Jennifer Granick
Stand back! Here come those four horses again! This time their names are: "Centralization, regulation, and globalization," Granick said, have wrought havoc on a space once thought of as "a world that would leave behind the shackles of age, of race, of gender, of class, even of law."
Wait! That’s only three horses. Read this story to figure out what the fourth horse’s name is.
Already this morning people are finding they are blocked from this blog. I’m glad they tell me. But worse is the plague of people who know what’s wrong, which to their minds is either due to my deficiencies (user error) or a lamentable lack of knowledge and superior judgement that they happen to have.
Helpers, like the people who want to “help” me by coming over and getting all my property in shape: mowing the lawn, getting rid of the cats and books, and forcing me to buy a new wardrobe. They never realize that conformity is a source of violence, unless they’re asked to put in a water meter or wear seat belts or stop driving drunk or make sure their kids are vaccinated.
So the people who wish me well set out to “fix” my problem with the Internet. Except for the techies at 3Rivers who are employed on the premise that they will do this, if they can spare time from telling me how much 3Rivers appreciates me and advising me to “have a nice day.” They tell me lots of irrelevant things in jargon I don’t understand.
If I wrote what I know about kittens, people would scream, because they haven’t known what happens to kittens and cats, how much they are metaphors for both that which is cute (but expendable) and that which is malevolent. Terrible, daily, blood-soaked fates for many animals. Cuteness and hiding are not very effective defenses. The most vicious people on the planet are those who insist that human babies be conceived, carried to term and born. At that point, they are abandoned: no help for food, shelter, and education. Controllable. Commodities.
Medium.com is another place where I post. It’s in a state of becoming, always adding and subtracting features, which is what the techies love, but I can never anticipate which feature will work when, so I just write my posts on iPages (which cannot be upgraded in the US -- I suppose it’s a legal loose end from when Apple bought it) or on Blogger (prairiemary.blogspot.com) and then cut and paste. Don’t tell anyone, because if they figure that out, they’ll block it.
They don’t understand why I write. On Medium.com this post will appear as a “response” to one of Tim’s raving rippers which is classified as a “response” to some nice perky little high school assignment about why you should write short stories, even if they don’t sell. I think that eventually Medium will have to begin censoring content. I hope they censor the stupid. Maybe they could start a parallel stream for the darker folks. Maybe they could put a little black bat on those posts as a warning.
Tim writes from his gut, explosive and vulgar -- but real. He says his alternative is to go crazy. I don’t care why he writes -- I just love the energy and surrealism. I write because I love the act of writing and I don’t care whether it sells or anyone reads it or I get praise. People usually praise the wrong thing anyway. They read as voyeurs and force readers into their fetish life. You don’t think perky naive little females have a fetish life? They ARE fetishes.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/if-you-give-a-mouse-a-xanax-1438978022 Last night I read this snarky little review of LeDoux’s new book, “Anxious”. The reviewer missed the point. The book is a sort of summary of what we know so far, that addresses our unbalanced neglect of our pre-existing mammal processes. The standing order of scholarship is based on writing, logic, and other white male European priorities. In that context, all is words and that’s our entitlement and superiority as humans, so why consider anything else?
But LeDoux is a musician -- he can think in sound patterns and emotional valences. Without words. This is exactly what I’ve been working on in terms of the meaningful experiences we call “worship, ritual, ceremony, liturgy” in order to get beyond all the verbiage, which someone always wants to copyright.
LeDoux is a major scientist making genuine breakthroughs about how brains work. He sent me a response worthy of Wittgenstein, who famously said that sometimes words are useless to convey a concept and all you can do is point. I sent LeDoux an email to nudge him about Stephen Toulmin, who was a good pointer. So LeDoux, who knows this, was happy to be reminded of Toulmin, and knows that I have a vague idea of Wittgenstein, so he sends me a single emoticon. A smiley face.
My father used to sign letters with a little drawn smiley. When I was starting out in Browning, I drew one with a scribble of curly hair and round glasses. I did that so much that Bob made a rubber stamp of it. He thought it was cute and funny, though rather childlike, but I was much younger than he and did what he told me, like a rubber stamper, so his assumed concepts came through in that act, a gift.
It was education in theatre and thought that revealed this invisible subtext, and that eventually ended the relationship. Because though he was older and admired by many, I could not explain this to him -- he didn’t want to hear it. So much of helping and generosity is a cover for control. So much of control is a matter of denying reality, reducing it to little cartoons, using white-out to deny suffering. I wanted a little control. I stopped drawing that face and threw away the rubber stamp.
The irony and tragedy is that Bob was also a musician, a jazz musician at that. But what I saw was a man wearing himself out, shrinking his brain through age, self-abuse, bad nutrition, heart attacks, little strokes, suspicion of doctors, efforts to control. All because he needed to be famous. And what I saw after his death was hyenas parting him out for profit, dispersing his lifework to suit their own importance, denying and distorting him for politics. It happens to everyone, including Charlie Russell. So why create a body of work?
Why is Joe LeDoux doing much much more than offering Xanax to mice? If you don’t know, just go buy an anthology of short stories instead, the ones written by perky little girls who shone in high school and still think that going to a bookstore to read her writing to an audience of three, one of whom is stone deaf, means anything at all. After all, she’s wearing pink feather handcuffs like Helen Mirren in that movie -- what was it called? Oh, yeah: “Love Ranch,” about a Nevada brothel.
The fourth horse is called “Who’s on Top?”
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