WHAT SHALL WE DO TO BECOME RICH AND FAMOUS?

Writing is opportunistic, compensatory, advisory and voyeuristic.  It exists as the culture exists, entwined with it.  When the culture presents an opportunity, writing flows into the opening and fills it.  Sometimes it is the writing that changes the culture (culture is always changing) and that in itself is a writing opportunity.  Sometimes culture throttles writing.  Iconoclasm is always fun.

Examples.  The country is full of new immigrants, some of whom will be trying to bring their previous life along with them with as little change as possible (opportunity) while at the same time trying to present a positive front where they are trying to work and learn (opportunity) and their children are trying to develop a new life in this different place (opportunity).  They want to know about clothes, cooking and manners.

Emily Post says don't slurp.

In the heyday of soap operas, women worked at home with family.  Radio stories went with them all day, proposing strategy for relationship networks and as voyeurism.  Now the same stories are on tablets and iPods, but the content is the same.  The delivery system is able to keep the same women in daily contact with each other, making soap opera of their real lives.  The dynamics are the same advisory story telling as used to happen in kitchens or even doing laundry at a stream side.  

Suddenly there is a huge market for romances, esp those that provide a lot of information about how to establish a family or how to survive on the job or a combination of both.  The consumers listen on earphones or read on iPods while they commute.  Some of it is psychological management and some of it is how to become alluring.  For immigrants, housewives and line workers, clerks and commuters, the stream is both self-improvement how-to and consolation, mending after damage and defeat. 

"I love your hairdo, Shamus."

You already knew all this.  You know why you hunger for fiction and you know why you hunger for intimate views of other lives.  Once I was serving a congregation with a minister’s office that had been the stage in the building’s previous incarnation.  They simply put a wall where the curtain had been.  But one woman told me that she sat in the audience imagining that the wall were drawn like a curtain because she intensely wanted to see what I was doing in that office.  The door had no lock, so I installed one, which upset everyone.  What nasty thing was I doing in there that I would need a lock?  (Actually I was trying to protect my electric typewriter which I often found children pounding on.)  What secrets of my status were hidden there? 

Where do people get this sense of entitlement about access to the lives of ministers and writers?  They think such people are parents and they believe children are entitled to the lives and profits of parents.  This is cultural.  They are obsessed with the question of what one’s sexuality is.  That’s commercial.

Now we are finally getting around to taking a look behind the scenes of writing, the machinery of delivery, since we all have stories to tell (we’re told that all the time) and because the means of delivery have returned to the oral and even the ocular, which is wonderful for voyeurs, like people who watch travel documentaries and National Geographic cameras hidden in nests and burrows.  The drone of the narrator can be turned way down, but it’s necessary to support the idea that this is legitimate education.

And some people are realizing two things:  how much writing is controlled and distorted by the delivering businesses and how fantasy (a vital characteristic of writing) has provided those opportunistic businesses with an ocean of writing from people so grateful to be put into fugitive print pixels that they don’t need to be paid.  Merely having their names mentioned makes them walk tall.  

The trouble is having to sort a lot of narcissistic trash to find the worthy stuff.  And the problem with that is that the business is based on 19th century assumptions which are WEIRD —Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic.  They are also urban and hope to stay college-aged forever.  And they are hopelessly bourgeois.  Wikipedia:  “bourgeoisie”:  a social class oriented to economic materialism and hedonism, and to upholding the extreme political and economic interests of the capitalist ruling class.”

Writers are all over the map economically, educationally, aspirationally — but those who control publication are inevitably as described above.  Many writers have nothing but contempt for them, which they must disguise in order to make a living.  Others think that pleasing these controllers is a confirmation that they are special, deserving, no longer merely bourgeois, and if their writing sells well enough to make money for the producers, the producers will assure them they’re right.  They’re like starlets in Hollywood, sleeping with producers and believing that makes them excellent actresses.

Gordon Lish

Alexander Nazaryan ’s article in Newsweek offers Gordon Lish as an example of the interstitial editor who buffers the publishing poseurs from the writers still entranced by their own potential. He edited the undisciplined into "brilliance" and sold his opinion of the result to the checkbook keepers.  Lish has replaced Maxwell Perkins in the mythology of the fairy godfather who can spin straw into gold.  (Female editors who try to do this will be called castrating bitches.)

“Gordon Lish is a traveler from a country no longer extant, a country where editors were princes and writers kings. A country where the publishing fiefdoms of Manhattan were proud castles in the sky, where the desperate flailings of The Real Housewives of Pittsburgh never made the gossip pages, but the seating arrangements at Elaine’s always did.”  http://www.newsweek.com/2014/06/27/angry-flash-gordon-255491.html

A contrasting phenomenon of the now tech-dominated publishing is the idea of “cloud editing.”  That is, one posts one’s writing publicly, complete or not, and all the readers out there are welcome to advise, edit, and inevitably "improve" the work.  It’s the MFA seminar gone global.  What could go wrong?

First of all, no one who writes cares about what other writers are writing.  Second of all, there is such a huge crowd of wanna-be writers than any attempt to read a fraction of it is soon overwhelmed.  Let’s look at Medium, a platform of this sort.  Their answer to the first problem was to salt the gold mine with work by professional writers, which meant paying them.  No one paid the wannabes, who all innocently assumed they were on their way up and soon would earn money.

Their answer to the second problem was to subdivide the territory into types run by sub-editors who might actually act as the Lish/Perkins who created geniuses, a fantasy almost as potent as being writers.  Of course, they could publish their own work, too.  Actually, this worked rather well until the same two problems cropped up: the only writers who cared about other writers were the ones who had a focus in common, and there was just too much stuff.  Now as cyber code instead of ink on paper.

From the faraway safety of small-town prairie, I see this as part of the shift from individualism back to group.  The Post-War Fifties glamorization of the lone creative genius is fading. (Thoreau is their saint, though he never really was what they imagine.  But then, no one is.)  Consider that JFK’s son died with his wife and friend, flying alone in fog.  Suddenly the Truman/Eisenhower years of conformity and infrastructure seem a lot wiser.  No need to rehearse the Bush/Cheney paranoia.  It is still upon us.

So now we’ve got to figure out a cloud/fog that is actually a popularity contest like the ones that controlled high school.  Comments are no longer insightful analysis, but only the sums of cutsey thumbs and hearts.  I don’t care but the producers realize that numbers are economic.  The tech strategy is always to create a gimmicky startup, get a lot of people involved, then sell out to those producers who have the real venture capital — except that it’s turning out that the capital is not real at all --  it’s debt and stock options.  So Esquire “made” Gordon Lish and Gordon Lish “made” Raymond Carver.  That’s no reason to write "Walmart minimalism", as Nazaryan nails it.  Unless it's all you know.

I only put my stuff online because I compose on a keyboard and once the stuff is composed, it’s easy to post.  What happens then is fate.  And culture.  My part is done.

THE SHORES OF SURVIVAL

Many people are focused tightly on the disease caused by human immunodeficiency syndrome or HIV.  This is because research is traditionally done in this way and because people are driven to stop the specific suffering and death of human beings due to HIV.  But many other issues and patterns are connected to HIV.  My interest is in the big picture of the entangled bits of the surface of the planet and sometimes in the forces inside the planet that produce geological events.  As well as these physical links and ruptures, I try to think about social cultural patterns that derive from them and contribute to them.  Therefore, I’m interested in the primate origin of HIV, the changing human patterns that transformed SIV into HIV, the resulting reactions of societies around the world as the virus reached them, all the previous pandemics we know about, and the social forces that prevent scientific knowledge and ordinary compassion from saving people.

The Decameron of Boccaccio is a collection (decameron) of stories presumably told by a small group self-quarantined during the great plague that swept Europe, reducing the population by one-third.  My mother survived the Spanish Flu (though her doctor did not) but I don’t know of an anthology that resulted.  It killed 2 to 3% of the population of the planet, reaching even into the Arctic.  Ten percent of the American prairie population died.  The demographic was the same as soldiers: the best and the strongest, because it was not the LACK of immunity, but a sudden burst of SUPER immunity that killed people.  The homeostasis of immunity, which is a stream between the two banks of too-much and too-little, is deadly when over either limit.

The origin of the Black Plague was microbes carried on fleas riding on black rats which may have followed the Silk Trade into Europe.  Most flu epidemics come from the mixing of birds with pigs, which have a physiology much like humans.  The birds are air travel.  (When pigs fly.)  In both cases, plague (which persists in rodent fleas of Asia but is now curable with drugs) and flu (which is a virus and therefore not susceptible to most drugs) were closely linked with human travel patterns for trade or war.

This is also true of smallpox. The history of smallpox extends into pre-history; the disease likely emerged in human populations about 10,000 BC [when livestock was domesticated].  The earliest credible evidence of smallpox is found in the Egyptian mummies of people who died some 3000 years ago. During the 18th century the disease killed an estimated 400,000 Europeans each year, including five reigning monarchs, and was responsible for a third of all blindness. Between 20 and 60% of all those infected—and over 80% of infected children—died from the disease.  When Europeans brought the disease to America, it had the same consequences, but worse.

The following information is from a paper written in 2005, which means it’s out-of-date, but it still gets the idea across that African primates and monkeys of many kinds have SIV and that the origins are very ancient.  Gorillas have passed SIV, as HIV, to humans in a small area.  Monkey-originated HIV has affected more people, and the main origin of the Euro-American HIV is from chimps.  Given a chance, all primates eat other primates, but maybe gorillas less so than the others.  It’s a puzzle to me that if SIV and HIV are transmittable by sex, why do bonobos seem to escape?  They are the most human-like and the most constantly sexual.  Is it because all the bonobos who were susceptible died a long time ago -- so now being a bonobo means inheriting immunity?  People who eat a lot of bush meat carry blood markers of many versions of SIV.  One tribe of human pygmies carries almost all of them but seems immune to not only SIV but also HIV.   

Simian immunodeficiency viruses (SIVs) are primate lentiviruses [lente = slow] that infect no fewer than 36 different nonhuman primate species in sub-Saharan Africa. Two of these viruses, SIVcpz from chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and SIVsmm from sooty mangabeys (Cercocebus atys), have crossed species barriers on multiple occasions and have generated human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) types 1 and 2. . . 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph6_Z6NIx98#t=15   “We Were Here.”  

This link is to a University of California Television Osher Center for Integrative Medicine hour and a half movie about the origin and history of AIDS, reaching back centuries until it goes crazy in San Francisco about 1981 and begins wiping out a community of men who came to join a movement expressing freedom, esp. in terms of MSM sex.  Survivors tell their stories in a kind of national “decameron.”  

Because of the kinds of communities, these men -- and the women who were also there --have a particular kind of story to tell.  Many linked sex with love (this is probably as much physiological (in-born) as psychological (cultural).  They took care of each other before anyone even knew what was going on.  These were guys who broke barriers, who challenged the status quo, who had come from all over the planet to participate in a revolution.  It wasn’t just about free love -- it was about freedom from assumptions.  When I look at all the faces, it often strikes me how similar they are demographically to the WWII photos of soldiers.  When the plague hit, the veterans -- now doctors, professors, and researchers -- at once set to work on the problem of AIDS. 

When AIDS jumped from the West Coast to the East Coast and hit the artistic and bohemian population, a highly political bunch who knew a holocaust when they saw one, the reaction was much sharper and more violent.  Gay liberation broadened and intensified at the same time.  It is the combination of both modes of response (love and fighting back) that has brought us -- at least most of us -- to a new understanding of human relationships.  Now we are up against a similar revolution that is about whether economic patterns can be kept from killing people just as AIDS has -- is.  We see that poverty, hunger, unjust law, stupid priorities, and so on are fanning the flames of an AIDS pandemic into a holocaust of the world as we know it.

Nothing is more contagious than ideas, but some populations around the world have not “caught” ideas that would protect them from fear.  They are still infected with what one writer calls “the culture of persecution,” which he figures arose in Europe about 1100 AD, probably as a reaction to the plague.  It is a meme pattern that promotes fear by pointing to culprits and trying to eliminate them as sources of contagion.  But we see many of the Inquisitors secretly indulging their obsession: J. Edgar Hoover cross-dressing, super-conservative politicians unzipping, teenagers persecuting other teens.  The mysterious draw of wickedness.

The homeostasis of culture is not different from any other limits of survival.  Too much persecution and the culture will kill itself, a kind of auto-immunity.  Failure to identify dangers and resolve them before they kill the vulnerable is also to lose the culture.  These are the shores of survival. 

LET IT BE A DANCE WE DO

TIM BARRUS: DANCERS AND THE DANCE

She saved my life. I do not know if she sees herself as a dancer or not but she is one.

I was drowning then. In a lot of things. In the fragments one piece at a time. Way, way, way over my head. Lost in this morass of a thing I did not know how to escape from.

Did it have to do with another guy. It usually did back then. I don't give them that power anymore. I am content with how things are. My marriage is different. My relationships are different.

Because I have constructed the choreography of it to be different because it fits.

At sixteen, all I knew was this: the only way to get out of the situation was to get the hell out of Dodge. But I was sixteen. Most of you guys in Cinematheque left home before you were sixteen. More than a few of you were thrown out on your ear into the street. Leaving home at sixteen was a daunting idea to me back then. I didn't see any way out. So I blew my guts out with a shot gun.

Now, there was a way out. Most suicide attempts are exactly that. Out. Out. Out.

The first night in that hospital room, I vaguely felt her presence. Through the Demerol I knew she was in the room or her spirit was. You see, she has a very strong presence and she's very tall. She moved like a gazelle back then. I’ll call her AKS.

. . .

The recovery from the wounds took a while. She was there for me.

She would visit me in the hospital. She wanted to talk. I wanted to dance. It hurt to dance but all dancers know pain is nothing.

Survival took on many forms, wore many masks. I became a dancer. I danced on stage.

My family did not know I was doing this. I had to hide it.

My dad was a violent man. A man of fists and guns. Our family hid it like so many families do. But he would beat me to within an inch of my life. I cannot even begin to count the number of times he almost killed me. You measured up to his standards as a man or you didn't. I would be a dancer. We all know what that means, right. No dancer was going to live in my father's house. That ability to move to the music allowed me to leave the shell Tim Barrus lived in where he was afraid of Maynard [Barrus].

To survive, I danced. To work the pain out. Just out. Out. Out.

. . .

No one knew I had this Other Life.

The menial job I was supposed to have did not exist. Most of my time was spent in choreography and practice. People at Michigan State University thought I was a dance student. Often, I was the one teaching them.

We choreographed Macbeth once for the drama department which staged the play outside. All of this took me away from the guy who haunted me.

We also set Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf to dance. All male cast, no less. Every now and then, my path and AKS' path would cross. Antiwar was thick as blood.

The draft board didn't want me. They said my wounds were too extensive. I didn't exactly tell them about the dancing.

What surprises me about dance (still) is how you're really not connecting to the other dancers, even when paired.

I tried that but there was really no one who wanted to be connected to. So you tended to simply connect to your own physical self. You could lose yourself in all that movement.

You know. Two of you are professional dancers now. Yes, even with HIV.

The one time I connected with the Other Dancer was when AKS came over to my house. I was married now and we lived in our own place.

I was alone that day. AKS drives up. Comes into the house. We didn't articulate anything. We just danced, we connected, and she left.

We went and lived our lives.

I continued to dance. I wrote. I published. I had a kid.

I am a grandfather now and good at it.

She adopted. I caused scandals (everywhere I went, usually). I still feel fervently about demanding change. I do demand it. Lately, from publishing. I was deeply involved in gay politics in California. Then the UN. Then photography. I still cause trouble. Sometimes a lot of it.

I taught in special education. I worked in psychiatric hospitals on intensive care units with adolescents. Often, I would get a lot of information from them in terms of how they moved. I taught dance to deaf children.

Dancers know.

I traveled around the world. A lot. I started working with boys with HIV/AIDS. We dance. Cinematheque is scattered now: Paris, Italy, the UK, LA, NYC.

The work is a challenge and a struggle. You know that.

It comes with a lot of pain. Pain is nothing to a dancer.

My wife and I love to dance. Late at night on a beach is good.

. . .

Having had both hips replaced, the dancing is different now. With Avascular Necrosis and my shoulders riddled with hairlines fractures, it's harder to lift my arms up, and forget about lifting a ballerina because it isn't going to happen, and I'm too old to be on a traditional stage anymore anyway.

. . .

I was living in San Francisco the last time we connected. This time drowning but drowning in a sea of death and AIDS. Everyone I know from that time is dead and I knew a lot of people.

About every twenty years, I try to connect with AKS again. I find her. She responds. It is not unlike this dance we do. Touch. Respond. Connect.



MARY: A RESPONSE

The figure of AKS -- not so much the actuality but the idealized memory of her -- is a recurring figure in just about every culture: the compassionate woman, often portrayed as a mother with a nursing baby. In Catholic cultures she is Mary, the mother of Jesus. In Buddhist countries she is Kuan Yin, almost as familiar a figurine as Buddha. “The root meaning of karuna (Kuan Yin) is said to be the anguished cry of deep sorrow and understanding that can only come from an unblemished sense of oneness with others.”

In the Plains tribes she is “White Buffalo Woman” and in the SW tribes she is “Yellow Corn Pollen Woman.” In Peter Pan she is Wendy maybe. In “Pinocchio” she is the Blue Fairy (in some versions she has turquoise hair), the figure who -- young mother-like -- gently urges the little puppet to behave in a way that will make him become a “real boy.” In “The Wizard of Oz” she is Glinda, the Good Witch, who knows how to get Dorothy home (and her little dog, too).

Tim, of course, didn’t look all this up on the Internet -- he just slipped his dancing friend into this universal role of a woman who holds out her arms, not sexually but to connect as a human being, especially in a situation deserving of compassion. I went looking through my mythology, psychology, archetypal, and feminist books for more, but found that most were focused on female figures of force, justice, and change -- pretty militant stuff. From the Seventies. Or else they confronted and encouraged sex as the only intimacy, the other big part of that cultural revolution. We seem to have lost the dimension of compassion that used to be the specialty of saintly actresses like Ingrid Bergman, Audrey Hepburn, and Deborah Kerr. They didn’t have to DO anything, just be there and SEE it all.

A writer in an encyclopedia suggests: “It may be worthwhile to bear in mind that, although Carlo Collodi wrote Pinocchio at a time and within a culture wherein the routine beating of children was often carried out in the widespread Eurocultural belief that early and frequent exposure to such brutality would improve their prospects for eventual moral goodness, Collodi's Blue Fairy affords her wayward beneficiary every opportunity to do the "Right Thing" on his own with no particular coercion or threat applied on her part. She allows him to wander by his own free will back into his own world of error again and again, relying on his own memory of her goodness toward him even while suffering in the throes of his own self-induced difficulties. This "meta-parental" treatment on her part gives Pinocchio's final transformation and entrance into full humanity to be the genuine result of his /own/ correct decisions - and therefore his own to keep forever.”

This opens up some very interesting things for Barrus to think about. His mother, faced with a brutal husband, did not oppose him or protect her son. This denial still wounds, but it has been at least partly healed by “good fairies” -- some of them in the sense of homosexual. (The original compassionate god from which Kuan Yin developed was male. The AIDS plague called out mothering/nursing skills in many men, something like what the plight of the wounded Civil War soldiers called out in both Florence Nightingale and Walt Whitman.)

Which brings me to a whole online course on the meaning and transformations of Pinocchio!

http://www.fathom.com/course/72810000/sessions.html


“The Persistent Puppet: Pinocchio's Heirs in Contemporary Fiction and Film” is a whole lecture series (complete with discussion questions) by Rebecca West!

“The story a rich fund of themes, motifs and images for exploring such still highly pertinent issues as the limits between the human and the non- (or post-) human, the toll of reaching responsible maturity and the place of education in that process, the function of transgression both for individuals and for society, and the ways in which dominant attitudes toward paternal and maternal roles have come historically and currently to have an essential impact on our collective concept of humanness.” Doesn’t that sound like Cinematheque?

“The contemporary Italian actor and director Roberto Benigni, whose humor emerges in great part out of the Tuscan tradition of the novella, especially out of the beffa, or trickster story, as well as out of a very personal sort of bricolage of popular and high cultural references, has recently filmed his version of Pinocchio, starring himself as the puppet.”

West discusses at length the Spielberg re-take on the story, which is called “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence,” in which the puppet is a robot child.

Is there a dance version of Pinocchio with a role in it for Barrus’ tall friend, a compassionate Blue Fairy who is there, understanding, but not intervening or controlling? Puppets dance, but not as well as people. The difference is in the heart. And sometimes it's not mythic -- it's real.