Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays

Notes

1 One porn production company, Caballero Home Video, has its headquarters in a big Van Nuys duplex whose other half is the soundstage for Beverly Hills 90210. (back to text)

2 The passive mood here’s a bit disingenuous — the release itself is announcing them. (back to text)

3 At, say, an average of 90 minutes per movie, this means that some person or persons put in 1.4 years of nonstop continuous porn-viewing. Hence your correspondents’ alternative for US males so tortured by carnal desire that they are tempted to autoneuter: Volunteer as a judge for the AVN Awards and spend 1.4 years gazing without rest at the latest in adult video. We guarantee that you will never thereafter want to see, hear, engage in, or even think about human sexuality ever again. Trust us on this. All five marginal (and male) print journalists assigned to cover the 1998 AVN Awards concur: Even just watching the dozen or so “big” or “high-profile” adult releases of the past year — Bad Wives, Zazel, A Week and a Half in the Life of a Prostitute, Miscreants, New Wave Hookers 5, Seduce & Destroy, Buttman in Barcelona, Gluteus to the Maximus — fried everyone’s glandular circuit-board. By the end of the Awards weekend, none of us were even having normal biological first-thing-in-the-morning or jouncy-bus-ride-between-hotels erections; and when approached even innocently by members of the opposite sex, we all now recoiled as from a hot flame (which made our party a kind of strange and challenging breakfast gig, according to our Sunday-AM waitress). (back to text)

4 (Mr. Peter North, in particular, delivers what seem more like mortar rounds than bioemissions.) (back to text)

5 Yes: “Software” is a funny misnomer here. It’s going to be a constant temptation to keep winking and nudging and saying “no pun intended” or “as it were” after every possible off-color entendre, of which there are so many at the AAVNAs that yr. corresps. have decided to try to leave most of them to the reader’s discretion as matters of personal choice and taste. (back to text)

6 St. Croix’s background is that he apprenticed as a mason but then couldn’t get union work. He’s got great dark satanic-looking eyebrows and has won several AVN Awards. (back to text)

7 (meaning both men habitually wear fedoras) (back to text)

8 Dick Filth reports that a couple years ago the big industry trend was Heavy Metal and that everyone at the Adult CES had very long hair and wore black tanktops and iron crosses, etc. (back to text)

9 Vivid is one of the industry’s great powers, a company famous for having billboards that sometimes cause traffic accidents in downtown LA. (back to text)

10 Here, if you’re interested, is D. Filth’s out-loud on-site peripatetic expansion re the camaraderie between XPlor and South Park: XPlor is a kind of an anomaly type of thing in the porn business. By and large the industry is still run by these dim grim cigar-smoking numbnutses who’ll just stare blankly at you if you should ever even like attempt a bonmot [pronounced as one consonant-intensive word] or whatnot. You get me? In contrast to how XPlor are more of your hippieish dope-smoking bunch of Gen Xers who are always up for a good gag. Like, after Trey [Parker, the Groening-type figure behind South Park] and Farrel [Timlake] became pals [via Parker’s hanging out at XPlor to do research for his and Matt (Stone, Parker’s partner on South Park)’s Orgazmo, an upcoming movie about which your correspondents know nothing], XPlor was doing a video shoot at Buck Henry’s place [?!? Explanatory details unavailable — everyone simply acts as though Buck Henry’s place being available for hard-core porn shoots were a matter of wide and public knowledge]. Richard Dreyfuss and I think Carrie Fisher also were at the shoot [?!? But no kidding, according to Filth, who yr. corresps. rather hope has a good attorney], and, as a goof, Trey and Farrel decide to switch identities, get it? So Trey pretends to direct, doing it in like big drama-queen persona — “I want more ASS shots, goddammit!” type of thing — while Farrel hung back and pretended to take notes. Get it? Then later at one point Trey orders Farrel, as Trey, to perform — because, oh, Farrel performs sometimes too, under the name Tim Lake, Tim Lake, get it? — and Farrel does, did, puts down the notebook and phone and dis, like, robes and dives right in, which you can understand this completely freaks out the assembled legit showbiz types [!?], like, they’re like “I can’t believe the guy from South Park is having sex in front of a camera!” Then at one point Trey gives the video rig to Carrie Fisher [?!] and tells her to try and do the close-ups as they’re getting close to money [see below for defs. of industry jargon]. Get me? What a couple of yucks. [End of expansion.] (back to text)

11 The average professional lifespan of a female performer is two years. Males, though lower paid, tend to last much longer in the business — sometimes decades. (back to text)

12 Silvera, who broke in way back in the ’70s at Times Square’s old Show World, looks like a curly-haired and extremely fit praying mantis; he’s even weirder-looking now that his curls are mostly gray. He’s also famous for always showing up on the set with a small duffel bag filled with exotic vitamins and herbal and other supplements, all self-prescribed. (back to text)

13 What’s maybe even weirder is that you can then scuttle back to your hotel, if you wish, and watch Jameson and North have hard-core gymnastic sex in The Wicked One on payper-view for $9.95. (back to text)

14 Mr. Harold Hecuba, whose magazine job entails reviewing dozens of adult releases every month, has an interesting vignette about a Los Angeles Police Dept. detective he met once when H.H.’s car got broken into and a whole box of Elegant Angel Inc. videotapes was stolen (a box with H.H.’s name and work address right on it) and subsequently recovered by the LAPD. A detective brought the box back to Hecuba personally, a gesture that H.H. remembered thinking was unusually thoughtful and conscientious until it emerged that the detective had really just used the box’s return as an excuse to meet Hecuba, whose critical work he appeared to know, and to discuss the ins and outs of the adult-video industry. It turned out that this detective — 60, happily married, a grandpa, shy, polite, clearly a decent guy — was a hard-core fan. He and Hecuba ended up over coffee, and when H.H. finally cleared his throat and asked the cop why such an obviously decent fellow squarely on the side of law and civic virtue was a porn fan, the detective confessed that what drew him to the films was “the faces,” i.e. the actresses’ faces, i.e. those rare moments in orgasm or accidental tenderness when the starlets dropped their stylized “fuck-me-I’m-a-nasty-girl” sneer and became, suddenly, real people. “Sometimes — and you never know when, is the thing — sometimes all of a sudden they’ll kind of reveal themselves” was the detective’s way of putting it. “Their what-do-you-call… humanness.” It turned out that the LAPD detective found adult films moving, in fact far more so than most mainstream Hollywood movies, in which latter films actors — sometimes very gifted actors — go about feigning genuine humanity, i.e.: “In real movies, it’s all on purpose. I suppose what I like in porno is the accident of it.”

Hecuba’s detective’s explanation is intriguing, at least to yr. corresps., because it helps explain part of the deep appeal of hard-core films, films that are supposed to be “naked” and “explicit” but in truth are some of the most aloof, unrevealing footage for sale anywhere. Much of the cold, dead, mechanical * quality of adult films is attributable, really, to the performers’ faces. These are faces that usually appear bored or blank or workmanlike but are in fact simply hidden, the self locked away someplace far behind the eyes. Surely this hiddenness is the way a human being who’s giving away the very most private parts of himself preserves some sense of dignity and autonomy — he denies us true expression. (You can see this very particular bored, hard, dead look in strippers, prostitutes, and porn performers of all locales and genders.)

But it’s also true that occasionally, in a hard-core scene, the hidden self appears. It’s sort of the opposite of acting. You can see the porn performer’s whole face change as self-consciousness (in most females) or crazed blankness (in most males) yields to some genuinely felt erotic joy in what’s going on; the sighs and moans change from automatic to expressive. It happens only once in a while, but the detective is right: The effect on the viewer is electric. And the adult performers who can do this a lot — allow themselves to feel and enjoy what’s taking place, cameras or no — become huge, legendary stars. The 1980s’ Ginger Lynn and Keisha could do this, and now sometimes Jill Kelly and Rocco Siffredi can. Jenna Jameson and T.T. Boy cannot. They remain just bodies. (back to text)

15 Whether the framers of the US Constitution might, in their very wildest imaginations, have been able to foresee things like Anal Virgins VIII or 900-666-FUCK when they were thinking of expression they wanted to protect is obviously a thorny question and outside this article’s purview. (back to text)

16 (set previously in 1994, by one Amber Chang, at 251 males) (back to text)

17 According to Dick Filth, the imbroglio started when Hecuba crashed the party and was spotted by Ms. Nici Sterling, about whom Mr. Hecuba had said in a recent film review that it was “unclear whether she’d win any beauty contests, but she sure could suck cock.” It was apparently the beauty contest crack that had hurt Ms. Sterling’s feelings, and on seeing H.H., and suffering the relaxation of social inhibitions for which entertainment parties of all kinds are famous, the starlet made a beeline for Hecuba, uttered two high-volume expletives, and attempted to strike the print journalist with an open-handed right cross, whereupon H.H. had the presence of mind (aided perhaps by the six-inch heels that made Ms. Sterling’s balance precarious and forced her to telegraph the blow) to grab her hand before it could knock his trifocals off. Whereupon in turn Ms. Jasmin St. Claire, seeing Harold Hecuba clutching the upraised hand of an agitated and off-balance Nici Sterling, performed a set-pick off the three-foot width of Ron (“the Hedgehog”) Jeremy and leapt on Hecuba’s back and deployed what Filth averred was a pretty authentic- and impressive-looking LAPD-style chokehold, prompting Hecuba to whirl 360º in an effort to dislodge Ms. St. Claire while he still had the cerebral oxygen to do so, inadvertently whipcracking Ms. Sterling into Randy West and mussing Mr. West’s coiffure for the first time in industry memory and (to the best of Filth’s recollection) simultaneously dislodging H.H.’s special autotint trifocals and sending them out in an arc across the room and into the forbidding décolletage of Ms. Christy Canyon, never to be recovered (the glasses) or even seen ever again.

Filth also reports that the Sterling Incident had been just either the iceberg’s tip or the camel’s straw so far as Jasmin St. Claire and Harold Hecuba were concerned. H. Hecuba had evidently also conducted a recent interview with J. St. C. in which she had confided that she was taking the rather staggering amount of $ she was making from World’s Biggest Gang Bang 2 and investing it in a (pretty dubious-sounding) string of pornographic gumball machines all up and down the CA coast, and Hecuba had chosen to include this confidence in the published interview, and Ms. St. Claire was reportedly furious that Hecuba had publicized her “secret investment strategy,” believing that now everyone and his brother were going to want to get into adult-themed-gumball-vending and it would glut the market, and so Jasmin St. Claire had had it in for Harold Hecuba for some time, and may well have viewed the Sterling Incident more as a convenient excuse than as the rescue of what appeared to be an endangered colleague — D. Filth says that debate over the motives behind the Chokehold-360º-Hair-Cleavage fiasco has been vigorous and multiform for 20 months now.

Dick Filth also appends, “apropos nada,” that Ms. Jasmin St. Claire happens in real life to be the granddaughter of late NYC capo di tutti capo Paul Castellano, who was assassinated in the 1980s at least partly because of his opposition to the Mob’s involvement in “immoral enterprises” like narcotics and porn, and who thus has to have been doing a good 180 rpm in his grave ever since WBGB2.

PLUS APPARENTLY COMING SOON TO AN ADULT RETAILER NEAR YOU: Ms. Jasmin St. Claire, in a bid to retain and even enhance her cult status, allows butane gas to be pumped via PVC into her lower colon and set afire on expulsion, resulting in a 3.5-foot anal blowtorch for Cream Productions’ 1998 Blow It Out Your Ass. (back to text)

18Mook means roughly what rube used to mean among carnies. Like all psychically walled communities, the adult industry is rife with code and jargon. Wood is a camera-ready erection; woodman is a dependably potent male performer; and waiting for wood is a discreet way of explaining what everybody else in the cast and crew is doing when a male performer is experiencing wood trouble, which latter term is self-evident. SS means a sex scene; a DP is a Double Penetration, wherein a starlet’s vagina and rectum are simultaneously accessed by two woodmen — q.v. 1996’s semiclassic NYDP Blue. (Certain especially stoic and/or capacious actresses are apparently available for Triple Penetrations, but these performers are rare and so, thankfully, are TPs.) Tush ’n’ Bush denotes a film with both anal and vaginal SSs. Skeet (n/v) is a term used for both the act of male orgasm (v) and the material thereby emitted (n). (N.B., however, that both H. Hecuba and D. Filth aver that one of their big challenges as reviewers is to keep coming up with lively and evocative synonyms for semen.) Money — short for money shot — is a successfully filmed male orgasm, which of course 100 percent of the time takes place external to the female partner; e.g. a facial is a money whose skeet is directed onto the partner’s cheek or forehead. Girl-Girl signifies a sapphic SS, which every single hetero film seems to require at least one of. Beam denotes a straight-on deep-focus view of a dilated and wood-ready orifice. A B-girl is a second- or third-tier porn actress who’s lower paid than a starlet and is usually available for more perverse, degrading, or painful SSs. Fluff (v) is unfilmed oral activity designed to induce, maintain, or enhance a woodman’s wood (and high-end porn films used to employ what were actually called fluff girls, who were usually B-girls in waiting).

EXERCISE: Use at least eight (8) of the prenominate adult-industry terms in a well-formed English sentence.

SAMPLE SOLUTION: “After a kind of long wait for wood, a B-girl fluffed the rookie woodman into a state where he could take part in a DP SS whose frequent beams required maximum wood, and after a shaky start the SS ended up a spectacular double-facial in which the starlet really displayed her professionalism by managing to stay enthusiastic even though some of the skeet went in her right eye.” (back to text)

19 The female performers seem, in truth, not just uncommunicative but downright surly. How much of this is tradeshow fatigue and how much is the stony demeanor of Insiders toward all Outsiders is anyone’s guess. The actresses are all in post-CES mufti — baggy jeans and cotton halters and big fuzzy slippers, etc. Without their makeup and appurtenances, Savage and Dane look even prettier; the B-girls do not. They all spend most of the time on the suite’s long vinyl couch watching a syndicated Seinfeld triple-header. (back to text)

20 (especially their bottoms, it seems, in the Gonzos of Max, Buttman, Mr. Ben Dover, and “Butt Row’s” J. Silvera) (back to text)

21 So let’s observe that whereas traditional, quote-unquote dramatic porn videos simulate the 100 percent sexualization of real life (viz. by creating a kind of alternative real world in which everyone from secretaries to firemen to dental hygienists is always just one prompt away from frantic intercourse), Gonzo videos push the envelope by offering the apparent sexualization of actual real life (by, for instance, combining real footage of babes on the Cannes beach with scripted footage of seduction and explicit sex). Gonzo thus obviously seems like the porn equivalent of the mainstream trend in Docudramas, COPS, Real-Life Adventures of 3rd-Shift Trauma Surgeons, etc. (back to text)

22 This is not a rumor. It is documented as fact. No theories on this phenomenon or on the civilian females’ possible motives/susceptibilities will even be attempted here — the relevant questions are just too huge and stupefying. (back to text)

23 Max is here referring not only to Silvera and Byron and the rest of the Gonzo-come-latelies, but to directors like Gregory Dark and Rob Black, who are the spearheads of a certain other hot ’90s genre called (by Dick Filth, in print) “Bizarro-Sleaze.” Gregory Dark’s recent Snakepit and The Shocking Truth do things like seat a starlet in an interview chair and then have an off-camera inquisitor ask her, e.g., whether she thinks she’s a slut and whether she thinks she’s eventually going to go to hell for her insatiable sluttiness and how she felt about the sexual attentions of her piggish stepfather, which example then segues into an SS where four men dressed stepfatherishly in bowties and cardigans and all with plastic pig-snouts strapped onto their faces gang-bang her into a stupor. Whereas Mr. Rob Black — compared to whom Gregory Dark is Frank Capra — offers entertainment like gang bangs of paraplegic women, women being made to eat Ritz crackers that have been skeeted on, and men taking turns spitting in women’s faces.*

Your correspondents elect here to submit an opinion. Dark’s and Black’s movies are not for men who want to be aroused and maybe masturbate. They are for men who have problems with women and want to see them humiliated. Whether Bizarro-Sleaze might conceivably help armchair misogynists “work out” some of their anger at females is irrelevant. Catharsis is not these films’ intent. Their intent is to capitalize on a market-demand that quite clearly exists — these directors’ products, like Max Hardcore’s, are near-constant presences in Adult Video News’s Top Sellers and Renters lists.

Dark’s and Black’s movies are vile. They are meant to be. And the truth is that in-your-face vileness is part of the schizoid direction porn’s been moving in all decade. For just as adult entertainment has become more “mainstream” — meaning more widely available, more acceptable, more lucrative, more chic: Boogie Nights — it has become also more “extreme,” and not just on the Bizarro margins. In nearly all hetero porn now there is a new emphasis on anal sex, painful penetrations, degrading tableaux, and the (at least) psychological abuse of women. In certain respects, this extremism may simply be porn’s tracing Hollywood entertainment’s own arc: It’s hardly news that TV and legit film have also gotten more violent and explicit and raw in the last decade. So maybe. And yet there’s something else.

The psychodynamics of porn seem always to have involved a certain real degree of shame, self-loathing, perception of “sin,” etc. This has held both on the performing end — “I’m a nasty girl,” “I’m a little fuckhole” — and on the consumption end — recall, or get someone to tell you about, the embarrassment of being seen at the ticket window of an adult theater, or the haunted faces of trenchcoated men in Times Square, Boston’s Combat Zone, SF’s Tenderloin. We note, though, that the faces of today’s fans at the Adult CES seem different, the affect more complex. An observer gets the odd sense that the average fan here feels slightly ashamed of being slightly ashamed of his enthusiasm for porn, since the performers and directors now appear to have abandoned shame in favor of the steely-eyed exultation that always attends success in the great US market. Wherever else it is, porn is no longer in the shadows and slums. As Max’s scarlet-clad crewman put it, “In a way, it’s kind of a drag. Now everybody’s watching it. We used to be rebels. Now we’re fucking businessmen.” †

The thing to recognize is that the adult industry’s new respectability creates a paradox. The more acceptable in modern culture it becomes, the farther porn will have to go in order to preserve the sense of unacceptability that’s so essential to its appeal. As should be evident, the industry’s already gone pretty far; and with reenacted child abuse and barely disguised gang rapes now selling briskly, it is not hard to see where porn is eventually going to have to go in order to retain its edge of disrepute. Whether or not it ever actually gets there, it’s clear that the real horizon late-’90s porn is heading toward is the Snuff Film. It’s also clear — w/ all moral and cultural issues totally aside — that this is an extremely dangerous direction for the adult-film industry to have to keep moving in. It seems only a matter of time before another conservative pol sees in mainstream porn an outrage sufficient to hang his public ambitions on. The AVA, after all, is not the only powerful lobby with an interest in social norms. At this point, anyway, porn’s own internal contradictions (e.g., constantly offending mainstream values —> the billions of $ that attend mainstream popularity) look to be the industry’s most dangerous enemy. (back to text)

24 (Here yr. corresps.’ suspicion that the AVNA statuettes are bought in bulk, possibly hot, feels somehow confirmed.) (back to text)

25…and of the ubiquitous smolder that’s so much a part of ’90s commercial culture. Mr. H. Hecuba, for instance, during one of the marathon screenings of Award-nominated videos referenced above in FN 3, pointed out that the relation between a Calvin Klein ad and a hard-core adult film is essentially the same as the relation between a funny joke and an explanation of what’s funny about that joke. (back to text)

26 Hecuba and Filth, being both familiar with Max and financially independent of him, elect to remain in the suite under the beady and seemingly lidless eye of the Production Asst. (who, by the way, is not wearing a fire-colored MAXWORLD jumpsuit but has evidently been promised one if he completes his probationary employment period in good standing). (back to text)

27 = fellatio? = very energetic French kissing? (back to text)

28 (so to speak) (back to text)

29 Yes, this is it: What’s so unbelievable is not the extent or relentlessness of porn people’s egotism (Jasmin St. Claire’s way of greeting a journalist is to offer him a personally autographed photo; Tom Byron, who is 36 and has precisely one attribute, affects the air of a Mafia don at the Sands’ bar’s nightly porn parties, extending his hand knuckles-up as if for obeisance, etc. etc.). It’s the obtuseness of it. Take, for just one other instance, the 29-year-old Mr. Scotty Schwartz, with whom through the good offices of Harold Hecuba your correspondents had a working supper that ended up being a whole Russian novel in itself. Young Mr. Schwartz, maybe 5'0" in low gravity and platform shoes, is a former Hollywood child star whose performances in Richard Pryor’s The Toy and Darren McGavin’s A Christmas Story were the zenith of a career the abrupt decline of which led — through a flux of circumstances too tortuous to even take notes on — to an acquaintance with the ubiquitous Ron Jeremy and an entrée to the insular social nexus of adult video. Either desperate or deranged or both, Scotty Schwartz evidently decided that the “controversy” of his appearance in a hard-core film would jump-start his legit career (kind of like a rehab or arrest, is Scotty’s analogy; he repeatedly gnashes his teeth over the fact that his old rival Corey Feldman’s career survived a rehab). And the adult industry, only too happy to cash in on the novelty of Scotty’s mainstream celebrity (recall 1994’s John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut, after all), starred Schwartz in Wicked Pictures’ 1996 Scotty’s X-Rated Adventure, a production beset by near-crippling anxiety and epic waits for wood, all of which psychic travails Scotty recounts in a detail that inspires pure empathic horror in yr. male corresps. (FYI, Mr. Bobbitt’s porn debut, too, was marred by serious wood issues — impotence apparently being the Achilles’ heel of nearly all nonprofessional woodmen [the term performance anxiety must take on a whole new hideous resonance in the magnesium glare of a working porn shoot] — but Bobbitt finally submitted to a penile injection of prostaglandin [known in the industry as “instant wood”], whereas Schwartz bravely/cravenly chose to limp through S.’s X-R.A. without medical assistance.)…

The thrust of the whole long story being that Schwartz, though (understandably) no longer a hard-core performer, has abandoned mainstream ambitions for the adult vortex and is now a budding Gonzo-genre director, and is even this week guiding something called Scotty’s Behind the Anal Door at the C.E.S. (which presumably Max Hardcore doesn’t know about) through a hectic series of Tush ’n’ Bush shoots.

Anyway, the point is that yr. corresps. were on Thursday night lured to this supper meeting by Hecuba’s reports that S. Schwartz had become sort of the unofficial mascot of the adult industry, and knew absolutely everybody, and was a near-manic chatterbox: We figured that he’d be a good source of background and context and gossip. H.H. had already prepared us for Schwartz’s personal manner (which is ticcy and breathless and neurally irritating in the same way a musical note held much too long is neurally irritating), but what Hecuba neglected to mention was that Scotty Schwartz is also totally incapable of talking about anything other than himself. Two courses and half an hour are spent on Scotty’s mainstream résumé and the fucking-over he got from fate’s fickle finger (alliteration and anatomically mixed metaphor Schwartz’s) and the comparative injustice of the arcs of his and C. Feldman’s careers, then another 20 minutes on Schwartz’s budding and allegedly platonic relationship with a born-again Christian girl he met on the Internet (during which whole initial 50 minutes one of yr. corresps. kept having to put his napkin in his mouth). Nor did Schwartz seem able or disposed to tell any story of which he himself was not the hero. Here — as close to verbatim as stupefaction permitted — is Scotty’s tale of his introduction to Mr. Russ Hampshire, head of VCA Inc. and what Scotty terms “a very very big fish: like this if you know what I’m saying to you here” in the adult industry:

“So I’m at this party and hanging and schmoozing up the girls and there across the room is Russ Hampshire and Russ catches my like eye if you know what I’m saying and and goes, like, you know, ‘Hey kid, c’mere’ and so I do I go over I mean this is Russ fucking Hampshire you know what I’m saying here and I do I like go on over to where Russ is at and Russ comes over to me and goes, ‘Scotty, I been watching you. I like your style. I’m a good judge of people, and Scotty, you’re good people. I never heard one person say one bad thing about you.’ [Keep in mind that this is Scotty telling this story. Note how verbatim he gets Hampshire’s dialogue. Note the altered timbre and perfectly timed delivery. Note the way it never even occurs to Schwartz that a normal US citizen might be bored or repelled by Scotty’s lengthy recitation of someone else’s praise of him. Schwartz knows only that this interchange occurred and that it signifies that a big fish approves of him and that it redounds to Scotty’s credit and that he wants it widely, widely known.] ‘Kid, I just want you to know you’re fucking OK in my book, and if there’s anything I can do to, you know, help you, anything at all, I just want you to say the word.’”

…End of vignette, and now Scotty — like Max, like Jasmin, like Jenna and Randy and Tom and Caressa — looks around the table, examining his auditors’ faces for the admiration that cannot possibly fail to appear. What is the socially appropriate response to an anecdote like this — a contextless anecdote, apropos nothing, with its smugly unsubtle (and yet not unmoving, finally, in its naked insecurity) agenda of getting you to admire the teller? The few seconds after, with the vignette hanging there and Scotty’s eyes on your correspondents’ faces like fingers, were the first of countless such moments over the AAVNA’s weekend. How is one expected to respond? It was very uncomfortable. One of yr. corresps. opted for “Gosh. Wow.” The other pretended to have had a brussels sprout go down the wrong way. (back to text)

30 (Apparent pun accidental… although one of your corresps., on receiving Filth’s overall review in the fleeing taxi, responded that surely we had penetrated as far into the core of Max as any sentient organism could ever want to penetrate. Filth’s subsequent rebuttal, which consisted mainly of a long string of unsubstantiatable Max Hardcore stories, is, for basic legal reasons, here omitted.) (back to text)

31 Mr. Tom Byron, by the way, who broke into the industry in the mid-’80s as a young man whose adolescent skinniness and Howdy-Doodyish mien were as compelling and distinctive as his penis, is now having the same weird thing happen to his face that Christopher Walken seemed to have happen to his face sometime after The Dead Zone. It’s not just that Byron’s freckles are now gone or that his eyes have taken on a dead menace — the actual skin of his face has become shiny and sort of plasticized-looking, overtaut in the way a death mask is overtaut. For anyone who remembers what Byron looked like as a kid fresh out of the University of Houston, his face now after thirteen years at the top of his trade is a chilling contradiction of the industry’s claim that it’s all about pleasure and unfettered play. (back to text)

32 (physical location of this Hall, if any, is unknown) (back to text)

33 [Laughter, cheers.] (back to text)

34 Let us note that the slick, full-color 15th AAVNA Official Program is itself an advertiser-sponsored document, its lists of categories and nominees scattered among full-page production-company ads hyping the nominated films themselves. This doesn’t seem beyond the pale — certainly Variety does the same sort of thing at Oscartime. Other ads in the AAVNA Program are for things like Wet Platinum — brand lubricant —

STAYS SLICK EVEN UNDER

WATER… NEVER DRIES… WILL NOT HARM LATEX!

— plus several from California Exotic Novelties Corp., maker of the RAMROD Penile Pump, of Doc Joc’s Incredible Jack-Off Device, and of the “Anne Malle Facsimile Fullsize KNEELING DOLL”:

• KNEELING POSITION — READY TO BE TAKEN

• EXCITING ANAL PENETRATION

• RIPE LUSCIOUS SQUEEZABLE BREASTS

• VIBRATING ACTION

• BEAUTIFUL BLACK HAIR

BEND OVER and TAKE ME NOW!!!

Whether these ads are niche-directed at industry Insiders (doubtful, although they’re pretty much the only ones who are going to see the Programs), at retailers, or at plain old mooks is unclear. (back to text)

35 There are 45 official voters listed in the Awards Program. Here are some of their names: Avie Chute, Rich C. Leather, Marlon Brandeis, Roland Tuggonit, Stroker Palmer, S. Andrew Roberts & Slave Girl (so actually there are either 45 or 44 official voters, depending on whether Slave Girl gets her own vote or is just along to rubber-stamp S. Andrew Roberts’s vote). Oddly, Ms. Ellen Thompson appears on the list both as Ida Slapter and as Ellen Thompson, so one sort of wonders just how many ontologically distinct voters there actually are. Nor does an independent Big 6 accounting firm tally the ballots in secret under armed guard or any of that Oscar-type security. According to Slapter/Thompson, the Awards voting is “secret,” but the completed ballots are all turned in to Paul Fishbein and Gene Ross, who are the Publisher and VP (and Fishbein a co-owner) of Adult Video News, and who thus have an obvious interest in happy sponsors and healthy ad revenues. The whole thing inspires something less than rock-solid confidence. (back to text)

36 What many of the top woodmen resemble most are gymnasts. They’re compact and muscular and move with the liquid economy of athletes, as if equipped with internal gyroscopes. Little of their physical grace is ever visible on tape. (back to text)

37 We are not kidding — the Oscars are brisk and minimalist compared to the AVNAs. (back to text)

38 (e.g. Debbie Does Dallas, Behind the Green Door, something ill-lit with John Holmes in it, The Devil in Miss Jones, etc. — nothing identifiable from Deep Throat, though, and definitely nothing involving the statutorily infamous Traci Lords…) (back to text)

39 There is something deeply surreal about standing behind a female performer in hot-pink peau de soie, a woman whose clitoris and perineum you have priorly seen, and watching her try to get a microwaved egg roll onto her plate with a cocktail fork. (back to text)

40 (platonically) (back to text)

41 Despite the fact that the movie presents everybody in porn as cretinous, pathetic, or both, the adult industry has evidently embraced Boogie Nights the same way the music industry embraced This Is Spinal Tap, and the Anderson rumor (which never comes to anything — if P. T. Anderson ever shows, it’s deeply incognito) generates the least cynical enthusiasm of the evening. (back to text)

42 (We’re on duty.) (back to text)

43 For instance, H. Hecuba has strictly enjoined us from buying any sort of distilled beverage for Dick Filth, for reasons that become clear as the evening wears on. (back to text)

44 (The waiters’ special 15th AAVNAs fringe benefit, which sharply reduced yr. corresps.’ empathy with them, wasn’t revealed until the gala concluded — see below.) (back to text)

45 Filth is shouting because between the screens’ clips’ audio and the stage band warming atonally up and the ambient conversational roar it’s close to deafening in here. When the Awards Show starts, the audio techs will have the amplifiers turned all the way up to Shattering, which, even though it will tend to cause mussed hair and spilled drinks in both directions’ front rows, those of us way back in mookland appreciate. (back to text)

46 As both the screens’ preliminary clips and the Musical Salute indicate, Adult Video News appears to believe that the History of Adult begins circa 1975, when in fact this is merely the year when the locus of US porn moved from New York to California. (back to text)

47 E. just one g.: AVN head Paul Fishbein takes a moment out from his welcoming remarks to announce that his proud parents are in the audience tonight… and they are. (back to text)

48 (Nobody mispronounces Sodomania, though, we notice.) (back to text)

49 There is no will left to inquire about this (much less about the gynecological logistics of a Triple Penetration); by this time yr. corresps. are slumped in opposite directions in their chairs, only slightly less fried than the lady from ABC Radio. (back to text)

50 Yes — it’s a real category. There’s also Best Anal Sex Scene/Video, Best Group Sex Scene/F & /V, Best All-Girl Sex Scene, Best Gay Sex Scene, Best Foreign Sex Scene, Best Tease Performance, and something called Best Solo Sex Scene. Etc. etc. Hence the Awards Show’s extreme and numbing length: There’s a total 104 categories overall, plus three Special Achievement Awards, an AVN Breakthrough Award, and sixteen new inductees to the already engorged AVN Hall of Fame. (back to text)

51 Though Ms. Swift won for Miscreants, she is here actually alluding to her and director R. Black’s real breakthrough video in 1997, Gangbang Angels, which is essentially a one-woman show and features the year’s most infamous scene: Twelve woodmen line up and do an about-face, and S. Swift performs analingus on each in turn; she then kneels and assumes a prayerful/compliant posture as the twelve men all do a right-face and form a moving line and take turns hawking and spitting in her face. (back to text)

52 (Meaning people in the live audience. Adult Video News is taping the whole Awards Show, and they’re going to distribute the tape for sale/rent; and in the taped version, clips from various winning scenes are going to get spliced in, which seems clearly designed to mitigate at-home boredom.) (back to text)

53 (who is no J. Whatley but at least doesn’t screech) (back to text)

54 No woodmen are invited to join in, or at any rate none try to. (back to text)

55 (whom D. Filth is still hectoring for $13.00 in alleged Grand Marnier change) (back to text)

* Hereafter, GMNs. (back to text)

* Unless, of course, you consider delivering long encomiums to a woman’s “sacred several-lipped gateway” or saying things like “It is true, the sight of her plump lips obediently distended around my swollen member, her eyelids lowered demurely, afflicts me with a religious peace” to be the same as loving her. (back to text)

1 Compare e.g. in this regard the whole “What was the old man in despair about?”— “Nothing” interchange in the opening pages of Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” with water-cooler zingers like “The big difference between a White House intern and a Cadillac is that not everybody’s been in a Cadillac.” Or consider the single word “Goodbye” at the end of Vonnegut’s “Report on the Barnhouse Effect” vs. the function of “The fish!” as a response to “How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” (back to text)

2 I’m not referring to lost-in-translation stuff here. Tonight’s whole occasion [*] notwithstanding, I have to confess that I have very little German, and the Kafka I know and teach is Mr. and Mrs. Muir’s Kafka, and though Lord only knows how much more I’m missing, the funniness I’m talking about is funniness that’s right there in the good old Muirs’ English version. (back to text)

3 There are probably whole Johns Hopkins U. Press books to be written on the lallating function that humor serves in today’s US psyche. A crude way to put the whole thing is that our present culture is, both developmentally and historically, adolescent. And since adolescence is acknowledged to be the single most stressful and frightening period of human development — the stage when the adulthood we claim to crave begins to present itself as a real and narrowing system of responsibilities and limitations (taxes, death) and when we yearn inside for a return to the same childish oblivion we pretend to scorn* — it’s not difficult to see why we as a culture are so susceptible to art and entertainment whose primary function is escape, i.e. fantasy, adrenaline, spectacle, romance, etc. Jokes are a kind of art, and because most of us Americans come to art now essentially to escape ourselves — to pretend for a while that we’re not mice and walls are parallel and the cat can be outrun — it’s understandable that most of us are going to view “A Little Fable” as not all that funny, or maybe even see it as a repulsive instance of the exact sort of downer-type death-and-taxes reality for which “real” humor serves as a respite. (back to text)

61 * (or, “POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE” IS REDUNDANT) (back to text)

1 (the best and most substantial of these being The American Heritage Book of English Usage, Jean Eggenschwiler’s Writing: Grammar, Usage, and Style, and Oxford/Clarendon’s own The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage) (back to text)

2The New Fowler’s is also extremely comprehensive and fine, but its emphasis is on British usage. (back to text)

3 Sorry about this phrase; I hate this phrase, too. This happens to be one of those very rare times when “historical context” is the phrase to use and there is no equivalent phrase that isn’t even worse (I actually tried “lexico-temporal backdrop” in one of the middle drafts, which I think you’ll agree is not preferable).

INTERPOLATION

The above ¶ is motivated by the fact that this reviewer nearly always sneers and/or winces when he sees a phrase like “historical context” deployed in a piece of writing and thus hopes to head off any potential sneers/winces from the reader here, especially in an article about felicitous usage. One of the little personal lessons I’ve learned in working on this essay is that being chronically inclined to sneer/wince at other people’s usage tends to make me chronically anxious about other people’s sneering/wincing at my usage. It is, of course, possible that this bivalence is news to nobody but me; it may be just a straightforward instance of Matt. 7:1’s thing about “Judge not lest ye be judged.” In any case, the anxiety seems worth acknowledging up front. (back to text)

4 One of the claim-clusters I’m going to spend a lot of both our time arguing for is that issues of English usage are fundamentally and inescapably political, and that putatively disinterested linguistic authorities like dictionaries are always the products of certain ideologies, and that as authorities they are accountable to the same basic standards of sanity and honesty and fairness as our political authorities. (back to text)

5 SNOOT (n) (highly colloq) is this reviewer’s nuclear family’s nickname à clef for a really extreme usage fanatic, the sort of person whose idea of Sunday fun is to hunt for mistakes in the very prose of Safire’s column. This reviewer’s family is roughly 70 percent SNOOT, which term itself derives from an acronym, with the big historical family joke being that whether S.N.O.O.T. stood for “Sprachgefühl Necessitates Our Ongoing Ten-dance” or “Syntax Nudniks Of Our Time” depended on whether or not you were one. (back to text)

6 This is true in my own case, at any rate — plus also the “uncomfortable” part. I teach college English part-time. Mostly Lit, not Composition. But I am so pathologically obsessed with usage that every semester the same thing happens: once I’ve had to read my students’ first set of papers, we immediately abandon the regular Lit syllabus and have a three-week Emergency Remedial Usage and Grammar Unit, during which my demeanor is basically that of somebody teaching HIV prevention to intravenous-drug users. When it emerges (as it does, every term) that 95 percent of these intelligent upscale college students have never been taught, e.g., what a clause is or why a misplaced only can make a sentence confusing or why you don’t just automatically stick in a comma after a long noun phrase, I all but pound my head on the blackboard; I get angry and self-righteous; I tell them they should sue their hometown school boards, and mean it. The kids end up scared, both of me and for me. Every August I vow silently to chill about usage this year, and then by Labor Day there’s foam on my chin. I can’t seem to help it. The truth is that I’m not even an especially good or dedicated teacher; I don’t have this kind of fervor in class about anything else, and I know it’s not a very productive fervor, nor a healthy one — it’s got elements of fanaticism and rage to it, plus a snobbishness that I know I’d be mortified to display about anything else. (back to text)

7 N.B. that this article’s own title page features blocks of the typical sorts of contemporary boners and clunkers and oxymorons and solecistic howlers and bursts of voguish linguistic methane that tend to make a SNOOT’s cheek twitch and forehead darken. (N.B. further that it took only about a week of semi-attentive listening and note-taking to assemble these blocks — the Evil is all around us.) (back to text)

8 Please note that the strategically repeated 1-P pronoun is meant to iterate and emphasize that this reviewer is very much one too, a SNOOT, plus to connote the nuclear family mentioned supra. SNOOTitude runs in families. In ADMAU’s preface, Bryan Garner mentions both his father and grandfather and actually uses the word genetic, and it’s probably true: 90 percent of the SNOOTs I know have at least one parent who is, by profession or temperament or both, a SNOOT. In my own case, my mom is a Comp teacher and has written remedial usage books and is a SNOOT of the most rabid and intractable sort. At least part of the reason I am a SNOOT is that for years my mom brainwashed us in all sorts of subtle ways. Here’s an example. Family suppers often involved a game: if one of us children made a usage error, Mom would pretend to have a coughing fit that would go on and on until the relevant child had identified the relevant error and corrected it. It was all very self-ironic and lighthearted; but still, looking back, it seems a bit excessive to pretend that your small child is actually denying you oxygen by speaking incorrectly. The really chilling thing, though, is that I now sometimes find myself playing this same “game” with my own students, complete with pretend pertussion.

INTERPOLATION

As something I’m all but sure Harper’s will excise, I will also insert that we even had a fun but retrospectively chilling little family song that Mom and we little SNOOTlets would sing in the car on long trips while Dad silently rolled his eyes and drove (you have to remember the theme to Underdog in order to follow the song):

When idiots in this world appear

And fail to be concise or clear

And solecisms rend the ear

The cry goes up both far and near

for Blunderdog

Blunderdog

Blunderdog

Blunderdog

Pen of iron, tongue of fire

Tightening the wid’ning gyre

Blunderdo-O-O-O-O-O-O… [etc.]*

9 (It seems to be a natural law that camps form only in opposition to other camps and that there are always at least two w/r/t any difficult issue.) (back to text)

10 If Samuel Johnson is the Shakespeare of English usage, think of Henry Watson Fowler as the Eliot or Joyce. His 1926 A Dictionary of Modern English Usage is the granddaddy of modern usage guides, and its dust-dry wit and blushless imperiousness have been models for every subsequent classic in the field, from Eric Partridge’s Usage and Abusage to Theodore Bernstein’s The Careful Writer to Wilson Follett’s Modern American Usage to Gilman’s ’89 Webster’s. (back to text)

11 (Garner prescribes spelling out only numbers under ten. I was taught that this rule applies just to Business Writing and that in all other modes you spell out one through nineteen and start using cardinals at 20. De gustibus non est disputandum.) (back to text)

12 From personal experience, I can assure you that any kid like this is going to be at best marginalized and at worst savagely and repeatedly Wedgied — see sub. (back to text)

13 What follow in the preface are “the ten critical points that, after years of working on usage problems, I’ve settled on.” These points are too involved to treat separately, but a couple of them are slippery in the extreme — e.g., “10. Actual Usage. In the end, the actual usage of educated speakers and writers is the overarching criterion for correctness,” of which both “educated” and “actual” would really require several pages of abstract clarification and qualification to shore up against Usage Wars — related attacks, but which Garner rather ingeniously elects to define and defend via their application in his dictionary itself. Garner’s ability not only to stay out of certain arguments but to render them irrelevant ends up being very important — see much sub. (back to text)

14 There’s no better indication of The Dictionary’s authority than that we use it to settle wagers. My own father is still to this day living down the outcome of a high-stakes bet on the correct spelling of meringue, a bet made on 14 September 1978. (back to text)

15 This is a clever half-truth. Linguists compose only one part of the anti-judgment camp, and their objections to usage judgments involve way more than just “subjectivity.” (back to text)

16 Notice, please, the subtle appeal here to the same “writing establishment” that Steven Pinker scorns. This isn’t accidental; it’s rhetorical. * What’s crafty is that this is one of several places where Garner uses professional writers and editors as support for his claims, but in the preface he also treats these language pros as the primary audience for ADMAU, as in e.g. “The problem for professional writers and editors is that they can’t wait idly to see what direction the language takes. Writers and editors, in fact, influence that direction: they must make decisions.… That has traditionally been the job of the usage dictionary: to help writers and editors solve editorial predicaments.”

This is the same basic rhetorical move that President R. W. Reagan perfected in his televised Going-Over-Congress’s-Head-to-the-People addresses, one that smart politicians ever since have imitated. It consists in citing the very audience you’re addressing as the source of support for your proposals: “I’m pleased to announce tonight that we are taking the first steps toward implementing the policies that you elected me to implement,” etc. The tactic is crafty because it (1) flatters the audience, (2) disguises the fact that the rhetor’s purpose here is actually to persuade and rally support, not to inform or celebrate, and (3) preempts charges from the loyal opposition that the actual policy proposed is in any way contrary to the interests of the audience. I’m not suggesting that Bryan Garner has any particular political agenda. I’m simply pointing out that ADMAU’s preface is fundamentally rhetorical in the same way that Reagan’s little Chats With America were. (back to text)

17 See? (back to text)

18 In this last respect, recall for example W. J. Clinton’s “I feel your pain,” which was a blatant if not especially deft Ethical Appeal. (back to text)

19 Really, howled: Blistering reviews and outraged editorials from across the country — from the Times and The New Yorker and the National Review and good old Life, or see e.g. this from the January ’62 Atlantic Monthly: “We have seen a novel dictionary formula improvised, in great part, out of snap judgments and the sort of theoretical improvement that in practice impairs; and we have seen the gates propped wide open in enthusiastic hospitality to miscellaneous confusions and corruptions. In fine, the anxiously awaited * work that was to have crowned cisatlantic linguistic scholarship with a particular glory turns out to be a scandal and a disaster.” (back to text)

20 It’s true: Newman, Simon, Freeman, James J. Kilpatrick… can George F. Will’s bestseller on usage be long in coming? (back to text)

21 Even the late Edwin Newman, the most thoughtful and least hemorrhoidal of the pop SNOOTs, sometimes let his Colonel B. poke out, as in e.g. “I have no wish to dress as many younger people do nowadays.… I have no wish to impair my hearing by listening to their music, and a communication gap between an electronic rock group and me is something I devotedly cherish and would hate to see disappear.” (back to text)

22 Note for instance the mordant pith (and royal we) of this random snippet from Partridge’s Usage and Abusage: (back to text) anxious of. ‘I am not hopeless of our future. But I am profoundly anxious of it,’ Beverley Nichols, News of England, 1938: which made us profoundly anxious for (or about) — not of—Mr. Nichols’s literary future.

Or observe the near-Himalayan condescension of Fowler, here on some people’s habit of using words like viable or verbal to mean things the words don’t really mean: slipshod extension… is especially likely to occur when some accident gives currency among the uneducated to words of learned origin, & the more if they are isolated or have few relatives in the vernacular…. The original meaning of feasible is simply doable (L. facere do); but to the unlearned it is a mere token, of which he has to infer the value from the contexts in which he hears it used, because such relatives as it has in English—feat, feature, faction, &c. — either fail to show the obvious family likeness to which he is accustomed among families of indigenous words, or are (like malfeasance) outside his range.

23 FYI, Leonard Bloomfield’s 1933 Language pretty much founded descriptive linguistics by claiming that the proper object of study was not language but something called “language behavior.” (back to text)

24 Utter bushwa: As ADMAU’s body makes clear, Garner knows precisely where along the line the Descriptivists started influencing usage guides. (back to text)

25 His SNOOTier sentiments about linguists’ prose emerge in Garner’s preface via his recollection of studying under certain eminent Descriptivists in college: “The most bothersome thing was that they didn’t write well: their offerings were dreary gruel. If you doubt this, go pick up any journal of linguistics. Ask yourself whether the articles are well-written. If you haven’t looked at one in a while, you’ll be shocked.”

INTERPOLATION

Garner’s aside about linguists’ writing has wider applications, though ADMAU mostly keeps them implicit. The truth is that most US academic prose is appalling — pompous, abstruse, claustral, inflated, euphuistic, pleonastic, solecistic, sesquipidelian, Heliogaba-line, occluded, obscure, jargon-ridden, empty: resplendently dead. See textual INTERPOLATION much below. (back to text)

26 (which is in fact true)(back to text)

27 (Q.v. the “Pharmakon” stuff in Derrida’s La dissémination — but you’d probably be better off just trusting me.) (back to text)

28 Standard Written English (SWE) is sometimes called Standard English (SE) or Educated English, but the basic inditement-emphasis is the same. See for example The Little, Brown Handbook’s definition of Standard English as “the English normally expected and used by educated readers and writers.”

SEMI–INTERPOLATION

Plus let’s note that Garner’s preface explicitly characterizes his dictionary’s intended audience as “writers and editors.” And even the recent ads for ADMAU in organs like the New York Review of Books are built around the slogan “If you like to WRITE… Refer to us.” * (back to text)

29 Granted, some sort of 100 percent compendious real-time Megadictionary might conceivably be possible online, though it would take a small army of lexical webmasters and a much larger army of in situ actual-use reporters and surveillance techs; plus it’d be GNP-level expensive (… plus what would be the point?). (back to text)

30New Criticism refers to T. S. Eliot and I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis and Cleanth Brooks and Wimsatt & Beardsley and the whole autotelic Close Reading school that dominated literary criticism from the Thirties to well into the Seventies. (back to text)

31 (“EVIDENCE OF CANCER LINK REFUTED BY TOBACCO INSTITUTE RESEARCHERS”) (back to text)

32 This proposition is in fact true, as is interpolatively demonstrated just below, and although the demonstration is persuasive it is also, as you can see from the size of this FN, lengthy and involved and rather, umm, dense, so that once again you’d maybe be better off simply granting the truth of the proposition and forging on with the main text.

INTERPOLATIVE DEMONSTRATION OF THE FACT THAT THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A PRIVATE LANGUAGE

It is sometimes tempting to imagine that there can be such a thing as a private language. Many of us are prone to lay-philosophizing about the weird privacy of our own mental states, for example; and from the fact that when my knee hurts only I can feel it, it’s tempting to conclude that for me the word pain has a very subjective internal meaning that only I can truly understand. This line of thinking is sort of like the adolescent pot-smoker’s terror that his own inner experience is both private and unverifiable, a syndrome that is technically known as Cannabic Solipsism. Eating Chips Ahoy! and staring very intently at the television’s network PGA event, for instance, the adolescent pot-smoker is struck by the ghastly possibility that, e.g., what he sees as the color green and what other people call “the color green” may in fact not be the same color-experiences at all: the fact that both he and someone else call Pebble Beach’s fairways green and a stoplight’s GO signal green appears to guarantee only that there is a similar consistency in their color-experiences of fairways and GO lights, not that the actual subjective quality of those color-experiences is the same; it could be that what the ad. pot-smoker experiences as green everyone else actually experiences as blue, and that what we “mean” by the word blue is what he “means” by green, etc. etc., until the whole line of thinking gets so vexed and exhausting that the a. p.-s. ends up slumped crumb-strewn and paralyzed in his chair.

The point here is that the idea of a private language, like private colors and most of the other solipsistic conceits with which this reviewer has at various times been afflicted, is both deluded and demonstrably false.

In the case of private language, the delusion is usually based on the belief that a word like pain or tree has the meaning it does because it is somehow “connected” to a feeling in my knee or to a picture of a tree in my head. But as Mr. L. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations proved in the 1950s, words actually have the meanings they do because of certain rules and verification tests that are imposed on us from outside our own subjectivities, viz., by the community in which we have to get along and communicate with other people. Wittgenstein’s argument centers on the fact that a word like tree means what it does for me because of the way the community I’m part of has tacitly agreed to use tree. What makes this observation so powerful is that Wittgenstein can prove that it holds true even if I am an angst-ridden adolescent pot-smoker who believes that there’s no way I can verify that what I mean by tree is what anybody else means by tree. Wittgenstein’s argument is very technical but goes something like:

(1) A word has no meaning apart from how it is actually used, and even if

(2) “The question of whether my use agrees with others has been given up as a bad job,”* still,

(3) The only way a word can be used meaningfully even to myself is if I use it “correctly,” with

(4) Correctly here meaning “consistently with my own definition” (that is, if I use tree one time to mean a tree and then the next time turn around and use tree to mean a golf ball and then the next time willy-nilly use tree to mean a certain brand of high-cal corporate cookie, etc., then, even in my own little solipsistic universe, tree has ceased really to “mean” anything at all), but

(5) The criterion of consistency-with-my-own-definition is satisfiable only if there exist certain rules that are independent of any one individual language-user (viz., in this case, me). Without the existence of these external rules, there is no difference between the statement “I am in fact using tree consistently with my own definition” and the statement “I happen to be under the impression that I am using tree consistently with my own definition.” Wittgenstein’s basic way of putting it is: Now how is it to be decided whether I have used the [privately defined] word consistently? What will be the difference between my having used it consistently and its seeming to me that I have? Or has this distinction vanished?… If the distinction between ‘correct’ and ‘seems correct’ has disappeared, then so has the concept correct. It follows that the ‘rules’ of my private language are only impressions of rules. My impression that I follow a rule does not confirm that I follow the rule, unless there can be something that will prove my impression correct. “And that something cannot be another impression — for this would be as if someone were to buy several copies of the morning paper to assure himself that what it said was true.”

Step (5) is the real kicker; step (5) is what shows that even if the involuted adolescent decides that he has his own special private definition of tree, he himself cannot make up the “rules of consistency” via which he confirms that he’s using tree the way he privately defined it — i.e., “The proof that I am following a rule must appeal to something independent of my impression that I am.”

If you are thinking that all this seems not just hideously abstract but also irrelevant to the Usage Wars or to anything you have any interest in at all, I submit that you are mistaken. If words’ and phrases’ meanings depend on transpersonal rules and these rules on community consensus,† then language is not only non-private but also irreducibly public, political, and ideological. This means that questions about our national consensus on grammar and usage are actually bound up with every last social issue that millennial America’s about — class, race, sex, morality, tolerance, pluralism, cohesion, equality, fairness, money: you name it.

And if you at least provisionally grant that meaning is use and language public and communication impossible without consensus and rules, you’re going to see that the Descriptivist argument is open to the objection that its ultimate aim — the abandonment of “artificial” linguistic rules and conventions — would make language itself impossible. As in Genesis 11:1–10–grade impossible, a literal Babel. There have to be some rules and conventions, no? We have to agree that tree takes e’s and not u’s and denotes a large woody thing with branches and not a small plastic thing with dimples and TITLEIST on it, right? And won’t this agreement automatically be “artificial,” since it’s human beings making it? Once you accept that at least some artificial conventions are necessary, then you can get to the really hard and interesting questions: which conventions are necessary? and when? and where? and who gets to decide? and whence their authority to do so? And because these are the very questions that Gove’s crew believes Dispassionate Science can transcend, their argument appears guilty of both petitio principii and ignoratio elenchi, and can pretty much be dismissed out of hand.(back to text)

33 In fact, the Methodological Descriptivists’ reasoning is known in social philosophy as the “Well, Everybody Does It” fallacy — i.e., if a lot of people cheat on their taxes, that means it’s somehow morally OK to cheat on your taxes. Ethics-wise, it takes only two or three deductive steps to get from there to the sort of State of Nature where everybody’s hitting each other over the head and stealing their groceries. (back to text)

34 This phrase is attributable to Ferdinand de Saussure, the Swiss philologist who more or less invented modern technical linguistics, separating the study of language as an abstract formal system from the historical and comparative emphases of 19th-century philology. Suffice it to say that the Descriptivists like Saussure a lot. Suffice it also to say that they tend to misread him and take him out of context and distort his theories in all kinds of embarrassing ways — e.g., Saussure’s “arbitrariness of the linguistic sign” means something other and far more complicated than just “There’s no ultimate necessity to English speakers’ saying cow.” (Similarly, the structural linguists’ distinction between “language behavior” and “language” is based on a simplistic misreading of Saussure’s distinction between “parole” and “langue.”) (back to text)

35 (If that last line of Pinker’s pourparler reminds you of Garner’s “Essentially, descriptivists and prescriptivists are approaching different problems,” be advised that the similarity is neither coincidence nor plagiarism. One of the many cunning things about ADMAU’s preface is that Garner likes to take bits of Descriptivist rhetoric and use them for very different ends.) (back to text)

36 Pinker puts it this way: “No one, not even a valley girl, has to be told not to say Apples the eat boy or The child seems sleeping or Who did you meet John and? or the vast, vast majority of the millions of trillions of mathematically possible combinations of words.” (back to text)

37 (FYI, there happens to be a whole subdiscipline of linguistics called Pragmatics that essentially studies the way statements’ meanings are created by various contexts.) (back to text)

38 (presumably) (back to text)

39 In the case of little Steve Pinker Jr., these people are the boy’s peers and teachers and crossing guards. In the case of adult cross-dressers and drag queens who have jobs in the straight world and wear pants to those jobs, it’s bosses and coworkers and customers and people on the subway. For the die-hard slob who nevertheless wears a coat and tie to work, it’s mostly his boss, who doesn’t want his employees’ clothes to send clients “the wrong message.” But it’s all basically the same thing. (back to text)

40 Even Garner scarcely mentions it, and just once in his dictionary’s miniessay on class distinctions: “[M]any linguistic pratfalls can be seen as class indicators — even in a so-called classless society such as the United States.” And when Bryan A. Garner uses a clunky passive like “can be seen” as to distance himself from an issue, you know something’s in the air. (back to text)

41 In fact, pretty much the only time one ever hears the issue made wholly explicit is in radio ads for tapes that promise to improve people’s vocabularies. These ads tend to be extremely ominous and intimidating and always start out with “DID YOU KNOW PEOPLE JUDGE YOU BY THE WORDS YOU USE?” (back to text)

42 To be honest, the example here has a special personal resonance for this reviewer because in real life I always seem to have a hard time winding up a conversation or asking somebody to leave, and sometimes the moment becomes so delicate and fraught with social complexity that I’ll get overwhelmed trying to sort out all the different possible ways of saying it and all the different implications of each option and will just sort of blank out and do it totally straight — “I want to terminate the conversation and not have you be in my apartment anymore” — which evidently makes me look either as if I’m very rude and abrupt or as if I’m semi-autistic and have no sense of how to wind up a conversation gracefully. Somehow, in other words, my reducing the statement to its bare propositional content “sends a message” that is itself scanned, sifted, interpreted, and judged by my auditor, who then sometimes never comes back. I’ve actually lost friends this way. (back to text)

43 (… not to mention color, gender, ethnicity — you can see how fraught and charged all this is going to get) (back to text)

44Discourse Community is a rare example of academic jargon that’s actually a valuable addition to SWE because it captures something at once very complex and very specific that no other English term quite can. * (back to text)

45 Just how tiny and restricted a subdialect can get and still be called a subdialect isn’t clear; there might be very firm linguistic definitions of what’s a dialect and what’s a sub-dialect and what’s a subsub-, etc. Because I don’t know any better and am betting you don’t either, I’m going to use subdialect in a loose inclusive way that covers idiolects as distinctive as Peorians-Who-Follow-Pro-Wrestling-Closely or Geneticists-Who-Specialize-in-Hardy-Weinberg-Equilibrium. Dialect should probably be reserved for major players like Standard Black English et al.(back to text)

46 (Plus it’s true that whether something gets called a “subdialect” or “jargon” seems to depend on how much it annoys people outside its Discourse Community. Garner himself has miniessays on airplanese, computerese, legalese, and bureaucratese, and he more or less calls all of them jargon. There is no ADMAU miniessay on dialects, but there is one on jargon, in which such is Garner’s self-restraint that you can almost hear his tendons straining, as in “[Jargon] arises from the urge to save time and space — and occasionally to conceal meaning from the uninitiated.”) (back to text)

47 (a redundancy that’s a bit arbitrary, since “Where’s it from?” isn’t redundant [mainly because whence has receded into semi-archaism]) (back to text)

48 E.g., for a long time English had a special 2-S present conjugation — “thou lovest,” “thou sayest” — that now survives only in certain past tenses (and in the present of to be, where it consists simply in giving the 2-S a plural inflection). (back to text)

49 A synthetic language uses grammatical inflections to dictate syntax, whereas an analytic languages uses word order. Latin, German, and Russian are synthetic; English and Chinese are analytic. (back to text)

50 (Q.v. for example Sir Thomas Smith’s cortex-withering De Recta et Emendata Linguae Anglicae Scriptione Dialogus of 1568.) (back to text)

51 N.B., though, that he’s sane about it. Some split infinitives really are clunky and hard to parse, especially when there are a lot of words between to and the verb (“We will attempt to swiftly and to the best of our ability respond to these charges”), which Garner calls “wide splits” and sensibly discourages. His overall verdict on split infinitives — which is that some are “perfectly proper” and some iffy and some just totally bad news, and that no one wide tidy dogmatic ukase can handle all s.i. cases, and thus that “knowing when to split an infinitive requires a good ear and a keen eye” — is a fine example of the way Garner distinguishes sound and helpful Descriptivist objections from wacko or dogmatic objections and then incorporates the sound objections into a smarter and more flexible Prescriptivism. (back to text)

52 (It is, admittedly, difficult to imagine William F. Buckley using or perhaps even being aware of anything besides SWE.) (back to text)

53AMATEUR DEVELOPMENTAL-SOCIOLINGUISTIC INTERPOLATION #1 The SNOOTlet is, as it happens, an indispensable part of the other children’s playground education. School and peers are kids’ first socialization outside the family. In learning about Groups and Group tectonics, the kids are naturally learning that a Group’s identity depends as much on exclusion as inclusion. They are, in other words, starting to learn about Us and Them, and about how an Us always needs a Them because being not-Them is essential to being Us. Because they’re little children and it’s school, the obvious Them is the teachers and all the values and appurtenances of the teacher-world. * This teacher-Them helps the kids see how to start to be an Us, but the SNOOTlet completes the puzzle by providing a kind of missing link: he is the traitor, the Us who is in fact not Us but Them. The SNOOTlet, who at first appears to be one of Us because like Us he’s three feet tall and runny-nosed and eats paste, nevertheless speaks an erudite SWE that signals membership not in Us but in Them, which since Us is defined as not-Them is equivalent to a rejection of Us that is also a betrayal of Us precisely because the SNOOTlet is a kid, i.e., one of Us. Point: The SNOOTlet is teaching his peers that the criteria for membership in Us are not just age, height, paste-ingestion, etc., that in fact Us is primarily a state of mind and a set of sensibilities. An ideology. The SNOOTlet is also teaching the kids that Us has to be extremely vigilant about persons who may at first appear to be Us but are in truth not Us and may need to be identified and excluded at a moment’s notice. The SNOOTlet is not the only type of child who can serve as traitor: the Teacher’s Pet, the Tattletale, the Brown-Noser, and the Mama’s Boy can also do nicely… just as the Damaged and Deformed and Fat and Generally Troubled children all help the nascent mainstream Us-Groups refine the criteria for in- and exclusion. In these crude and fluid formations of ideological Groupthink lies American kids’ real socialization. We all learn early that community and Discourse Community are the same thing, and a fearsome thing indeed. It helps to know where We come from. (back to text)

54 (Elementary Ed professors really do talk this way.) (back to text)

55AMATEUR DEVELOPMENTAL-SOCIOLINGUISTIC INTERPOLATION #2 And by the time the SNOOTlet hits adolescence it’ll have supplanted the family to become the most important Group. And it will be a Group that depends for its definition on a rejection of traditional Authority. * And because it is the recognized dialect of mainstream adult society, there is no better symbol of traditional Authority than SWE. It is not an accident that adolescence is the time when slang and code and subdialects of subdialects explode all over the place and parents begin to complain that they can hardly even understand their kids’ language. Nor are lyrics like “I can’t get no / Satisfaction” an accident or any kind of sad commentary on the British educational system. Jagger et al. aren’t stupid; they’re rhetoricians, and they know their audience. (back to text)

56 (The skirt-in-school scenario was not personal stuff, though, FYI.) (back to text)

57 There is a respectable body of English-Ed research to back up this claim, the best known being the Harris, Bateman-Zidonis, and Mellon studies of the 1960s. (back to text)

58 There are still some of them around, at least here in the Midwest. You know the type: lipless, tweedy, cancrine — old maids of both genders. If you ever had one (as I did, 1976–77), you surely remember him. (back to text)

59INTERPOLATIVE BUT RELEVANT, IF ONLY BECAUSE THE ERROR HERE IS ONE THAT GARNER’S ADMAU MANAGES NEVER ONCE TO MAKEThis kind of mistake results more from a habit of mind than from any particular false premise — it is a function not of fallacy or ignorance but of self-absorption. It also happens to be the most persistent and damaging error that most college writers make, and one so deeply rooted that it often takes several essays and conferences and revisions to get them to even see what the problem is. Helping them eliminate the error involves drumming into student writers two big injunctions: (1) Do not presume that the reader can read your mind — anything that you want the reader to visualize or consider or conclude, you must provide; (2) Do not presume that the reader feels the same way that you do about a given experience or issue — your argument cannot just assume as true the very things you’re trying to argue for. Because (1) and (2) seem so simple and obvious, it may surprise you to know that they are actually incredibly hard to get students to understand in such a way that the principles inform their writing. The reason for the difficulty is that, in the abstract, (1) and (2) are intellectual, whereas in practice they are more things of the spirit. The injunctions require of the student both the imagination to conceive of the reader as a separate human being and the empathy to realize that this separate person has preferences and confusions and beliefs of her own, p/c/b’s that are just as deserving of respectful consideration as the writer’s. More, (1) and (2) require of students the humility to distinguish between a universal truth (“This is the way things are, and only an idiot would disagree”) and something that the writer merely opines (“My reasons for recommending this are as follows:”). These sorts of requirements are, of course, also the elements of a Democratic Spirit. I therefore submit that the hoary cliché “Teaching the student to write is teaching the student to think” sells the enterprise way short. Thinking isn’t even half of it. (back to text)

60 (Or rather the arguments require us openly to acknowledge and talk about elitism, whereas a traditional dogmatic SNOOT’s pedagogy is merely elitism in action.) (back to text)

61 (I’m not a total idiot.) (back to text)

62ESPECIALLY GOOD EPIGRAPHS FOR THIS SECTION “Passive voice verbs, in particular, may deny female agency.”— DR. MARILYN SCHWARTZ AND THE TASK FORCE ON BIAS-FREE LANGUAGE OF THE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN UNIVERSITY PRESSES “He raised his voice suddenly, and shouted for dinner. Servants shouted back that it was ready. They meant that they wished it was ready, and were so understood, for nobody moved.”— E. M. FORSTER (back to text)

63 (A pithier way to put this is that politeness is not the same as fairness.) (back to text)

64 E.g., this is the reasoning behind Pop Prescriptivists’ complaint that shoddy usage signifies the Decline of Western Civilization. (back to text)

65A Dictionary of Modern American Usage includes a miniessay on vogue words, but it’s a disappointing one in which Garner does little more than list VWs that bug him and say that “vogue words have such a grip on the popular mind that they come to be used in contexts in which they serve little purpose.” This is one of the rare places in ADMAU where Garner is simply wrong. The real problem is that every sentence blends and balances at least two different communicative functions — one the transmission of raw info, the other the transmission of certain stuff about the speaker — and Vogue Usage throws this balance off. Garner’s “serve little purpose” is exactly incorrect: vogue words serve too much the purpose of presenting the speaker in a certain light (even if this is merely as with-it or hip), and people’s odd little subliminal BS-antennae pick this imbalance up, and that’s why even nonSNOOTs often find Vogue Usages irritating and creepy. It’s the same phenomenon as when somebody goes out of her way to be incredibly solicitous and complimentary and nice to you and after a while you begin to find her solicitude creepy: you are sensing that a disproportionately large part of this person’s agenda consists in trying to present herself as Nice. (back to text)

66 FYI, this snippet, which appears in ADMAU’s miniessay on obscurity, is quoted from a 1997 Sacramento Bee article entitled “No Contest: English Professors Are Worst Writers on Campus.” (back to text)

67 This was in his 1946 “Politics and the English Language,” an essay that despite its date (and the basic redundancy of its title) remains the definitive SNOOT statement on Academese. Orwell’s famous AE translation of the gorgeous “I saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift” part of Ecclesiastes as “Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account” should be tattooed on the left wrist of every grad student in the anglophone world. (back to text)

68 If you still think assertions like that are just SNOOT hyperbole, see also e.g. Dr. Fredric Jameson, author of The Geopolitical Aesthetic and The Prison-House of Language, whom The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism calls “one of the foremost contemporary Marxist literary critics writing in English.” Specifically, have a look at the first sentence of Dr. Jameson’s 1992 Signatures of the Visible — The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination; thinking about its attributes becomes an adjunct to that, if it is unwilling to betray its object; while the most austere films necessarily draw their energy from the attempt to repress their own excess (rather than from the thankless effort to discipline the viewer).

— in which not only is each of its three main independent clauses totally obscure and full of predicates without evident subjects and pronouns without clear antecedents, but whatever connection between those clauses justifies stringing them together into one long semicolonic sentence is anyone’s guess at all.

Please be advised (a) that the above sentence won 1997’s First Prize in the World’s Worst Writing Contest held annually at Canterbury University in New Zealand, a competition in which American academics regularly sweep the field, and (b) that F. Jameson was and is an extremely powerful and influential and oft-cited figure in US literary scholarship, which means (c) that if you have kids in college, there’s a good chance that they are being taught how to write by high-paid adults for whom the above sentence is a model of erudite English prose. (back to text)

69 Even in Freshman Comp, bad student essays are far, far more often the products of fear than of laziness or incompetence. In fact, it often takes so long to identify and help with students’ fear that the Freshman Comp teacher never gets to find out whether they might have other problems, too. (back to text)

70 (Notice the idiom’s syntax — it’s never “expresses his beliefs” or “expresses his ideas.”) (back to text)

71 (Please just don’t even say it.) (back to text)

72 (The student professed to have been especially traumatized by the climactic “I am going to make you,” which was indeed a rhetorical boner.) (back to text)

73 FYI, the dept. chair and dean did not, at the Complaint hearing, share her reaction… though it would be disingenuous not to tell you that they happened also to be PWMs, which fact was also remarked on by the complainant, such that the whole proceeding got pretty darn tense indeed, before it was over. (back to text)

74 To be honest, I noticed this omission only because midway through working on this article I happened to use the word trough in front of the same SNOOT friend who compares public English to violin-hammering, and he fell sideways out of his chair, and it emerged that I have somehow all my life misheard trough as ending with a th instead of an f and thus have publicly mispronounced it God only knows how many scores of times, and I all but burned rubber getting home to see whether perhaps the error was so common and human and understandable that ADMAU had a good-natured entry on it — but no such luck, which in fairness I don’t suppose I can really blame Garner for. (back to text)

75 (on zwieback vs. zweiback) (back to text)

76 It’s this logic (and perhaps this alone) that keeps protofascism or royalism or Maoism or any sort of really dire extremism from achieving mainstream legitimacy in US politics — how does one vote for No More Voting? (back to text)

77 (meaning literally Democratic — it Wants Your Vote) (back to text)

78 The last two words of this sentence, of course, are what the Usage Wars are all about — whose “language” and whose “well”? The most remarkable thing about the sentence is that coming from Garner it doesn’t sound naive or obnoxious but just… reasonable. (back to text)

79 (Did you think I was kidding?) (back to text)

8 °Cunning — what is in effect Garner’s blowing his own archival horn is cast as humble gratitude for the resources made available by modern technology. Plus notice also Garner’s implication here that he’s once again absorbed the sane parts of Descriptivism’s cast-a-wide-net method: “Thus, the prescriptive approach here is leavened by a thorough canvassing of actual usage in modern edited prose.” (back to text)

81 (Here, this reviewer’s indwelling and ever-vigilant SNOOT can’t help but question Garner’s deployment of a comma before the conjunction in this sentence, since what follows the conjunction is neither an independent clause nor any sort of plausible complement for “strive to.” But respectful disagreement between people of goodwill is of course Democratically natural and healthy and, when you come right down to it, kind of fun.) (back to text)

144 * Plus: Selected other responses from various times during the day’s flag-hunt when circumstances permitted the question to be asked without one seeming like a smartass or loon:

“To show we’re Americans and we’re not going to bow down to nobody”;

“It’s a classic pseudo-archetype, a reflexive semion designed to preempt and negate the critical function” (grad student);

“For pride.”

“What they do is symbolize unity and that we’re all together behind the victims in this war and they’ve fucked with the wrong people this time, amigo.” (back to text)

145 * Pace some people’s impression, the native accent around here isn’t southern so much as just rural. The town’s corporate transplants, on the other hand, have no accent at all — in Mrs. Bracero’s phrase, State Farm people “sound like the folks on TV.” (back to text)

146 † People here are deeply, deeply into lawn-care; my own neighbors mow about as often as they shave. (back to text)

147 * Mrs. Thompson’s living room is prototypical working-class Bloomington, too: double-pane windows, white Sears curtains w/ valence, catalogue clock with a background of mallards, woodgrain magazine rack with CSM and Reader’s Digest, inset bookshelves used to display little collectible figurines and framed photos of relatives and their families. There are two knit samplers w/ the Desiderata and Prayer of St. Francis, antimacassars on every good chair, and wall-to-wall carpet so thick that you can’t see your feet (people take their shoes off at the door — it’s basic common courtesy). (back to text)

148 * AP reporter Michael Mewshaw’s Short Circuit (Atheneum, 1983) is just one example of national-press stuff about drugs on the tour. (back to text)

149 * Or listen again to her report of how winning her first US Open felt: “I immediately knew what I had done, which was to win the US Open, and I was thrilled.” This line haunts me; it’s like the whole letdown of the book boiled down into one dead bite. (back to text)

150 * Here I should point out that this RS editor, whose name was Mr. Tonelli, delivered the length-and-space verdict with sympathy and good humor, and that he was pretty much a mensch through the whole radically ablative editorial process that followed, which process was itself unusually rushed and stressful because right in the middle of it (the process) came Super Tuesday’s bloodbath, and McCain really did drop out — Mr. Tonelli was actually watching McCain’s announcement on his office TV while we were doing the first round of cuts on the telephone — and apparently Rolling Stone’s top brass’s fear of looking stupid came roaring back into their limbic system and they told poor Mr. Tonelli that the article had to be all of a sudden crammed into the very next issue of RS, even though that issue was scheduled to “close” and go to the printer in less than 48 hours, which, if you know anything about magazines’ normally interminable editing and fact-checking and copyediting and typesetting and proofreading and retype-setting and layout and printing processes, you’ll understand why Mr. Tonelli’s good humor through the whole thing was noteworthy. (back to text)

151 * In particular I never got to talk to Mr. Mike Murphy, who if you read the document you’ll understand why he’d be the one McCain staffer you’d just about give a nut to get three or four drinks into and then start probing. Despite sustained pestering and sleeve-tugging and pride-swallowing appeals to the Head Press Liaison for even just ten lousy minutes, though — and even after RS’s Mr. Tonelli himself called McCain2000 HQ in Virginia to bitch and wheedle — Mike Murphy avoided this reporter to the point of actually starting to duck around corners whenever he saw me coming. The unending pursuit of this one interview (what eventually in my notebook got called “MurphyQuest 2000”) actually turned into one of the great personal subdramas of the week, and there’s a whole very lengthy and sordid story to tell here, including some embarrassing but probably in retrospect kind of funny attempts to corner the poor man in all sorts of awkward personal venues where I figured he’d have a hard time escaping… nevertheless the crux here is that Murphy’s total inaccessibility to yrs. truly was not, I finally realized, anything personal, but rather a simple function of my being from Rolling Stone, a (let’s face it) politically featherweight organ whose readership was clearly not part of any GOP demographic that was going to help Mike Murphy’s candidate in SC or MI or any of the other upcoming sink-or-swim primaries. In fact, because the magazine was a biweekly with a long lead time — the Lebanese-Australian lady from the Boston Globe (see document) pointed all this out to yrs. truly after we’d just watched Murphy more or less fake an epileptic seizure to get out of riding in an elevator with me — even a droolingly pro-McCain Rolling Stone article wouldn’t actually appear until after 7 March’s Super Tuesday, by which time, she predicted (correctly), the nomination battle would effectively be over. (back to text)

1 There’s a comprehensive native apothegm: “Camden by the sea, Rockland by the smell.” (back to text)

2 N.B. All personally connected parties have made it clear from the start that they do not want to be talked about in this article. (back to text)

3 Midcoasters’ native term for a lobster is, in fact, “bug,” as in “Come around on Sunday and we’ll cook up some bugs.” (back to text)

4 Factoid: Lobster traps are usually baited with dead herring. (back to text)

5 Of course, the common practice of dipping the lobster meat in melted butter torpedoes all these happy fat-specs, which none of the council’s promotional stuff ever mentions, any more than potato industry PR talks about sour cream and bacon bits. (back to text)

6 In truth, there’s a great deal to be said about the differences between working-class Rockland and the heavily populist flavor of its festival versus comfortable and elitist Camden with its expensive view and shops given entirely over to $200 sweaters and great rows of Victorian homes converted to upscale B&Bs. And about these differences as two sides of the great coin that is US tourism. Very little of which will be said here, except to amplify the above-mentioned paradox and to reveal your assigned correspondent’s own preferences. I confess that I have never understood why so many people’s idea of a fun vacation is to don flip-flops and sunglasses and crawl through maddening traffic to loud, hot, crowded tourist venues in order to sample a “local flavor” that is by definition ruined by the presence of tourists. This may (as my festival companions keep pointing out) all be a matter of personality and hardwired taste: the fact that I do not like tourist venues means that I’ll never understand their appeal and so am probably not the one to talk about it (the supposed appeal). But, since this FN will almost surely not survive magazine-editing anyway, here goes:

As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way — hostile to my fantasy of being a true individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing. (back to text)

7 Datum: In a good year, the US industry produces around 80,000,000 pounds of lobster, and Maine accounts for more than half that total. (back to text)

8 N.B. Similar reasoning underlies the practice of what’s termed “debeaking” broiler chickens and brood hens in modern factory farms. Maximum commercial efficiency requires that enormous poultry populations be confined in unnaturally close quarters, under which conditions many birds go crazy and peck one another to death. As a purely observational side-note, be apprised that debeaking is usually an automated process and that the chickens receive no anesthetic. It’s not clear to me whether most Gourmet readers know about debeaking, or about related practices like dehorning cattle in commercial feed lots, cropping swine’s tails in factory hog farms to keep psychotically bored neighbors from chewing them off, and so forth. It so happens that your assigned correspondent knew almost nothing about standard meat-industry operations before starting work on this article. (back to text)

9 The terminal used to be somebody’s house, for example, and the lost-luggage-reporting room was clearly once a pantry. (back to text)

10 It turned out that one Mr. William R. Rivas-Rivas, a high-ranking PETA official out of the group’s Virginia headquarters, was indeed there this year, albeit solo, working the festival’s main and side entrances on Saturday, 2 August, handing out pamphlets and adhesive stickers emblazoned with “Being Boiled Hurts,” which is the tagline in most of PETA’s published material about lobsters. I learned that he’d been there only later, when speaking with Mr. Rivas-Rivas on the phone. I’m not sure how we missed seeing him in situ at the festival, and I can’t see much to do except apologize for the oversight — although it’s also true that Saturday was the day of the big MLF parade through Rockland, which basic journalistic responsibility seemed to require going to (and which, with all due respect, meant that Saturday was maybe not the best day for PETA to work the Harbor Park grounds, especially if it was going to be just one person for one day, since a lot of diehard MLF partisans were off-site watching the parade (which, again with no offense intended, was in truth kind of cheesy and boring, consisting mostly of slow homemade floats and various midcoast people waving at one another, and with an extremely annoying man dressed as Blackbeard ranging up and down the length of the crowd saying “Arrr” over and over and brandishing a plastic sword at people, etc.; plus it rained)). (back to text)

11 By profession, Dick is actually a car salesman; the midcoast region’s National Car Rental franchise operates out of a Chevy dealership in Thomaston. (back to text)

12 The short version regarding why we were back at the airport after already arriving the previous night involves lost luggage and a miscommunication about where and what the midcoast’s National franchise was — Dick came out personally to the airport and got us, out of no evident motive but kindness. (He also talked nonstop the entire way, with a very distinctive speaking style that can be described only as manically laconic; the truth is that I now know more about this man than I do about some members of my own family.) (back to text)

13 To elaborate by way of example: The common experience of accidentally touching a hot stove and yanking your hand back before you’re even aware that anything’s going on is explained by the fact that many of the processes by which we detect and avoid painful stimuli do not involve the cortex. In the case of the hand and stove, the brain is bypassed altogether; all the important neurochemical action takes place in the spine. (back to text)

14 Morality-wise, let’s concede that this cuts both ways. Lobster-eating is at least not abetted by the system of corporate factory farms that produces most beef, pork, and chicken. Because, if nothing else, of the way they’re marketed and packaged for sale, we eat these latter meats without having to consider that they were once conscious, sentient creatures to whom horrible things were done. (N.B. “Horrible” here meaning really, really horrible. Write off to PETA or peta.org for their free “Meet Your Meat” video, narrated by Mr. Alec Baldwin, if you want to see just about everything meat-related you don’t want to see or think about. (N.B. _{Not that PETA’s any sort of font of unspun truth. Like many partisans in complex moral disputes, the PETA people are fanatics, and a lot of their rhetoric seems simplistic and self-righteous. But this particular video, replete with actual factory-farm and corporate-slaughterhouse footage, is both credible and traumatizing.))} (back to text)

15 Is it significant that “lobster,” “fish,” and “chicken” are our culture’s words for both the animal and the meat, whereas most mammals seem to require euphemisms like “beef” and “pork” that help us separate the meat we eat from the living creature the meat once was? Is this evidence that some kind of deep unease about eating higher animals is endemic enough to show up in English usage, but that the unease diminishes as we move out of the mammalian order? (And is “lamb”/“lamb” the counterexample that sinks the whole theory, or are there special, biblico-historical reasons for that equivalence?) (back to text)

16 There’s a relevant populist myth about the high-pitched whistling sound that sometimes issues from a pot of boiling lobster. The sound is really vented steam from the layer of seawater between the lobster’s flesh and its carapace (this is why shedders whistle more than hard-shells), but the pop version has it that the sound is the lobster’s rabbit-like death-scream. Lobsters communicate via pheromones in their urine and don’t have anything close to the vocal equipment for screaming, but the myth’s very persistent — which might, once again, point to a low-level cultural unease about the boiling thing. (back to text)

17 “Interests” basically means strong and legitimate preferences, which obviously require some degree of consciousness, responsiveness to stimuli, etc. See, for instance, the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, whose 1974 Animal Liberation is more or less the bible of the modern animal-rights movement: It would be nonsense to say that it was not in the interests of a stone to be kicked along the road by a schoolboy. A stone does not have interests because it cannot suffer. Nothing that we can do to it could possibly make any difference to its welfare. A mouse, on the other hand, does have an interest in not being kicked along the road, because it will suffer if it is. (back to text)

18 This is the neurological term for special pain-receptors that are “sensitive to potentially damaging extremes of temperature, to mechanical forces, and to chemical substances which are released when body tissues are damaged.” (back to text)

19 “Preference” is maybe roughly synonymous with “interests,” but it is a better term for our purposes because it’s less abstractly philosophical — “preference” seems more personal, and it’s the whole idea of a living creature’s personal experience that’s at issue. (back to text)

20 Of course, the most common sort of counterargument here would begin by objecting that “like best” is really just a metaphor, and a misleadingly anthropomorphic one at that. The counterarguer would posit that the lobster seeks to maintain a certain optimal ambient temperature out of nothing but unconscious instinct (with a similar explanation for the low-light affinities upcoming in the main text). The thrust of such a counterargument will be that the lobster’s thrashings and clankings in the kettle express not unpreferred pain but involuntary reflexes, like your leg shooting out when the doctor hits your knee. Be advised that there are professional scientists, including many researchers who use animals in experiments, who hold to the view that nonhuman creatures have no real feelings at all, merely “behaviors.” Be further advised that this view has a long history that goes all the way back to Descartes, although its modern support comes mostly from behaviorist psychology.

To these what-looks-like-pain-is-really-just-reflexes counterarguments, however, there happen to be all sorts of scientific and pro — animal rights counter-counterarguments. And then further attempted rebuttals and redirects, and so on. Suffice it to say that both the scientific and the philosophical arguments on either side of the animal-suffering issue are involved, abstruse, technical, often informed by self-interest or ideology, and in the end so totally inconclusive that as a practical matter, in the kitchen or restaurant, it all still seems to come down to individual conscience, going with (no pun) your gut. (back to text)

21 Meaning a lot less important, apparently, since the moral comparison here is not the value of one human’s life vs. the value of one animal’s life, but rather the value of one animal’s life vs. the value of one human’s taste for a particular kind of protein. Even the most diehard carniphile will acknowledge that it’s possible to live and eat well without consuming animals. (back to text)

1 From “Can These Bones Live?” in The Edward Dahlberg Reader, New Directions, 1957. (back to text)

2 Of course, contemporary literary theory is all about showing that there’s no real distinction between these two ways to read — or rather it’s about showing that aesthetics can pretty much always be reduced to ideology. For me, one reason Frank’s overall project is so worthwhile is that it shows a whole different way to marry formal and ideological readings, an approach that isn’t nearly as abstruse and (sometimes) reductive and (all too often) joy-killing as literary theory. (back to text)

3 The amount of library time he must have put in would take the stuffing out of anybody, I’d imagine. (back to text)

4 Among the striking parallels with Shakespeare is the fact that FMD had four works of his “mature period” that are considered total masterpieces — Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons (a.k.a. The Demons, a.k.a. The Devils, a.k.a. The Possessed), and The Brothers Karamazov — all four of which involve murders and are (arguably) tragedies. (back to text)

5 Volume III, The Stir of Liberation, includes a very fine explicative reading of Notes, tracing the book’s genesis as a reply to the “rational egoism” made fashionable by N. G. Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? and identifying the Underground Man as basically a parodic caricature. Frank’s explanation for the widespread misreading of Notes (a lot of people don’t read the book as a conte philosophique, and they assume that Dostoevsky designed the Underground Man as a serious Hamlet-grade archetype) also helps explain why FMD’s more famous novels are often read and admired without any real appreciation of their ideological premises: “The parodistic function of [the Underground Man’s] character has always been obscured by the immense vitality of his artistic embodiment.” That is, in some ways Dostoevsky was too good for his own good. (back to text)

6 This last one Frank refers to as The Devils. One sign of the formidable problems in translating literary Russian is the fact that lots of FMD’s books have alternative English titles — the first version of Notes from Underground I ever read called itself Memoirs from a Dark Cellar. (back to text)

7 Never once in four volumes does Professor Frank mention the Intentional Fallacy7(a) or try to head off the objection that his biography commits it all over the place. In a way this silence is understandable, since the tone Frank maintains through all of his readings is one of maximum restraint and objectivity: he’s not about imposing any particular theory or method of decoding Dostoevsky, and he steers clear of fighting with critics who’ve chosen to apply their various axes’ edges to FMD’s work. When Frank does want to question or criticize a certain reading (as in occasional attacks on Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, or in a really brilliant response to Freud’s “Dostoevsky and Parricide” in the appendix to Volume I), he always does so simply by pointing out that the historical record and/or Dostoevsky’s own notes and letters contradict certain assumptions the critic has made. His argument is never that somebody else is wrong, just that they don’t have all the facts.

What’s also interesting here is that Joseph Frank came of age as a scholar at just the time when the New Criticism was becoming entrenched in the US academy, and the good old Intentional Fallacy is pretty much a cornerstone of New Criticism; and so, in Frank’s not merely rejecting or arguing against the IF but proceeding as if it didn’t even exist, it’s tempting to imagine all kinds of marvelous patricidal currents swirling around his project — Frank giving an enormous silent raspberry to his old teachers. But if we remember that New Criticism’s removal of the author from the interpretive equation did as much as anything to clear the way for poststructural literary theory (as in e.g. Deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Marxist/Feminist Cultural Studies, Foucaultian/ Greenblattian New Historicism, & c.), and that literary theory tends to do to the text itself what New Criticism had done to the author of the text, then it starts to look as if Joseph Frank is taking a sharp early turn away from theory7(b) and trying to compose a system of reading and interpretation so utterly different that it (i.e., Frank’s approach) seems a more telling assault on lit theory’s premises than any frontal attack could be.

^7(a) In case it’s been a long time since freshman lit, the Intentional Fallacy = “The judging of the meaning or success of a work of art by the author’s expressed or ostensible intention in producing it.” The IF and the Affective Fallacy (= “The judging of a work of art in terms of its results, especially its emotional effect”) are the big two prohibitions of objective-type textual criticism, especially the New Criticism.

^7(b) (said theory being our own age’s big radical-intellectual fad, rather as nihilism and rational egoism were for FMD’s Russia) (back to text)

8 It seems only fair to warn you, though, that Frank’s readings of the novels are extremely close and detailed, at times almost microscopically so, and that this can make for slow going. And also that Frank’s explications seem to require that his reader have Dostoevsky’s novels fresh in mind — you end up getting immeasurably more out of his discussions if you go back and actually reread whatever novel he’s talking about. It’s not clear that this is a defect, though, since part of the appeal of a literary bio is that it serves as a motive/occasion for just such rereading. (back to text)

9 That distinctive singular stamp of himself is one of the main reasons readers come to love an author. The way you can just tell, often within a couple paragraphs, that something is by Dickens, or Chekhov, or Woolf, or Salinger, or Coetzee, or Ozick. The quality’s almost impossible to describe or account for straight out — it mostly presents as a vibe, a kind of perfume of sensibility — and critics’ attempts to reduce it to questions of “style” are almost universally lame. (back to text)

10 One has only to spend a term trying to teach college literature to realize that the quickest way to kill an author’s vitality for potential readers is to present that author ahead of time as “great” or “classic.” Because then the author becomes for the students like medicine or vegetables, something the authorities have declared “good for them” that they “ought to like,” at which point the students’ nictitating membranes come down, and everyone just goes through the requisite motions of criticism and paper-writing without feeling one real or relevant thing. It’s like removing all oxygen from the room before trying to start a fire. (back to text)

11… especially in the Victorianish translations of Ms. Constance Garnett, who in the 1930s and ’40s cornered the Dostoevsky & Tolstoy — translation market, and whose 1935 rendering of The Idiot has stuff like (scanning almost at random):“Nastasya Filippovna!” General Epanchin articulated reproachfully.…“I am very glad I’ve met you here, Kolya,” said Myshkin to him. “Can’t you help me? I must be at Nastasya Filippovna’s. I asked Ardelion Alexandrovitch to take me there, but you see he is asleep. Will you take me there, for I don’t know the streets, nor the way?”…The phrase flattered and touched and greatly pleased General Ivolgin: he suddenly melted, instantly changed his tone, and went off into a long, enthusiastic explanation.…

And even in the acclaimed new Knopf translations by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the prose (in, e.g., Crime and Punishment) is still often odd and starchy:“Enough!” he said resolutely and solemnly. “Away with mirages, away with false fears, away with spectres!.. There is life! Was I not alive just now? My life hasn’t died with the old crone! May the Lord remember her in His kingdom and — enough, my dear, it’s time to go! Now is the kingdom of reason and light and… and will and strength… and now we shall see! Now we shall cross swords!” he added presumptuously, as if addressing some dark force and challenging it.

Umm, why not just “as if challenging some dark force”? Can you challenge a dark force without addressing it? Or is there in the original Russian something that keeps the above phrase from being redundant, stilted, just plain bad in the same way a sentence like “‘Come on!’ she said, addressing her companion and inviting her to accompany her” is bad? If so, why not acknowledge that in English it’s still bad and just go ahead and fix it? Are literary translators not supposed to mess with the original syntax at all? But Russian is an inflected language — it uses cases and declensions instead of word order — so translators are already messing with the syntax when they put Dostoevsky’s sentences into uninflected English. It’s hard to understand why these translations have to be so clunky. (back to text)

12 What on earth does it mean to “fly at” somebody? It happens dozens of times in every FMD novel. What, “fly at” them in order to beat them up? To yell at them? Why not say that, if you’re translating? (back to text)

13 Q.v. a random example from Pevear and Volkhonsky’s acclaimed new Knopf rendering of Notes from Underground:“Mr. Ferfichkin, tomorrow you will give me satisfaction for your present words!” I said loudly, pompously addressing Ferfichkin.

“You mean a duel, sir? At your pleasure,” the man answered. (back to text)

14 (… who was, like Faulkner’s Caddie, “doomed and knew it,” and whose heroism consists in her haughty defiance of a doom she also courts. FMD seems like the first fiction writer to understand how deeply some people love their own suffering, how they use it and depend on it. Nietzsche would take Dostoevsky’s insight and make it a cornerstone of his own devastating attack on Christianity, and this is ironic: in our own culture of “enlightened atheism” we are very much Nietzsche’s children, his ideological heirs, and without Dostoevsky there would have been no Nietzsche, and yet Dostoevsky is among the most profoundly religious of all writers.) (back to text)

15 Frank doesn’t sugar-coat any of this stuff, but from his bio we learn that Dostoevsky’s character was really more contradictory than prickish. Insufferably vain about his literary reputation, he was also tormented his whole life by what he saw as his artistic inadequacies; a leech and a spendthrift, he also voluntarily assumed financial responsibility for his stepson, for the nasty and ungrateful family of his deceased brother, and for the debts of Epoch, the famous literary journal that he and his brother had co-edited. Frank’s new Volume IV makes it clear that it was these honorable debts, rather than general deadbeatism, that sent Mr. and Mrs. FMD into exile in Europe to avoid debtors’ prison, and that it was only at the spas of Europe that Dostoevsky’s gambling mania went out of control. (back to text)

16 Sometimes this allergy is awkwardly striking, as in e.g. the start of part 2 of The Idiot, when Prince Myshkin (the protagonist) has left St. Petersburg for six full months in Moscow: “of Myshkin’s adventures during his absence from Petersburg we can give little information,” even though the narrator has access to all sorts of other events outside St. P. Frank doesn’t say much about FMD’s Muscophobia; it’s hard to figure what exactly it’s about. (back to text)

17 = Poor Folk, a standard-issue “social novel” that frames a (rather goopy) love story with depictions of urban poverty sufficiently ghastly to elicit the approval of the socialist Left. (back to text)

18 It is true that FMD’s epilepsy — including the mystical illuminations that attended some of his preseizure auras — gets comparatively little discussion in Frank’s bio; and reviewers like the London Times’s James L. Rice (himself the author of a book on Dostoevsky and epilepsy) have complained that Frank “gives no idea of the malady’s chronic impact” on Dostoevsky’s religious ideals and their representation in his novels. The question of proportion cuts both ways, though: q.v. the New York Times Book Review’s Jan Parker, who spends at least a third of his review of Frank’s Volume III making claims like “It seems to me that Dostoevsky’s behavior does conform fully to the diagnostic criteria for pathological gambling as set forth in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual.” As much as anything, reviews like these help us appreciate Joseph Frank’s own evenhanded breadth and lack of specific axes to grind. (back to text)

19 Let’s not neglect to observe that Frank’s Volume IV provides some good personal dirt. W/r/t Dostoevsky’s hatred of Europe, for example, we learn that his famous 1867 spat with Turgenev, which was ostensibly about Turgenev’s having offended Dostoevsky’s passionate nationalism by attacking Russia in print and then moving to Germany, was also fueled by the fact that FMD had previously borrowed fifty thalers from Turgenev and promised to pay him back right away and then never did. Frank is too restrained to make the obvious point: it’s much easier to live with stiffing somebody if you can work up a grievance against him. (back to text)

20 Another bonus: Frank’s volumes are replete with marvelous and/or funny tongue-rolling names — Snitkin, Dubolyobov, Strakhov, Golubov, von Voght, Katkov, Nekrasov, Pisarev. One can see why Russian writers like Gogol and FMD made a fine art of epithetic names. (back to text)

21 Random example from her journal: “‘Poor Feodor, he does suffer so much, and is always so irritable, and liable to fly out about trifles.… It’s of no consequence, because the other days are good, when he is so sweet and gentle. Besides, I can see that when he screams at me it is from illness, not from bad temper.’” Frank quotes and comments on long passages of this kind of stuff, but he shows little awareness that the Dostoevskys’ marriage was in certain ways quite sick, at least by 1990s standards — see e.g. “Anna’s forbearance, whatever prodigies of self-command it may have cost her, was amply compensated for (at least in her eyes) by Dostoevsky’s immense gratitude and growing sense of attachment.” (back to text)

22 Q.v. also, for instance, Dostoevsky’s disastrous passion for the bitch-goddess Appolinari Suslova, or the mental torsions he performed to justify his casino binges… or the fact, amply documented by Frank, that FMD really was an active part of the Petrashevsky Circle and as a matter of fact probably did deserve to be arrested under the laws of the time, this pace a lot of other biographers who’ve tried to claim that Dostoevsky just happened to be dragged by friends to the wrong radical meeting at the wrong time. (back to text)

23 In case it’s not obvious, “ideology” is being used here in its strict, unloaded sense to mean any organized, deeply held system of beliefs and values. Granted, by this sort of definition, Tolstoy and Hugo and Zola and most of the other nineteenth-century titans were also ideological writers. But the big thing about Dostoevsky’s gift for character and for rendering the deep conflicts within (not just between) people is that it enables him to dramatize extremely heavy, serious themes without ever being preachy or reductive, i.e., without ever blinking the difficulty of moral/spiritual conflicts or making “goodness” or “redemption” seem simpler than they really are. You need only compare the protagonists’ final conversions in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych and FMD’s Crime and Punishment in order to appreciate Dostoevsky’s ability to be moral without being moralistic. (back to text)

24 Here is another subject that Frank treats brilliantly, especially in Vol. III’s chapter on House of the Dead. Part of the reason FMD abandoned the fashionable socialism of his twenties was his years of imprisonment with the absolute dregs of Russian society. In Siberia, he came to understand that the peasants and urban poor of Russia actually loathed the comfortable upper-class intellectuals who wanted to “liberate” them, and that this loathing was in fact quite justified. (If you want to get some idea of how this Dostoevskyan political irony might translate into modern US culture, try reading House of the Dead and Tom Wolfe’s “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” at the same time.) (back to text)

25 The political situation is one reason why Bakhtin’s famous Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, published under Stalin, had to seriously downplay FMD’s ideological involvement with his own characters. A lot of Bakhtin’s praise for Dostoevsky’s “polyphonic” characterizations, and for the “dialogic imagination” that supposedly allowed him to refrain from injecting his own values into his novels, is the natural result of a Soviet critic’s trying to discuss an author whose “reactionary” views the State wanted forgotten. Frank, who takes out after Bakhtin at a number of points, doesn’t really make clear the constraints that Bakhtin was operating under. (back to text)

26 Not surprisingly, FMD’s exact beliefs are idiosyncratic and complicated, and Joseph Frank is thorough and clear and detailed in explaining their evolution through the novels’ thematics (as in, e.g., the toxic effects of egoistic atheism on the Russian character in Notes and C&P; the deformation of Russian passion by worldly Europe in The Gambler; and, in The Idiot’s Myshkin and The Brothers Karamazov’s Zossima, the implications of a human Christ subjected literally to nature’s physical forces, an idea central to all the fiction Dostoevsky wrote after seeing Holbein the Younger’s “Dead Christ” at the Basel Museum in 1867).

But what Frank has done really phenomenally well here is to distill the enormous amounts of archival material generated by and about FMD, making it comprehensive instead of just using selected bits of it to bolster a particular critical thesis. At one point, somewhere near the end of Vol. III, Frank even manages to find and gloss some obscure author-notes for “Socialism and Christianity,” an essay Dostoevsky never finished, that help clarify why he is treated by some critics as a forerunner of existentialism:“Christ’s incarnation… provided a new ideal for mankind, one that has retained its validity ever since. N.B. Not one atheist who has disputed the divine origin of Christ has denied the fact that He is the ideal of humanity. The latest on this — Renan. This is very remarkable.” And the law of this new ideal, according to Dostoevsky, consists of “the return to spontaneity, to the masses, but freely.… Not forcibly, but on the contrary, in the highest degree willfully and consciously. It is clear that this higher willfulness is at the same time a higher renunciation of the will.” (back to text)

27 The mature, postconversion Dostoevsky’s particular foes were the Nihilists, the radical progeny of the 1840s’ yuppie socialists, whose name (i.e., the Nihilists’ name) comes from the same all-negating speech in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons that got quoted at the outset. But the real battle was wider, and much deeper. It is no accident that Joseph Frank’s big epigraph for Vol. IV is from Kolakowski’s classic Modernity on Endless Trial, for Dostoevsky’s abandonment of utilitarian socialism for an idiosyncratic moral conservatism can be seen in the same basic light as Kant’s awakening from “dogmatic slumber” into a radical Pietist deontology nearly a century earlier: “By turning against the popular utilitarianism of the Enlightenment, [Kant] also knew exactly that what was at stake was not any particular moral code, but rather a question of the existence or nonexistence of the distinction between good and evil and, consequently, a question of the fate of mankind.” (back to text)

28 (maybe under our own type of Nihilist spell) (back to text)

29 (whatever exactly that is) (back to text)

30 (which, given this review’s venue, means basically us) (back to text)

31 We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies — but this is very different. (back to text)

* N.B. Of those friends and intimates of your correspondents who happen to dislike porn, a large majority of them report disliking it not so much for moral or religious or political reasons but because they find it boring, and a lot of them seem to use robotic/mechanical/industrial metaphors to try to characterize the boredom, e.g.: “[Hard-core sex is usually] just organs going in and out of other organs, in and out, like watching an oil rig go up and down all day.” (back to text)

* N.B. here in advance that Mr. Rob Black will win Best Director/Video at Saturday night’s Awards gala. (back to text)

† (Max’s response to this crew member’s analysis, accompanied by a thumbs-up: “God bless America, kid.”) (back to text)

* [= a PEN American Center event concerning a big new translation of The Castle by a man from I think Princeton. In case it’s not obvious, that’s what this whole document is — the text of a very quick speech.] (back to text)

* (Do you think it’s a coincidence that college is when many Americans do their most serious fucking and falling-down drinking and generally ecstatic Dionysian-type reveling? It’s not. College students are adolescents, and they’re terrified, and they’re dealing with their terror in a distinctively US way. Those naked boys hanging upside-down out of their frat house’s windows on Friday night are simply trying to buy a few hours’ escape from the grim adult stuff that any decent school has forced them to think about all week.) (back to text)

* (Since this’ll almost surely get cut, I’ll admit that, yes, I, as a kid, was in fact the author of this song. But by this time I’d been thoroughly brainwashed. It was sort of our family’s version of “100 Bottles… Wall.” My mother was the one responsible for the “wid’ning gyre” line in the refrain, which after much debate was finally substituted for a supposedly “forced” rhyme for fire in my own original lyrics — and again, years later, when I actually understood the apocalyptic thrust of that Yeats line I was, retrospectively, a bit chilled.) (back to text)

* (In case it’s not totally obvious, be advised that this article is using the word rhetoric in its strict traditional sense, something like “the persuasive use of language to influence the thoughts and actions of an audience.”) (back to text)

* (Sic— should obviously be “eagerly awaited.” Nemo mortalium omnibus horis sapit.) (back to text)

* (Your SNOOT reviewer cannot help observing, w/r/t this ad, that the opening r in its Refer shouldn’t be capitalized after a dependent clause + ellipsis. Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus.) (back to text)

* Because The Investigations’ prose is extremely gnomic and opaque and consists largely of Wittgenstein having weird little imaginary dialogues with himself, the quotations here are actually from Norman Malcolm’s definitive paraphrase of L.W.’s argument, in which paraphrase Dr. Malcolm uses single quotation marks for tone quotes and double quotation marks for when he’s actually quoting Wittgenstein — which, when I myself am quoting Malcolm quoting Wittgenstein’s tone quotes, makes for a rather irksome surfeit of quotation marks, admittedly; but using Malcolm’s exegesis allows this interpolative demonstration to be about 60 percent shorter than it would be if we were to grapple with Wittgenstein directly. (back to text)

* There’s a whole argument for this, but intuitively you can see that it makes sense: if the rules can’t be subjective, and if they’re not actually “out there” floating around in some kind of metaphysical hyperreality (a floating hyperreality that you can believe in if you wish, but you should know that people with beliefs like this usually get forced to take medication), then community consensus is really the only plausible option left. (back to text)

*(The above, while true, is an obvious attempt to preempt readerly sneers/winces at the term’s continued deployment in this article.)(back to text)

* (Plus, because the teacher-Them are tall humorless punishers/rewarders, they come to stand for all adults and — in a shadowy, inchoate way — for the Parents, whose gradual shift from composing Us to defining Them is probably the biggest ideological adjustment of childhood.) (back to text)

* (That is, the teacher-/parent-Them becomes the Establishment, Society — Them becomes THEM.)(back to text)