Constellation No. 1

"Now female authors like to live in jolly intimacy with their fellows; they rejoice in literary luncheons, publishers' teas and getting books together as if they were charades; male authors like to do their work in solitude and take their pleasure in the company that will distract them least from their serious business; but epicene authors like to huddle together and imagine plots and betrayals."

Evelyn Waugh, "Present Discontents" (1937) in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh (Donat Gallagher, editor [1984]): p. 240.

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"At times Berg no doubt relegated my own philosophical ballast to the category he termed "a bore" [fad]; I joked about it once and he did not seriously contradict me. 'A bore' as a collective term for anything not sensuously appetizing was in fact one of Berg's favorite words. Admittedly I was deadly earnest in those days, which could get on a mature artist's nerves. Out of pure veneration I tried never to say anything I did not consider particularly profound, though I did not always live up to that standard; I had as yet no idea that in their contact with others, emphatically productive people prefer to relax from those extremes of intensity and concentration which at the time I considered their due."

Theodor W. Adorno, "Reminiscence" from Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link, (1968), translated by Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey (Cambridge, 1991): pp. 29-30.

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"I have already said (and it was precisely Robert himself who at Balbec had helped me, quite unwittingly, to arrive at this conclusion) what I think about friendship: to wit, that it is so trivial a thing that I find it hard to understand how men with some claim to genius--Nietzsche, for instance--can have been so ingenuous as to ascribe to it a certain intellectual merit, and consequently to deny themselves friendships in which intellectual esteem would have no part."

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, Chapter Two, (1981 Vintage edition of the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation: Vol. II): p. 409.

"Proust, cloistered in bed in Paris, had difficulty appreciating why anyone would be dissatisfied with the idea of spending a holiday on a beach with some young people whose only fault was not to have read Descartes: 'I do my intellectual work within myself, and once with other people, it's more or less irrelevant to me that they're intelligent, as long as they are kind, sincere, etc."

1920 letter to Sidney Schiff, quoted by Alain de Botton in How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997): p. 122.

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"Deep down, I had little respect for the contemporary art scene. Most of the artists I knew behaved exactly like entrepreneurs: they carefully reconnoitered emerging markets, then tried to get in fast. Just like entrepreneurs, they had been at the same few colleges, they were cast from the same mold. There were some differences, however: in the art market, innovation was at a greater premium than in most other professional sectors. Moreover, artists often worked in packs or networks, in contrast to entrepreneurs, who were solitary beings surrounded by enemies--shareholders ready to drop them at a moment's notice, executives always ready to betray them. But in the artists' proposals I dealt with, it was rare for me to come across a sense of genuine inner desire."

Michel Houellebecq, Platform (2001), U.S. (2003) version of the translation by Frank Wynne, p. 132.

"Jake Balokowsky, my biographer, has this page microfilmed."

"'Odi profanum vulgus et arceo,' said the son of a freed slave," said the son of an exiled wine-merchant, said the son of a retired plumber.

Monogram

"Odi profanum vulgus et arceo," said the son of a freed slave, said the son of an exiled wine-merchant.

Le Spleen de Baltimore

Seul au comptoir à manger du Marché Chez Eddie,


Je chipote, avec lassitude, une salade infecte à la grecque, et bois, à petits coups, un café au lait brûlant.


Le sono de la maison emet «She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah», aneantissant tout pouvoir de penser.


Comme toujours, c'est le chiant «Beatle Brunch» de WQSR.


A gauche, un quinquagénaire obscenement gros, barbu, se tient debout,
Le contour de sa bite--éléphantesque mais ingonflable--nettement visible sous la braguette de son short khaki.


A ses côtes, son copain, son veritable clone.


Ils causent à propos des communs sujets neuf-fois-epuisés:
Le global warming, le christian fundamentalism, l'art of fucking.


Je me rends compte que je ne connaîtrai plus jamais des jours sauf jours comme celui-ci,


Jours gris, blafards, débordants de l'humanité et dénués de beauté et signification.


Je me rends compte, de plus, que je m'immergerai, volontiers, maintes et maintes fois, là, dans chaque jour


Comme dans un bain d'eau de cale froide.


C'est une espéce de flânerie bête, atroce:
C'est flânerie aux connards.

Flannery O' Connor.


Merci, cher hypocrite lecteur.

Theses on Metaphysics

I.
God is undead: not purposively undead, like the ghost of Hamlet's father; but gratuitously, tastelessly undead, like Freddie Kruger, like Pumpkinhead, like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. Or, like Dracula, you ask? Madam, please! As if His Lordship the Count would ever stoop to hiring this God fellow as his footman, let alone as his butler!


II.
To those who instance the current worldwide religion boom in confutation of my last postulate, I say, 'Would an upsurge in viewership of The Nightmare on Elm Street films prove that they were masterpieces?'


III.
Hell is other people's poo.

Theses on the History of the Concept

I.
Platonism is to pragmatism what pederasty is to Platonism.


II.
Q. What do you get when you take the piss out of epistemology?
A. Etymology, of course.

Theses on the Concept of History

I.
Marx remarks somewhere that "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." He, Marx, forgot to substitute "seven times" for "twice," and to add: the third time as English pantomime, the fourth time as Punch and Judy show, the fifth time as bear baiting, the sixth time as cock fight, and the seventh (and last) time as Battlebots Tournament.


II.
The future used not to be what it had already been.


III.
Those who misremember the past are condemned to flatter themselves that they are repeating it.


IV.
Here is Dostoevsky on human nature as he conceived of it in 1864: "It seems to me that the meaning of man's life consists in proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key. And man will keep proving it and paying for it with his own skin; he will turn into a troglodyte if need be." But in the early twenty-first century man has long since ceased to mind being treated as a piano key; indeed, he has long since been all too content to be treated as a piano key on the condition that the keyboard in question is sufficiently up-to-date--such that, for example, in 1986, the psychiatric equivalent of the Casio SK-1 perforce outranked the parallel equivalent of the Steinway concert grand.


V.
In ancient times, on being confronted by the spectacle of a natural disaster or some other great calamity, people used to say, "There but for the grace of God go I"; now they say, "There by the grace of the commodity I need never fear going."


VI.
Avant nous la deluge; après nous, rien (sauf, évidemment, les gens robotiques).


VII.
Dead is the new dead.


VIII.
The mote in your neighbor's eye is the best inverted telescope.


IX.
It is perhaps certain that nothing will happen to anyone anywhere ever again.


X.
In the present epoch, capitalism may be faceless, but it is assuredly not assless. The capitalism of today is, in fact, a six-billion-brown-eyed Anti-Argus. Every human brain is a colon of this monster, and every human mouth is an anal iris perpetually discharging, in the form of gormless chatter about commodities, a stream of verbal sewage into the intellectual ether.

He's Seeing Red, Ken

Latest post from an hilarious trans-pondic blog I've been following for a few weeks now,

http://angrylondoner.blogspot.com

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This song goes out to Ken Livingstone, and it goes a little something like this:

(Verse 1):

Fuck Ken Livingstone!
Fuck Ken Livingstone!
Fuck Ken Livingstone!
Fuck Ken Livingstone!

(Chorus):

Fuck Ken Livingstone!
Fuck Ken Livingstone!
Fuck Ken Livingstone!
Fuck Ken Livingstone!

(Verse 2):

Fuck Ken Livingstone!
Fuck Ken Livingstone!
Fuck Ken Livingstone!
Fuck Ken Livingstone!

(Repeat chorus ad naus.)

Yeah, I know I've posted the lyrics before, but it's one of those songs you just never get tired of hearing, isn't it? Just when you think things in this city can't be bollocksed up any worse than they already are, Ken goes and gives you another excuse to shuffle off to bleeding Buffalo (or Sheffield in a pinch). Three fucking quid for a one-way, one-zone trip, for a trip from Goodge Street to Tottenham Court, or Edgware Road to Marlybone. Cor's Boars, I could walk from one of those stations to the other for free in 15 minutes. Does Ken actually expect me to cough up £3 for the fucking privilege of finishing the trip by tube in 20? Because that's how long it takes, surface to surface on a Sunday afternoon. Try timing it sometime. 'This fare rise will hopefully bring all riders round to seeing the advantages of the Oyster Card,' he drawls in that revoltingly smug, half-pleb, half-posh south-of-the-river accent of his. Like it's so fucking obvious what these advantages are. I'll tell you some advantages I'd like to have Mr Mayor. I'd like to have the advantage of taking the tenner in my pocket right now, breaking it to pay my £2.50 (sorry, £3) fare to West Finchley, then of using the balance to buy a takeaway CTM, or a pack of fags, or a couple of pints of Stella down at my local. I'd like to have the advantage of not having to waste an hour on a wash day sorting through my trouser pockets looking for that fucking card if I want to be sure I don't throw away the other £7. Above all I'd like to have the 25-odd pounds I've laid out on Oyster Cards over the past year in my hands now instead of taking up precious space in my wallet. I want to have absolutely free use of that money so that in case I'm hit by a bendy bus tonight while staggering home from the pub, I'll at least die knowing that those £25 went to a good cause--the cause of my intoxication--and not to pay for another one of Ken's dopey civic-improvement projects. The Oyster Card is great if 1) you don't own a car and b) you commute to and from the centre city every day. But it's like fucking Bristols on a mule for those of us who drive and come into centre city 5, 10--at most 15--times a year. The problem with Ken is, he's never driven a car so he doesn't know all the hassle and aggravation of being stuck behind a lorry spewing diesel exhaust in your face for 45 minutes while you circle around the Hanger Lane Gyratory (make that Stationary) at the speed of an hour hand on a clock; he doesn't know what it's like to lose a dinner reservation in Islington because you've wasted an hour looking for parking, or to end up with no money to pay for your meal because you've been mugged twice on your way to the restaurant during your half-mile walk through the ropiest stretch of road in Camden Town. (Garage isn't a dirty word, Ken, although congestion charge is). Because he doesn't know what any of this is like (and of course, because he's a fucking megalomaniac), as long as he's mayor, life will be a living hell for car-owning Londoners. Yeah, I'll say it again: Fuck Ken Livingstone. Fuck him and the poncey little bike he rode in on.

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Jeez. If this Mayor Ken is actually half as awful as this guy says he is, he makes Marion Barry look like Ed Koch (or is that vice-versa?).

Now out on DVD...

The chef d'œuvre of one of the Big Five (Cinque grandi) of Italian New Wave cinema
(Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow):

Immortality in Milan (1971). Directed by Luigi Contadino. Color, 183 minutes. In German, Italian, French, Danish, Polish, Flemish, and Romansh, with optional English subtitles. Cast: Sophia Lauren, Julie Christie, Ruth Gordon, Dominique Sanda. Based on Trudi Weib's 1962 novella Die Unsterblichkeit in Mailand, often compared to Kafka's Metamorphosis, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and, proleptically, Jaecken's Emmanuelle and Anderson's Logan's Run. The year is 2012. Gretchen Lindenberg (Lauren), a self-described "paper-pulp baroness" of proletarian origins, is in Milan for a trade fair. Ruthlessly practical in every domain of life, Lindenberg is particularly scornful of matters metaphysical and aesthetic; an attitude attested to by her one-off boast to a colleague that "our flagship cotton bond contains a higher concentration of pulverized sheet music than that of any other paper manufacturer in the EU." The diegesis of the film freely shuttles between the present and past, as well as between the actual and counterfactual, most famously in a series of recollected and fancied conversations between Lindenberg and her unnamed lover (Christie), a painter and philosophical idealist in the grand old German tradition who has contended that Lindenberg must hold herself aloof from the daily bustle of her business and dedicate her innermost self to the cultivation of the intellect and the contemplation of the thing-in-itself. On the first day of the exhibition, in the midst of a working lunch in the cafeteria of the Pirelli Tower, Lindenberg notices an elderly woman in a lime-green pantsuit (Gordon) sitting alone at a nearby table. The sheer hideousness and decrepitude of the old crone is such as to impel Lindenberg to question, for the first time in her life, not only her own sexuality, but also her vocation as a businesswoman. She imagines Christie pointing to the old woman and exclaiming, "Ecce mulier--that bag of bones! The telos of all of your vaunted pragmatism; me in 30 years, you in 20!" Stressed beyond belief by the untimely onset of this metaphysical crisis, Lindenberg contracts a chest cold and retires to her room at the Park Hyatt for two consecutive days and nights. At 23:00 of the second night she learns, courtesy of a local television news broadcast, that the first batches of the fabled immortality serum, discovered the previous year in the United States, have at last begun to arrive in the city's hospitals. By midnight she is fast asleep and dreaming of gloating to Christie, "So much for your vaunted idealism!" First thing next morning she repairs to the pronto soccorso of the Ospedale San Raffaele and is administered a dose of the serum, whose restorative effects are said to be immediate and dramatic. As if to spite her, however, her cold degenerates into a case of acute bronchitis. In desperation, she throws herself into the activity of the fair with feigned alacrity. Every day, both on the floor of the Fiera Milano and off, all talk of the non-shop variety centers on the immortality serum and the rejuvenation it has wrought among her fellow industrialists, to say nothing of the Milanese at large. The sole exception to this generally salubrious state of affairs (apart from herself) is her bugbear the old woman, who at lunchtime never fails to appear at her accustomed table, invariably looking worse for the passage of the preceding day. Lindenburg cannot help but be seized by the paranoiac suspicion that the ineffectuality of the serum in her own case is somehow linked to the prolongation of the old woman's moribund existence. She contrives sundry schemes for bumping off the old girl, but somehow never manages to summon up the gumption necessary for their execution. Finally, on the last day of the exhibition, when her walk to the Pirelli taxes her almost to the point of total physical collapse, she is met at the threshold of the cafeteria by a pair of orderlies bearing on a stretcher a body covered by a blanket from head to foot. As they pass into the lobby she catches a glimpse of a withered hand and the cuff of a lime-green sleeve protruding from under the edge of the blanket. At that very moment, to her astonishment and delight, she finds that her cold has seemingly completely evaporated; that she can breathe freely again; that, indeed she feels better, more youthful, more alive than she can remember ever before having felt. Her professional obligations vis-a-vis this sojurn having been met, she decides to treat herself to an early evening stroll in the Parco Sempione. There, under at the Arco della Pace, she meets and is instantly smitten by a young streetwalker (Sanda) for whom, as the camera pans up and down the newcomer's lithe, nublie young body in the closing scene, the viewer presumes she will shortly ditch Christie.

Hypernihilist's Credo

Nothing will happen to anyone anywhere ever again.

Bronx Cheer for the Common Man

Of all of the intellectual lumpenproletarian folkways over which our intellectual petit-bourgeoisie is forever working itself into a fellationary lather, perhaps the most overrated--the least deserving of the obeisance--is slang. Viewed in toto, the slang lexicon of any age testifies not--as its boosters would have us believe--to the fecundity, resourcefulness, and infinite invention of the everyday speakers of the language, but rather to their prevailing indolence, dullness, and incomparable ineptitude. For "everyday speakers" in the last sentence one should of, course, read: pimps, cutpurses, brigands, vandals, losels, loblolly men, louts, molls, trollopes, Tower Wharf maids, rug rats, sandbox slugs, and other such persons of dubious parts--and even more dubious morals--who collectively embody that rich melange of mendacity and mental torpor that alone can engender and sustain a genuinely vital intellectual lumpenproletariat. One knows better than to expect gold filigree from such rude artificers as these; and, accordingly the most pervasive and longstanding neologistic technique in the argotsphere consists in simply and brutally pruning an item in the standard lexicon down to a single syllable (as in the substitution of rep for reputation, of dis for disrespect, of peen for penis). In these cases the truncated word retains its original sense, but transposed into a more street-wise (read: lower) register befitting a speaker who would stab or shoot his interlocutor sooner than be caught saying please or thank you to him. A slightly less common and slightly more subtle stratagem of the slangsmith consists in the catechretic or metonymic displacement of the sphere of denotation of one of these standard-lexical items; and this is a change we witness being rung, for instance, on such stalwart Anglo-Saxon monosyllables as lame, cool, smoke, and bite. In the case of such argotemes as avail themselves of this second stratagem, the extent of the new usage' s transgression of the original sense is often much more slight than the intellectual petit-bourgeois apologist for slang, out of his understandable but my no means forgiveable zeal to be down with whatever is au courant among the kids or the people, would have us believe. The skate-punk's poser is only one letter away from the hoary Gallicism poseur, and as far as I can tell, mutatis habitus mutandi, carries exactly the same meaning; while Joe Average Teenager's secondary acceptation of lame (as in "a lame excuse") can boast of a standard literary English pedigree extending at least as far back as the 14th century.


In all candor, I must admit here that as a youngster, I was intermittently seduced by the blandishments of the trendier slang of my micro-generation. I recall, for instance, falling prey in my high school years to a transient infatuation with dis, a word that, as my first encounter with it fell hard on the heels of a first reading took of Dante, I fancifully conjectured must be some sort of hifalutin synonym for damn. It amused me no end to imagine that in dissing someone you were consigning him to permanent residence in Dis, the capital city of hell. As for props, a word I became acquainted with perhaps a year later, I mistook it for a manifestation of Stratagem No. 2; that is to say, I conceived of it as an arrogation by the moral sphere of the established meaning of prop; viz. "a material, literal support." I supposed that in rendering a person his props you were offering him moral support in the form of verbal approbation. In the case of both of these words, as with practically everything that appeals in this nine-times-reheated world of ours, the charm of the thing susbsisted largely on my sheer will not to look too closely into or for too long at the phenomenon at hand. So long as I abstained from undertaking any subcultural anthropological sallies into the histories of these words, I was free to spin etymological mondegreens around them to my heart's content. But alas! At some point in my early twenties, under the importunate aegis of some by-now-long-forgotten agent (perhaps a radio interview with a self-appointed expert on so-called street language), I came to learn of the true provenance of these words; to learn that they were both manifestations of the all-too-prosaic Stratagem No. 1; to learn that dis was merely a truncation of "disrespect," that props was merely a truncation of "proper respect." These revelations might not have been particulary demoralizing had the root of either word savored ever-so-slightly of the genuinely demimondiale. But neither "disrespect" nor "proper respect" sounded like anything that a genuinely hip person would be caught dead saying; neither sounded, in fact, like anything even a marginally cultivated square person would be caught dead saying. Both, in fact, sounded like the sort of thing an uncultivated person of either hip or square persuasion might say by way of conning his uncultivated brethren into believing that he was cultivated; both are, in fact, exemplars of that pandemic linguistic tic that Kingsley Amis termed the hyper-urbanism, the embodiment "of an indulged desire to be more correct than correct or posher than posh."


Of course, though, hyper-urbanism is hardly the exclusive purview of slanglophones. It is, indeed, preeminently the stomping grounds of that class of morons for whom linguistic gracelessness is a point of professional pride--namely the class comprising the commercial, governmental, and academic bureaucracies. And from hyper-urbanism we are but a throne's stow away officialese, that parallel lexicon the Slang has been called the "common man's art," but it would be more rightly termed the common man's officialese. Contrary to the word on the intellectually petit-bourgeois street, which holds that slang is a kind of ionic chemical force binding the salt of the earth together in one big happy shaker, the aims of slang are largely consubstantial with the aims of the language of bureaucrats; these aims being the coercion, management, and degradation of the individual in the name and interests of the collective; and in the world-bleary eyes of the man of spirit[1] the leading 40-watt-bulbs of the most bureauphilic professions (e.g. [but not i.e.], clinical psychology, public health, and law enforcement) are like to appear as indistinguishable from the leading 40-watt-bulbs of the street. His lamentable confusion of the two types is so extreme as to lead him, in moments when he is caught unawares by an exemplar of one or the other of them to confuse him for one of his counterparts in the other realm; to exclaim "Please don't shoot me!" on being stopped for a traffic violation by a police officer, or "I'm sorry, officer, but my ID has expired!" on being aggressively panhandled by a street person .


From the point of view of the man of spirit, the most demoralizing fact of all about the argotsphere is surely that, inasmuch as it is the habitual haunt of the sorts of people who have absolutely no regard for historical memory, it tends to dredge up, with drying-machine-like rapidity and regularity, the same words over and over again, across not only decades but also centuries, with ever-more-predictable denotations attached to them like so many electrostatically-charged socks or pairs of knickers. Much in the manner of someone stuck at the Laundromat long after his clothes have dried, the man of spirit tends to tire of hanging around such a milieu. Immured in such a wash of tedium, he would fain retire for good to the tranquility and solitude of his chamber, where alone he is afforded sufficient leisure to bone up on his command of the standard English lexicon, a command whose inadequacy is time and again pointed up to him in the course of his diurnal reading schedule, in which scarcely an hour passes without his stumbling over some altogether unfamiliar hard word, often enough in a work by one of those very writers celebrated for the most spartan simplicity and pellucidity of style. But the man of spirit should resist yielding unreservedly to this reclusive impulse; for in so doing he would play directly into the hands of the intellectual petit bourgeois, who is ever on the lookout for opportunities to brand the him a linguisitic luddite, a wanker, or a pretentious fuck. In any composition that should ever perchance meet the optics of this most pretentiously unpretentious of all fucks, the man of spirit should take care to alloy his prevailingly standard formal lexical style with a small proportion of words drawn from the slang lexicon, together with a soupcon of pseudo-slang words of his own coinage. If he judiciously follows this prescription, he will find himself not only generally succeeding in keeping the intellectual petit bourgeois at bay, but also in occasionally managing to throw him off balance, or even to knock him over flat on to his chino-swathed fat ass; he will manage not only consistently to prove to the intellectual petit-bourgeois that he (the MOS) is not, after all, the proverbial guy who has been living in a cave for the past ten years, but also occasionally give him (the IPB) cause to wonder whether he himself has not been getting out enough lately. In musicological terms, the slang lexicon may be likened to the most infantile of instruments--a toy piano. The man of spirit must every now and again take it upon himself to pound out a few fortissimo tone clusters on the keyboard of this instrument, lest his own linguistic perfomances should be drowned out by the billion-strong chorus of toy piano virtuosi feebly essaying their million interchangeable variations on Chopsticks.


Contrary (again) to the word on the intellectually petit-bourgeois street, the overwhelming bulk of lasting additions to the lexicon of English since Norman times have been crafted at the point of a quill not of a shiv; in the coolness of deliberation not the white heat of spontaneity; in the closets of scholars and gentlemen, not on playgrounds or in bawdy houses. Anyone who says otherwise is, of course, welcome to bring the chupa-chupa down on my King Dong.


[1] Man of Spirit: A calque of the German Geistesmensch; not, it must be emphasized, a paraphrase of the English Spiritual Guy (or Dude).


P.S. Did you ever notice, by the way, that slang is an anagram of glans? That's food for thought, in a certain lewdly meta-metaphorical register.

You Might Be a Redneck If...

...you've been known to brag about your private boycott of Starbucks, Microsoft or Wal-Mart.


...you think such a thing as the "digital divide" exists.


...you thought Super-Size Me! was a good movie.


...you've willingly sat through even a single episode of American Idol, The Apprentice, Fear Factor, or Rock Star for any reason, especially "the pleasure of seeing just how stupid people can act."


...it wouldn't be out of character for you to address the waiter at a so-called ethnic restaurant in his native language (Here your degree of rubriousness is directly proportional to the waiter's apparent fluency in English).


...you've ever complained that Hollywood stars are "too beautiful," or, corallarily, you've praised the Dove soap company's Campaign for Real Beauty.


...you've ever used the phrase "shades of gray" in a setting other than a paint store.


...you have ever posted a so-called spoiler warning, or have ever been dissuaded from reading ahead in a text by a spoiler warning posted by someone else.

The King Dong in My Pants (apologies to Wallace Stevens)

Call the roller of this cigar,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
On bathroom tiles concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches model such undress
As they are used to wear, and let his mate
Bring cherries in last year’s magazines.
Let fate take tuition from chance.
The only King Dong is the one in my pants.

Take from the journal of June
Priced at nine round bucks that sheet
On which I’ve emblazoned Rorschachs thrice
And spread it to showcase her ass.
If her horny eyes obtrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the dancer be the dance.
The only King Dong is the one in my pants.

Portmanteau Songs

Lost my partner, what could I do?
Skip to my loo, skip to my loo.
I needed money, what could I do?
Skip to my loo, skip to my loo;
Skip to my loo, and the loo won.


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Purple Rain, Purple Rain,
Purple Rain, Purple Rain,
West Virginia, Mountain Mama,
Take me hame,
Purple Rain.

The Span of Life (apologies to Robert Frost)

The kitten mews sweetly, oblivious of fawkin'.
I'll still be around when she's a grimalkin.

O My Friendster, There Is No Friend

(For a PDF version of this essay, go to The Worldview Annex.)




About a month ago as of this writing, I joined Friendster at the invitation of someone whom I had up to that point not really regarded as a friend of my own, but rather as a friend of a friend with whom I enjoyed, at most, from my own point of view, an amicable—that is to say a merely friend-like—acquaintanceship. Had this invitation not been extended to me, I probably would have remained un-Friendsterized to this very moment, as although I had nursed a mild curiosity about Friendster ever since first learning of its existence about a year earlier, this curiosity had always been overpowered first by my impression, formed on the basis of my reading of a single article in The New Statesman, that the median age of its users was just shy of 16; and second by a certain frisson of moral and aesthetic revulsion that came over me whenever I tried to imagine myself putting into practice the Friendsterian project of collecting friends. I can trace the initial stimulus to this frisson back to a micro-epoch in which Friendster itself—and for that matter the very interweb itself—could at most have constituted a gleam in a software developer’s eye, to wit, the micro-epoch of the early 90s, and it had been brought into being by an anecdote concerning a person I knew only by sight, related for my amusement by an acquaintance or near-friend of mine who had been involved in a standoff with him that had threatened to erupt into an outright altercation. “You’d better watch out,” this person had yelled menacingly over his shoulder at my acquaintance or near-friend as he retreated, seemingly content to postpone the fisticuffs until such time as he could count on the support of a sufficiently large retinue of supernumerary fists and cuffs, “I have 10 friends.” Subsequently, my recollection of this moment in all of its risibility has sufficed to check every temptation to tally or even vaguely estimate the number of my friends.


Now, as to my first reservation: I was disabused of my misconception about Friendster’s micro-generational demographics at the moment of registration, when I discovered that you had to be at minimum 18 even to join; and subsequent browsing of the gallery of user profiles has persuaded me that I am, at 32, still young enough to limbo-dance my way gracefully enough under the right rim of the chronological bell curve of the population comprising the Friendster-using so-called community. Evidently the Friendster of today is not your father’s Friendster, the Friendster of the summer of 2003. But even a month into my Friendster membership, I hold fast to my second reservation; and indeed I hold all the faster to it the longer in the tooth I become as a Friendster user.


For the balance of this essay, I propose to examine, to analyze, to contextualize, to attempt to come to terms with, this second reservation. As I mentioned earlier, I have not kept up with the press on Friendster, but I think I am safe in assuming that whatever has been written about it in our major metropolitan dailies and alternative weeklies has been prevailingly derisory in tone and pitched to a readership that was complementarily predisposed to regard Friendster with a mixture of bemusement (not amusement) and scorn. I think I am safe in assuming that my detection of more than a whiff of Limburger about Friendster eo ipso does not suffice to render me some kind of voice—or, rather, nose—in the wilderness. I think I am safe in assuming that my readership of above-average literacy must needs a rant, eo ipso, against Friendster about as much as it needs a rant against American Idol (and surely the expression “to rant against American Idol to the literate” conjures up the phenomenon metaphorically denoted by the expression “to preach to the choir” so vividly that by all rights it ought to supersede the expression “to preach to the choir” itself, at least for the duration of American Idol’s broadcast run). But I hardly believe I would be safe in assuming that my reader was annoyed, offended, bemused, put off by Friendster for the same reasons that I am annoyed, offended, bemused, and put off by it. Often enough, although not invariably, in cases in which I share a distaste for something with another person, it turns out that my fellow nose-holder is repulsed by what appears to me to be that something’s least essential, its most contingent, qualities; while I am repulsed by what appear to me to be its most essential qualities, which qualities my fellow nose-holder for her part, finds completely innocuous, if not, even supposing that he or she has taken notice of them—and as often as not she has not taken notice of them. Supposing my distaste for Friendster fits this general pattern, I imagine that Joe or Jane Average contemns Friendster because its de facto (and icky) function as an online dating service so stridently clashes with its ostensible (and wholesome) raison d'être of bringing prospective friends together; whereas my distaste for Friendster is inspired by the raison d’être itself, which I take to be far from wholesome inasmuch as it is necessarily predicated on a wholly unwarrantable overrating, sentimentalizing, kitschifying of the bond of friendship. “In the world outside of the interweb,” so the creators of Friendster must have mused in their Eureka moment, “how do people make new friends but through the friends they already have? Out of all the people in the world a person has yet to meet, with whom is she most likely to have something in common but an as-yet unmet friend of a friend? Hence what greater service could we perform on behalf the lonely and friend-impoverished than that of facilitating, through the magic of the interweb, their meeting of these as yet-unknown friends of their friends?”


But this line of thinking is founded on the old logical fallacy of post hoc, propter hoc: as a matter of course we probably are indeed obliged to select the majority of our new friends from a pool of friends of old friends, but that gives us no justification for supposing that on meeting some counterfactual version of one of these friends of one of our friends, a person who conformed exactly in every respect to her real-world self save for the fact that she remained innocent of the acquaintance of our friend, we would, statistically speaking, be any more inclined to strike up a friendship with her than we would on meeting any other stranger picked at random out of a crowd. Let me not mince words here; let me not pull any punches; let me, indeed, play right into the hands of those who would accuse me of shooting from the hip, as with a well-nigh Proustian degree of cocksureness I resume the thread of my discourse by averring that even in the best of all best-case scenarios we—you and I and people in general—have precious little enough in common with our existing friends as it is. Contingency and inertia are the foundation and walls of friendship, in relation to which infrastructure shared interests and outlooks are but so much fluting and stucco. In the course of our lives, we are lucky if we meet a handful of people with whom we individually share a single ethicule, with whom we see eye to eye on just one or two points; the greater part of the outlook of even our closest of friends is terra incognita to us—indeed terra that we would prefer never to become cognita, that in fact we would blow to smithereens if we had our druthers. Thus, there is not even the slightest suspicion of a guarantee that whatever binds us to one of our closest friends corresponds to whatever binds her in turn to her other friends. Thus, every new acquaintance we make through one of our existing friends threatens to impoverish our personal life at least as much it promises to enrich it: yes, in this new acquaintance we may have encountered a future boon companion who will one day rival our friend in point of the esteem and trust she inspires in us; but in her we are much more likely to have encountered a future third wheel who promises to blight countless rendezvous by virtue of her mere presence.


Hence the ultimate perfidiousness of the whole Friendster project. In the mere act of publicly naming our existing friends in a non-hierarchical list, as we are impelled to do by Friendster from the outset, we already traduce our affections, we publicly overrate our tolerance for the company of certain people at the expense of certain others whose tolerability we necessarily underrate; and in continually augmenting this list by indiscriminately befriending the friends of our existing friends, both close an distant, as Friendster encourages us to do over the long haul, we ensure that the discrepancy between our material connection to our so-called social network and the actual ebb and flow of our affections will grow ever wider with the passage of time. And as if this weren’t bad enough, Friendster compounds the perfidiousness by eliciting from its users so-called “testimonials,” postings on a user’s profile page attesting to all and sundry what “a fabulous, hellarad, superphly dude Josh” or “a wonderful, hyperebullient, drop-dead-gorgeous sex goddess Suzy” is. The intrusion of the word testimonial into the gemütlich realm of friendship is disconcerting to say the least, considering how gamily it reeks of such places of killjoy formality as the human resources office, the courtroom, and the funeral parlor. Traditionally speaking, when it concerns a living person, the praise bestowed within a testimonial—in a reference for a prospective employer or in a deposition in the witness stand—is by its very nature a qualified form of praise, a form of praise severely limited in its scope of moral judgment. I testify that so-and-so is an accomplished graphic designer, that so-and-so is not so morally unregenerate as to be capable of drowning a kitten in cold blood, but I am mute on the question of whether so-and-so could be counted on to cover his share of a bar tab or offer his shoulder sympathetically to the tears of a genuinely aggrieved soul. Traditionally speaking, we allow ourselves to give vent to effusions of such fulsome goo as typifies the Friendster testimonial only in eulogies at funerals, when we can rest assured that no matter how thick we’re laying on the praise on behalf of so-and-so, and no matter how much of a first-rate asshole we actually thought he was when he walked the earth, so-and-so will never manage to give the lie to our testimonial by doing a bad turn to ourselves or anyone else present, being as he is safely dead and packed up for shipping to the cemetery or crematorium. Traditionally speaking, all of these provisos on the context and content of testimonials have universally held true—but we shall have to see what becomes of them in the post-Friendster age.


So far I have written of Friendster only in connection with the institution of friendship itself—that is to say, in isolation from a consideration of the other institutionalized social bonds of our time, to wit, the family, the marriage and the (ugh!) life partnership. And so far the picture I have painted of friendship has, at its very rosiest, been rather grim in aspect. But in all candor, and in spite of the Ecclesiastian fervor of my tirade of the preceding paragraphs, I can affirm that I have come here to praise friendship—to offer a testimonial, as it were, on its behalf—and not to bury it, that I have come here, in fact to do whatever I can—presumably practically nothing—stave off its prospective burial (although, as will become presently clear, I hardly regard burial as a particularly apt metaphor for the process that I fear friendship is about to undergo). Yes, the fact is that my view of friendship is, as compared to my view of these aforementioned other institutions, positively radiant; and that at bottom my fear of Friendster has nothing to do with its potentially deleterious effects on the bond of friendship qua friendship and everything to do with its potentially deleterious effects on friendship qua last bastion of humane sociality; I fear that Friendsterism, once its example has been taken up by the world at large, will end by dragging friendship from the surface of the muddy puddle on which it presently floats down to the murky bottom of this puddle in which these other institutions have been mired for several decades now. Let us synoptically consider the state of the family, the marriage, and the (ugh![1]) life partnership at the turn of the millennium. Owing to a multitude of historical causes that it is beyond the scope of the present essay (and, what is more to the point, the present writer’s patience) to delineate, over the past 50 to 75 years particular embodiments of all of these institutions have come materially to resemble certain big-ticket durable consumer goods—personal computers, cars, sailboats, and the like—more closely than they resemble their 18th and 19th century counterparts. At every stage of life, the possession of one of these three quasi-commodities, a life partnership, a spouse, or a family (our spouse and our progeny considered collectively), is a necessary if not sufficient precondition for membership in the human community, and yet no ineluctable extrinsic force, whether in the form of parental authority or in that of the prospective disapproval of society at large, binds us to the particular life partner, spouse, or family that we have chosen to affiliate ourselves with. We are entirely free to choose whether to maintain our affiliation with this particular life partner, spouse, or family, and being thus free we are bound to be haunted by the temptation to upgrade to a more agreeable or more covetable life partnership, marriage, or domestic arrangement. And yet again, if we were to judge by the general tenor of the remarks made by individuals apropos of their (ugh!) life partners, spouses, and children, we would suppose that the institutions of romantic love, marriage, and family were stronger, more perdurable now than at any earlier point in human history. No sooner have you had sex with the same person for two consecutive weekends, no sooner have you tied the old matrimonial knot, no sooner have you sired or borne your first whelp, than you are immediately obliged, in every social setting of whatever scale, from the corporate stockholders’ meeting to the barroom chinwag, to avow that it is the presence of “Ben, my life partner,” “Suzanne my devoted wife,” “Caitlin and Brianna, my darling children” alone in your life that is keeping your from applying a razor blade to your wrists, putting a bullet in your head, slipping your neck through a noose (this, of course, until the dissolution of the life partnership or of the marriage, or until the kids move away and stop bothering to stay in touch with you, at which point you are free to avow that the depredations of a Hitler, a Stalin, a Pol Pot can never match those that have been visited on you by your ex-life-partner, your spouse, your ungrateful children). At no point in our history than at present have we had less legitimate cause to trust and to feel loved by those supposedly nearest and dearest to us, and yet we persist in devoting the better part of our conversational energy on crying up our dependence on the trust and affection of these same people. As if in willful denial of the contingency and provisionality of our affiliations with our (ugh!) life partners, spouses, and children, we protest the essentialness and perdurability of these affiliations by means of a hyperbolic rhetoric of feeling that even the Victorians in their schmaltziest moments would never have stooped to using. In short, collectively, vis-à-vis the three institutions of the (ugh!) life partnership, the marriage, and the family, we have succumbed to the much underrated vice of sentimentality: we have lost the will or the capacity to distinguish, in the first place, between what it might be expedient, for the sake of keeping up with the Joneses, to avow we feel and what we actually feel; and in the second place, between what we actually feel at the present moment and what we have every reasonable expectation of feeling a month, a year, ten years hence—most damningly of all, we have lost sight of any notion that it might be worthwhile, for decency’s sake, to draw such distinctions.


It is only in counterpoint to my foregoing lament on the obligatory sentimentalization of the life partnership, the marriage, and the family that I can finally sing my ode to friendship; for it seems to me that for all of its inherent and inescapable failings, the quasi-institution of friendship has, if nothing else, and in contrast to these other institutionalized social relationships, heretofore managed to slip below the radar screen, so to speak, of sentimentality—perhaps merely by virtue of its sheer marginality, its non-exclusivity, its institutional nebulousness. To be sure, sentimentalization is probably the rule rather the exception in friendship. Most people do indeed tend to overrate the degree of intimacy they enjoy with their friends just as they overrate the degree of intimacy they enjoy with their life partners, spouses, or children; and even the least sentimentally-inclined among my readers doubtlessly can attest to their firsthand familiarity with collectivities of so-called friends in which the discrepancy between the institutional rhetoric of the friendship and its underlying material stratum of intimacy is of the acutest—to name a pair of hypothetical but entirely plausible examples, a group of women who have nothing in common but their residence in Moline, Davenport, Rock City, or Bettendorf, and their womanhood, and who every Saturday afternoon as a gaggle descend upon the shops of the Rock City Supermall sporting identical pink T-shirts collectively identifying them as the Quad City Shopaholics, a group of men who have nothing in common but their manhood, their residence in the 21030 Zip code and a predilection for beer-swilling, and who every Saturday evening as a pride descend upon the barstools of the Cockeysville Pool ’n’ Pub sporting identical blue T-shirts that identify them collectively as the Greater Cockeysville Beer Swillers. But such kitschification as instanced by these examples has not been written into the very specifications, so to speak, of friendship as it has been written into the very specifications of all of the other institutionalized social relationships I discussed earlier. For whatever reason, I have found it worthwhile and practical to stay in touch with a certain individual—let us call him Jeff Stuckenschmidt—over a period of more than a decade. My presentation of my affiliation with Mr. Stuckenschmidt to the world is entirely at my discretion. I am permitted to refer to him, at one extreme of estimation as my oldest friend, or my closest friend, or one of my lead homies, while at the other extreme I may choose to refer to him as this guy I know or simply elect to avoid any allusion whatsoever to his existence in the presence of other people. Mr. Stuckenschmidt is likewise free to represent his affiliation with me to the world just as he chooses. He may choose to represent me as his oldest and closest friend in the course of every conversation at which I am not present or he may never mention me at all to a single soul; none of this is relevant to the material character of our friendship, none of this matters a whit as far as he and I qua friends are concerned. And the specific material content that Mr. Stuckenschmidt and I impart to our friendship is likewise entirely up to the two of us. I can spend as much or as little time with Mr. Stuckenschmidt as I choose in any setting that I choose, and when I have become weary of his company I can take my leave of him. If Mr. Stuckenschmidt is a passionate lepidopterist and he knows that the sight of butterflies makes my skin crawl he will never dream of inviting me along to a butterfly hunt, while if I am a passionate oenophile and know that Herr Stuckenschmidt is a teetotaler I will never dream of inviting him to a wine tasting; and neither of us will feel snubbed for having been excluded from the other's pastime. (Contrast this latitudinarian atmosphere with the factionalism that prevails in most marriages, in which each party squanders thousands of hours a year on alternately humoring the other party's tastes and trying to cure her of them.) If I take offense at something Mr. Stuckenschmidt has said or done, I am not required on the spot to figure out whether I am justified in feeling so offended; that is, to figure out whether my resentment arises out of an on-the-mark intuition of some irremediable flaw in his character or from some blameworthy trait of my own (such as, say, an inclination toward envy). I can wait for my resentment to cool to such a point at which it will no longer cloud my judgment, and at that point I can decide whether it was I or he who was at fault. If in the end I decide in favor of Mr. Stuckenschmidt, I may subsequently call him up without reservation; if in the end I decide against him, I must subsequently decide, based on a general consideration of the history of his conduct, whether the flaw in his character that gave rise to the insult precludes my enjoyment of his company—whether it is a peripheral vice outweighed by certain central virtues or a central vice insufficiently counterbalanced by peripheral virtues. I am in no way obliged in such a case to yield to my resentment by picking a quarrel with him, for the sake of “clearing the air,” of “getting things out in the open,” as I am so obliged whenever I feel rising within my breast the faintest tremor of ill-feeling toward my (ugh) life-partner, my wife, or one of my children. Within friendship it is still possible to maintain simultaneously a genuinely ethical disposition toward the other person that is, correlatively, a genuinely ethical disposition toward oneself, a disposition that gives free scope to other person’s subjecthood without impinging on one’s own subjective freedom. It is still possible to maintain such a mutual disposition within a friendship because the world has placed no formal restrictions on what constitutes a friendship, on what a friend should or should not be expected to do. Above all else, on this score, I wish to emphasize the exemption from having to name our friends as friends; as it is within this exemption that resides the utopian hope of freeing ourselves from the curse of sentimentalization. We cannot, after all, overrate that which we do not rate at all. Hypothetically—but not at all merely theoretically—we may envisage a friendship in which neither party ever made reference to the word friend either to the other party or to any third party, but which nonetheless by virtue of its continuity provided the heartiest moral sustenance to both parties; a friendship that formally speaking did not even exist but materially speaking, in point of sheer consistency of purpose, in point of its capacity to let each of them to be herself—however fleetingly—without impinging on another person’s freedom to be herself, trumped all of the other relationships in these two people’s lives, provided each of them with a greater degree of moral sustenance than did any of these other relationships. Such a friendship would be a normative if not ideal[2] friendship, and, by extension, a normative if not ideal embodiment of human sociability. Suffice it to say, such a friendship is axiomatically impossible, indeed unintelligible, within the Friendster universe; and it will be equally axiomatically impossible, equally axiomatically unintelligible, in the larger world should the codification of friendships, according to the model furnished by Friendster, become the rule rather than the exception.


Even after setting aside the ultimately unanswerable kinds of ad hominem retorts to my very premises, retorts that in any case might be issued only by the sort of self-congratulatory Pollyanna who has given up reading this essay several pages ago (“You’re just saying all of these mean things about people because you’re incapable of loving; why can’t you just accept others as they are like me?,” etc.), I can foresee two objections to the argument I have advanced so far that at first blush seem entirely reasonable. The first—and the easier of the two to dispatch—consists in the observation that Friendster is hardly the first example of a thing of its kind to appear on the world stage, that in Friendster we hardly witness the first large-scale and certainly not the most radical attempt to redefine or reconstitute the quasi-institution of friendship. Two obvious candidates for such a precedent spring to mind, namely Quakerism and the International Communist Labor Movement, neither of which, obviously, has in the long run proved fatal to the classical institution of friendship. Every Quaker was (and, for all I know, still is) obliged to address every other Quaker as friend; every Communist was (and in a tiny handful of countries still is) obliged to address every other Communist as friend’s more plebian synonym, comrade. Quakerism has been around for the better part of four centuries, Communism for the better part of two; at certain points in their respective histories each has been a social and political force to be reckoned with on a national or global scale, and yet all along, even during those periods and in those places in which one of the other of them has been at its been at its most vigorous and has claimed the greatest number of adherents, people have continued to form and cultivate friendships on the classical model. “Is it not conceivable,” my reasonable opponent queries me, “that Friendster should flourish on the same scale as Quakerism or Communism while remaining content, like these two movements, to leave the classical institution of friendship untouched? Does the mandate that every Friendster user should address all of his fellow Friendster users as friends differ in any material respect—vis-à-vis the world at large—from the mandate that every Quaker should address all of his fellow Quakers as friends or the mandate that every Communist should address all of his fellow Communists as comrades?” To the first of these questions I answer no; to the second, yes. For in both Quakerism and Communism the friendly-comradely mandate is merely a tactical maneuver subordinate to a larger strategic aim. Quakerism and Communism are both movements in the only meaningful sense of the term: that is to say, they are both collectivities united by their will to attain a common goal—the kingdom of God in the case of the Quakers, a post-capitalist utopia in the case of the Communists. Thus, the hailing of your fellow Quaker or Communist as a friend or comrade amounts to nothing more (or less) than an acknowledgment that he or she is every bit as devoted to the cause of the movement as you are. Neither the Quaker nor the Communist has ever seen any point in dispensing with the classical notion of friendship, or in ceasing to cultivate friendships according to the classical model, until such time at which every human soul will have been won over to the cause of Quakerism or Communism; the Quaker or Communist has always simply gone about his business in the world with two parallel notions of friendship in his head—one that is lofty, noble, and preeminently transcendent; and another that is lower, common, and worldly. In the present, fallen state of the world, you and I are both friends or comrades inasmuch as we are both united in our will to bring into being the kingdom of God or the workers’ paradise, a will that transcends our venal impulses to enjoy each other’s company and to help each other out as individuals; in hailing you as my friend I may put you under the obligation to attend an anti-war protest in solidarity with all of our other friends, or to participate a campaign to organize the workers at a local factory in solidarity with our other comrades. But on the other hand I do not thereby put you in any danger of being one day conscripted to help me move or share a drink with me at five minutes’ notice when I find myself in a state of personal crisis (unless, by some unhappy coincidence, we find ourselves both living in some jerkwater town where neither of has any expectation of meeting any other Quakers or labor activists). But Friendster, unlike Quakerism and Communism, is no movement: the Friendsterian project of making as many friends as possible is not subordinated to any higher aim but constitutes an aim in itself. And unlike Quakerism and Communism, Friendster makes no pretense of redefining the institution of friendship from scratch; indeed, it holds fast to the classical notion of friendship and presupposes its solidity. For the Friendster user, it is not a question of forming an altogether new kind of affiliation with the world under the auspices of an altogether new definition of friendship, of devoting oneself to a cause and retroactively christening all of the adherents of that cause (even those whose existence she is as yet unaware of) as friends; it is a question, rather, of maintaining her existing affiliation with the world along with her existing understanding of friendship, and of slackening the standards according to which she considers herself bound to another person in friendship. To cast my comparison of the two classes of phenomena into a metaphor that is only barely a metaphor: Quakerism and Communism set about forming an economy apart from the one sanctioned by the state, an economy that makes use of its own, self-minted currency; while Friendster sets about flooding the official state-sanctioned economy with counterfeit bills that are impossible to distinguish from legitimate currency. In the post-capitalist or post-secular world envisaged by Quakerism or Communism—that is to say, a world in which every human being was a Quaker or a Communist—the old classical notion of friendship, like the state, would have long since simply withered away, having been supplanted by a form of sociality by comparison with which the affiliation of mere individuals with other mere individuals would seem downright barbaric. By contrast, in a world in which every human being was a Friendster user—a world that Friendster may be preparing us for whether it actually envisages it or not—the classical notion of friendship would survive intact, but radically degraded, given that 99% of all of the friendships subsisting in the world had been built on a foundation comprising a handful of smiley-face emoticons and 50-character-long text messages.


As to the second of the two plausible objections to my argument, namely that I am surely taking Friendster just a wee bit too seriously in ascribing to it any kind of world-transforming power; given that Friendster is in essence a mere toy, hailing from the infantile fringe of the interweb; and given, moreover, that a substantial plurality, if not a majority, of Friendster users, being full aware of its infantile provenance, habitually allude to their own affiliations with Friendster with tongues firmly in cheek—as to this objection, I have no hope of conclusively refuting it. For to argue persuasively that something sets a bad precedent, as I hope I have already done vis-à-vis Friendster, does not amount to arguing persuasively that it sets a dangerous precedent. A man who drives his car over the railings of a bridge sets a bad precedent for other drivers, but one not very many of them will be keen to follow. Generally speaking—or, at any rate, in the human world—the only way to go about arguing that a given precedent is a dangerous and not merely bad one is to try to prove that it echoes in some significant register an antecedent bad precedent whose dangerousness has, with the benefit of hindsight, been conclusively proven.[3] As we have already seen, in the register of friendship itself Friendster has no precedent of any kind, dangerous or harmless, to echo. Hence my intuition that Friendster threatens to erode the quasi-institution of friendship as we have known it necessarily rests on my admittedly counterintuitive conviction that flippancy, jocularity, lack of seriousness, whatever you want to call it (only please, for Petessakes, don’t call it irony[4]), far from being the impassable scourge of sentimentality, may in the long run, in some instances, prove to be sentimentality’s partner in crime. My conviction is that when we jokingly refer to something by means of the word x we are behaving more like the person who refers to this same something as x in all earnestness than we are like the person to whom it would never occur to refer to this particular something as x in any spirit, joking or otherwise. As regards Friendster specifically, then, I believe that if the devisers of Friendster had not, on some level, as the expression goes, been keen on capitalizing on the sentimental and non-predatory connotations of the word friend, they would have chosen a different name for their service: in a spirit of greater modesty they might have called it Knowster; in a spirit of greater frankness they might have called it Prospectivesexpartnerster. And I believe that Friendster users, in acquiescing in the designation of the people they happen to meet or keep in touch with through Friendster as friends, are complementarily on some level either capitalizing on or being capitalized by these same sentimental and non-predatory connotations, however smirkingly they might go on about Friendster in their real-world conversations.


In order to make my conviction carry any weight with the reader, I must tell the story of how some particular word, having initially been bandied about in a spirit of jocularity, eventually came to serve a materially serious function; and happily, I have the story of just such a word ready to hand, that word being another F-word, indeed, the coarsest of all F-words—namely, folks. The ballad of the word folks that I am about to tell is the mirror image of the science fiction scenario I envisage for the post-Friendster world; for whereas looking ahead to the post-Friendster world I see a watchword of civilization being debased by the increase of its currency in uncivil settings, the story the evolution of folks over 80 or so years is a tale of the ennoblement of a watchword of barbarism through the increase of its currency in civil settings. Through the earliest decades of the last century, folks was a word used exclusively by bumpkins in reference or address to other bumpkins. And implicitly or explicitly the word folks always carried with it the attributive adjective plain, or simple; to the person employing it folks were always plain, simple individuals like you and me without any use for book-learning or the fancy talk of city-slickers. The class of folks comprised all of those idlers and simpletons who were distinguishable not so much by their idleness and simplicity as by their placidity in the face of the notion of remaining idle and simple. On the other hand, within a general register of linguistic usage for the purpose of designating, in the third person, a more general class of human beings comprising both the provincial and the urbane we had at our disposal the perfectly serviceable and humane word people; while for the purpose of addressing a class of human beings to whom by default we always gave the benefit of the doubt of assuming they were cultivated and urbane, we had at our disposal the equally serviceable and humane expression ladies and gentlemen. But all that started to change back in the (heady?) days of the first-generation organ of electronic mass media, the radio, when some cynically plain-spoken humorist hailing from the heartland (Will Rogers seems a likely candidate) hit on idea of addressing his entire listening audience, comprising all sorts of folks—er, people—from toffish Manhattan socialites to little old ladies in Dubuque, as folks, by way of bringing them all under one big chautauqua-tent-like electromagnetic umbrella. Of course, our humorist must have known full well that roughly half of his audience were not and did not consider themselves folks, but he also presumably thought that this half would also take his hailing of them as folks as a good-natured jibe, and would actually, in a perverse kind of way, enjoy it, as they might enjoy a week’s sojourn at a dude ranch. The telos of this bit of rural vaudevillian tomfoolery of yesteryear is that now, at the turn of the millennium, folks has almost completely displaced people and ladies and gentlemen in practically every conceivable kind of context, from greetings in general-circulation letters or e-mail messages to the body text of articles in major metropolitan newspapers. At the same time, folks has shed not a particle of its old connotation of placid simplicity and idleness; it has, I must emphasize, displaced rather than replaced the word people. To refer to or address a given human collectivity as a group of folks is automatically to hail each member of that collectivity as a good-natured, banjo-picking, tobacco-chewing, rocking-chair-loving hillbilly, a veritable Jed Clampett. But clearly, a substantial if ever-diminishing minority of the populace would prefer not to be lumped in with Jed Clampett and company—they would prefer, in correspondence addressed to them by strangers, to be addressed as Dear Sir or Madam; to be addressed by their radio and television talk show hosts as (a member of the collectivity of) ladies and gentlemen; to read in their local newspaper about the people milling about the corridors the Rock City Supermall (where they themselves have been known to shop). For my part, I know that whenever I receive a general-circulation e-mail that opens with a greeting of “Folks,” or turn on my radio and hear myself and my fellow-listeners addressed by the same formula, I want to reach into the monitor or the speaker with both hands, seize the offending party by his grubby lapels, and having dragged him bodily into the room, pull his moth-eaten homburg down over his ears, break his god-awful banjo in two over my knee, and pour chaw from his own pouch down his throat until he chokes. But of course, practically speaking, I have no means of giving vent to my outrage; the most I can do is to close my inbox or tune to a different station and wait for it to dissipate. The folks and would-be folks among us have triumphed seemingly for good; in our epoch those dour and pretentious sorts who aspire to be full-fledged people are, as they say, shit out of luck. Those who, in a thoroughly Friendsterized world, took so serious and selective view of friendship as to demur at calling a friend every Tom, Dick, and Harry (or Meg, Jane, and Suzy) whose existence they had become apprised of through the interweb, would likewise be shit out of luck.


In conformity to custom, I shall conclude this essay as I began it, on a personal note, by publicly taking stock of the state of my own friendscape a full month into my Friendster membership. So far the list of friends on my profile page comprises a mere five individuals, only one or at most two of whom, by virtue of being people I try to stay in touch with on every week or every other week when they are nearby and every month or every other month when they are far away, actually qualify as friends according to my provisional, private standards. The other three I would describe as friends of friends who are there effectively because they asked to be by adding me to their own list of friends. (To brush away a hand offered in friendship is as good as to make a new enemy, no?) On the other hand, I myself have been left in suspense by one of my provisionally genuine friends, a Friendster user whom I invited to be my Friendster friend several weeks ago and who has yet to acknowledge my invitation. Should I read his silence—so I ask myself—as a token of the marginality of Friendster in his own world or as a token of my own marginality in that world, a marginality that has so far been belied by his willingness to meet me for dinner at least once during each of his increasingly rare and increasingly brief stays in my home metropolis (his former home metropolis)? In all of this endless fretting over the question of whether I am being snubbed by this friend of mine I descry the materialization of one of my least wholesome qualities, a kind of jealous suspiciousness that I must always be on guard against whenever I find myself speculating about the motives of other people. I can hardly take comfort in the thought that my Friendster use is nurturing this quality rather than abetting my efforts to rein it in. Nor can I take much pride in the fact that I have seen fit to accept more than one Friendster testimonial in which I seem to be presented more as an object of ridicule than as one of esteem. Parenthetically, I must add here in qualification (but by no means in retraction) of my earlier diatribe against Friendster testimonials that, presumably in rebellion against the inherent soppiness of the testimonial formula, a minority of Friendster users have taken to penning testimonials that are essentially anti-testimonials, mini-screeds that tread a fine line between satire and surrealism; and that the testimonials I am writing about are instances of this anti-genre. To elaborate: in one of the two testimonials he has written on my behalf (the other one consists of a single word: “deviant”), Paul claims that I “like collecting boxes.” I can pinpoint the inspiration for this little fragment of misrepresentation down to the very day and practically the very hour of its origination; namely late on an early summer evening when Paul paid his first and so-far only visit to my apartment and vocally observed that occupying practically the full breadth of my living room couch (and thus effectively annulling its utility as an accoutrement of hospitality) were two enormous cardboard boxes, the packing materials for the very computer on which I am writing this essay, a computer that had been delivered to me less than a month earlier. Now, I’ll tell you something, ladies and gentlemen: disposing of large cardboard boxes in my apartment building is no picnic; with justice you might even describe it as something of an ordeal. You have to collapse them, fold them up, and carry them all the way downstairs (seven flights in my case) to a dumpster at the side of the building. To anyone already aware of this set of disincentives or thoughtful enough to intuit them after the fact, the presence of these two boxes in my apartment would have served simply as an index of my participation in a certain kind of middle-grade slovenliness. But Paul, whether or not he really saw their presence in a different, more sinister light (and I can’t seriously imagine he did), impishly seized on it as a pretext for publicly affiliating me with the risible but nonetheless decidedly sinister class of demented souls who actively hoard cardboard boxes. And for all of my scruples on this score how could I refuse to allow him to represent me thus? If there is one character in our epoch who is the object of more contempt and ultimately more mistrust than the type who hoards cardboard boxes it is the type who, as they say, can’t take a joke.
To my credit, I have at least managed to resist the temptation to invite my non-Friendsterized friends to join Friendster for the sake of padding out my list of friends and thereby making myself appear to be better liked, more popular than I at present appear to be to the so-called community of Friendster users. I have further managed to resist the temptation to use my Friendster membership as an excuse or pretext for getting back in touch with a round half-dozen former friends and acquaintances whose existence in the world of the present I have become cognizant of through their inclusion in one of my Friendster friends’ list of friends. Prior to my affiliation with Friendster, I had at my disposal abundant means of ferreting out their whereabouts and dropping them a line, and yet for whatever reason I did not find it worthwhile to do so; why should I find it any more worthwhile to do so now? The discovery that we share an affiliation with Friendster inspires in me no more fellow-feeling than would the discovery that our respective Social Security numbers shared a single three-digit prefix.[5] In the end, I suspect that my foray into the world of Friendster will be short-lived: I do not foresee my list of friends expanding much beyond its present length; nor do I envisage myself endlessly tweaking my profile page in the hope of transforming it into a homing beacon for my prospective soul mate in the urban bustle of Manhattan or the wilds of Tajikistan. I foresee myself essentially doing my level best to live, as long as I am permitted to do so, in exactly the same manner as I lived before I signed up with Friendster—fastidious in choosing my friends and even more fastidious in choosing which of them to call friends, keeping as my watchword Montaigne’s famous proclamation, lifted from Aristotle, “O my friends, there is no friend,” and embracing it in all of its bracing paradoxicality.


[1] To gloss my inarticulate “ugh!” in comparatively articulate English: with the displacement, over the course of the past decade, of the paired terms girlfriend and boyfriend by the single gender-neutral term life partner we have clearly reached an all-time low as regards the discrepancy between the words we use to designate our particular affiliations with other people and the actual character of these affiliations. Girlfriend and boyfriend were both appropriately infantile in connotation: in referring another person as your girlfriend or boyfriend you conjured up in the mind of your listener or interlocutor the image of two high school students going steady—that is to say, seeing each other for a period of at most three years, a period pretty much coextensive with the length of the average relationship between two adults of any age. The introduction of the term life partner was evidently intended to impart to such relationships an aroma of sanctity, grown-upness, and perdurability that they are simply incapable of exuding. Your chances of persuading your parents that they may expect to see Suzy next Christmas will not improve an iota for your having introduced her this past Christmas as your life partner rather than as your girlfriend. Those who would divest the phrase of its sententiousness by cropping it down to the word partner more often than not end up setting their listener or interlocutor the awkward and distracting task of figuring out whether the relationship alluded to is of a professional or of an amorous nature, a task made all the more exasperating by the fact that often enough the domains of love and work overlap.
[2] A norm is distinguishable from an ideal by virtue of the practicability of its attainment.
[3] Hence the avidity with which partisans of every conceivable political cause pounce on interwar Germany in search of parallels to the present historical situation. After all, the most dangerous bad precedents in history are to be found there
[4] The history of the debasement that the word irony has undergone over the past half-century is worthy of treatment in a separate essay, perhaps even a monograph.
[5] In all candor, though, I must confess to having been mildly piqued by the wholesale neglect of these former friends and acquaintances of mine, by the apparent fact that not one of them has thought it worthwhile to invite me to be her Friendster friend. But such is the perverse logic of the human heart: to invert and inflate Groucho’s famous witticism, any club that won’t have me as a member is one that I want to be asked to join, regardless of whether I would ever have it as my club.

An observation I've been meaning to record somewhere for about six months now

We find other people's cell phone conversations irksome principally (and perhaps solely) because they simultaneously whet and frustrate our appetite for eavesdropping.

Pseudo-Mars and Pseudo-Venus

So, partly under the inspiration of Phil Gyford's Pepys Diary blog I've started up a blog version of Addison and Steele's Spectator. Originally I planned to publish this post as a comment on that blog, but on second thought (and also in emulation of Mr. Gyford's practice) I decided that I should save my editorializing for this one. The very first post headed (by me, not by A&S or any of their editors) Chastity and Courage put me in mind of how nuanced and progressive the Enlightenment view of natural human qualities was by comaprison with received opinion about these qualities in our own time. The essay (by Addison) centers around--or rather grows out of--a "Discourse upon that which passes for the chief Point of Honour among men and Women." By a "Point of Honour" Addison means a moral quality that a person feels himself or herself shamed in failing to exemplify; in men, he writes, the chief point of honor is courage, in women chastity. Addison's main aim in this essay is, in a word, to persuade the reader that each of these qualities is much overrated as a virtue--that in being given pride of place it crowds out the cultivation of more worthwhile qualities. The cause of this overrating of courage among men and of chastity among women, Addison speculates, must be "that each Sex sets the greatest Value on the Qualification which renders them the most amiable in the eyes of the contrary Sex. Had Men chosen for themselves, without Regard to the Opinions of the Fair Sex, I should believe the Choice would have fallen on Widsom or Virtue; or had Women determined their own Point of Honour, it is probable that Wit or Good-Nature would have carried it against chastity." What's fascinating and ultimately compelling about Addison's thesis here is its refusal to make a beeline from established practice to some ineluctable natural cause. The present-day reader would agree with Addison that men prize courage because they want to make a good showing in the eyes of women and that women prize chastity (or, at any rate, wish to avoid seeming promiscuous) because they want to make a good showing in the eyes of men, but he or she would take this to be a difference hard-wired into us by nature and would then adduce some dopey pseudo-scientific theory drawing on the evidence provided by the behavior of cavemen, dogs, reptiles, possibly even protozoa by way of arguing that because we could never help it anyway all of us, men and women alike, should just go on behaving as stupidly as we always have according to the models supplied to us by the current microepochal stereotypes of our sex. (Recall that most of the hack behaviorialist accounts of sex differences account not only for such historically unspecific qualities as chastity and courage but also such new arrivals on the scene as bad driving and forgetting to put the toilet seat down.) Not that Addison rejects the notion that there are biologically grounded moral differences between the sexes--quite the contrary; he simply believes that because these differences never emerge unmediated by a social setting, we should never assume that the prevailing pattern of their manifestation is either desirable or natural. According to the Addisonian dispensation, we must draw a distinction not between men and women as they are and as they would be in some adrogynous utopia, but between men and women as they are and as they would be in some realizable world in which they would remain men and women while being more attentive to the moral exigencies of a bi-sexual (as distinct from bisexual!) world. But the intermillennial reader has long since lost both the relish and the capacity for making such salutary distinctions as these; that capacity and relish have long since fallen victim to the ravages of Ockham's Airbrush, that rule of intermillennial logic that states that "the simplest of two or more competing theories is preferable when and only when it reaffirms our prejudices."