Saturday, 21 January 2006

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World, My Navel. My Navel, World. Looking over what I've written these past many months I notice I've fallen into a comfortable rut of public consumables and quasi-private communications. A canny manipulator would claim this had been the plan all along: you come for the satire and general vituperation but stay for the desperate pleas of a random but individualized dissertator. Tonight I embrace the oscillation: Earlier Adam confessed he "sometimes gets sick of listening to music all the time." I'll match his confession with one of my own: I never listen to music anymore. Not really. When I cook. Or do the dishes. Or have the radio on in the car. Or when it cheaply manipulates my emotions while watching something. (I'm looking at you, Mr. Braff .) I still want to listen to music . . . only I find it difficult to find the right accompaniment to what I'm reading or writing. Once upon a time I could pair my literature with my music with ease. I would read Thomas Pynchon and listen to Lotion or couple James Joyce and The Levellers . A perfect fit? The Pynchon truly truly. The Joyce and every other novel I read and every other band I obsessed over were paired according to a logic predicated on nothing more than Kaufmanian contiguity. I read X while listening to Y and the two are now bound by Krazy Glue in my memory. Since I don't make many memories anymore which don't involve my desk and books and chair and daily writing routine I no longer create even random associations. In its place I become slave to a tune. What tune? Whichever one stuck in my head while I cooked or washed dishes or drove somewhere or watched something. If my iPod could do more than tamp down Adam's manuscript I wouldn't be in this mess. But it has lost the will to play. So I'm stuck with random hooks setting up house in my head. Or doing dishing constantly. Or having the gorgeous soundtrack to Battlestar Galictica on heavy rotation. (Were it not for the artificial drama it adds to the most mundane activities—Can he finish morning ablution before that Cylon RIGHT BEHIND HIM strikes!—I probably would. Who wouldn't want to listen the Gayatri Mantra in Sanskrit all the time? Especially when so beautifully rendered. But still.) The only alternative is to interrupt my vigorous wall-staring with the latest Wilco . . . but that would lead to some unwholesome associations. Who wants to associate breathtaking music with the suffocation of dissertating? I certainly don't. But what choice do I have? Blog under musical influence? If I listen while I blog my sense of my words will be scattered by the lyrics in my head. I have a quiet style any accompaniment will ruin. (Stop laughing. I do too have a quiet style.) I know the real solution is to find appropriate music for writing about S.W. Mitchell and evolutionarily-influenced historical romances about the Revolutionary War. I don't...
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What "Everyone Knows" About NAMBLA and Historical Methodology [X-posted to the Valve.] Reading through the complete (online) works of the handsome Benoit Denizet-Lewis, I found the following paragraph (warning: long) on the North America Man/Boy Love Association: Curley family attorney Larry Frisoli flatly compares NAMBLA to the Mafia. "NAMBLA is a criminal organization that teaches its members how to rape kids," he says in a conversation in his Cambridge office. "To say that age-of-consent laws should be changed is fine; it's legal. But to actually encourage and assist in the abuse of children is illegal. If you look at The Godfather , in the '40s and '50s, the Corleones always got up there and said, 'We don't exist.' Yet they did exist. And NAMBLA does exist. And it has tiers of membership. And like the Mafia, the question becomes how much can you blame the Godfather for what the foot soldier on the street is doing?" The evidentiary standards set by Curley family attorney Larry Frisoli lack a little something in the substance department. To prove that a conspiracy of pedophiles exists in the face of overwhelming evidence that it doesn't, Frisoli compares it to the fictional counterpart of La Cosa Nostra. One could say that this tactic works on the analogical level because "everyone knows" that Puzo based the Corleone family on LCN. But shouldn't what "everyone knows" be based on fact instead of fictionalization? Shouldn't the Curley's attorney appeal to the inner-workings of LCN instead of what Puzo imagined them to be? Otherwise Frisoli transfers to what he believes an actual conspiracy the attributes of Puzo's fictional one. The oversimplification involved in such a move isn't merely explanatory either. Unlike a scientific analogy intended to communicate the complexity of a process by baby steps, Frisoli's analogy is an end unto itself. No further learning involved: If NAMBLA is structured like La Cosa Nostra, then it is a criminal conspiracy. Frisoli invokes The Godfather not to explain the workings of a more complex network but to explain away the complexities of any bureaucratic organization . . . by pointing to an imaginary one in which all actions are intentional and all consequences the result of premeditation. "Everyone knows" that Michael Corleone is responsible for the infamous Baptismal Bloodbath. Thus "everyone knows" that all pederasts intend to kill the likes of Jeffrey Curley. From analogy to intention to conviction via a single fictional leap. As much as this particular analogy bothers me—and lest I be misunderstood by those who could only want to misunderstand me, I'm not defending Curley's murderers nor NAMBLA here—what bothers me more is the insistence on the logic of what "everyone knows." Because not "everyone knows" all that much about anything. At least that's what it seems like today. But irony of ironies: My dissertation is predicated on the notion that there are some things that "everyone knows" and that these things are so pervasive they appear in almost all the literary and popular writing of the period. So when reading a surprisingly (given...

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