A First Thought on Goon Squad

Of the whole book I still think it was the first chapter that moved me most. In it, Sasha (the novel's heroine, if it has one) meets and takes home Alex, who's new to New York. He's full of a sort of moral uprightness that Sasha thinks of as quaint; she herself is a guilt-ridden kleptomaniac. Finding herself alone with Alex's trousers while he's running a bath, Sasha goes through his wallet. She finds a small, faded note that says, "I believe in you," and steals it.

That touched me a lot, I think especially because somehow I felt for both the characters at once, in several different kinds of sadness. What is it that leads someone to carry around a note like that? We never learn. How would it feel to one day look inside your wallet for the note, and find it gone? Perhaps he had forgotten all about it, but I don't think so. And then, from Sasha's side, I think I can see why she would want to take - to have - such an item. It's both priceless and meaningless. But just like 'priceless' implies both that it has no value and all the value in the world, so 'meaningless' here means it has no meaning (we don't know its story) and all the meaning in the world (to him, and then, at one remove, to her).

In the last chapter of the book, we meet Alex again, later in life, when Sasha is a memory that niggles somewhere at the back of his mind. He is struggling with himself over his corruptibility: he's taken on a sordid job that he doesn't really believe in. He realises that although his wife sees him as incorruptible, and he once would have thought of himself that way, he no longer is. He doesn't remember the note, but we do. "I believe in you." Without the note, he has forgotten whatever it was he pledged of himself, whatever it was that made him upright and indignant in the first chapter, whatever it was that someone believed in, once.

Henry James on Unrequited Love

At last there was a silence, and it said so much more than either had said that it scarce needed his fial words. "I've written to you several times."
"Written to me? I've never had your letters."
"I never sent them. I burned them up."
"Ah," laughed Isabel, "it was better that you should do that than I!"
"I thought you wouldn't care for them," he went on with a simplicity that touched her. "It seemed to me that after all I had no right to trouble you with letters."
"I should have been very glad to have news of you. You know how I hoped that - that -" But she stopped; there would be such a flatness in the utterance of her thought.
"I know what you're going to say. You hoped we should always be friends." This formula, as Lord Warburton uttered it, was certainly flat enough; but then he was interested in making it appear so.

[...]

They had gradually stopped and they stood a moment face to face. "Poor Lord Warburton!" she said with a compassion intended to be good for both of them.
"Poor Lord Warburton indeed! But I'll be careful."
"You may be unhappy, but you shall not make me so. That I can't allow."
"If I believed I could make you unhappy I think I should try it."  At this she walked in advance and he also proceeded. "I'll never say a word to displease you."
"Very good. If you do, our friendship's at an end."
"Perhaps some day - after a while - you'll give me leave."
"Give you leave to make me unhappy?"
He hesitated. "To tell you again - " But he checked himself. "I'll keep it down. I'll keep it down always."

The Portrait of a Lady, Chapter XXVII

Writers and Fantasies

Writers must have moral obligations. If writing isn't a moral act, then is there even a point? Well, maybe that depends on your idea of morality and aesthetics. I'm currently reading The Portrait of a Lady (from my list!), and I think there's a passage there that can be read as a meta-fictional discussion of the rights and wrongs of writing about rich people. Or, rather, a justification of writing about rich people, which is what James does.

Ralph is convincing his father to leave a large part of his fortune to the heroine, Isabel. Here's what he says:

"I take a great interest in my cousn," he said, "but not the sort of interest you desire. I shall not live many years; but I hope I shall live long enough to see what she does with herself. She's entirely independent of me; I can exercise very little influence upon her life. But I should like to do something for her."
"What should you like to do?"
"I should like to put a little wind in her sails."
"What do you mean by that?"
"I should like to put it into her power to do some of the things she wants. She wants to see the world for instance. I should like to put money in her purse."

Now the point of the novel, at least so far (and to judge from the title), is the creation of this wonderful character, this perfect woman. When we make these people, wouldn't we all like to put some wind in their sails? We might even come to have little influence on our own characters - after all, can you have much influence on your own ideal woman? - but we can at least change the world around them, and see how they act in it.

"I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination. Isabel has a great deal of imagination." [...]
"Well, I don't know," Mr Touchett answered. "I don't think I enter into your spirit. It seems to me immoral."
"Immoral, dear daddy?"
"Well, I don't know that it's right to make everything so easy for a person."
"It surely depends upon the person. When the person's good, your making things easy is all to the credit of virtue. To facilitate the execution of good impulses, what can be a nobler act?"

Inheritance

Inheriting wealth seems politically wrong. It's literally the primary means of perpetuating unearned economic inequality, and inequality of opportunity as well. Surely nobody should be able to inherit money: there should be a 100% inheritance tax. Even if this means people giving their children more money while they're alive, that seems better for society than standard inheritance - and surely it's nicer to be able to enjoy your children's gratitude!

But people still want to say things like, "I earned that money, and I have a right to do what I want with it when I die. I have a right to pass it on to whom I like." Even people who otherwise hate the idea of unearned income (like the dole) say this. But why? Especially when they won't be around to care about it. But I think maybe that's the very reason. Thinking about your financial legacy is a way of thinking about the world after your death, and your continuing impact on that world. It is a weapon in the battle with mortality.

If we accept that when we die, all our wealth should revert to the common stock, perhaps it would feel too much like the truth - that we cease to exist. Perhaps we would find it more difficult to go on earning and accumulating, in the knowledge of that coming darkness. It's not the actual legacy/inheritance per se that matters, but the idea, as accepted by society, that we pass what's left of ourselves on to our heirs. That we have heirs. And therefore, do not really die.

Championship Point

Is there a better phrase in all sports jargon to sum up the collapse of time that happens in the moment before victory is finally won?

Championship: the all, everything, days of matches, not just the series of matches that has led you to this final, but all the matches that were playing simultaneously and which led nowhere for their players, like parallel universes that feature your untimely demise. Championship: your victory, your championship: being champion. Not just for one moment but as if for all time, at least until another such moment brings round your dispossession, at least one year off.

Point: dot, the line reduced to zero dimensions, to nothing. All meaning is consolidated in this moment. Like perspective, it all comes to this point. It is synechdoche: a match is made of many points, a tournament of many matches. But this point, this championship point, technically no different from any other (within the rules it could go on for ever). All hope, expectation, striving, all of human life is here, and all faded away, all nothing to your mind which is fixed on this point, this set of lines, this ball, dot, point. There is no reason why such points could not recur forever, infinite of such infinitesimals.

The sad but strong and true answer

Dear Needs Direction,

I have a lot of letters like yours. Most go on at length, describing all sorts of maddening situations and communications in bewildered detail, but in each there is the same tiny question at its core: can I convince the person about whom I’m crazy to be crazy about me?

The short answer is no.

The long answer is no.

The sad but strong and true answer is the one you already told yourself: this man likes you, but not the way you like him. Which is to say, not enough.
So now you get to decide what you want to do about that. Are you able to be friends—or even occasional lovers—with this man who is less crazy about you than you are about him without feeling:

a)     bad about yourself
b)    resentful of him or
c)     like you’re always aching for more?

If the answer is not yes on all three counts, I suggest you give your friendship a rest, even if it’s just for the time it takes you to get over him. There are so many things to be tortured about, sweet pea. So many torturous things in this life. Don’t let a man who doesn’t love you be one of them.

Yours,
Sugar

Greenwich Village

So I was totally in love with Midge, in Mad Men. It probably helped that I didn't know her name was Midge. Who needs to know people's names? When she returned in the fourth season I was so happy. Then it turned out she's addicted to heroin now. I actually cried.

It's her look (4:38). It's her mixture of freedom and... dependency? Carelessness and, maybe, insecurity. But most importantly the carelessness. She seemed to live. Maybe I just want to be bohemian.

Irony and Identity

There are two aspects of the problem of irony, its existence and prevalence creates two forms of confusion. One is confusion of reception. How do we know whether to experience or interpret things ironically, or to what extent? There are social consequences to this confusion: 'mis'-interpretation causes disconnection, dissonance; it exposes disparities between viewpoints that seem 'fundamental' because they usually go silently assumed, and it also exposes those viewpoints themselves, as held by others and ourselves.

If the confusion of reception creates some conditions for self-questioning in that way (what are my silent assumptions? Do they match those of others?), the second type of confusion is still more self-oriented. This is confusion of intention. We could call it just a type of confusion of reception: i.e. self-reception, our own understanding of ourselves. Irony-saturated culture habituates us to ironic modes of expression. But when we have the irony habit, it sometimes seems hard to know when even we ourselves are being literal.

I find myself saying things, and then being unsure if I meant them ironically or not. So not only am I isolated from others by the potential for confusion of reception, I am isolated from myself as well. I don't know any longer what I really mean, or what I really think, or what I really am. I am now radically uncertain. So where do I go from here?

Snippets

1.

[From a conversation with James Harding.] There are two types of neurotic person. People who walk quickly: they're constantly being held up by slow-walkers, tourists, etc., they can never go as fast as they like, they can never relax or be free. People who walk slowly: they're always being overtaken by fast-walkers, people whose lives seem to have an urgency and meaning that theirs don't, they're anxious about getting in the way. There is nobody who walks 'at an average speed'. Dialectics of neurotic walkers: it takes both types to make each other.

2.

There's pleasure in the gaps between things: making them line up, or closing them, although you never can. The pleasure of sport is about the gap between vision and its accomplishment. To be a good sportsman (I was thinking of tennis: "chess on the run") you have to know what you're trying to do, at tactical and strategic levels: you have to have vision - comprehension, prediction, imagination; but you also have to be able to do it, it's no good saying I want to hit it there if you can't. Some people are better at one than the other, but you have to do both (that's why chess is not a sport). The way I've described it seems Cartesian: mind + body. But it's really the opposite: sport needs the whole of you, the pleasure comes from making yourself whole.

Virtue and Social Control

This morning and early-afternoon I was reading a book that was egregious in many ways. But towards the end it led me to a mini-breakthrough. It's this:

I'm interested in how republicanism and liberalism relate to social control. I think they (especially liberalism) represent an alternative to patriarchalism where invisible, structural control takes the place of overt, active control. The concept of 'virtue' is central to this because it contains an implied structure of (invisible) social control: the virtuous man has 'self-control,' he willingly submits to 'legitimate' authority, sacrifices his 'immediate interests' and so on. The important source of my thought on this has actually been Robin Hanson's discussion of self-discipline.

But my realisation today was that there's a way of linking virtue to social control far more directly, using eighteenth-century thought itself. The Founders (as well as people like Adam Smith and David Hume) were believers in the 'spur of fame' - that men will find it in their 'interest' to do things that will make them look good to others and posterity. "The love of it [i.e. of fame, in this sense] is the love of virtue," said Smith. But acting in this way is really about acting according to social norms and structures (or acting in ways that aren't in your clear and present interest), doing what others expect and value: that's how you achieve 'fame'. Patriotism, self-sacrifice, obedience: virtue is social control.

Singularly Unuseful

Let's combine some recent themes. Here is David Foster Wallace on irony (via):

Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything it debunks. …The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean what I’m saying.” … Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like an hysteric or a prig. [from E Unibus Pluram]

Play Talking

Robin Hanson adds still more to my understanding of irony:

With a little indirection, however, even play talk can communicate on serious important topics. For example, while social rules might forbid directly propositioning others for sex, people often communicate an interest in sex by joking about it in the right way. As long as there are other plausible interpretations of their words and actions, it can be hard for others to accuse them of violating the social rules...

Humans thus developed sophisticated capacities for using play talk to indirectly communicate on serious topics. We became very adept at and fond of playfully talking on two levels at once, especially when the more hidden level talks about or embodies rule violations. We are so fond of this sort of activity and ability, in fact, that we often consider a surplus of it the main reason we like or love someone, and a deficit of it almost a definition of being inhuman. 

But I would add, the saturation and complexity of play talk in our culture is (necessarily) at the edge of our discernment. Sometimes we don't know if other people are play talking or just really talking. Sometimes we don't know if we're play talking.

Something Pathetic About It

When I was a little way into Infinite Jest I was thinking the interesting thing about it was that it didn't seem to be about love at all. And most of the books that I read and like really do seem to be about love. Or at least, I suppose, they have an easy way in for me to make it about love. Like for example, the novel I read before Infinite Jest was Dostoevsky's The Devils. Pretty much about love. You might say madness, or something about the nature of politics and revolution and utopia and hope (like, it's all mad), but for me it was mainly really about love (the maddest thing of all, eh?).

Then I got a bit further through Infinite Jest. In fact I was pretty near the end. I think I might even be able to pinpoint the moment when I had this sort of revelation. When Gateley's lying in hospital after the fracas with the Canadians and he's sort of immobile and thinking, and he's thinking about Joelle and fantasising about their maybe future love. Incidentally there are a few lines there that are appear almost word-for-word at the beginning of The Finkler Question - which makes you think, Gately and Treslove are such different characters, or maybe DFW and Jacobson such different authors, this must be real, here. Let me quote at length (it's all at length) from Infinite Jest:

If a halfway-attractive female so much as smiles at Don Gately as they pass on the crowded street, Don Gately like pretty much all heterosexual drug addicts, has within a couple of blocks mentally wooed, shacked up with, married and had kids by that female, all in the future, all in his head, mentally dandling a young Gately on his mutton-joint knee while this mental Mrs. G. bustles in an apron she sometimes at night provocatively wears with nothing underneath. By the time he gets where he's going, the drug addict has either mentally divorced the female and is in a bitter custody battle for the kids or is mentally happy still hooked up with her in his sunset years, sitting together amid big-headed grandkids on a special porch swing midofied for Gately's mass, her legs in support-hose and orthopedic shoes still damn fine, barely having to speak to converse, calling each other 'Mother' and 'Papa,' knowing they'll kick within weeks of each other because neither could possible live without the other, is how bonded they've got through the years.

...Having Joelle share personal historical snapshots with Gately leads his mind right over the second's wall to envision Joelle, hopelessly smitten with the heroic Don G., volunteering to bonk the guy in the hat outside the room over the head and sneak Gately and his tube and catheter out of St. E.'s in a laundry cart or whatever, saving him from the BPD Finest or Federal crew cuts or whatever direr legal retribution the guy in the hat might represent, or else selflessly offering to give him her veil and a big dress and let him hold the catheter under the muumuu and sashay right out while she huddles under the covers in impersonation of Gately, romantically endangering her recovery and radio career and legal freedom, all out of a Liebestod-type consuming love for Gately.

This last fantasy makes him ashamed, it's so cowardly. And even contemplating the romantic thing with a clueless newcomer is shameful... Gately sees it's probably no accident that his vividest Joelle-fantasies are coincident with flight-from-Finest-and-legal-responsibility fantasies. That his head's real fantasy is this newcomer helping him avoid, escape, and run, joining him later in Kentucky on a modified porch swing. He's still pretty new himself: wanting somebody else to take care of his mess, somebody else to keep him out of his variou cages. It's the same delusion as the basic addictive-Substance-delusion, basically. His eyes roll up in his head at disgust with himself, and stay there. [pp862-864]*

That passage was really powerful for me when I read it, and I guess I felt a bit ashamed too, I guess I felt like Gately. Shall I do a trite line here? We're all "drug-addicts" really. We just have different drugs. And that's what I take DFW to be saying, one of the things he's saying in the book: life's big, and there are lots of drugs, lots of obsessions, and love's one of them. It's not something more special than that. Because all sorts of drugs are pretty special for different sorts of people. But it's just part of that bigger thing, it's part of this (which line I took to be the motto of the novel):

We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately - the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. [p900]

That's- I don't know, that's hard for me.


* Here's the line from The Finkler Question:

When a woman of the sort Julian Treslove found beautiful crossed his path it wasn't his body that took the force but his mind. She shattered his calm... He no sooner saw the woman than the aftermath of her - his marriage proposal and her acceptance, the home they would set up together, the drawn rich silk curtains leaking purple light... only for every wrack of it... to come crashing down on him in the moment of her walking past. [p3]