Masculinity is Not a Mass Product

There’s been a good long line over the last several years of people clamoring for more literature about men, by men. Many have noticed that publishing is managed primarily by safetyist women, that men are pursuing college study and especially the humanities at drastically decreasing rates, so on and so forth. There are many reasons why men feel less inclined toward writing novels of this sort, but in my capacity as a man who loves literature, I think the most salient question is this: why would they?

If you’re dying for stories written by men that explore their internal lives, there is a long and diverse history of people writing exactly that. Looking for fiction that explores how boys make men of themselves and find their place as masculine adults? Go read Dickens! Interested in how men approach and find allure in women? Read Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Steinbeck, Henry James, or a million others. Are you curious about the experience of disaffected young men who go down an anti-social rabbit hole of solipsistic pseudo-philosophy and come out the other side as dangerous misanthropes? Try Crime and Punishment !

Perhaps you are interested in a novel written from the perspective of a man with some kind of trauma or other social disenfranchisement that causes him to feel alienated, distant, and emasculated in every social situation. Perhaps this man feels aimless and without meaningful pursuits, which is constantly reaffirmed by his total inability to secure the affections of the women in his milieu; and yet despite all of this, he consistently labors to make himself seen and heard both interpersonally and through his writing. You could absolutely trawl through the self-publication platforms and search for a diamond in the rough. You could send out a call from Esquire magazine and whichever other places asking men to reveal their innermost selves to you on the page.

You could also just pick up a copy of The Sun Also Rises.

But wait, you’re saying, all of those books are old and dusty! Raskolnikov was no incel - he never logs in to Reddit or posts a slur in a journalist’s Twitter replies! Oliver Twist may have been taken under the wing of an exploitative scumbag with a dysgenic program for male adulthood, but he never had the TikTok algorithm force-feed him Andrew Tate slop like the kids today! These are very different things! The experience of masculinity now is radically different from how it was a hundred years ago!

If this is your response, then I’d like to gently suggest that you’re not actually interested in how men move through the world and maintain their internal lives. Maybe what you’re looking for are actually stories about men using Instagram. Which is okay! For better or worse, systems like social media are now part and parcel to the western world. However, it does bring up the question of why My Twisted World, the memoir-manifesto of UC Santa Barbara shooter Elliot Rodger, is not as popular as Industrial Society and its Future, despite dealing with topics like sexuality and intimacy, which are traditionally more interesting to women than political theory and industrial history. (If this claim bothers you, consider whether the bestseller list is more likely to contain romance novels or sober military histories, and then recall that the vast majority of people who buy books are women). Perhaps it’s because Kaczynski was broadly successful in his campaign to terrorize the people he saw as his enemies, as well as having achieved impressive credentials in academia. In contrast, Rodger was a consummate loser in essentially every metric available, and that fundamental fecklessness is inexcusably revolting in a man, no matter how precisely his writing aligns with what is being asked after in these calls for litfic about men’s internal lives.

Anyway, there is clearly more to be said about who men are and what their lives are like in our brave new world. If Shakespeare had determined that Homer adequately covered man’s inclination to make devastating war in service of self-aggrandizement, or how singular fixations on legacy and legend can be the downfall of great men and societies, then he wouldn’t have given us Macbeth or probably several of his other masterpieces.

The point here is not to make some hack claim that all the ideas have already been had, every piece already written. There are of course a number of factors which distinguish the circumstances of the contemporary man from those of his predecessors, and those of us inclined toward art are, as ever, called to express those circumstances and the men and women that inhabit them.

The question is what we can say about contemporary men’s internal lives, or ‘interiority’ if you like, and why it seems to have vanished from popular literature. Andrew Boryga makes the excellent point that this is primarily because men’s internal thoughts have not been popular among opinion merchants in general lately. Again, if you doubt this, I encourage you to compare how much literature markets itself as written by men compared to that written by women. Boryga attributes this largely to a tendency of men to express themselves in ways that agitate women’s sensibilities, which becomes untenable when women are hegemonic in publishing. Even the c-suite has become primarily populate by women, but more important is this: the functionaries that read and edit submissions or sign advance checks (and therefore embody the actual activity of publishing) are overwhelmingly women, as are the outsiders aggregating reviews on Goodreads or booktok/tube that generate an actual readership, which is itself also almost entirely women.

For a book to be popular in this climate, it must, by definition, be saying something that women want to hear, which is very rarely how normal straight men think or speak on their own terms.

If you’re reading this as a straight man, consider how long it’s been since you last spoke completely freely and naturally, without any kind of careful self-adjustment or softening of language, in the company of women. For that matter, I wonder how often women feel they can speak freely in the company of men. This isn’t purely a matter of political ends, though that is a factor; rather I think the political differences that are now so common between the sexes are downstream of a general gap that has been widening between us for a long time.

Few aspects of our society have been so frequently demolished and rebuilt in recent history as the relationship between men and women. Which sex is suited to which stations in society; how they ought to conduct themselves around each other in private or in public; whether one or the other should have primacy in certain domains; whether the categories exist at all or if there might be more than those two; what reparations, if any, are due for past grievances. We barely agree on the terms of one question before stacking another on top of it, over and over for generations, and then we wonder how it is that we’ve grown so distant and alien to each other.

These questions do have answers, and these problems do have resolutions. I don’t claim special insight on any of them, and I also don’t think any of them have to be settled before we see the return of men’s personal writing to the fold of popular literature. But I do think it’s silly to ask us to be honest and direct when you’ve given every impression that you neither understand nor appreciate it when we do so.

towards a normal masculinity

subtitle pending

I’m sick and tired of being told what men ought or ought not to do. I’ve recently been curious about the very occasional posts I encounter on Substack that call for more men’s media, more positive / affirmative writing about men that is written by men. An article interrogating the decline of the male novelist; an article seeking personal essays; articles discussing a general absence of men from literary culture altogether; on and on. This of course happens concurrently with morons autistically muttering “sigma, gamma, alpha, sigma” over and over or aspirational pimp-fluencers masturbating into your computer monitor and calling it insight. Still more people are offering their two cents on the male loneliness and mental health problems, the apparent wayward directionlessness of young men today, obsessively diagnosing and prescribing cures for the nature of men’s existence ad infinitum until we behave in the way best suited to some kind of purpose that is most decidedly not our own.

I was animated to write on this topic not because I have my own program for masculinity (though I suppose I do live one out) but because this simpering geek responded to a high-potential but played-out conceit (there’s a hunger for authentically masculine perspectives in the culture) and nosedived it into precisely the same crash site as everybody else who has written on this topic.

In case it isn’t obvious, let me name the mistake these people make: you keep trying to get me to explore your preferred vision of men as if it were my own. Perhaps men writ large don’t claim any of the alternatingly sterile or tard-raging scribblings that constitute men’s media nowadays because they don’t identify with it.

Look at the linked article above. It starts out reasonably enough, expressing interest in men’s accounts of their attempts at sex and romance. What follows is the same constant barrage of prescriptive assaults on masculinity that we have all experienced every day of our lives for the last few decades. You must tell us about your feelings, men. It’s okay to tell us what you feel - in fact, it’s better and more manly if you front your emotions. ““Real Men Don’t Talk About Their Feelings, says Evil Chauvinist ‘Traditional Masculinity’ Bogeyman” is the same headline about men and the problems with our behavior that I have never stopped hearing, ever, and probably never will, from every direction simultaneously.

It really gets under my skin. It’s so close to doing something useful and appears sincere and truly curious. The author of that post goes on to claim that one of the best things he has ever read on the topic of masculinity is a twitter thread making the assertion that men are unnecessary for the teaching and development of good men, that ‘traditionally masculine’ people are “not as happy as they think they are”, that men should not consider how they might adjust to changes in how they relate to women economically and culturally. this is all so unbelievably, obviously incorrect that i almost can’t believe a man wrote it and another man described it in the superlative.

The end of the article is a call for men to share their perspectives, but only as it might make others feel heard and seen. This isn’t an interest of men specifically, it’s an interest of people who are pathologically fixated on men’s feelings to the point of fetishization. You can just picture the heavy breathing and accelerated heartbeat that these people must display when a man affects emotional sensitivity. It’s why these essays and articles can never, ever ask for men’s perspectives without explaining what specifically that perspective ought to be. These people don’t want to hear about men’s beliefs, they want to hear their own beliefs repeated back to them by men. Remember this bit from 30 Rock?

so what should men be writing?

I don’t know. To the extent that we ‘should’ be writing anything, most of us probably don’t know either. I guarantee you if men had things to say, they would be doing so frequently. It might be best to let us come to you.

I wonder if women get their morning coffee and think on how being a woman makes them feel. Ladies, when you’re waiting for your work computer to boot up, do you meditate on what femininity means to you? Does your soul cry out for an outlet to plumb the depths of how your ovaries have colored your soul, publicly and without holding anything back? Because the answer to the male-targeted versions of these questions is almost always going to be “get away from me you sicko.”

personal essays

I only took one creative writing class in undergrad, which was called Creative Non-Fiction. It sounded ridiculous, a contradiction in terms, but in retrospect this is perfectly appropriate for the product of a cultural era defined by polarity and oppositionalism. It turned out that this species of writing referred to what I read the most of and aspired to professionally write myself: memoirs, opinion pieces, cultural commentary, et cetera.

The class was fine. I enjoyed the readings and some of my classmates’ work, but as with all workshop environments, the most important part was field testing my own writing before a captive audience. This quickly became my least favorite part of the course.

Just a few weeks into the workshop, I found myself reading aloud from a piece describing my relationship with my brother in the time leading up to his death. We’d been assigned to compose a short memoir, and in my total creative poverty, I struggled to think of anything compelling to write about myself. I eventually settled where I did because the deadline was looming and I knew the content of such a narrative would imply profundity and weight regardless of the actual quality of the writing. So I found myself running through the greatest loss I’ve ever experienced by way of precious little turns of phrase designed to impress strangers. My shame and embarrassment were sharp and immediate. Yes, I was guilty of vulgar commodification of my brother’s memory, but above all I was ashamed of revealing some of the essential truth of myself so incautiously.

Vulnerability is a porousness of our psychic borders - a permeability of the boundaries that prevent others from directing our behavior and emotions. To be vulnerable is to take a risk that someone may do harm within our domain, yes, but it is also a risk that something from within may venture outward and be lost or harmed. Each of us has very little that is as precious as ourselves, so we are jealous guards of what animates and moves us. To be cavalier with our private thoughts is to diminish them; time and repitition grind even the most devout adoration into dusty indifference.

why am i so mad about it

It’s possible that it really was the tweets linked in that article that set me off, especially when paired with the reference to the moronic survey data claiming that 44% of the men responding think “society says Real Men don’t talk about their feelings”. I guess we can try to suspend our disbelief to the maximum and not immediately discount that statement as laughable nonsense, but I don’t think I’ll succeed. Whatever could possibly be meant by ‘society’ in this context, it is definitely going to include cultural and political opinion as distributed by media. Which means these survey respondents apparently believe that journalists, politicians, celebrities, television writers, academics, and so forth are claiming that men should keep a stiff upper lip and do their best Gary Cooper, and that none of these people are asking men to be sensitive. If they believe themselves, then I can only marvel at the sublime cognitive incompetence of these men. Perhaps when they read “society” they performed some kind of esoteric linguistic alchemy and substituted “Andrew Tate et al., and literally zero other people of any cultural import whatsoever”, which caused them to arrive at this bizarre conclusion that Society wants men to keep their feelings in despite every single dominant form of cultural production loudly and constantly agitating in the opposite direction.

One of the great blessings of social science is that even when it is totally and obviously wrong in every single one of its claims and conclusions, it can often still be useful as a conversation starter. Regardless of their intellectual capabilities, this survey did reveal that nearly half of those men believe their emotional expression is repressed by a culture that denegrates male sensitivity. We can still wonder how and why they feel that way and try to account for it.

One possible answer is that they may have actually heard and felt this pressure in their private lives, no matter what the telly or their twitter follows have to say. I’d be inclined to give this some weight if the last twenty years had not made it obvious that media-inspired hysteria frequently overrides tangible reality as a basis of belief formation. Regardless of whether you bleed red or blue, you will uncritically accept that the other team votes against their obvious self-interest and does so because they have some false consciousness or are being duped or otherwise brainwashed by predatory ideology. It shouldn’t be controversial to say that the same mechanism applies as a cause of behaviors other than the ones you personally wish to discredit, so we can say with some confidence that it’s at least as likely the survey respondents have been misled into believing they are emotionally repressed by society as it is that they genuinely are experiencing such repression.

I think the far more likely explanation is that this bankrupt hedge-stoicism that says “real men don’t talk about their feelings” really is foundational to how we understand masculinity today; the mistake is in naming it a virtue rather than a vice. Like a postmodern Kronos, it has pride of place in our creation myths as the Great Enemy that is defied and replaced by the superior ideals of the new age. Men today know instinctively that the image of men as emotionless and taciturn is crucial to their understanding of what kind of thing they are; they simply mistake the presence of this image for its endorsement. This is what enables the male feminist (for example) to describe our culture as a patriarchy that punishes vulnerability and quashes sensitivity, and then be showered with praise from every direction for saying so. His manhood is an eternal striving to divorce masculinity from its shadow.

Lying About Your Politics for Fun and Profit

A Guide to Cultural Non-Aggression

I was recently invited to a friend’s birthday party where several of her other friends were in attendance. These were primarily people I had only heard of in passing (if at all) from stories the hostess told, such that the only people in the room I’d ever had a conversation with were the hostess herself and the two people who accompanied me to the party.

We had a lovely evening, complete with meat and cheese, booze, a cake with words written on it in frosting, and informal socializing. I don’t meet new people very often, so this was a rare pleasure for me, especially because I found everyone I met to be interesting and their company enjoyable. I found there was much that we shared in addition to our mutual friend and would be happy to invite any and all of them into my home or to cook them a meal.

I also found on at least one occasion that our views on certain issues are what I would until recently have called irreconcilably different. God forgive me, but I regularly use the internet, which means I encounter people saying preposterous or objectionable things daily. Fortunately, I am not a partisan or an activist, so I don’t experience a pathological compulsion to immediately attempt to either convert or destroy everyone who expresses politics that differ from my own. Still, I have learned through painful experience that the bloviating maximalist oppositionalism of professional pundits has trickled down enough to convince otherwise pleasant, normal people that the only distinction between their neighbor and an existential enemy is which posts they upvote.

The revelation of the gulf between their politics and mine was troubling for a few reasons. Obviously when you meet charming and insightful people, you want them to agree with you about things, but even more concerning was the realization that I might not be allowed to continue meeting them amicably. To express my earnest views would be interpreted as a declaration of myself as an enemy, which I did not want to do. I do not believe I could have converted them and I did not wish to try; they have a right to their views, and, more the point, I didn’t want to change our easy discourse into a challenging conflict of values or policy.

So when this person mentioned in passing their political conviction, and it was my turn to reply, I was well aware of what was at stake. To respond with my own opposed view would immediately set us at odds and inspire enmity in a relationship that was heretofore quite friendly, and would probably ripple out in ways that would negatively impact my relationship with the other people I had met there, including my old friend the hostess. All this would be balanced against the paltry benefit of arguing a point. I therefore determined honesty to be countereffective to our best enjoyment of the evening and each other’s company.

This is all well and good, but it left me in a position where I still had to say something; a conspicuous aversion to the topic would be noticed and quite possibly lead my audience to suspect me of the very thing I was trying to conceal, which would defeat the purpose of the whole endeavor. My only recourse was to lie through my teeth and express a warm affirmation of what they believed. Now I know any audience to this idea will have reservations. One of the few things most everyone can agree on is the virtue of honesty and the sin of dishonesty. Surely a person of conviction and character would rather rise or fall with sincerity than persist in malign cynicism; death before dishonor and all that. This is righteous and admirable for heroes receiving their call to adventure or denying the temptations of a villain, but for a young man making a friend in trying social times, perhaps a staunch moralist perspective is less valent than a fluid pragmatic one. I certainly doubt any meaningful good would have come from sticking to my guns; all that I stood to gain was censure and exile from a social group in which my membership was mutually enjoyable.

Some might argue that this is actually harmful to both of us; that my persistence in relationships where I feel unable to speak freely on the issues of the day can only lead to consternation and increasingly compromising concessions of my values in the future. Better to respectfully part ways and continue seeking Our People. You might even argue that this is a disservice to the other party, as they are working under a misapprehension that I am one kind of person while I am secretly the opposite kind, and that I have no right to subvert their freedom to be discerning in their relationships and weigh political values for themselves. What I ask you to consider is whether it truly matters, in any material sense, whether I agree with them about political issues or not. To my knowledge, nobody involved in this party has the right to propose or enforce legislation and does not occupy a station with any meaningful political influence over other human beings. This means that the significance of our political views extends only as far as our votes, a value whose calculation I leave as an exercise for the reader. I found the actual telling of the lie easy enough; it is not difficult to learn the talking points of your political rivals, after all. So I spoke, the conversation naturally drifted into less troublesome places, and it was over.

An analytical reader might identify in this perspective something reminiscent of an obsolete mode of socialization, the sort of bipartisan idealism that can only be remembered mockingly by residents of current year. I wish to dissuade you of this opinion. I remain as committed to my beliefs as anyone this side of the hysterical fervor commonplace in political agitators and their thralls. I read opinion and advocacy that confirms my convictions and I disparage the arguments of my political rivals in my private life. Those closest to me know my views and know I do not brook evil or harm as I see it. This can remain true even as I discard my politics in my extroversive conduct.

What I’m describing is not a nihilist or amoral abdication of belief. Nor is it a program for predatory subversion of your friendships with intent toward sabotage or some other nefarious end. I’m merely advocating for the same courtesy you hopefully extend to your mother over the phone or your uncle at Thanksgiving; the maintenance of your real relationships and the experience of a eusocial bond with your fellows is drastically more important to your continuing experience of love and security than any ideological program. Perhaps political or para-political motivations have been useful in finding your crowd and experiencing kinship, perhaps not. My experience and that of most people who talk about such things online is that, where politics are concerned, harmony is the rarer fruit than strife; and so I advance a theory of personal politics that suborns it to your best living, which is supposed to be the point anyway.

what is a writer anyway

when i was a kid and teachers asked me what i wanted to be when i grew up, i used to say i wanted to be an author. i mean, i also said a cop and an astronaut and a farmer and a fireman and all sorts of other things, but i usually said i wanted to be an author.

when i was a teenager, my guidance counselor asked me what i wanted to get a degree in. not really knowing how to politely say “i don’t want a degree, i want a house and fulfilling hobbies”, or else “i would prefer if my wife was the breadwinner”, i briefly reflected on which classes i had found enjoyment in, if any, and recalled that i felt the best about my work when i was getting an essay grade back. those classes had been history classes where we talked about changing political systems and about philosophy more broadly. my parents had not so subtlely pushed me towards thinking about law school a few weeks prior, so i figured political science would be a good way to combine those things. at the very least i should learn something marketable.

next came the issue of actually picking out a university to attend. my parents spent a lot of money and energy on putting me in the schools where i had the best opportunities available, and i had always done well enough to make them not regret it. now, at the ripe old age of 16, it was dawning on me in real terms that i actually had to do some legwork to advance my life. so i filled out a not-quite form-fillable application and sent it to a few schools i had briefly googled, and they seemed alright enough anyway. they were names i had heard before at least. i was told it was also important to think about what schools would be a “good fit”, somewhere i actually wanted to be, not just the name at the top of my eventual degree. frankly, i couldn’t be bothered. i was 16. all my energy was devoted to keeping my gpa afloat, playing league of legends, and stewing about being a virgin - all things i could accomplish anywhere.

one college i was looking at offered me the option to take a year off and start with them the following fall. i was intrigued, but couldn’t be bothered with doing the research on what a gap year would really entail in my case. fortunately the choice was taken away from me when an end-of-year speech from one of my teachers somehow moved me enough to make me sure that i wanted to be in a classroom and do great things. so i decided to take the straight and narrow instead.

the path of least resistance took its course and i landed in my 100 level classes. i was shocked to discover that political science is a university code word for bureaucrat training. this is perhaps my fault - i had done as little research as was physically possible before committing to this path - but it still felt like a betrayal. or false advertising. whichever. what writing was available to me was mostly in the form of short responses to questions for which we had already been given the answers in lecture. what specific kind of game theory model is this? how come this amendment is written this way? what is the tragedy of the commons? in a shakespeare class i took for a gened requirement, i was able to write essays, such that they were. for the third or fourth time in my academic life, i was confronted with such thought provoking questions as “isn’t hamlet’s life fucked up?” and “do you think it’s racist for iago to be mean to othello?” once again, following the trend from high school, the absolute best any of us could even theoretically do was present a mechanically sound and generally comprehensible rehashing of the same essays the professor read every semester. nothing new was created, even if we were good at writing essays. most of us were not.

the problem was that this work was ostensibly what i should have wanted to be doing, even though it obviously wasn’t. i wanted to write something new. i wanted to learn something new. the university is supposed to be the place where you specialize, learn, and above all, create. what i had in mind was maybe learning a thing or two, reading a book i hadn’t read before for example, and then using the content to go on and do my thing. instead i found myself in “high school 2: now it’s expensive”.

over time, the gap between what i was doing and what i wanted to be doing grew more and more impossible to span psychologically, even with the assistance of psychoactive drugs and a constant stream of social functions. the problem of course was that i didn’t really know what i wanted to do instead. my major choice, and really university as a whole, was already a compromise from my adolescence. the only thing i could think of was how offensive my coursework felt. here were courses i was taking because they constituted a writing requirement, but the only writing i did was the humanities equivalent of taking the derivative of a function x. it was a set of benchmarks installed to ensure i wasn’t too much of a slack-jawed dunce to make the business i attended too embarrassed to continue taking my money. there was no creation, no expression, no revelation or discussion in it. just rote memorization of the bare minimum necessary skills to show the person reading my writing that i was an adult with an accordingly appropriate command of the english language.

the options for escaping this were meager. i could pivot to creative writing, put up with even more laughable standards of quality, and run the risk of not immediately being recognized as the next great novelist of our age. the other option was full-on english, which is in many ways doomed to be more of the same memorization and regurgitation. this was no clearer than when considering career paths, where getting enough inconsequential accolades to eventually replace my teachers seemed like the most likely endpoint.

i did, of course, wind up taking the second option anyway, and it has actually improved my relationship with school, but i think it’s mostly because in the interim, i’ve discovered what i actually want to do, and how little it rubs shoulders with anything resembling a legitimate institution.

when i was a kid i wanted to be an author. that’s still true, except i’m not brave or confident enough to commit to a whole book. i’d much rather write something here or there when i can. the trick is to convince someone with lots of money to give me some in return for the writing that i do. obviously everybody would like that job; i’m sure even people who don’t have an interest in writing would love to make a decent living for putting out a couple thousand words one or two times a month. so it’s not so simple as realizing you’d like to be a columnist or a commentator or whatever it is. most people who have those kinds of gigs don’t really call themselves anything but writers anyway. the important thing for them is that they write in some generative capacity, and that they’re good enough at it to get by.

this is what being a writer is, i think. it’s basically a hobby, only unlike being into model trains or skiing, calling yourself a writer puts you in the same category as people like hemingway and newton and dostoevsky and plato. it also doesn’t really mean anything in particular. if you tell someone you’re a salesman, it means you sell things. it could be any product, and you could have any clientele, but the function and format are largely the same. if you say that you’re a writer, it could mean almost anything. nyt editors are writers, but so are philosophers. you could do intensive research and peer review, but you could just as easily write copy for the sides of boxes of cheerios. it doesn’t really matter. i think that’s why people use this term ‘writer’ instead of something more specific. you see it all over people’s social media bios. this guy’s a contributor to the atlantic. that guy’s a writer, and you can buy a book they co-wrote on amazon with this link. the only people who call themselves authors are people who do books full time. most people in this circle of the world, though, they’re just writers. whatever that means.

quarantine livin’

it’s not all that bad

granted, my parents have a nice house with a yard and a pool and i get to see my dogs again, so it’s easy for me to say.

my schedule every day has been something like this:

• 2pm: wake up for class meetings on slack and zoom
• 4pm: get out of bed, alternate between playing viola and reading
• 6pm: dinner, watch the sopranos
• 9pm: dad starts complaining that he’s tired, goes to bed
• 10:30pm: mom falls asleep on the couch while we watch the british baking show
• 11pm: catch up on homework
• 12:30am: shower
• 1:00am: watch anime, youtube, twitch streams
• 6am: fall asleep

some days we walk the dogs around the neighborhood for a while in the afternoon. surprisingly, i don’t listen to much music. i shuffle a playlist for a bit while i’m showering or when i’m doing housework, or occasionally a particular song will pop into my head and i’ll listen to it a few times. the past few days i’ve had “oh darlin’” by the beatles and “kokomo” by the beach boys stuck in my head, so i’ve been humming along to that.

music

the main thing missing from my routine is travel. not in the sense of going significant distances, but literally in the sense of traversing from one place to another. my locomotion is a constant loop between my bed, the bathroom, the kitchen, the living room, and the street. this really ought to be the case for everyone given the pandemic, but it’s no coincidence that, in the absence of walks to and from class or appointments or coffee shops, active music listening has also largely departed from my routine. i do most of my listening while i’m on the go; last year it was almost all in my car because i spent so much time driving to and from work, and this semester it was between classes or while i waited for the bus. my intuition is that this is relatively uncommon, and it’s surprising to me that this is the case. i think of myself as someone who loves music (and pizza! and the office!!! and dogs!!!!!!!), and yet, i apparently use music as a space filler. my former 90+ minute commute to and from work in atlanta traffic was a psychic black hole that needed to be filled, so i obliged with the only stimulation allowed by the DMV, namely music and (hands free!) phone calls. all that said, i’m still trying to keep consistent with getting my viola chops back in action, so maybe i’m not so phony.

what i have been listening to is a mix of lofi, some korean groups, bedroom pop type stuff, and a few other scattered things. i really enjoy old school, balls-out love songs. stuff like put your head on my shoulder.

tv

i’ve been working through the man in the high castle and the sopranos a good bit, because my parents will watch them. high castle is alright. we started season 3 and i don’t really care for it too much anymore but i like to give things a fair shot.

the sopranos is pretty good. we’ve only gotten through season 2 so far so i don’t know if it’s still not at the ‘good’ part yet or if i’m just a philistine, but i don’t quite see reason for it to be as hyped as it is. i’ve heard it called one of the best shows of all time. still, it’s interesting and i like talking to my therapist about dr. melfi because it prompts him to talk about the theory and ideas behind psychotherapy and why show biz always gets it wrong.

anime

i finished full metal alchemist: brotherhood last week after having started it before the quarantine. VERY good show, and relatively short at roughly 60 episodes. it has a somewhat simplistic view of human struggle and failure, but it’s charming and the characters are compelling enough to carry it. it has a little bit of everything; humor, flashy magic, top-notch openings, political subterfuge, and wholesome romances. it’s on netflix.

i started watching jojo’s bizarre adventure this week, on recommendation of its ubiquity in memes. it’s not very good in the sense of writing and characterization, technical stuff like that, but it’s hilarious and insane. i pulled an all-nighter because i kept saying “one more episode” and then cracking up too hard to sleep. it’s about the joestar family fighting against ancient vampires through time, and every protagonist has a name like Jonathon or Joseph, so they all go by JoJo, hence the title. every single character is a hyper-muscley adonis dude with 16 abs and shoulders broader than a car. the villains in the second arc have these mediterranean/egyptian/persian looks with turbans and tattoos and lip rings, but their only clothes are basically loincloths and they’re all named after 80s rock bands. it’s so dumb, i love it. the openings have kind of weird 3d animation going on but the music is tight, and of course there’s the famous use of ‘to be continued’ as the riff from roundabout kicks in to end every episode. highly recommend this one if you’re in the mood for shits and giggles. it’s also on netflix.

i’ve been watching my hero academia off and on for the past several months. there are four seasons out right now and i’m currently an episode or two into that one. i will be catching up next week. i think of it as a shonen with the tone of a slice of life anime; the art style is softer and you’re more likely to say “he’s so cute!” about deku (protagonist) than you are to say he looks cool (not that he isn’t cool). this is one of those shows that’s fun enough to watch and has a broad enough concept that it could conceivably run for a really long time. it’s about society if almost everyone had a superpower, and how people step up to become heroes to keep the peace, because the cops are just useless (as usual). the fights are pretty fun to watch, with the one small drawback that because everything is so power oriented, there isn’t a ton of cool choreography like you see in naruto or in full metal. there’s a wide cast of characters and the show does a good job of making them all at least someone that you want to root for, if not particularly deep in every case. you should check it out on hulu.

books

i’ve mostly read things for class recently. i’ve enjoyed the marxism stuff from my critical theory class (lol) and readings from my film class about certain directors and the state of hollywood in the 90s. there will probably be dedicated posts to these topics when i get around to it.

i’ve been slowly working through ‘our death’ by sean bonney. it’s a collection of poetry, letters, and essays, mostly poetry. the whole thing has a very strong anarchist bent, but it’s not really political, not exactly. it deals more with the feeling of beeing utterly alienated from spirituality and the feelings of disillusionment in the current moment. the tone and delivery of my previous post is pretty overtly inspired by bonney, so that will give you a sense.

i plan to pick up walden again this week if i can stomach it. we’ll see how that pans out. i’m interested in it because it was referenced a lot in a book of essays by mark greif i sifted through a few months ago. i don’t really buy into the mythical “return to nature” aspect, at least not in the literal sense. people love to ‘gotcha!’ thoreau by pointing out that walden pond is like 10 minutes from his parents’ house. i don’t really put any stock in that criticism because he did, in the end, spend a few years living self-sufficiently and bartering fairly for what he couldn’t produce himself. the important part, from what i can tell, is more about the spirit of returning to tangibility and being responsible for the activities and projects we undertake. it’s extremely dense and meandering, though, which is why i have a hard time picking it up.

movies

courtesy of the film class i’m taking, i’ve been watching many more movies this semester than i usually did before. it’s nice to discover that i do in fact have the attention span for it. i haven’t attempted anything monolithic like apocalypse now or the irishman, 3 hour odysseys of film, but you know what i’m talking about. it’s the effect that makes people comfortable watching an entire season of television but turn their nose up at watching a single entity that takes 2 hours. my favorites from the class, which is entirely about american film in 1999:

the blair witch project, which i had not seen before my professor screenshared it over zoom. i happen to be of the opinion that a movie simply cannot be legitimately frightening because suspension of disbelief doesn’t go that far, but this was at the very least deeply unsettling and quite stressful. i’m more interested about the making of the film, though. i’m sure there are plenty of places you can research this more in-depth than this quick paragraph, but the things that stuck out to me are the ‘method’ approach not just of the acting, but the whole production. the actors portraying the students in the film were publicly stated to be dead in the months leading up to theatrical release, and remained so for months after. their imdb pages even listed them as deceased. official film websites usually include extras, trivia, interviews with actors and directors, that sort of thing - blair witch’s website instead functioned as an extension of the “missing, seeking information” vibe in regular publication about the film. the actors were not given scripts or warning about what shenanigans they would encounter in the woods, and weren’t fed very much to help exacerbate their stress. part of what makes the film so effective is the performances, but finding out that the actors didn’t read lines or have cues and were genuinely terrorized also begs the question of whether it’s really acting. still, this movie rocks and, i’m told, was incredibly important in the history of horror.

we watched the boondock saints as well. this movie was kind of strange; it has that same fantastical hyperrealist vibe you get from a lot of action/violent movies in the era (think tarantino). it’s about these two brothers in south boston who fall into some information about a meeting between higher-ups in the russian mob, which leads them onto a crusade of vigilantism against all the particularly evil organized crime guys in town. it’s pretty ridiculous most of the time, especially willem dafoe’s character (the fbi guy on their trail), but, whether heavyhandedly or not, it does kind of make you think about ethics and how much authority individuals have to take care of business. plus they’re good catholic boys just like me :)

if you haven’t seen office space then you probably should right away. it’s the absolute peak of “job sucks, i just wanna grill for god’s sake” americana. which reminds me, office space is written and directed by mike judge, the guy who makes king of the hill. apt. it kind of does the american beauty thing where the solution to the issues of disillusionment with work and difficulty with fulfillment are treated with checking out entirely - peter in office space says “i’m not gonna go to work anymore. no, i’m not gonna quit, just, i don’t like it, and i don’t wanna go”. this movie’s extremely cathartic, hilarious, and hits many of the same anxieties we still have about work culture nowadays, with some notable changes from the late 90s. many of us today i’m sure would be thrilled to have access to the kind of job that peter says makes his life worse every day than it was before, for example.

you should probably also watch when harry met sally. yeah, yeah, it’s a romcom, but the good kind. the very good kind. minimal bullshit (you do need some to make a romantic plot work), very funny dialogue, and really bizarre characters that are extremely relatable in their own way. i watched this on recommendation from a friend, and it also happens to be one of my mom’s favorite movies. do with that what you will, but i really earnestly recommend this one.

that’s all for today folks, if i think of more stuff to add on here i’ll either make a post referencing it as its own topic or i’ll add it to this list, or both. if you see something missing from this list then let me know and i’ll add on.

originality

i got the sense during high school that nothing i had done in my classes was original. especially looking at english classes, i was certain that nothing i had written or said during discussions was something that you could have called by that name. of course i wasn’t plagiarizing, but it felt that there was no way my conclusions or thoughts about beowulf or the great gatsby or what have you were things that hadn’t been said before. people had been writing and talking about those stories since before my grandparents were alive; how could i add anything that wasn’t, at best, redundant? and even if i set aside that kind of towering landmark of the english literary canon, and wrote about a lesser-known piece of literature for class, it was clear from the essay prompts and the way my teachers were able to run with ideas as soon as i suggested them that the thought had already crossed their mind.

the problem for me is that for something to be considered truly original, it needs to not only be something that nobody else has said, but something that nobody else could have said. originality is the pure expression of voice; the synthesis of an individual’s particular ability to respond to the world around them and add to it. i could make a statement that nobody has ever heard before, but if someone else is on course to make the same statement, whether within the next minute or the next century, then where does my voice fit in? is it meaningful at all for me to have said it instead of someone else?

in essence, i’m searching for originality that stems not just from novelty, but from true creative independence — media that could be exactly the same if it was made in a vacuum, without being informed or impacted in any way by its predecessors. even writing that sentence makes me realize how impossible of a standard i’ve set. most of my classes have talked about how all media is reactionary in the sense that it’s a response to what came before it. this plays the leading role in how we understand art, and gives it its punch. seminal movements in literary theory are founded on the idea that what i’m describing can’t exist, almost by definition.

going forward, i find in the way i live that i’ve more or less let go of the need to be unique, or at least of the impossible standard i’ve described. i can discuss movies and read interesting books, then go on to write interesting essays and blogposts about it. my friends tell me it’s interesting to them, and that i say things they hadn’t thought of before. maybe that’s the only way to really know if what you’re doing matters, if it exists. at the same time, you’re supposed to be internally driven. don’t care about what other people think or say. do what makes you happy, and do it to make yourself happy. you don’t have to be the best, or even very good at it; you just have to be happy or die trying. the irony is that, in the same way no piece of art exists in a vacuum, neither can a person. you create from within, but creation is measured and given meaning by the world it inhabits. a human life is the same. pulling on a previous post, it seems like the best way forward is to not make it about going forward. framing your life around where you’ve been and where you’re going, perhaps how you’re remembered, defeats the purpose of being and having been. still though, we ask ourselves, if we fall down in a forest and nobody hears us scream, do we still exist? what if we fall down in the street, and the traffic lights keep blinking? somehow we have to find a balance between being the center of our own universe and the hard fact that our perception lies to us about that. the world doesn’t turn on a single point, but we can only ever understand it as it relates to us. what the world is to each person is necessarily founded upon their own interpretation. to a human mind, the only possible world is the one we build around ourselves, and yet we constantly need to verify it against what other people have built. creativity has to come from within, but meaning can only come from without.