The Staff

It can be complicated. There are multiple levels, multiple programs, different sources of funding, connections curving and twisting and sometimes quite Byzantine.

There are those who work with the patients directly, or who work in some fashion around them…nurses, RNs, PAs, Nurse's Aides, M.D.s, the custodial staff, the receptionists, the physical therapists, the speech therapists, the vocational therapists, the replacers of oxygen tanks, the emptiers of this and the fillers of that, those who man desks and those who pilot the wheelchairs to lunches of much softened meats and pureed vegetables…

And, as a rule, these people know my father. He is there so often. He is so friendly. So open. He greets them. He speaks to them. Asks about their families and their lives. They call him, "Mr. Tucker," even when he tells them he is "T.J." They check on him, they watch out for him, ask him about her, encourage him, even…in their way…protect him, or as much as they can in the chaos of the place and the time.

*

Then there is another level. These are the occupiers of front offices and the givers of bills. These do not see the patients, or not as much. These deal with the children or siblings or spouses or whoever it is that is deemed Responsible. Some of these, too, have a relationship with my Father. Something like friendship. He brings them a check once a month.

They have a game they play. He hands the women at her desk the check. She tries to take it. He pretends his fingers clamp shut and the paper cannot be removed by any means short of surgery. She giggles. He relents. The money changes hands.

*

Other layers, other complications. There is a layer of administrators who, in theory, also deal with the patients and their families, but whose actual contact with either may be rather minimal. They are, instead, the managers of those who do connect. They are not "in charge," exactly, but neither do they labor in the vineyards and fields. They hew not wood nor draw water, but they command those who do. They set not policy, but enforce it. In another sort of army, they'd be NCOs. Subalterns is, I think, the term employed by Those Who Know Important Things.

These we shall revisit.


*

Further still upwards. Managers.

Managers of the complex, some of whom have offices here. Most of whom do not. They are invisible. You will not see them. They have no interest in seeing you. They are the Great and the Powerful. The Oz. Behind the curtain. Silent and the Inevitable. The MBAs. Heaven's blest. Children of the King. Increasers of shareholder value. Those who made suburban parents and high school guidance counselors very, very happy.

These, too, we shall see again.

*

And all these women and men are present. These different strands. They connect, twine, interlink, form that most tentative and least natural but most common of all our modern communities…a workplace. The Office. No worse than most. Better than many.

Yet, I wonder, for you see the Others…the patients…they too are present daily. But, they are not permanent. They, the patients, occupy the beds and the chairs, are wheeled into the sunshine on pleasant days, are left in front of the televisions when there is rain. They are tended to. They may be here for years.

But, ultimately, sooner or later, and usually sooner, they…the patients…they have other appointments. Some recover from some distressing ailment and are able to live at home. Others, most, the majority, they, well, shall we say? it is best left unsaid. Insert silence here. An inevitable silence. Perhaps meditative. Perhaps even to be wished. If not to be hurried. But a silence.

On the other hand they…the staff…they will remain. Coming in each morning. Leaving each evening. Thirty minutes for lunch. Tasks large and small repeated ad infinitum. Gossip around the proverbial water cooler. Small friendships which would not normally form and will not last the change of jobs or position. Enmities which are deathless and eternal. Our normal lives.

And I wonder, then, whose story this really is. Who are the genuine residents? Whose home is, in fact, the Home?

Who, in the end, is fixed? The flies in amber?

And who the free?

Room

Her room.

It is easily envisioned. Not cramped, but not large. Comfortable but not personal. What you expect of life in an institution. Thus:

1) Her bed: a technical marvel. It is inflated. It rises and falls and shifts positions all by itself. This to fight bedsores. At the foot of her bed is a machine that contains controls and an air pump. It huffs and it puffs and moves the mattress according to some mysterious and complicated algorithm of its own. We ignore it. It ignores us. We are thus, man and machine, united in indifference to one another.

2) Entertainment: twin TVs on the wall, one of her, one for a potential roommate. Turned on by the nurses and aides. They show Sesame Street, Elmo and Bert and Ernie, The View, Celebrity Chefs, DIY shows, rebuild your house in seven easy days (she was a great fan of home construction. Putting in a ceiling or installing sheet rock was a pleasure to her, and a hardware store more fun than a candy shop)…sometimes adventure movies, science-fiction, Men In Black is a fav. She watches it. Her eyes open. Not quite staring. Not quite anything else.

3) Decoration: Mostly photos, and mostly on the wall in front of her. There is a collage of family scenes my wife put together on cardstock—assorted images, some familiar, some strange. My father in a heavy jacket, standing tall against some distant winter's snow. Her and him at the beach. Texas, I think. My son as a child. The dogs. We show them, the pictures, to her. She looks at them. She does not change expression.

4) Medical devices: A metal stand next to her bed supporting a plastic bag. It contains the chalk-brown fluid that is her nutrient; a long tube aches down to the insertion point in her stomach. Another, similar tube snakes down from under her bedclothes to the catheter balloon where it hangs under her bed, filling laboriously, drop by golden drop.

5) Flowers: Or, rather, flowering plants in pots on the windowsill. One is dead but remains, dry, yellow, straw-like but somehow still clinging to shape and color, like a dried herb. One lives, after a fashion. It is something we bought at the grocery store and bought to her. ("Wait, wait," she said, when I showed her the plant and to my amazement she reached for it, would let not me take it away, not until she had brought it to her chest and held it between clinched fists.) It sits on the sill and I water it when I remember. The flowers droop. Grow brown.

6) Dressers: two, one beside her bed, the other across the room from it. They, along with the little closet at the end of the room, hold her clothing, folded or hung. Also medical supplies, spare Foley balloons, plastic tubing, adult diapers, a dozen other things industrial and gray.

And last.

7: The Window…

Only one of those, but it is beside her bed. It looks out into the parking lot but also beyond it. Look up, look over the parked cars, over the little bus that takes the seniors on their outings, over the pickups of the lawn crew, over the vans making their deliveries of oxygen tanks and processed meals, over the ambulances that appear without sirens and carry their sheeted burdens out the back, over all of that and …you will see the mountains.

The mountains.

The Sandias. Blue in the morning. Rose at sunset. Reaching up from the mesa. Enormous. Vigorous. Glorious. A promise.

A Certainty.

Scent

If those others are not, then what is the dominant sense in the Home?

Strangely, I think it is scent. You smell things. You return to those first origins of life, when chemical sensitivity was all-important. When molecules and olfactory receptors defined perception. And communication. With their own grammar and poetry.

It is not all good. Very little of it is sweet or mellow. You detect…cleaners, harsh and abrasive, bland food on the trays being taken on carts to those patients who can sit and eat; medical smells, disinfectants, the electronic-hot-metal odor of clinical machines; very few perfumes or personal scents unless they're on the skins of visitors; and, most of all…

Urine.

It is not that the place is unclean. No. It is very, very clean. But urine is a powerful scent. And the Foley catheter is not a perfect technology. (Note to transhumanists and others who long for the blending of man and machine, partisans of cyborg and superhuman, there is much remaining undone, long miles to be traversed 'tween here and your utopia.).

And so, as you walk past a patient or a patient's room, you will detect urine. Sometimes, too, feces, if they are having a bowel movement.

You get used to it. You don't think you could, but you do. And if you are of a certain mental bent there is something instructive in it. Almost comforting. For, you see, these are also the scents of the nursery. Of the maternity ward. Cycle of life, etc. I'm sorry if that strikes you as platitudinous. Perhaps it is. But it is also true. And inescapable.

Besides, it is humbling. We go from ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and from uric acid and methane to uric acid and methane. Even the most remarkable among us comes, in time, to here. The most powerful, the most arrogant, the most supercilious, the most talented …here. Here and nowhere else.

Oh ye mighty. Sniff upon these works and despair.

Or, better, learn modesty. And so wisdom.

Swimming

Sound, too, is not dominant, though for other reasons.

There is an attempt to muffle noises in the Home. There is soundproofing here and there, padding in the walls and so on. But it does not matter. Everywhere there is noise. Constant, grating, strident noise.

Everything is alarmed, you see. Open the wrong door, or the right one at the wrong time, and emergency alarms begin their incessant beepings. If a patient rolls over and hits the nurse's call button, more beepings, equally loud. If one of the machines that support the patients in their beds malfunctions or runs out of some necessary fluid, yet more beepings and bleatings.

And, of course, all the rooms have TVs, usually tuned to competing channels, and (given the viewers' almost inevitable deafness) usually quite loud.

Yet, after a day or so, you learn to tune out all this. It blurs away. Becomes indistinct. In time, it's all just white noise, and in a strange way, even serene.

Or, here's a better description. Go swimming. Put your head under the water. Listen, if you can, to the talk of other swimmers on the surface. What do you hear? It is reduced, of course. Their conversations dwindle, grow dim, are incomprehensible…

And somehow alien. As though you eavesdropped on strangers from a different world, far away and chill, where concepts are different, nothing quite makes sense, and communication…no matter how sincerely attempted…is impossible.

Yet, even so, there is hope to be had. It is in the knowledge that you will eventually rise, abandon the rushing waters, come again upon the tile and earth, feel the towel over your shoulder, the sun on your body, the warmth, the knowledge, hear again the spoken word…

Rendered coherent. And whole. And potent.

The Home

It is pleasant as such places go. A smallish building, tan and white and yellow, "southwestern colors"…you go through the front entrance, sign in at the desk, talk to whichever receptionist is on duty (there are two, they alternate)…then you go through the doors behind the desk (closed, difficult to open if you are seated in a wheel chair, deliberately so, reduces "risk of elopement").

You find yourself inside a large central space. The nurse's station is on your right. Hallways lead off to the patients' rooms in various directions. If it is morning, then many of them…I mean, the patients…will be in this central space. They are pushed there in their wheel chairs and one of the aides reads them the morning paper. You must, then, navigate a crowd of chairs and impassive men and women.

You find your way to one of the seemingly identical hallways (it is all too easy to get confused, to pick the wrong one, and have to return and start over again) and head toward the individual room you want to visit. My mother's is on the immediate right hand side, which makes it a little easier.

It's funny. As I think about it, I realize that vision is not the dominant sense there. Things seem a little smooth, a little bland, a little hazy. The beige rugs, the earth tone walls, the subliminal blues which are almost gray, the uniformity of the furnishings, give the place a curiously unseeable quality. It is not invisible, you are not blinded, but you somehow cannot recall looking at anything in particular. Nothing specific. It is as though someone wrapped your face with gauze and you perceive the world indistinctly, as through a veil.

Which perhaps is fitting. Maybe that is the way the patients in their chairs also see the world. Veiled. Awaiting that moment in the ceremony when the music swells, union is achieved, the veil is lifted, and all things are made once more new and crystalline.

I like that. It is a comforting image. True or not, I shall choose to believe it. Forsaking all others.

Besides, there are moments when something like that truly seems to happen. Albeit on a smaller scale. When, say, you are picking your way carefully through the chairs, the old men and the old women, and one of them looks at you for just a moment, and you smile, and to your surprise one of them smiles back…

For a second, a split second, it is as if the sun reaches through shuttered windows.

All shadows are banished. Your sight is incalculably clear. 

how much of her remains?

And her?

She speaks sometimes. Not a great deal. I don't know how much she recognizes me. She will smile. She will respond to my questions, at least on occasion. Usually, it is just "yes" or "no." Sometimes we will get a full sentence.

She moves her hands. With some help, she has even fed herself. She has a great fondness for soft ice cream. And my father brings her mashed sweet potatoes, which she also seems to love.

I wonder, sometimes, when I watch…when I watch those beautiful, luminous eyes of hers…how much of her remains. How much of the woman I knew and loved and admired?

My nightmare is that she is still in there, someplace, unable to speak, unable to move…raging against the dying of the light.

Such a thing is not to be considered. It would be kinder if she were not there at all…if she had, somehow, moved on to whatever place it is that awaits us…(insert the image of the celestial sphere, the blue crystal dome of heaven, turned by mystic clockwork engines …and she, the traveler of the tarot deck, comes, pauses, considers, passes on, through the boundary of What Is, sees what we may not yet perceive…)

Kinder, yet harder, for it would mean she would never return to us.

And there is part of me, hopeless yet ever hoping, that it is only a matter of time, or reconnections, or resumed neural linkages, and one day…maybe after many summers…there will come the morning…

The morning she looks out into the room. Sees her husband. Smiles. Says Thank you for waiting. Reaches for his hand.

colossus

As a rule, I see my mother once a day. I get up, walk the dog, have breakfast, then head over to the nursing home. My father will be already there. He spends the morning there, and sometimes much of the afternoon. He comes and sits by her bed, speaks to her, plays her music on a little stereo he bought on eBay, and (most of all) watches out for her.

They are in awe of him. I mean, the staff at the home. He is there every day. Rain or shine. Snow or sleet. He is there. He comes and is with her. He is her companion. Her guardian. Her support. No matter what.

If you saw him, not knowing, you would see a very small man, very old, wearing ill fitting clothing that we can never get him to change, his hair unkempt…

You would dismiss him.

You would be wrong to do so.

Remember the saying about entertaining angels unaware? With him, it is the titan that is concealed. The giant. The more-than-man.

How frail the flesh. How fragile the bone. But perceive him correctly. You will see the monolith. The shimmering entity. The colossus at the edge of cosmos. The gaze which seeks the infinite.

And will, in time, obtain it.

A certain spectrum...

And so I begin again.

It has been months since I've done anything with Xcargo. I have some excuse. As you know, we moved to New Mexico this summer. My mother had a stroke—a second one, actually—and my father is elderly. Someone had to be here. And that was me. Or, rather, Martha and me.

If circumstances were different, if we came for other reasons, we'd be quite happy. Martha was retiring from Tufts, anyway. What I think of as my career is entirely portable. I can do it via computer and the web. Our son is now going to school in Virginia. There was, in short, increasingly little to hold us to Massachusetts. Why stay and fight the winters?

Thus, we came, and we are glad to be here. Or mostly so. The qualifier of the mostly being, of course, our motivation. The reason for our coming. The illness. The stroke. The slow and incomplete dying of the brain.

Alas, you see, the quality of contentment has something of the nature of physics. Between the quantum of the consequence and the shimmer of the cause, there is a certain spectrum which, like the rainbow, is constructed by the breaking of the light. Or, if you prefer another metaphor, one taken from the falsity of vacuum, then consider the virtual pair. Whose life is beautiful but brief.

Begun in nothing. And ended there.

B and B's transgression

As you know, I work with a small epublisher called Belfort & Bastion. Here's a entry to B&B's editorial blog which I just posted. You can see the original here. Or you can just read it below.


Here come the Transgression…


In the next few weeks, we're going to be introducing a new category of works to the Belfort and Bastion catalog. Specifically, we are going to be offering you works of Transgressive literature and art.

Which should, of course, invoke in you a certain response. You should, at this moment, be sitting there in front of your laptop, your hand on that cup of mocha-grande, and be asking yourself, "What the hell do they mean by that?"

A damn fine question.

Unfortunately, we're not too sure ourselves.


*

It seems odd that there should be any question of what "transgressive literature," or "transgressive fiction" is. There's a whole section on it at Wikipedia. That wise source informs us, "Transgressive fiction is a genre of literature that focuses on characters who feel confined by the norms and expectations of society and who break free of those confines in unusual and/or illicit ways. Because they are rebelling against the basic norms of society, protagonists of transgressional fiction may seem mentally ill, anti-social, or nihilistic. The genre deals extensively with taboo subject matters such as drugs, sex, violence, incest, pedophilia, and crime."

All well and good.

But, come, let us be honest. Most of the time, and for most people, transgressive literature has meant just one thing. 

Sex.


*

It used to be that you could say what was "transgressive" without a whole lot of effort. It meant a dirty book. Or, if you prefer, porn or erotica.

And that was a good thing…for publishers and writers. It meant you could be daring and new (and extremely salable) by simply throwing in a few words like "dick" or "cunt" or "boob" or whatever. And, if you weren't particularly talented, well, terrific. Lack a plot or sense of character. No problem. A little sex here and there, plus a lurid and leerworthy cover on the paperback version, and who cared? I mean, really?

And if you could write…if you actually had talent…ah, so much the better. It meant that people like Oscar Wilde, Algernon Charles Swinburne, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Anne Desclos (a.k.a., Pauline Réage), Anaïs Nin, etc. could (like De Sade) smuggle ideas under the cover of smut into a greater public's otherwise unresponsive intellect.

Of course, it was a dangerous game. The endless court cases, the imprisonments of artists and writers, the unwelcome attentions of the world's Anthony Comstocks great and small…these were real threats.

But, until recently, you knew what was illicit to say. You knew what could not be said. You knew what was considered unspeakable.

Alas, that is no longer the case.


*

Sex was the lodestone of the unspeakable right through the 1970s. But after that …well, the erotic gradually faded from the transgressive. It became less taboo. Less dangerous. Less important.

That was, of course, because sex was no longer quite the problem it had once been. Unwanted pregnancy is a serious thing, and not just for the mother or the child. Societies, particularly but not exclusively pre-modern ones, are not fond of children who must somehow be supported without the co-operation of at least two adults. Preferably more. Hence, again particularly but not exclusively in pre-modern societies, marriage becomes a vital economic institution, and sex outside that institution becomes a sin. And discussion of sex outside marriage becomes a crime.

But contraceptives change all of that. Suddenly, extramarital sex becomes relatively consequence free. Yes, you run risks. You have your share of "illegitimate pregnancies." You have diseases, including quite serious ones, likes HIV. But, on the whole, sex becomes "casual." Even recreational. Indeed, it becomes the norm.

And, in the process, porn looses its sting. It becomes just another middle class industry.


*


Today, of course, there is nothing transgressive about porn. Except for the most obviously wantonly and hideous acts (rape, child abuse), there is not a form of sex that isn't portrayed quite freely in the market. Straight, Gay, oral, anal, group, solo, with dolls, toys or sheep …you name it, it's out there. 

The Dominatrix in her black leather catsuit bounds about superhero movies for the entertainment and titillation of twelve-year-old boys. Her brooding male equivalent, in tight breeches and equipped with a riding crop, is to be found on the covers of bestsellers everywhere. Soap operas and sitcoms, meanwhile, discuss role-play and pegging and mammary intercourse. Talk shows provide tips on the proper methods of bondage and the correct pronunciation of Bukkake.  Oh, and if you have questions about what "tea-bagging" is, or how one performs a "turkey slap," well, these things are nicely covered in the some 85 pages (and counting) of Wikipedia that deal with different sex acts.

Yes…of course, yes…there are still barriers and taboos. There are still places and times where one had better not raise, as it were, the issue. Yet, come! Admit it. This is a new age. And there is no turning back… in spite of the best efforts of moralists and censor of every stripe, ranging from the religious fundamentalist to the radically feminist.

Sex has become all too commonplace. It's depictions are no more transgressive than images of eating, and considerably less so than those of defecation.


*

So, what is transgressive now?

I think there is a short and a long-term answer to that. The short-term answer is that we shall see sex itself questioned. After having been so long taboo, its current dominance in society invites critique. An age, after all, in which the Kardashians and the Real Housewives discuss the intimate details of their bedrooms on Reality TV (and their revelations are considered worthy of front page coverage), is by definition ridiculous.

We shall see, then, a class of literature exploring that fact. We shall see a type of book asking if the insertion of this or the extraction of that is really so exciting. Or, indeed, if it is worth remarking upon at all.

And Belfort and Bastion has two titles about to go online that might be said to fall into this category. The first of these is WARNING: Sexually Explicit Content by Aubrey Tannhauser, while the second is The Pellucid Risen: Book One, Awakening, by Brad Amante.

Both of these mock sex, or rather, they mock our cultural obsession with it. They do so, however, in very different ways.

To explain that, let me take them one at a time.


*

The Pellucid Risen: Book One, Awakening, by Brad Amante, came into us via editor Victor Storiguard, who (as he puts it) "stumbled across" Mr. Amante's blog-based webfiction some time ago (you can see it at bradamante75.blogspot.com, by the way).

Amante writes science fiction and his book is, at first glance, nothing more than a piece of rather conventional space-opera, or rather "time-opera" since the main character visits the future. It concerns a young man, Robert, who has led a pretty wretched life in our own century, but who is then murdered for mysterious reasons.

However, he's frozen, and after five hundred years, he's brought back to life. In fact, he finds himself in a feminist utopia in which the sexes have completely changed roles. Women are tall and masterful. Men are small and delicate.

So far there's nothing here particularly transgressive. Sex-role reversal is a staple of sci-fi, and, indeed, in what passes for public discourse these days (think about the famous Newsweek issue, and the equally famous article in the recent Atlantic).

Ah, but here's where things get interesting. Robert, now a male ingénue named "Bobbi," has rather a lovely time. He's petted and pampered and wooed and won by dozens of beautiful superwomen, all of them desperate for his favors.

Women, on the other hand, well, they discover that being on top isn't quite the bowl of cherries they thought it would be.

And, this, of course, is the transgression. What the author is saying is simply this: the great and much ballyhooed Battle of the Sexes…the battle over sex, the battle during sex…is in the end irrelevant. The victory is uncertain, the victor unclear, the triumph …

Doubtful.


*

WARNING: Sexually Explicit Content by Aubrey Tannhauser, meanwhile, is perhaps a more subtle work. In it, Tannhauser presents us with the life and loves of Jacob Lamdan, a young man who wants nothing more than to be a famed author of well-crafted erotica.

And this should be a snap for Lamdan. He's a decent stylist and he's got scads of personal experience from which to take his material. He is, you see, one of those young men that women perceive as beautiful, no matter how they really appear. Where the rest of us poor heterosexual males (particularly those who are, as they delicately say, of a certain age) must struggle and sweat to gain even the passing attention of women, Lamdan gets it whether he likes it or not. They fall into his arms at the least excuse. They offer him sexual escapades that would embarrass Caligula. Indeed, they demand his attentions with a single-minded fury. (We have here something of Amante's Bobbi, do we not?)

But, Jacob discovers something distressing. To wit, his easily obtained sexual experiences provide no inspiration. They have required no effort, so they are not genuinely rewarding. They satisfy the animal, but they do not nourish the human part of him. He has no muses, only fuck-buddies and "friends with benefits."

In time, he finds that only by withdrawing from the sex may he save himself. In the process, he must confront both great unhappiness and real tragedy, but it is his route to salvation.

Which is, of course, how Mr. Tannhauser commits his own transgression. He takes the climax of every porn film, every romantic comedy, and every advertisement for underarm deodorant…i.e., the moment when boy-gets-girl and vice versa…and says, "It doesn't matter."

Doesn't matter. And maybe should be avoided.


*

So that's our two newest additions. And it is also my suggestion for short-term transgressions.

But what about the long? The other possibility I suggested? The second and more lasting sort of transgression.

That is complicated. And political. And for another day.

But, I will leave you with a clue. I hope it will be appropriately tantalizing.

It is a quote from Voltaire. It is: "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."

But let us change it. Let us say, instead, "whom you may not mock."

Three Books About Strangers

Okay, first some confessions. In the interest of full (or nearly full) disclosure, I'm about to write a blog entry about a book in which I've an interest. In my capacity as an editor of Belfort and Bastion (of which more later), I'm helping publish it.

That said, I think I'm objective enough to write about it with something more or less like a clear head. Or, as clear a head as I've ever got.

Still, you've been warned.



*

The book is Stranieri: Life among Italy's Tourists, Expats, and Immigrants by Tristan Gans. In theory, it is a personal memoir of a trip to Italy undertaken by Gans and his then girlfriend (now wife) Sarah. And, yes, I know both and count them as friends.

Anyway, as young college gradates in 2008, the two went merrily off to Italy to live for a spell. Specifically, they went to the little industrial city of Brescia, where Sarah had landed a job teaching English. Gans went along to compose music and, as he says, contemplate art.

So, at first glance, you could be excused for thinking this was yet another imitation of Eat, Pray, Love and all the other recent English-language bestsellers about finding one's self in exotic locations. And, to a certain extent, there really is a book here that's sort of like that. It concerns a young couple, in love, yet human and so prone to the occasional bit of friction, exploring their relationship someplace far from home.

Except, read a page or two, and you find that's not all that's going on. Tristan and Sarah aren't in for an endless summer of love in the Tuscan sun. They find themselves instead in a grimy little industrial city, where the locals are for the most part unfriendly and inaccessible, and the only real connections they can make are with other foreigners.

Ergo, you have another book in this work, this one about the Stranieri from which the title comes.  Gans thus contemplates the Africans, Arabs, Eastern Europeans, Greeks, South Asians, North Americans, etc., who have made Italy their home (in spite of the objections of the Italians).

And a wild and wonderful crew they are. We have, for instance, Asad the Pakistani (maybe Gay, maybe not) who runs the international calling center in the neighborhood, and who becomes Gans' first real friend in Italy. Then there's Donnie Columbo, an Italian-American who's come to the land of his forefathers, discovered he is regarded by the locals as the most alien of aliens, and who has therefore embraced and exaggerated his Americanness to promote his business as a kind of cultural broker.

And there are others, some named and some not, but always present and always providing the services, labor, and energy which the Italians cannot seem to produce for themselves. Gans' sympathies are clearly and overwhelmingly with these people. He prefers them to the locals and he watches with no little fascination as they increasingly control vital sections of the economy. What will Italy be, he wonders, and how will Italians react, when they find they have been outclassed by their own guest workers?

So we have that book, that second book from Gans. It is the story of the New Peoples of Italy, and is an excellent read for that reason alone.

Ah, but we are not finished yet. There's a third book lurking here. And it may be the most important of all.


*

Years and years ago, I read a review of Ryszard Kapuściński's The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, an analysis of the fall of Haile Selassie. Alas, I don't remember the author of the review. I'm not even sure where it appeared. The New York Review of Books? The Globe? Oh, well.

Anyway, in it, the reviewer began by noting that when he (or she) had first picked up the book, he'd thought it was about "well, Ethiopia." But, in fact, it wasn't about Ethiopia at all. It was about Kapuściński's native Poland, where the Communist regime was just about to implode.

And, guess what. We have a similar situation here. The third book in Stranieri is a self-portrait.

Of Gans, and his whole generation.


*

As I say, I know Gans. He is young. He also describes himself as "upper middle class."

But there's a lot wrapped up in that expression. "Upper Middle Class." It means a time, a space, a mindset, and an interesting place to be today, if you're young.

Not necessarily nice. But interesting. As goes the Chinese curse.


*

To be young in the Upper Middle is to be at the center of a perfect storm of expectation. It is to be in a place where everything…everything…is focused on "being a success," on getting high SAT scores, on being admitted to the "good schools." It is to be in a place where Ritalin is handed out to everything with a Y-chromosome, where there is a college prep franchise after-school program on just about every corner, and where achievement is everything and standardized tests are the word of God.

And Gans is the product of all that. He is one of those young people who came through the System…who has been taught by it that he must achieve greatness. Not just success. Not just a happy life. Not just a rewarding career. But greatness.

Absolute greatness.


*

When my father was young, his parents hoped that he would have "a nice life." They hoped that their children would not suffer a Depression, as they had, and that he would live the comfortable middle class life which had been so cruelly stolen from them in 1929.

My father, in turn, wanted something quite similar for me. He made it clear that I was to pursue whatever path it was that led to my happiness. If that meant being a writer, well, it was a tough job to get, and a harder one to make pay, but that was my choice. He would be in my corner.

And I think a lot of Baby Boomers, people my age, were told something similar. My parents were a bit more hippies than some, but they were not uncommon. Their hope for their children was that they be, well, comfortable. Maybe not greatly wealthy. But comfortable.

Ah, but consider what we…people my generation and a little after …have said to our own children.

Is it all right to be "comfortable?" To have "a nice life?" To live a middle class existence?

I don't think that's what we've said. I think the message we've given our children is that they are to exceed beyond our wildest expectations. They are the tools by which we express our most malignant narcissism.

Don't believe me? Try the following little test. Go to an affluent suburb and, if you can, engage a few parents in conversation. Ask them how they would react if little Johnny decided on a career as a plumber. Or if Tiffany proclaimed her intention to be a stay-at-home Mom.

As I say, ask the question. But you might be well advised to do so at a distance. And perhaps even then wear a bullet-proof vest.


*


Now, understand, there is nothing wrong with being a plumber or a stay-at-home mom. In fact, they can be rewarding professions. A good tradesman can earn over $100 an hour. And stay-at-home Moms (or Dads) can provide so many advantages to a family that their actual economic input may exceed that of the so-called "breadwinner." (Think of the cost that most families otherwise face in terms of things like child-care.)

But that's not enough, is it? To be successful in a rational, normal, healthy sense is simply not enough for us anymore.

What we want for our children…what we shall demand…is for them to be inhumanely accomplished. They are to be Stephen Jobs or Bill Gates or Hillary Clinton or Condoleezza Rice or Brad Pitt or Halle Berry or Stephen Hawking or Jane Goodall or…well, you get the point.

But there's the rub. We can't all be Stephen Jobs or Bill Gates or Hillary Clinton or Condoleezza Rice or Brad Pitt or Halle Berry or Stephen Hawking or Jane Goodall or whoever. We can't all be great. We can't all be stars.  This isn't Lake Wobegon where all the children are above average. Some of us, even if we are talented and wise and filled to the brim with the best of ambitions, will fail.

And the vast majority of us…well, we shall never grandly fail nor grandly succeed. We shall just be… people.

For better or worse.


*

What this means, though, is that a vast number of young folk—those of Gans' age, class, and origins—are doomed to misery.

They cannot help but be so. They have been trained, programmed, indoctrinated from their earliest youth with the idea that they are obliged to achieve greatness. I don't mean that they think they can achieve it. I don't mean they think they will achieve it. I mean they are obligated to gain it. They are commanded to do so. They must.

And if they do not…

Then they are worthless.


*


I've wondered how we got into this weird mess. How did we come to this great, national neurosis by which we (or, at least, our middle and upper middle classes) act out Alice Miller's Drama of the Gifted Child on a titanic scale.

I'm not at all sure. Though, I have wondered if it has something to do with media. We tend to take our role models from the people we know in our communities. Not so long ago, that meant the people we actually might meet—the town doctor, the local banker, the mighty president of the women's club.

But now, our "community" has expanded via the cinema, the TV, and the web to include the whole world. The banker, lawyer, and clubwoman have been replaced by Donald Trump and The Kardashians—people whose lives, celebrity, and conspicuous consumption are trumpeted to the heavens.

The obtainable is thus rejected. The only acceptable goal is what cannot actually be achieved.

And our children…they are condemned to the anguish of Tantalus, forever reaching, never acquiring.


*

And Gans has wised up.

During his long sojourn in Italy, watching what he suspects is the decline of the West (he is writing while the economic system melts down in 2008-2009), he's figured out that he's been sold a bill of goods. He's realized that no matter how hard he works, how dedicated he is, how talented he is…it isn't going to happen. 

He begins his story as a composer. He has internalized the idea that he must be the next John Cage, or even a Mozart. And he has done his level best. He is no slacker. And he is talented. His music is good.

But as he watches Italy and the world wrestle with the new realities of resource scarcity, oil depletion, the rise of China and India, the post-industrial scarcity of jobs, the appearance of strange new totalitarianisms…the general impoverishment of us all both economically and intellectually…

He sees the future.

It is surely no accident that as he ends the book, he is no longer planning on a career in music or the academy. His profession will be, instead, bankruptcy law.


*

And so, I think, Stranieri will be an important book. It is a corrective. It is a rebuttal. It is the voice of many, many young people who are just now waking up to the fact that they have been given goals that cannot be reached. And that other ends, which they have been told to despise, are not only better but perhaps the only ones possible in our curious and mutable age.

In fact, I hope it is the first example of a new literature—a kind of text in which our children hesitate before the TV, watch for a few moments while The Real Housewives obsess about fame and fortune and diamond tennis bracelets, and then … perhaps with a sigh…switch off the box.

And go outside to cultivate the garden. 


*


Stranieri should be up and running on both Amazon and the Belfort and Bastion site very shortly. The official launch is August 20, 2012. Lots of little things will be happening before and after that as well.

I do hope you'll read it. As I say, it is many books in one. Though, again to repeat myself, the last of them is my favorite. And there is a reason for my preference. You see, I have always been a bit of a fan of the heroic.

And there is something heroic about this new literature…this literature of re-born realism…

It requires courage to take in hand the vorpal sword and slay that Jabberwock, i.e., grandiosity and the unrealizable expectation.

Compared to which T. Rex seems mild and sympathetic.

And I'm in NM

Well, I'm officially in NM. I'll be posting here again.

Watch for all the sordid details.

my tweets

Which reminds me...

If you read my tweets because you buy or sell comics and keep track of my offerings, you should know that you'll have slim pickings over the next few weeks. I'll be on the road and what tweeting I do, if any, will be purely personal and be about my travels.

However, towards the end of July I'll pick up again. AND I hope to establish a new twitter account just to deal with my ebay business.

So, stay tuned. More to come.

I'm on the road!

Hello, hello!

I'll be on the move for a few weeks and so won't be posting here much. Not that I've had a lot of time to do so recently anyway...but my apologies and promise to do spent more time Xcargoing once I'm in NM.

Talk to you soon.

mjt

I kept copies of almost every magazine I ever worked for. They filled up boxes and boxes in the basement. Now I'm getting rid of them. I'm even selling some of them on ebay.

Oddly, I find this harder than throwing away my personal notes. These, you see, have been seen by other people. They are thus, somehow, more concrete. More real.

What is purely private is like a fantasy. It may dismissed, dissolved, murdered...and no one is the wiser. There are no witnesses to threaten retribution.

Datamation at eBay.

I haven't been ignoring you.

Discovered to my considerable distress that people had been commenting on my blog postings but, for some reason, I've haven't been seeing the aforesaid comments.

So, I haven't been ignoring you. I've just been, as is (alas) too often the case, stupid.

If want to reach me, please feel free to do so at MichaelJayTucker@gmail.com. I'd love to hear from you.

Cheers
mjt

Ted Nugent

I have been watching the Ted Nugent affair with interest. His more or less open threats of violence against the Obama family are, indeed, distressing. Yet, on some level, I am not disturbed by the predictably inane statements of a celebrity who appears both daft and decadent. What is, however, genuinely terrifying is something else. To wit, that when he spoke, his audience applauded.

Once again, I repeat my plaintive question: how have we come to this?

moving

Spent another day packing and sorting and throwing away. We've also now got a big U-Haul container out in the driveway. Periodically, I go dump another load of stuff in it.

I've got almost all of my own personal papers and such packed up and in the U-Haul container. On one level, that's very good news indeed. On another, well, there is something disconcerting about knowing that most of one's personal and professional life can get squeezed down to a dozen 12x10x15 banker's boxes.

Sort of humbling when you think about it.

Santorum's Rise

As I watch the unexpected success of Santorum in the primaries, I'm struck by how many of his supporters are the working poor (or below), the dispossessed, the needy…the people, in short, who have been left-behind, alienated, or terrified by our postindustrial age. To them, it offers little but poverty, indignity, and a loss of self-worth as wounding as annihilation. They are looking for someone to blame, and pretty much anyone will do.

It is the great fault of Liberalism that it did not recognize those individuals nor seek them out as allies. (Let us face it, the Conservatives had a point. The Left of the last few decades has sympathized far more with spotted owls than unemployed men.) It is the great power, and shame, of the Right that it recognized those people before anyone else, and was eager and willing to exploit them.

Yet, in this the Right invited its own enslavement if not destruction…as I think, now, it begins to realize. With Santorum's rise, the Right of the Elite finds itself confronting another, very different Right, one that has very little sympathy with its libertarianism and secularism.

Already, the Elite has reason regret the forces it has unleashed. In time, I suspect, it will learn to fear them.

Life Everlasting...

I have friends who are inspired by the idea of not dying. I mean that literally. They hold that technological advancement will someday…someday reasonably soon… give us the power to banish death. Or, at least, to extend human life into the realm of centuries or even millennium.

I suppose that's a good thing and a worthy end. I support it. Yet, I do not think I'd care for it myself.

I mean, I've have not been particularly competent in managing the 50-something years I've already got. One shudders to think what I'd do with 500 more.

Dare not speak its name...

I have been following with interest the spate of stories about the sudden emergence of the "N-word" in connection with President Obama. A sticker reading "Don't Re-Nig: 2012" has appeared on car bumpers and on the web. A nationally read blogger posts a cartoon of the president as a chicken-eating spook. And on and on.

So, finally, it is all beginning to break, isn't it? The fog lifts. The concrete appears behind the vast abstraction. The reality: the virulence of the Right, of its hatred of Obama, has nothing to do with economics, nothing to do with being a "socialist," or a liberal, nothing to do with foreign policy or the support of Israel or energy…

It is about Race. It has always been about Race. It always will be about Race.

But, then, we knew that already, didn't we?

We just didn't dare say it.