The Age of the Electronic Whale; or Politics and Hyperbole
May 20, 2010 § 1 Comment
There’s one criticism of my writing that I’m especially sensitive to, the accusation of hyperbole. I’m happy to tangle with disagreement and often amused by personal insults and mockery, but when someone suggests hyperbole, I feel like I’ve failed in something essential. For the accusation to stick, it has to be demonstrated that the subject doesn’t actually believe what they’ve written. It’s an accusation of being disingenuous, having exaggerated a point beyond the limits of what the author really believes. It’s a devastating criticism. How can any writer expect someone else to believe a point that they themselves know is a whimsical untruth?
Cannibalism, Crisisses, and My Disappearing Sex Columns
May 5, 2010 § 2 Comments
Last week something unexpectedly terrible happened. I was rifling though some links of things I’d written and discovered that every Nerve column had disappeared. The links, when sent out to the humming computer boxes housed in a high-rise office building somewhere in midtown Manhattan, found empty spaces where once had been mementos from my emotion-swollen brain. When I first started writing I was in the habit of reading my own work over and over again. There was no one who enjoyed it more than me. No one better appreciated the words whose etymologic thread had an especially lovely meaning, or which connected to some anecdote that hovered silently in between the lines. No one reveled more than I did in the circuitous conclusions I’d arrive at after wandering in the rhetorical murk for a thousand words. And no one, certainly, laughed louder at my jokes.
The Case Against History, or Same-Sex Marriage and Human Digestion
April 15, 2010 § Leave a Comment
It’s sometimes unflattering to look back at the record of history one leaves behind. When I was twelve, I remember the mortification I felt when my dad brought home a video camera with which he intended to record one of his classes. He let me and a friend record ourselves yammering into the lens, and when we took the video tape out and replayed it on the television I felt like I was looking a poorly formed worm in a baggy t-shirt. My voice sounded somehow pig-like. The thrill I’d felt in seeing the glinting new piece of technology suddenly turned to resentment. “Get that stupid thing out of here,” I thought.
Marriage, Poetry, and Fucking That Ass That I Own
April 10, 2010 § 5 Comments
Poetry is a lost art that no one rightfully cares about anymore. Modern media offers many more powerful and direct methods for expressing the abstractions in our lives. The dusty old practitioners of word bending couldn’t keep pace with the rest of the world. It’s not that poetry is bad, nor that John Milton doesn’t matter anymore. It’s that there’s nothing left to build on in what remains of those old creations. You could listen to a song on your iPod, discovering the same colliding ideas held together across the semantic handholding of a linebreak, but now with the added embellishment of sound and performance. You could watch a montage of abstractly connected ideas held together on YouTube video streamed to your phone while waiting for the bus. The abstract surrounds us in new forms so much more than it did centuries ago, in an age of deliberate functionality and ceremonial human engagement.
Rites of Anniversary, Commemorabilia, or the Wallpaper of Time
April 8, 2010 § 4 Comments
One of the roots of the word “right” comes from the French “droite,” which is derived from “du rois.” In this way a right was neither inalienable nor innately granted but referred to a slip of paper that exempted someone from a royal tax or restriction by order of the King. It’s an exception from an arbitrary demand, not a defining quality that can be used to ennoble humanity. On the other hand, the word “rite” is a demarcation of something passed through, experienced, or survived.
I moved to New York one year ago today. I can’t say that means anything, but it has been an experience that I’ve never really had before. It’s something I’m grateful for and so I’ll commemorate that strange and lucky passage with this collage of all the sights, experiences, and surprising places that have been a part of my meandering arrow of time here. Whatever I’ve done over the last year, this has been the world that I’ve done it in. And done it for.
In chronological order, from April 7, 2009 to April 7, 2010:
Entropy, Ice Skating, and You Lost Me At Hello
April 2, 2010 § 4 Comments
I used to be fixated on the idea of arranged marriages when I was in high school. Relying on other people’s judgment to get around the difficulties of discovering what I really wanted seemed both sensible and adventurous. What better way to enter into a lifelong relationship with someone than in the spirit of discovery and making the best of an unavoidable situation? I’d revel in the lower divorce rates for countries with traditional arranged marriages and munch on mystic stories about the capacity of someone else to play matchmaker on my behalf.
Precious, Torture Porn, and Permission to Stare
March 2, 2010 § 4 Comments
Torture porn has lately formalized itself into a full-fledged, and mostly unwelcome, new genre in the same way as reality television. Precious fits neatly into this new pocket of sensorial expression at the more extreme ends of the human emotional spectrum. The association of Precious and something as tawdry as Hostel of Saw 5 is heresy to a lot of people I’ve spoken with. There is sanctity in the womanly suffering endured by the protagonist cum victim, and it cannot survive the notion that it exists more for effect than as a document of real life.
