March 2012
30 posts
“When you see the loser-figure in a novel, what you are seeing is a complicated bargain that goes something like this: yes, it is kind of immature and boorish to be thinking about sex all the time and ogling and objectifying women, but this is what we men sometimes do and we have to write about it. We fervently promise, however, to avoid the mistake of the late Updike novels: we will always, always, call our characters out when they’re being self-absorbed jerks and louts. We will make them comically pathetic, and punish them for their infractions a priori by making them undesirable to women, thus anticipating what we imagine will be your judgments, female reader. Then you and I, female reader, can share a laugh at the characters’ expense, and this will bring us closer together and forestall the dreaded possibility of your leaving me.”
—Elaine Blair, “Great American Losers” (via millionsmillions)
Highly Irregular
Illustration by Frederick Dorr Steele for “The Empty House”
Colliers, October 1908
Michael Dirda
On Conan Doyle: or, The Whole Art of Storytelling
Princeton University Press, October 2011. 224 pp.
On a recent short plane flight, I read Michael Dirda’s On Conan Doyle: Or, The Whole Art of Storytelling in one sitting. The effect was like having a voluble but very interesting seatmate, one whom you interrupt only rarely with exclamations of agreement and perhaps a short recital of a similar anecdote from your life. I knew that I was expected to review the book, and so I sat back as the plane descended and contemplated my comments.
Best to begin with a disclaimer. I first met Dirda at the “Millennium Dinner” of the Baker Street Irregulars in January 2000. Subsequently, Dirda and I became friends, sharing meals, many conversations, and rambles around Washington and Los Angeles. Dirda has slept in my house and shared my table, and I have never left his company feeling less than a little inebriated, regardless of whether any alcohol was actually consumed. Not only does Dirda love to read and write, he loves to talk; and his talk is mostly about books, reading, and so many things that I cherish. Michael is the quintessential “bookman,” in an age when so few remain. So a chance to listen to him talk about Conan Doyle seemed likely to be an extremely pleasant way to spend my travel time.
I was mightily impressed that Dirda was speaking to the Irregulars. He was, after all, a Pulitzer-winning critic and the book editor of the Washington Post. It quickly became clear that he loved Sherlock Holmes and the entire Holmes canon as much as I did, though for different reasons. At that dinner, I had the honor of giving a toast to Sherlock Holmes, and I was a little nervous about my maiden remarks to the assembled Irregulars. I tried to express why it is that we love Sherlock Holmes. In my comments, I challenged the views of the greatest Sherlockian of all time, Edgar W. Smith, who wrote:I, on the other hand, asserted that we revere Holmes for his outsider status, his willingness to do right regardless of the consequences, imagining that we would choose to do the same. It was a very serious toast, free of the lighthearted notes struck by the other speakers:[Holmes] stands before us as a symbol … of all that we are not, but ever would be. We see him as the fine expression of our urge to trample evil and to set aright the wrongs with which the world is plagued … [He] is the personification of something in us that we have lost or never had. For it is not Sherlock Holmes who sits in Baker Street, comfortable, competent, and self-assured; it is we ourselves who are there, full of a tremendous capacity for wisdom, complacent in the presence of our humble Watson, conscious of a warm well-being and a timeless, imperishable content.
Dirda’s views, evidenced in his toast to The Hound of the Baskervilles, were different: He reveled in the Holmes stories for the sheer joy of reading them and for their place in the canon of Great Literature. In this book, he describes his talk as including “[a]n initial discussion of Watson’s narrative style and the canon’s ‘atmospheric emanations,’” segueing into a reminiscence about his boyhood reading of the stories. Then things took a turn for the unexpected: He announced his theory that Moriarty had survived the confrontation with Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls, moved to America, and as a cover for his new criminal organization, founded a group devoted to honoring his greatest enemy!No, in our age of uncertainty, I think that the element of Holmes’s character which burns like a beacon over the years is his individuality. A contemporary philosopher has declared the “Cowboy Way”: “Do the right thing” is the credo of its followers. And surely Holmes is the embodiment of that idea. Some have said that he is arrogant, cold, ruthless, high-handed, misogynistic, unfeeling, manipulative—and these are difficult charges to deny. I submit, however, that he is not so much those things as he is single-minded: driven in his pursuit of a case, without regard for the conventions of society or even the conventions of law. In our complex, restricted, regulated, rule-bound culture, he is what we dream to be and yet dare not to be: apart from the crowd. Edgar Smith’s vision of Holmes was as hero, in an age that sorely needed heroes. Our age needs less, or perhaps more: Holmes as an individual, who seeks first and foremost to “do the right thing.”
Underpaid Genius: The Problem With Pinterest →
underpaidgenius.com
I had a feeling that Pinterest was sort of Stepford Wives goes FFFound:
Pinterest is all pink, puppies and pretty ponies - Lisan Jutras via Macleans.ca
Remember how girls in high school would paper their lockers with pictures of heartthrobs, puppies in baskets, minidresses they wanted, red, fruity cocktails they’d like to get hammered on? Imagine looking in that locker, then being shoved in it and having the door slammed closed on you. That’s a visit to Pinterest.
And that’s why I find it so bleak. Here is a world devoid of science, of politics, of dark humour, of a social conscience. It’s a world where orgasms don’t exist but babies are everywhere. Where “you go, girl!” affirmations rub shoulders with Mountain Dew cupcakes. This domain is sort of like a girls-only clubhouse, but it’s not about expressing innermost desires, just surface desires—for hair, shoes, nail art, a boyfriend that exists in soft-focus black-and-white.
It’s not a subculture, either. It’s the same idea of femininity that the two biggest female entrepreneurs of the past decade—maybe ever—Martha and Oprah, made their fortune selling. And it infuriates me because it’s so damned archaic—Pinterest circa 1912 would be fundamentally the same.
It’s easy to say that my anger stems from being on the outside of this group, and I wouldn’t deny it. This easy how-to guide to being a woman, engineered by a bunch of other women, makes me not only feel like an outsider (sure, I love cute animals and cake but I also love The New Yorker, talking about bodily functions and looking at cross-sections of sea lampreys’ faces) but also like a jerk for being mean about them.
I can’t really justify wrapping this up with a big huff about how Pinterest oppresses me, because it doesn’t. I have many female friends who share my interests. There are lots of squalid places on the Internet for men and women alike to hang out. But what it says about how women see themselves is slightly depressing. Milan Kundera once famously wrote that, “kitsch is the absolute denial of shit.” He was talking about totalitarian regimes, which brook no dissent, no expression of anything authentic and challenging, because why would anyone want to change the status quo when it’s perfect?
Pinterest isn’t exactly a totalitarian regime, but it is kind of like the Army of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Dissent at your peril.
But there is real money to be made pandering to superficial interest in all that is shiny.
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