something about the mentor

You could say there was something pitiful about her. And, superficially, you wouldn't be wrong. She had these big, scared eyes (the right one maybe popped in a little lower than the left). Under different circumstances, you might have wondered if she was in shock—those eyes always wide, reflective, lacking presence, suggesting vulnerability. She spoke aimlessly, ceaselessly. In groups, she ticked her head like a chicken and registered each person's face, seeking approval there.

About a so-so book review in "The New Yorker"

"The Disconnect" gives a sloppy discussion while reviewing Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone by Eric Klinenberg. First the writer hazards that "Few things are less welcome today than protracted solitude". Whoa--what about people with kids they can't afford, or medical bills from ailing children and spouses? Wrecked and loveless marriages, and stifling alimony and child support payments? Or even smaller, more subtle miseries, like silent, nightly dinners with children you can't relate to, who hate and resent you? Are those things more welcome than protracted solitude? What about never being alone? How is that liked?

Next, the article poses the question: "as a rule, do people live alone because they want to or because they have to?" Subsequent passages suggest aloneness is usually a choice: (1) "Things changed when she made the decision to buy an apartment, committing to a future alone." (2) "Some people remain single out of a disinclination to settle." But the idea that aloneness is a a choice is casually abandoned in the next section, wherein the piece's most interesting part is revealed:

In a landmark study, “Bowling Alone” (2000), the Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam noted a puzzling three-decade decline in what he called “social capital”: the networks of support and reciprocity that bind people together and help things get done collectively. His work considered the waning of everything from P.T.A. enrollment to dinner parties and card games, but the core of his argument was declining civic participation. Between 1973 and 1994, the number of people who held a leadership role in any local organization fell by more than half. Newspaper readership among people under thirty-five dropped during a similar period, as did voting rates. Why? Putnam pointed to cultural shifts among the post-Second World War generation; the privatization of leisure (for example, TV); and, to a smaller extent, the growth of a commuting culture and the time constraints of two-career, or single-parent, family life. “Older strands of social connection were being abraded—even destroyed—by technological and economic and social change,” he wrote.

That last sentence is key, where the emphasis should fall on economic changes--changes so huge we can only begin to appreciate them. For starters, economic changes now mean people move around more, spend less time in one city or neighborhood, work several, maybe dozens of jobs in their lifetimes rather than one or two, and that unions have been dissolved, and on and on: all this, just for starters, is related to economic change. But this significant nugget, contained in a single paragraph, goes painfully unexplored by the author, who sums up the aforementioned study, saying, "Putnam, in other words, saw public institutions as a casualty of the same forces of individuation driving modern aloneness."

So now the rise in aloneness is driven by larger forces, and is no longer a choice. The original question, do people live alone because they want to or because they have to?, is now sort-of rhetorical. From here the article briefly, un-insightfully discusses online social interaction, confusing the original topic, aloneness, with something else--loneliness. But then the author pretty much dismisses the entire conversation by saying, "The truth is that lonely people at home typically contact friends, loiter in bookstores, work in cafés, take on roommates, open OKCupid profiles, or dance Tecktonik at a rave."

Oh, ok. Then what the hell are we talking about?

Billy Corgan at SXSW 2012

My sense is Billy Corgan can't say word without immediately being crapped on. This comment from SXSW, for example: "I was part of a generation that changed the world - and it was taken over by poseurs."

Corgan was discussing the Internet's effect on musical fame and artistry, and the obstacles that keep new artists from emerging. As the author of this Billboard post put it: "If there was an overarching theme, though, it's that both musicians and technology are feeding the mentality that fame is what should be hoped for, leaving artistry in its wake."

Corgan's comment is mostly laughable because it's such a hyperbolic generalization. But one angle of it may be something: Corgan's generation created Alternative music. Although that label now is as meaningless as Indie is, Alternative* music originally meant that outcasts, i.e., Freaks and Geeks, now had their own community in which acceptance was a foregone conclusion. You like Jane's Addition? You're in. You like Dinosaur Jr.? You're in. The only ground rule: Don't judge based on appearances.

Now, jump ahead to the new generation: To make it today, bands are forced and encouraged to act out, to create online selves so as to be liked; to one-up the next guy to get passer-by traffic--the ultimate in disinterested attention paid on unequal terms--something not altogether unlike the stripper-customer relationship.

The Alternative scene of Corgan's day obviously wasn't the first to welcome outcasts and losers (so to speak), but it was the first to, arguably, make them the mainstream. If nothing else, I think Corgan said something worth considering rather than just venting the bitterness of a has-been or the histrionics of a megalomaniac.

*I mean Alternative music to the extent that such a thing is reducible.

Notes:

• You could also say the when an out-group becomes the in-group, they soon adopt and enforce social rules and prejudices like the previous in-group.

• Internet-wise, as part of Generation X, Corgan's generation could maybe claim to have pioneered the common usage of the public Internet and with having populated it with its earliest content, giving it shape and color, meaning and appeal, from early social networking to wiki-style content development. But, whatever the accomplishments of the next generations, they likely can't be called poseurs.

Race and politics

The Los Angeles Times article "One black woman's personal mission to reelect Obama" uses a couple of big economic facts to say that blacks remain faithful to the President despite their worsening economic condition. The facts lack context, however, and this larger premise is a tremendous over-simplification and it's short-sighted.

The piece profiles grassroots Obama booster Gerri Hall, a retired black woman in Flint, MI. Note the difference in values that emerges at the outset when the article comments on changes since Hall's youth:

Fifty years later, there is a black man in the White House and Hall is firmly rooted in the middle class, with a nice home in a leafy neighborhood, a pension from her 30-year job at General Motors and enough savings to help her grown son buy a starter place of his own. 

"Things have definitely gotten better," she allows, "in terms of tolerance and coexistence and people getting along."

Note that the author speaks in economic terms, whereas Hall refers to social progress. The article reflects market-oriented values, but its subject, social values.

Then the article posits that black Americans see themselves reflected in Obama as he battles Republicans: "The sentiment may explain why Obama still enjoys commanding support among African Americans, even though blacks have suffered the worst of the deep recession that soured so many others on the incumbent." And again a few paragraphs later:

The statistics are grim. The poverty rate for African American children has increased under Obama, along with black joblessness. Nationally, black unemployment was 15.5% in November, almost twice the overall rate. For black teenagers it was just under 40%. 

Even so, African Americans remain far more upbeat than the rest of the country.

The article assumes--or, more likely, plays along with the assumption--that what happens during a President's term is attributable to him. Next, the black unemployment rate is given without any historical context. What was the unemployment rate for blacks under Bush? Under Clinton? What role does Congress play in all this?

Another misdirect comes on the heels of the previous quote. The article text says:

An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll done with theGrio.com, a black-oriented website, found that 49% of African Americans felt the country was on the right track, compared with nearly 3 in 4 overall who felt otherwise. Most African Americans blamed congressional Republicans, rather than Obama, for the country's economic ills.

The article treats the tendency to blame congressional Republicans ambiguously; one could read this as a feature exclusive to the black community. What is the overall trend? Could this be a party issue rather than a race issue?

This article dumbs down the whole discussion. The author is owing to black allegiance or camaraderie what's more likely long-term developments of political power relations within areas ranging from economics to social status, and education to faith.

Continuing on the unemployment argument, the article states: "Unemployment is officially 16.5% in Flint, where fortunes soared and, for the last several decades, plummeted with the near collapse of the auto industry." Has the auto industry really collapsed? What role does outsourcing in this industry play in local (and national) unemployment? And what are the politics behind that?

The point isn't that the writer hasn't done his job. It's that readers must evaluate what they read.

I did read one line I liked for its well-writteness: "To this day, Hall has the manner of one accustomed to being in charge: her diction precise, her dress fastidious and her case for Obama outlined in PowerPoint and carefully sorted fact sheets."

Something on The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

I previously wrote on two short Carson McCullers stories that depict love as a lost cause. Her most cited and celebrated work, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, zooms in on the lost. Loneliness reverberates through these pages as we  follow a modest cast of characters who harbor passions that stir and agitate them. Each character is doomed by their ill-fit connection to this world, seemingly unable to relate to it and to others. Isolated, they turn their thoughts and feelings over and over again in their minds before finding an outlet in a polite deaf-mute whose soft smile and modest nods of approval disguise his own pain.

Stealing moments alone with the deaf-mute, each character imagines they've finally found someone in the world who understands them without realizing that that someone actually does not. It may be the sole blessing in their miserable lives that they don't realize this, but even that delicate respite is stolen when the deaf-mute commits suicide. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter moves ploddingly at times but the characters are well drawn and the sorrowful tones resonate without deafening us to the sounds of tiny bubbles bursting.