIV virus.  Well, some of the time.  They’ve got a number of strategies going, some of them as ingenious as a chess game.  But monkey behavior, when the monkeys are in cages, is pretty easy to predict and control.

The one element of every disease that can never be brought under control is the behavior of human beings.  The people who are into serial shagging are adult, well-educated, gainfully employed, attractive, etc. etc. and they are destroying their ability to form relationships long enough and reliable enough to raise children.  They know that.  But they do it anyway.

I’m guessing that most places are not as dominated by glamour and status as Manhattan and it’s Manhattan or similar urban centers that seem to be “into” these hook-up games.  I mean, there’s a certain amount of bed-hopping that goes on everywhere, but then the chief of Great Falls police says that drugs reach into every community in the state.  He says that today he sees the arrests of the children of the people he arrested when he first started out.  But it’s quiet and behind the scenes.  The game of hooking-up isn’t so much fun if no one is watching.

Both of these are related to economics.  In a money-based society where marriage or extra bucks for a really good car or house can make the difference between success and just-getting-along, sex is not just Tinder, but also illegal or legal tender.  The question is, like the state of the environment, is it sustainable?

In a society as malleable by media as ours is, we come up to these sudden culture pivots every now and then.  This one is much defined by the conviction of movie writers that a man/woman relationship is the center of the universe.  They also believe that sex and love are the same.  

The problem is that social scientists in the real world, as well as scientists working at experiment benches (who may like their work because they’re antisocial) are finding that sex, like most things, is a continuum.  I was explaining to the Trash Roll-Off Lady who is generally “hip” but hadn’t yet gotten past the idea that male “homosexuality” is real and inborn and that there are only two options, like a questionnaire: M or F.   Instead, research suggests that the desire dial evidently is set early in gestation of the fetus -- anywhere from male, to a mix, to female, to children all the way down to null.  None.  But that’s just a potential.  Add environment, personality, circumstances, etc.  Add the molecular influences on sex as one goes along: self-generated, purchased, by-products in food, recreational drugs, infections, gut bacteria.  

Just now I read an article from Aeon.com about how cells form a film.  It was about how adjacent cells attach to each other.  In my simplistic version, there are potential sites for attachment spaced out along the surface of the cell.  Inside the cell there are filament structures, sort of bones or frames.  If the tip of one of these filaments contacts a point of attachment, then a connection is formed and the sheet of cells widens.  It seems to me that’s a nice metaphor, because it relates the internal world of the entity to the many potentials for connection.  But it’s still basically random.

What if a person ideally suited for a lifelong attachment full of joy and fulfillment is standing next to you at the bar in the illustration for this story, but you’re so busy hooking up on your iPhone that you never notice her or him.  (Do these services include both sexes -- um, I mean the array of possible desire modes and genital configurations?)

Another new concept is that of the person as a process, a constantly renewing and developing entity, shaping according to the forces it meets, even defying or departing from the double helix, through the epigenome.  What if this person is the love of your life, not because of decades shaping and being shaped by you, but because they happen in a random world to turn out just like you.  But then along comes a major plot twist and neither of you is the same anymore.  I guess you can’t blame a computer for that.

So where is the line between guessing compatibility by a flash on the tiny screen of a smart phone, and enough actual time together to discover whether you can make a real connection?  I think it’s a moving boundary and it all depends and nothing is forever.

But the potential for real damage in this half-roulette, half cyber-game, sort of approach is pretty high.  Naturally for the men and maybe even some of the women, that might be part of its attraction, flirting morbidly with the idea that this might be Jack the Ripper.  Or that this might be someone who will give you HIV.

"THE FRUIT BAT" (Fiction)

The nickname came first.  His real name was Rudy, which the kids rhymed to Fruity.  He looked it up online to make sure, but they all knew they meant he was gay.  He just liked to look things up.  The suggestion was that a “fruit” was easy-pickin’s, soft and pretty, low-hanging, as though gay and female gender characteristics were the same thing.  He was more tough-minded than most of the guys, which they never realized, so he sort of picked up their “fruit” thing and ran with it.  

He was a pretty good artist and began to specialize in paintings of piles of fruit that had, when you looked closely, the spheres of skulls and the long banana curves of snakes mixed in with the apples and oranges.  He liked the textures, the reticulations and blushes, making their skins gleam, seemingly wet, beaded with some mysterious fluid or honey, and sometimes bruised with rot.  The guys thought that was cool.  They all called his paintings “Forbidden Fruit.”  Like they knew what that meant.  None knew anything about the Garden of Eden and almost everyone was under sixteen.

He didn’t always go to their level -- literally.  He loved parcours, high running over the buildings of the city, and since it was a warm climate place with lots of room for buildings to spread out instead of being high-rises -- but a high crime rate so there were lots of connecting walls -- it was pretty easy.  The roofs in this dry place didn’t have a lot of pitch.  There were almost paths across the skyline and ridges.  He went out at night.  In the daytime he had his favorite places to sleep, roosting near building exhausts if it were cool.  So that accounted for the “bat” part of his nickname.

Lately the name had taken on a more ominous meaning, because ebola was a plague on the land and the virus was said to be carried by fruit bats with their sharp faces and wingspans a yard wide.  The town wasn’t in Africa, but still . . .

   

He had not told the guys that he was HIV positive.  How it came about was the same as usual -- meaning it just sort of happened.  He wasn’t having sex or anything. Not exactly.  No IV drugs.  But it was sort of a footnote to a life with a lot of subtle complexities that didn’t bear monitoring.  For all he knew, he’d gotten HIV from his mother at birth.

He and his mother had lived in an old hotel that the college had used for dorms, but then times got good for them and the college built a proper dorm, so this sagging warren of rooms off halls just sort of devolved.  His mother had birthed him young, which was why her family threw her out, but it was a rich family and somehow a trickle of money always got to her.  She was an addict in a classical way: opium.  Most of the time she was nodded out, so he just took care of the two of them.

This is not Hong.

Across the hall was a guy named Hong who had AIDS, not just HIV.  He was a Ph.D. ethics scholar, very gentle and quiet.  He looked out for Fruity and his mom.  Then one day the mom just disappeared.  No one saw her go, except someone said a taxi came for her.  She might have died or been locked up somewhere.  Eviction notices had come for the little studio apartment.  She would not have left him if she’d thought of him, but she forgot everything.  He just moved across the hall to live with Hong.

Hong made his living by contracting to grade papers for professors who preferred to give lectures and write their own books.  He made careful marginal notes analyzing structure and explaining grammar but didn’t much address the content.  At first he paid Fruity to be his courier since he hated to leave the building.  Then, since as he said, Fruity was already his sub-contractor, he trusted him to correct the multiple choice test answer sheets.  

That went well until optical scanners were invented.  But by that time he was painting and they sold well on campus.  Kids love that kind of stuff: the grotesque, the dangerous, whatever they were pretty sure their parents would hate.  As every artist should, he had a good line of talk, thanks to Hong, who often discussed the papers he was working on.  They sat with their shoulders together at the little kitchen table and talked about choices and situations and rule-based decisions.

When they fell in love it was not really like falling, but more like a natural progression, and the ethics of it seemed obvious, a matter of affinity and then bonding in which the physical merely followed the emotional.  It was like eating the fruit after it had been painted so that it wouldn’t spoil.  The skulls and snakes were there, but weren’t they organic and natural?  Wasn’t the demonizing of them, the suggestions of death, only a way of dealing with the reality that was part of their lives?

Not that they were stupid.  Hong maintained his regime and checkups.  He got Fruity signed up with an invented student identity so he had access to HIV meds.  They researched via their smart phones.  And they were careful not to have sex with others because that would be wrong, quite apart from the infection, because it would break the intimacy that was their justification.  They ate carefully, calculating nutrition and staying on schedule.

In spite of it all, Hong died.  No one knew the Fruit Bat existed except some students and they didn’t know anything specific -- just assumed.  The apartment eviction notice came but by that time the Fruit Bat had been doing parkours long enough to know the roofs of the town and campus well, even places where he could stash his canvasboard and paints, though he mostly never kept more than he could carry in his backpack.  

He was thin but graceful with eyes that were observant but never stared.   People liked him and bought him coffee and doughnuts for the sake of his conversation, but he found he was running short on protein and learned to net pigeons to roast over a small camp stove.  He reflected on the ethics and decided that pigeons were natural prey, meant to be eaten.  He felt invincible, above it all, and enjoyed watching the people down below.  His favorite place was the top of the chemistry building where the long graceful limb of an elm shaded one corner.

Then he saw the real bats.  They had found a vent that gave access to an under-roof.  At sundown they poured out like a vapor, barely noticeable unless one were prepared and watching.  They were silent.  He found one dropped on his roof, not quite dead, and examined it closely, carefully using a stick.  It had a white nose.  When he recharged his cell phone in the library that afternoon, he used the big computers to read up on the fungus that was killing off the bats across the country.  Like the fungus that had killed off the frogs.  All the little creatures.  A bat is a predator, though it only eats insects.  What is a fungus?  Or a virus? Were they even alive?  He had been feeling feverish.  He was out of compliance with meds.

That evening, for the first time, he missed his footing and fell.  The skull and snake had found him.  In the short moments while the Fruit Bat was more or less really flying, he remembered that one of the topics with Hong was what people thought if they were about to die and knew it.  Life flashing and so on.  For him, the answer turned out to be, “I’m coming.”  He had barely time to wonder if that were a sexual pun.

His autopsy was done by a sophisticated college crew.  They found he was carrying the microbes for HIV, pneumonia. athlete's foot, some minor infections and psittacosis but not rabies. They thought he had jumped on purpose and wrote “suicide” as the cause of death.  But they were wrong.  Who ever knows what goes on in another person’s mind?   

HIGH GOALS/ LOW BEHAVIOR

bush meat

A little story from some worker in Africa trying to hold back the tide of AIDS where the people live in primitive huts and resort to bush meat (whatever protein can be opportunistically killed, from bats to gorillas.  The main kind of HIV in the US is from eating chimps.)  He said their behavior was obviously short-term survival-based.   That is, eat what you can or starve.  Long-term survival, as is supplied by analysis and prevention, is to them a fantasy, as is the whole concept of a “virus.”  They don’t even know about “cells” since no one has a microscope.

At the other end of the scale, well-employed healthy urban people with HIV spend hundreds of thousands of dollars just to counteract side effects like fat buildup.  (Also to stay alive -- the core if expensive treatment is still survival-based.)  Families still throw out sons defined as gay so that not only is the boy untested, untreated, desperate for relationship, living on survival-based terms which means selling bodily contact and having little or no access to cleanliness, therefore vulnerable to opportunistic microbes -- just the ordinary stuff we wash off our hands -- but HIV means no immunity to anything.  Maybe immune to hope.

Thinking about HIV as a disease (it's really a complex of diseases and social problems) is all very dramatic and emotional.  Another insidious killer is diabetes with rates that go up all the time, affecting younger and younger people down to children.  The practical treatment means at least changing diet, but our culture has this peculiar flirtation with food.  On the one hand it means love and fitting in and rewards.  "I baked this cake just for you!"  On the other hand people on diets are teased, subverted, tempted, and mocked by the people around them.  “Just this one time have a cookie!  I won’t tell on you.  Live a little.”  In other words, we treat food very much the same as we treat illicit sex.  Or alcohol or tobacco.  

I do my thinking on the boundary between fancy science and small town errands.  (Early morning and I've already made three stops: “Cat stars” at the feed store, kitty litter at the grocery store, winter comforter newly cleaned from the meat store. No bush meat.  Just local cows.  (They’re the drop-off for the cleaners which is in Great Falls.)  

Then I looked at my email:

Environmental crisis is simultaneously and inseparably material and cultural, destructive and revolutionary. Besides complicating and endangering relationships between humans and other beings, it transforms human identities, communities and nations in unpredictable ways. Old distinctions between nature and culture are being eroded; new values, genres and media are emerging that respond to the crisis with mourning, scepticism, dismay, resourcefulness or ironic resignation. Environmental Cultures reflects the belief that cultural criticism can help avert, resolve, mitigate or at least comprehend ecological problems. It will publish ambitious, innovative literary ecocriticism and interdisciplinary, transnational and pedagogical scholarship on both traditional and digital media. The series will encourage reflexive theoretical critique and searching exploration of anti-environmentalist cultural forms as well as sophisticated literary analysis.  We seek book proposals on any topic in this field.

My suspicion is that they won’t accept anything from outside the usual circle of "experts" and that they wouldn’t recognize truly “innovative literary ecocriticism” even if they accidentally sat on it.  The one time I managed to get past the academic theory gatekeepers, on feminist grounds, the women editors were afraid to publish what I wrote.  (It was about boys with HIV.)  No one in Valier reads such books anyway -- not even me.

This morning my first surprise (before errands) was that Squibbie is shedding, which she addresses by gorging, waiting a while, and then vomiting up the food plus the fur she’s swallowed.  So this time, while I was still asleep, she didn’t make it off her window perch in time and upchucked on the keyboard of the computer.  Luckily, after I had worked for an hour at 3AM, I had remembered to replace the plastic cover.  No damage.  Keyboard cover easy to hold under the sink faucet.

Yesterday was Sunday, Father’s Day, so the town was quiet and I thought I’d sneak a nice 3PM nap.  First interruption was a pair of mismatched young missionaries: a big fat guy and a cute little girl with glasses.  This time I didn’t explain all about me but just told them to leave.  They tried praising the peonies to start a conversation but it didn’t work.  I used to try that trick in my animal control days.

The second interruptor was a dapper little old man, clearly a High Line businessman with an exaggerated sense of his own importance.  English tweed driving cap, hand-knit sweater-vest, swagger.  Claimed he knew Bob Scriver.  Wanted me to write a book about some friend of his -- not for money, but because he and his friend were so significant and they think old ladies who write books in small towns are fascinated by the minutia of guys like him.  When that idea didn’t fly -- I get grumpy when I’m napping -- he said he had a photo of Bob conducting a band in Havre or Malta about 1950.  Highly valuable, he thought.  He was the equivalent of the guys living in mud huts and eating bush meat -- the only world he knew was a little circle from his youth.  He doesn’t give a rip about HIV or diabetes.  Maybe Viagra.

How would it ever be possible to enlighten such a tight-assed, clench-minded little man?    In truth he’s not that different from the “scholars” soliciting what they call “books,” though they won’t be bound as codexes or marketed in bookstores.  Just x's and o's in an archive.  "The series will encourage reflexive theoretical critique and searching exploration of anti-environmentalist cultural forms."   Translated, this is the same old politics of resentment: let’s criticize our critics.  The Hermeneutics of Suspicion.  The little man at the door quite possibly owns oil wells, votes down regulations, and scoffs at global climate change.  He has more local power than any salary-dependent scholar sitting at a table with other highfalutin' folks with degrees.  

The paper mono-focus microscope.  Comes printed and requires a bit of assembly.

http://www.ted.com/talks/manu_prakash_a_50_cent_microscope_that_folds_like_origami

Looping back to the beginning, which is my practice, the story that gives me hope is the one on TED -- NOT a book, but a vid demo.  (Linked above.)  This guy invented a paper microscope that is nearly indestructible but so cheap that it’s discardable, almost weightless, but revelatory enough that once those bush meat eaters look at the microbes and parasites, they don’t forget.  

During my brief career as a ward clerk for a nursing home, the bully of a sanitation monitor forced us all to undergo a hand-washing exercise.  An invisible dye was squirted on our hands and then, after we washed in what we thought was an adequate way, a special light showed that there was plenty of residue left.  She wanted us to know how inadequate we were.  The real problem wasn’t our motivation: it was that there was not enough time to do everything, supplies weren’t always there, turnover was high, and we were tied to a computer system that no one understood. Social management issues.

The bottom line is not isolating one cause, one wicked perp, but always coming back to systems, esp. those that humans inhabit and reinforce.  Small inventions have major consequences.  IF people have the awareness, tools, time and motivation.  It would help if there were fewer of us or at least if we were better distributed.  Where’s the pocket paper instrument for that?

Paper cell phone: see http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1069/989

It’s called a cell phone.  Internet access.  A cure for xenophobia.  So much depends upon things as small as replacing the keyboard cover at 3AM.

Welcome to the world, kid!

QUACK EVOLUTION: Not About Ducks

Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending have written a book called “The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution.” As one reviewer said, it’s all very interesting and probably mostly wrong. Sort of like the cover, which shows the usual (and discredited) walking continuum from ape to Adonis, this time in the form of florescent skeletons.

Cochran suggests that evolution didn’t stop when modern man emigrated out of Africa 55,000 years ago and was accelerated with the development of agriculture about 10,000 years ago. The changes in diet, disease, and dispersal probably triggered far more mutations, the favorite example being lactose which allows the digestion of milk. In fact, there have been two mutations that allowed for milk digestion in two different places and times. I’m fine with these ideas.

It never occurred to me to question that evolution has continued all along and will continue through and past homo sapiens, partly because of all the jokes about how television would cause us to evolve into bodies with a big single eye, a fat one-butt sitter, and wheels instead of feet. Many are hoping we will evolve improvements in the brain, maybe something like “mirror cells” which increase empathy and therefore compassion. Because of thinking about Diabetes II, I’ve also had some notion that diseases and malfunctions required or caused mutations when humans began to live in close proximity to domestic animals and to eat cultivated grains. Cochran puts major emphasis on infections producing mutations, which is logical enough. He is returning to an older era of medical assumptions and he claims that cardiac problems, diabetes and other problems are probably not lifestyle issues but rather infections. His model here is helicobacter pilori, a stomach bug that causes most ulcers, though for a long time it was not found and not thought to exist.

Like the fellows at GNXP.com where Cochran also posts, he is very interested in who is smarter, whether IQ is hereditary (IQ is easy to discredit -- it simply asks for the “norm” in a white Euro community, so naturally those are the people who do well.), and what mutations would be helpful. He likes the idea of economics grouping people who then develop mutations that adapt them for special vocations. (If you’re rich and privileged, it’s because you evolved into it? That doesn’t fit the realities as I know them. Are the Kennedys more evolved than the rest of us? The Royal Windsors?) He’s attached to the idea of Ashkenazi Jews doing “brainy” work and becoming, as a result, selected to be smarter -- smarter ones being more likely to survive.

Having thus proved that he’s not afraid of dangerously political subjects, he suggests that homosexuality is a mutation produced by disease. I don’t quite follow his reasoning. First of all, he defines disease as anything that interferes with reproductive success, so why hasn’t homosexuality died out? Some arguments I’ve seen emphasize that to enhance evolutionary survival it is not the individual but the group with the genes that has to survive. Men without children of their own give the family an “uncle” advantage, that is, more males capable of work and battle. That’s something like the “granny” advantage which is an argument for how menopause evolved: so that the older women could contribute labor without the interference of pregnancy.

Cochran doesn’t seem to think in terms of the group, though in this case it would support his inherited mutation theory. But then, we live in a time obsessed with individualism. Our families are so scrambled and dispersed, they hardly count as people who know each other when they see each other. He doesn’t consider families that are assembled from various genetic sources, whether high tech egg/sperm implants or “Saturday Night Specials.” But he doesn’t seem to want to draw a bright line between heredity and upbringing, as though anyone could.

Also, he doesn’t consider pre-natal environment, though it is shown that the mother’s hormone state during gestation has a powerful influence on the unborn child. Of course, he is not at all looking at psychological or cultural influences. Personally, I’ve come to the conclusion that homosexuality is a category that includes genetic gays, plus fuzzily-gendered people, plus psychological gays, plus secretly het people who have their own reasons for seeming homosexual, plus atypical men (short, artistic, gentle) who are pressed into the category because of the stereotypes of others, plus people whom circumstances have “taught” male-on-male sexual behavior (prison, war, predator victims). If there is no objective test that reveals who is which, how can they be sorted? Presumably not all would be relevant to this theory.

Cochran is unclear in other ways. Is he saying there was a one-time disease that caused a genetic mutation in the brain that resulted in inheriting men desiring men? (He doesn’t address female same-sex desire. He wants to talk about testosterone, but I’ve not seen anything that said testosterone is the source of the desire for sex with males, or how could it be that I (female) desire males? I’m aware of studies that suggest testoterone is a thermostat controlling how MUCH desire there is.) Or is he saying that the disease organism itself is passed down somehow?

Or does he think homosexuality is not inheritable -- a one-gay-guy mutation? He says twin studies show that if one is gay, the other is not statistically inclined to be gay. No relevant brain change -- either mutation or disease -- has ever been isolated or identified. He is quick to provide examples like narcolepsy, which also cannot be “found” in the brain. He does seem to believe that gayness must be a brain disease rather than some hormone imbalance or maladjustment of the autoimmune system or maybe caused by something in our environment, like food processing. (My fav villain at the moment.) And he says homosexuality does not “interfere” with being brilliant and productive. (He does not identify his own desire valence, but doesn’t seem married.)

He points out that 6% of sheep demonstrate same-sex mounting, but says that the sheep must have caught the disease because humans screw them. GNXP.com commenters began supplying examples of relatives who “did” chickens, goats, etc. plus examples of famous dog acts. (There are also famous horse acts.) Cochran turned droll and claimed someone had a romantic relationship with an oryx in a certain hotel. By this time they were playing at what the English call “silly buggers.” Nervous joking to show superiority and make it clear that they personally would have nothing to do with such acts.

I’ve blogged about b*st**l*ty from my animal control days when we dealt with actual cases, but have yet to see the Humane Society of the United States take up this issue in their rush to be at the center of all animal controversies. There are logic problems: are these sheep shaggers who infected the ovines with their gay mutators looking for male partners who just happen to be sheep? Aren’t they actually screwing ewes? Gender doesn’t matter so long as the species is different?

Cochran is not a doctor nor a sociologist. He is a physicist specializing in high tech lenses (wouldn’t that be more of a very high level engineer?) and an “adjunct” anthropologist, which I take to be something like a “volunteer” self-taught anthropologist. His audience, as nearly as I can tell (which is not very clearly), are highly educated men, quite conservative, making good money, seemingly rigorous thinkers but not scientists and often single. They are also riveted by sex (while not ever admitting attraction to men and rarely to women who are not the Playboy ideal: young, blonde, buxom) and by religion (but usually the Abramic patriarchal kinds). I would suggest the subjects of sex and religion are entwined, both involving privilege and status. They resist immigration, not on the basis of skin color, but on the grounds of, well, all the things dark skin are supposed to stand for. You know.

Addressing the gay community in this way is both fertile ground and risky behavior, because there is no way to keep it from re-valorizing the issues associated with AIDS, even though HIV is has been proven over and over again to be simply a HUMAN virus and to be transmitted by bodily fluids in general, including spit, tears and milk. It begins to seem like shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre.

BOYZ IN THE NIGHT

The brave Cinematheque boys enrolled in a drug trial for HIV drugs. One had an allergic reaction and went into shock, stopped breathing. They used the paddles to "resurrect" him. Then they rounded up ALL the boys and slapped them into bed with tubes everywhere to monitor their breathing (some were breathing raggedly), heart beats (ditto), pee, poop, spit, and semen. They know some of these boys are gay hustlers but gave them heterosexual porn for jerking off. When the boyz began to make trouble, the medicos drugged them into oblivion. The boys are outraged and claim they won't stand for any more of it. Some wept. They were all terrified. Barrus is going room to room. When it gets to him, he writes poems.

Sometimes Sitting in This Death Room -- Tim Barrus

sometimes i think they're dead
so soundly asleep their stomachs
rippled at home in the darkness
as delicate as hearts are stabbed
with spring as the plastic tubes
are pushed into the urethras
i watch their eyes go wild knuckles
go white whose hinges have come
undone and i am impotent
to change the way it goes
balancing sleep for
the dead and the rest of us
whores poured down the dark
wheat not yet harvested and
probably never will be more than
merely poised terribly ruined
just above the shimmering depth
swans glide across even as they
wear it like badge.


MARY:

There are people out there who claim that the Cinematheque boyz are invented by Barrus. Every time there is a terrifying crisis: a suicide attempt, anaphylactic shock from meds, a runaway, I swear to myself that if he’s torturing me with made up stuff like this I’ll go over to Paris and personally strangle him, because a thousand miles away with a life that is totally irrelevant and unrelated to these boyz, I’m suffering, too. I can’t sleep and my blood pressure goes up and I eat too much and I hold the cats so tightly that they squeak in protest. Then when the boyz make it through -- and they usually do -- I feel GREAT! I’m released, restored, so grateful!

Then I think Barrus has invented a new art form: real-life. It’s like the stage except that it comes through blogs or maybe videos if you’re rich enough to have broadband. (I’m not.) Clearly it has to be shaped, edited, given details and themes -- and all that happens, but is it happening through one old hippie gay guy from San Francisco or through a couple dozen discards from a society that doesn’t know what riches they have put aside? I would submit that I know quite a bit about adolescent boys and this stuff is coming through the boys, a mixture of manure and moonbeams, boys so self-conscious that they will not pee in a cup in front of a woman and yet not self-aware enough to notice that they have headlice. (Which Barrus treated with a buzz cut in a paisley pattern even after the medical folks had killed the bugs.) Anyway, part of the reason for the buzz and part of the explanation for the unawareness has become obvious: drugs. Withdrawal is now imposed and vomiting is not good with long hair in the way. It was only one boy who had “broken protocol” this way.

Some of these boys will not survive. Neither will some of the young soldiers the countries send out to fight. These boys are also fighting, not just for their own lives but also for each other and for other future lives as the struggle goes on to cure their HIV, to comfort their inconsolably raging behavior, to capture their ideas in art. The art sells. It’s a new kind of hustling, one society pretends to like better than sex. Getting to know them, their art, their defiance and impatience with any restraits, can break your heart. So be it.

The boyz themselves are doing this voluntarily. Maybe someone is writing checks, maybe some social services have assigned them, but the truth is that they don’t have to be there unless they want to. They all occasionally rise up and jump a bus or an airplane to where they shouldn’t be; they all know how to finance themselves in underworld ways. They could disappear into the shadows of Paris instead of being shut up with so many tubes going into them that, as Kilian put it, he feels as though he’s being readied for execution. Sure, they know this might save their lives, but maybe after a while it’s a temptation to just surrender to death. Get into the boat, cross the black river. Among the swans.

What holds them is Barrus, full of tricks and calculation, determined to MAKE them survive, giving them tenderness and discipline as needed, the way fathers are supposed to. Sure, he feeds them and buys them new shoes when their feet grow by an inch every night as they sleep, but that’s not what keeps them there. They become enraged, they try to seduce him, they NEVER threaten or hurt his dog. They are bonded, attached, in a more than biological way -- deeper than psychology, deeper than DNA, as deep as -- well, I hate to say spiritual, but that’s about the only word that works.

The way they hurt him is that they die. They can’t help it. It’s the reason he took them on in the first place. He knew they might die. But some of them won’t. Some don’t have HIV anyway. They just have attitudes. Not all of them are gay, just nonconforming. Black swans, unexpected, going somewhere new.

The thing about living people as art forms is that they are so very unpredictable, so very rewarding, so likely to wrench your guts out with empathy for their predicaments. I suppose it’s about love. I suppose it might even be Christian, but don’t tell them for God’s sake. Don’t make them self-conscious unless you HAVE to make them pee in a cup. For their own good.

And if all these people are invented, fictional, a “hoax,” don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.