Clichés for A Broken Heart

From Ïmaginative Qualities Of Actual Things, by Gilbert Sorentino

"...I saw Bunny the same day. She was with three or four ugly Beautiful People, laughing, crackling, full of life, but underneath...! It was clear that her heart was broken.She was carrying a torch, she took a lot of time out for tears, she won't die, she'll live on, she gets that old feeling, there'll never be another Guy, she won't forget the night she met him, the songs of love are not for her, she dances with tears in her eyes, her love for him meant only heartaches, she'd like just one more chance, willows weep for her, every street's a boulevard of broken dreams, she covers the waterfront, she can't show her face, she smokes, she drinks, she never thinks about tomorrow, sometimes she can't even think of his name, sonnets she writes of him, she's aware her heart is a sad affair, their love went out just like a dying ember, she'll never smile again, half a love never appealed to her, she rushed in where angels fear to tread, she has those blues in the night, she's got it bad, she doesn't want to walk without him, she'll remember April, he'll never know just how much she loves him, she falls in love too easily, she should care, it was like a trip to the stars, he came, he saw, he conquered her, oh, how they waltzed, it's just her luck to be in love in vain, she wishes she didn't love him so, haunted heart won't let her be, don't cry, Bunny, she didn't see her in his eyes any more, her heart cries for him, she'll never be free, she talks to the trees, she won't cry any more, he's unforgettable, that's what he is, she wishes he were here, she needs him now, the night is bitter, she'll never stop loving him, and, frighteningly manic, she says, "Drink up, all you happy people!"

DJChris @ Golden Week Gathering

Here's a short streaming DJ mix taken from what I played at the EarthlingZ Golden Week Gathering. Coming just after the Indian live performance, it has many ethnic female vocal samples.

Why Nerds are Unpopular

Recommended for anyone who has ever been on either side of the nerds/normal divide, especially at an American secondary school...

By Paul Graham

When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the kids with mild cases of Down's Syndrome, what in the language of the time we called "retards."

We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically different. We were not being especially candid to grade ourselves as D. It would have taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise. Everyone in the school knew exactly how popular everyone else was, including us.

My stock gradually rose during high school. Puberty finally arrived; I became a decent soccer player; I started a scandalous underground newspaper. So I've seen a good part of the popularity landscape.

I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.

Why? To someone in school now, that may seem an odd question to ask. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange to imagine that it could be any other way. But it could. Being smart doesn't make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harm you in the real world. Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondary school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult. Why?



The key to this mystery is to rephrase the question slightly. Why don't smart kids make themselves popular? If they're so smart, why don't they figure out how popularity works and beat the system, just as they do for standardized tests?

One argument says that this would be impossible, that the smart kids are unpopular because the other kids envy them for being smart, and nothing they could do could make them popular. I wish. If the other kids in junior high school envied me, they did a great job of concealing it. And in any case, if being smart were really an enviable quality, the girls would have broken ranks. The guys that guys envy, girls like.

In the schools I went to, being smart just didn't matter much. Kids didn't admire it or despise it. All other things being equal, they would have preferred to be on the smart side of average rather than the dumb side, but intelligence counted far less than, say, physical appearance, charisma, or athletic ability.

So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be popular.

If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at him. Being unpopular in school makes kids miserable, some of them so miserable that they commit suicide. Telling me that I didn't want to be popular would have seemed like telling someone dying of thirst in a desert that he didn't want a glass of water. Of course I wanted to be popular.

But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things.

At the time I never tried to separate my wants and weigh them against one another. If I had, I would have seen that being smart was more important. If someone had offered me the chance to be the most popular kid in school, but only at the price of being of average intelligence (humor me here), I wouldn't have taken it.

Much as they suffer from their unpopularity, I don't think many nerds would. To them the thought of average intelligence is unbearable. But most kids would take that deal. For half of them, it would be a step up. Even for someone in the eightieth percentile (assuming, as everyone seemed to then, that intelligence is a scalar), who wouldn't drop thirty points in exchange for being loved and admired by everyone?

And that, I think, is the root of the problem. Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school.



Alberti, arguably the archetype of the Renaissance Man, writes that "no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it." I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. They occasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies. An American teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year.

I don't mean to suggest they do this consciously. Some of them truly are little Machiavellis, but what I really mean here is that teenagers are always on duty as conformists.

For example, teenage kids pay a great deal of attention to clothes. They don't consciously dress to be popular. They dress to look good. But to who? To the other kids. Other kids' opinions become their definition of right, not just for clothes, but for almost everything they do, right down to the way they walk. And so every effort they make to do things "right" is also, consciously or not, an effort to be more popular.

Nerds don't realize this. They don't realize that it takes work to be popular. In general, people outside some very demanding field don't realize the extent to which success depends on constant (though often unconscious) effort. For example, most people seem to consider the ability to draw as some kind of innate quality, like being tall. In fact, most people who "can draw" like drawing, and have spent many hours doing it; that's why they're good at it. Likewise, popular isn't just something you are or you aren't, but something you make yourself.

The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about. Their attention is drawn to books or the natural world, not fashions and parties. They're like someone trying to play soccer while balancing a glass of water on his head. Other players who can focus their whole attention on the game beat them effortlessly, and wonder why they seem so incapable.

Even if nerds cared as much as other kids about popularity, being popular would be more work for them. The popular kids learned to be popular, and to want to be popular, the same way the nerds learned to be smart, and to want to be smart: from their parents. While the nerds were being trained to get the right answers, the popular kids were being trained to please.



So far I've been finessing the relationship between smart and nerd, using them as if they were interchangeable. In fact it's only the context that makes them so. A nerd is someone who isn't socially adept enough. But "enough" depends on where you are. In a typical American school, standards for coolness are so high (or at least, so specific) that you don't have to be especially awkward to look awkward by comparison.

Few smart kids can spare the attention that popularity requires. Unless they also happen to be good-looking, natural athletes, or siblings of popular kids, they'll tend to become nerds. And that's why smart people's lives are worst between, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen. Life at that age revolves far more around popularity than before or after.

Before that, kids' lives are dominated by their parents, not by other kids. Kids do care what their peers think in elementary school, but this isn't their whole life, as it later becomes.

Around the age of eleven, though, kids seem to start treating their family as a day job. They create a new world among themselves, and standing in this world is what matters, not standing in their family. Indeed, being in trouble in their family can win them points in the world they care about.

The problem is, the world these kids create for themselves is at first a very crude one. If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.



Nerds would find their unpopularity more bearable if it merely caused them to be ignored. Unfortunately, to be unpopular in school is to be actively persecuted.

Why? Once again, anyone currently in school might think this a strange question to ask. How could things be any other way? But they could be. Adults don't normally persecute nerds. Why do teenage kids do it?

Partly because teenagers are still half children, and many children are just intrinsically cruel. Some torture nerds for the same reason they pull the legs off spiders. Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.

Another reason kids persecute nerds is to make themselves feel better. When you tread water, you lift yourself up by pushing water down. Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. I've read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks.

But I think the main reason other kids persecute nerds is that it's part of the mechanism of popularity. Popularity is only partially about individual attractiveness. It's much more about alliances. To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy.

Like a politician who wants to distract voters from bad times at home, you can create an enemy if there isn't a real one. By singling out and persecuting a nerd, a group of kids from higher in the hierarchy create bonds between themselves. Attacking an outsider makes them all insiders. This is why the worst cases of bullying happen with groups. Ask any nerd: you get much worse treatment from a group of kids than from any individual bully, however sadistic.

If it's any consolation to the nerds, it's nothing personal. The group of kids who band together to pick on you are doing the same thing, and for the same reason, as a bunch of guys who get together to go hunting. They don't actually hate you. They just need something to chase.

Because they're at the bottom of the scale, nerds are a safe target for the entire school. If I remember correctly, the most popular kids don't persecute nerds; they don't need to stoop to such things. Most of the persecution comes from kids lower down, the nervous middle classes.

The trouble is, there are a lot of them. The distribution of popularity is not a pyramid, but tapers at the bottom like a pear. The least popular group is quite small. (I believe we were the only D table in our cafeteria map.) So there are more people who want to pick on nerds than there are nerds.

As well as gaining points by distancing oneself from unpopular kids, one loses points by being close to them. A woman I know says that in high school she liked nerds, but was afraid to be seen talking to them because the other girls would make fun of her. Unpopularity is a communicable disease; kids too nice to pick on nerds will still ostracize them in self-defense.

It's no wonder, then, that smart kids tend to be unhappy in middle school and high school. Their other interests leave them little attention to spare for popularity, and since popularity resembles a zero-sum game, this in turn makes them targets for the whole school. And the strange thing is, this nightmare scenario happens without any conscious malice, merely because of the shape of the situation.



For me the worst stretch was junior high, when kid culture was new and harsh, and the specialization that would later gradually separate the smarter kids had barely begun. Nearly everyone I've talked to agrees: the nadir is somewhere between eleven and fourteen.

In our school it was eighth grade, which was ages twelve and thirteen for me. There was a brief sensation that year when one of our teachers overheard a group of girls waiting for the school bus, and was so shocked that the next day she devoted the whole class to an eloquent plea not to be so cruel to one another.

It didn't have any noticeable effect. What struck me at the time was that she was surprised. You mean she doesn't know the kind of things they say to one another? You mean this isn't normal?

It's important to realize that, no, the adults don't know what the kids are doing to one another. They know, in the abstract, that kids are monstrously cruel to one another, just as we know in the abstract that people get tortured in poorer countries. But, like us, they don't like to dwell on this depressing fact, and they don't see evidence of specific abuses unless they go looking for it.

Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens' main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible prevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I've read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.

In outline, it was the same at the schools I went to. The most important thing was to stay on the premises. While there, the authorities fed you, prevented overt violence, and made some effort to teach you something. But beyond that they didn't want to have too much to do with the kids. Like prison wardens, the teachers mostly left us to ourselves. And, like prisoners, the culture we created was barbaric.



Why is the real world more hospitable to nerds? It might seem that the answer is simply that it's populated by adults, who are too mature to pick on one another. But I don't think this is true. Adults in prison certainly pick on one another. And so, apparently, do society wives; in some parts of Manhattan, life for women sounds like a continuation of high school, with all the same petty intrigues.

I think the important thing about the real world is not that it's populated by adults, but that it's very large, and the things you do have real effects. That's what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow.

When the things you do have real effects, it's no longer enough just to be pleasing. It starts to be important to get the right answers, and that's where nerds show to advantage. Bill Gates will of course come to mind. Though notoriously lacking in social skills, he gets the right answers, at least as measured in revenue.

The other thing that's different about the real world is that it's much larger. In a large enough pool, even the smallest minorities can achieve a critical mass if they clump together. Out in the real world, nerds collect in certain places and form their own societies where intelligence is the most important thing. Sometimes the current even starts to flow in the other direction: sometimes, particularly in university math and science departments, nerds deliberately exaggerate their awkwardness in order to seem smarter. John Nash so admired Norbert Wiener that he adopted his habit of touching the wall as he walked down a corridor.



As a thirteen-year-old kid, I didn't have much more experience of the world than what I saw immediately around me. The warped little world we lived in was, I thought, the world. The world seemed cruel and boring, and I'm not sure which was worse.

Because I didn't fit into this world, I thought that something must be wrong with me. I didn't realize that the reason we nerds didn't fit in was that in some ways we were a step ahead. We were already thinking about the kind of things that matter in the real world, instead of spending all our time playing an exacting but mostly pointless game like the others.

We were a bit like an adult would be if he were thrust back into middle school. He wouldn't know the right clothes to wear, the right music to like, the right slang to use. He'd seem to the kids a complete alien. The thing is, he'd know enough not to care what they thought. We had no such confidence.

A lot of people seem to think it's good for smart kids to be thrown together with "normal" kids at this stage of their lives. Perhaps. But in at least some cases the reason the nerds don't fit in really is that everyone else is crazy. I remember sitting in the audience at a "pep rally" at my high school, watching as the cheerleaders threw an effigy of an opposing player into the audience to be torn to pieces. I felt like an explorer witnessing some bizarre tribal ritual.



If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice, the main thing I'd tell him would be to stick his head up and look around. I didn't really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a Twinkie. Not just school, but the entire town. Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children.

Where I grew up, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, and nothing to do. This was no accident. Suburbs are deliberately designed to exclude the outside world, because it contains things that could endanger children.

And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.

What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren't told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they're called misfits.



Life in this twisted world is stressful for the kids. And not just for the nerds. Like any war, it's damaging even to the winners.

Adults can't avoid seeing that teenage kids are tormented. So why don't they do something about it? Because they blame it on puberty. The reason kids are so unhappy, adults tell themselves, is that monstrous new chemicals, hormones, are now coursing through their bloodstream and messing up everything. There's nothing wrong with the system; it's just inevitable that kids will be miserable at that age.

This idea is so pervasive that even the kids believe it, which probably doesn't help. Someone who thinks his feet naturally hurt is not going to stop to consider the possibility that he is wearing the wrong size shoes.

I'm suspicious of this theory that thirteen-year-old kids are intrinsically messed up. If it's physiological, it should be universal. Are Mongol nomads all nihilists at thirteen? I've read a lot of history, and I have not seen a single reference to this supposedly universal fact before the twentieth century. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance seem to have been cheerful and eager. They got in fights and played tricks on one another of course (Michelangelo had his nose broken by a bully), but they weren't crazy.

As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed teenager is coeval with suburbia. I don't think this is a coincidence. I think teenagers are driven crazy by the life they're made to lead. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere.



When I was in school, suicide was a constant topic among the smarter kids. No one I knew did it, but several planned to, and some may have tried. Mostly this was just a pose. Like other teenagers, we loved the dramatic, and suicide seemed very dramatic. But partly it was because our lives were at times genuinely miserable.

Bullying was only part of the problem. Another problem, and possibly an even worse one, was that we never had anything real to work on. Humans like to work; in most of the world, your work is your identity. And all the work we did was pointless, or seemed so at the time.

At best it was practice for real work we might do far in the future, so far that we didn't even know at the time what we were practicing for. More often it was just an arbitrary series of hoops to jump through, words without content designed mainly for testability. (The three main causes of the Civil War were.... Test: List the three main causes of the Civil War.)

And there was no way to opt out. The adults had agreed among themselves that this was to be the route to college. The only way to escape this empty life was to submit to it.



Teenage kids used to have a more active role in society. In pre-industrial times, they were all apprentices of one sort or another, whether in shops or on farms or even on warships. They weren't left to create their own societies. They were junior members of adult societies.

Teenagers seem to have respected adults more then, because the adults were the visible experts in the skills they were trying to learn. Now most kids have little idea what their parents do in their distant offices, and see no connection (indeed, there is precious little) between schoolwork and the work they'll do as adults.

And if teenagers respected adults more, adults also had more use for teenagers. After a couple years' training, an apprentice could be a real help. Even the newest apprentice could be made to carry messages or sweep the workshop.

Now adults have no immediate use for teenagers. They would be in the way in an office. So they drop them off at school on their way to work, much as they might drop the dog off at a kennel if they were going away for the weekend.

What happened? We're up against a hard one here. The cause of this problem is the same as the cause of so many present ills: specialization. As jobs become more specialized, we have to train longer for them. Kids in pre-industrial times started working at about 14 at the latest; kids on farms, where most people lived, began far earlier. Now kids who go to college don't start working full-time till 21 or 22. With some degrees, like MDs and PhDs, you may not finish your training till 30.

Teenagers now are useless, except as cheap labor in industries like fast food, which evolved to exploit precisely this fact. In almost any other kind of work, they'd be a net loss. But they're also too young to be left unsupervised. Someone has to watch over them, and the most efficient way to do this is to collect them together in one place. Then a few adults can watch all of them.

If you stop there, what you're describing is literally a prison, albeit a part-time one. The problem is, many schools practically do stop there. The stated purpose of schools is to educate the kids. But there is no external pressure to do this well. And so most schools do such a bad job of teaching that the kids don't really take it seriously-- not even the smart kids. Much of the time we were all, students and teachers both, just going through the motions.

In my high school French class we were supposed to read Hugo's Les Miserables. I don't think any of us knew French well enough to make our way through this enormous book. Like the rest of the class, I just skimmed the Cliff's Notes. When we were given a test on the book, I noticed that the questions sounded odd. They were full of long words that our teacher wouldn't have used. Where had these questions come from? From the Cliff's Notes, it turned out. The teacher was using them too. We were all just pretending.

There are certainly great public school teachers. The energy and imagination of my fourth grade teacher, Mr. Mihalko, made that year something his students still talk about, thirty years later. But teachers like him were individuals swimming upstream. They couldn't fix the system.



In almost any group of people you'll find hierarchy. When groups of adults form in the real world, it's generally for some common purpose, and the leaders end up being those who are best at it. The problem with most schools is, they have no purpose. But hierarchy there must be. And so the kids make one out of nothing.

We have a phrase to describe what happens when rankings have to be created without any meaningful criteria. We say that the situation degenerates into a popularity contest. And that's exactly what happens in most American schools. Instead of depending on some real test, one's rank depends mostly on one's ability to increase one's rank. It's like the court of Louis XIV. There is no external opponent, so the kids become one another's opponents.

When there is some real external test of skill, it isn't painful to be at the bottom of the hierarchy. A rookie on a football team doesn't resent the skill of the veteran; he hopes to be like him one day and is happy to have the chance to learn from him. The veteran may in turn feel a sense of noblesse oblige. And most importantly, their status depends on how well they do against opponents, not on whether they can push the other down.

Court hierarchies are another thing entirely. This type of society debases anyone who enters it. There is neither admiration at the bottom, nor noblesse oblige at the top. It's kill or be killed.

This is the sort of society that gets created in American secondary schools. And it happens because these schools have no real purpose beyond keeping the kids all in one place for a certain number of hours each day. What I didn't realize at the time, and in fact didn't realize till very recently, is that the twin horrors of school life, the cruelty and the boredom, both have the same cause.



The mediocrity of American public schools has worse consequences than just making kids unhappy for six years. It breeds a rebelliousness that actively drives kids away from the things they're supposed to be learning.

Like many nerds, probably, it was years after high school before I could bring myself to read anything we'd been assigned then. And I lost more than books. I mistrusted words like "character" and "integrity" because they had been so debased by adults. As they were used then, these words all seemed to mean the same thing: obedience. The kids who got praised for these qualities tended to be at best dull-witted prize bulls, and at worst facile schmoozers. If that was what character and integrity were, I wanted no part of them.

The word I most misunderstood was "tact." As used by adults, it seemed to mean keeping your mouth shut. I assumed it was derived from the same root as "tacit" and "taciturn," and that it literally meant being quiet. I vowed that I would never be tactful; they were never going to shut me up. In fact, it's derived from the same root as "tactile," and what it means is to have a deft touch. Tactful is the opposite of clumsy. I don't think I learned this until college.



Nerds aren't the only losers in the popularity rat race. Nerds are unpopular because they're distracted. There are other kids who deliberately opt out because they're so disgusted with the whole process.

Teenage kids, even rebels, don't like to be alone, so when kids opt out of the system, they tend to do it as a group. At the schools I went to, the focus of rebellion was drug use, specifically marijuana. The kids in this tribe wore black concert t-shirts and were called "freaks."

Freaks and nerds were allies, and there was a good deal of overlap between them. Freaks were on the whole smarter than other kids, though never studying (or at least never appearing to) was an important tribal value. I was more in the nerd camp, but I was friends with a lot of freaks.

They used drugs, at least at first, for the social bonds they created. It was something to do together, and because the drugs were illegal, it was a shared badge of rebellion.

I'm not claiming that bad schools are the whole reason kids get into trouble with drugs. After a while, drugs have their own momentum. No doubt some of the freaks ultimately used drugs to escape from other problems-- trouble at home, for example. But, in my school at least, the reason most kids started using drugs was rebellion. Fourteen-year-olds didn't start smoking pot because they'd heard it would help them forget their problems. They started because they wanted to join a different tribe.

Misrule breeds rebellion; this is not a new idea. And yet the authorities still for the most part act as if drugs were themselves the cause of the problem.



The real problem is the emptiness of school life. We won't see solutions till adults realize that. The adults who may realize it first are the ones who were themselves nerds in school. Do you want your kids to be as unhappy in eighth grade as you were? I wouldn't. Well, then, is there anything we can do to fix things? Almost certainly. There is nothing inevitable about the current system. It has come about mostly by default.

Adults, though, are busy. Showing up for school plays is one thing. Taking on the educational bureaucracy is another. Perhaps a few will have the energy to try to change things. I suspect the hardest part is realizing that you can.

Nerds still in school should not hold their breath. Maybe one day a heavily armed force of adults will show up in helicopters to rescue you, but they probably won't be coming this month. Any immediate improvement in nerds' lives is probably going to have to come from the nerds themselves.

Merely understanding the situation they're in should make it less painful. Nerds aren't losers. They're just playing a different game, and a game much closer to the one played in the real world. Adults know this. It's hard to find successful adults now who don't claim to have been nerds in high school.

It's important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you're still in it.

If life seems awful to kids, it's neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life actually is awful (as you believe). It's because the adults, who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to spend years cooped up together with nothing real to do. Any society of that type is awful to live in. You don't have to look any further to explain why teenage kids are unhappy.

I've said some harsh things in this essay, but really the thesis is an optimistic one-- that several problems we take for granted are in fact not insoluble after all. Teenage kids are not inherently unhappy monsters. That should be encouraging news to kids and adults both


Thanks to Sarah Harlin, Trevor Blackwell, Robert Morris, Eric Raymond, and Jackie Weicker for reading drafts of this essay, and Maria Daniels for scanning photos

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		My War With Brian

Pre Hip Hopping

This is the spirit in which people went to work when I was younger....

Doctor Robert

During one summer vacation while I was a student at Cambridge, I spent a few idyllic months with the artists Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle and Eva Aeppli in Tinguely's converted auberge-studio in the Seine-et-Oise. Later, after I left Cambridge and was looking for a job that would allow me the time to write, Niki introduced me to Robert Fraser, who had just opened his gallery, and I became his assistant for several of the more tumultuous years of the Swinging Sixties, before leaving to work with John Dunbar at the Indica Gallery. Robert acquired quite a reputation during those years, and now an exhibition based on Harriet Vyner's book about him is opening in London....

Interesting also is this review of Vyner's book
_____________________________________________________________

Robert Fraser: Groovy Curator at London's Barbican

If you have any interest in the 60s London art scene, you might want to get down to Robert Fraser: Groovy Curator on 27th January 2009 at London's Barbican.

The event is a mix of talk and rare art films, the former being a Q&A with Harriet Vyner, the biographer of famed London art dealer Robert Fraser, the man responsible for introducing the London art world to Peter Blake, Jim Dine, Richard Hamilton, Bridget Riley and Andy Warhol among others. Vyner's book - Groovy Bob - tells Fraser’s story through the voices of those who new him best, which includes the likes of Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Marianne Faithfull, Kenneth Anger, Dennis Hopper and Vyner herself.

Aside from the Q&A, four rarely-seen associated films are also showing - see over the page for full details of those. Tickets are available now, priced at £7.50.

Looking for Mushrooms (15*)
A hypnotic trip of lush beauty and saturated colour while mushroom hunting in Mexico.
UK 1967 Dir. Bruce Connor 3 min.

Invocation of My Demon Brother (15*)
Anger’s homage to infamous occultist Aleister Crowley, with fast-moving editing, droning soundtrack and saturated with colour.
UK 1969 Dir. Kenneth Anger 11 min.

Pop Goes The Easel (15*)
A k aleidoscopic impression of the Pop Art universe and a portrait of artists Peter Blake, Derek Boshier, Pauline Boty and Peter Phillips. Made for BBC TV’s Monitor series.
UK 1962 Dir. Ken Russell 44 min.

Fathers of Pop (15*)
This rarely-screened documentary film, made with the support of the Arts Council, looks at the Independent Group (1952-1955), who saw themselves as a breakaway faction of the ICA, and their influence on the British Pop Art generation.

The Group were among the first British artists to explore both the horrors and promises of technology, space-travel and the consequent new sci-fi genre, and "the technicolour dreams [of] American media".

An interview-led film that clarifies connections with a very personal touch, including dialogues with Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton, Lawrence Alloway, Nigel Henderson, record producer Frankie Cordell and the late John McHale.
UK 1979 Dir. Julian Cooper 47 min.

What Is Art?

Radha's Graduation

After a 3-year course in film/video technique,my daughter Radha has graduated with a 1st-class degree. Here she is looking contented with the outcome


















Of course, in her father's mind, she will always look like:

Dennis Potter's Summation

Dennis Potter, best known to most as the writer of The Singing Detective and Pennies From Heaven, learned of his impending death from cancer a few months ahead, and in the short time left managed to complete his final series of television plays, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus. What he says in this remarkable interview from that time will certainly resonate with anyone with the slightest interest in writing, television, and of course Life and Death. Witty, courageous, and in no way heavy, it is extraordinarily intelligent, wise and prescient. Among his observations:

• How the vivid awareness of his own mortality sharpens his sense of beauty
• How religion is the wound and not the bandage
• How the English character was in the mid-20th century
• How it's easier to pull a gun than a cigarette from ones pocket in America
• How his relation with his father (long deceased) continues to improve. (cf. Atonement)
• Why Rupert Murdoch is the one man he would shoot, given the chance.
• Why people in his plays suddenly burst into lip-synched song (How life is like karaoke)

.and much more...

It's in 6 ten minute sections, and it's well worth your giving your attention to the last hour of this brilliant writer's public discourse.

Fiddling with the keyboard

At a recent small musical gathering, a friend recorded some of my piano improvising, unbeknownst to me. Here are a couple of tracks (full of mistakes) which came out sort of OK...please make allowances for the fact that I never had piano lessons...

It needs some bass boost, and perhaps a bit of treble boost.

Any Comments would be appreciated..

RISING HIGHEST (DJ CHRIS Mix)

If you like Old School trance, here's a mix of my favourite tracks from the classic Rising High label, known for its quality once described as "astral melancholy"

Neologism Contest

Once again, The Washington Post has published the winning submissions to its yearly neologism contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words.

• Coffee (n.), the person upon whom one coughs.
• Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained.
• Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
• Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk.
• Negligent (adj.), describes a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your nightgown.
• Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp.
• Gargoyle (n.), olive-flavored mouthwash.
• Flatulence (n.) emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steamroller.
• Balderdash (n.), a rapidly receding hairline.
• Rectitude (n.), the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.
• Pokemon (n), a Rastafarian proctologist.
• Oyster (n.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.
• Frisbeetarianism (n.), (back by popular demand): The belief that, when you die, your Soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.

The Washington Post's Style Invitational also asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are this year's winners:

• Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.
• Giraffiti (n): Vandalism spray-painted very,very high.
• Sarchasm (n): The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
• Inoculatte (v): To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
• Hipatitis (n): Terminal coolness.
• Osteopornosis (n): A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)
• Karmageddon (n): its like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? and then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.
• Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
• Dopeler effect (n): The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
• Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.
• Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
• Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a grub in the fruit you're eating.

Iren Lovasz

There are several women I've fallen in love with through their voices alone, mainly:

Elisabeth Schwarzkopf
Maria Callas
Emma Kirkby
Sheila Chandra (and a host of unnamed Indian female singers...)

and now Iren Lovasz
Listen to this song:
http://tinyurl.com/ey3j8

I don't understand a word of it, but I can tell she's telling it like it is. Brings tears to my eyes, but not of sadness, but more like relief at hearing the voice of my own anima

Rudhyar says tone is the carrier wave of psychic energy. In this song I hear the kind of acceptance and compassion that I wish Callas had eventually attained...


her complete album Rosebuds in a Stone Yard (streaming)
http://tinyurl.com/b2njm
A wide range of tones, from the innocently girlish to the slavically assertive...

Paleopoetics

Another poem I recently uncovered from my writings in my late teens. By this time I was a convinced agnostic (oxymoron?), and, judging from the content of this poem, influenced by W.H. Auden's masterpiece "Musee des Beaux Arts"

ON A CRUCIFIXION EVENING

On a crucifixion evening
come drift with me,
expecting every moment a cataclysmic roar
as the veil of the temple is rent in twain,
awaiting terror on each symbolic face
as the saints arise that have slept.

But in the meantime
come over here and watch
this dog die whining in the Via Dolorosa.
The last man home to supper from the darkening hill
(weeping for the shadows in the soul of Man
and the Pilate in himself) kicked in his rage
too hard the outlined ribs, which broken now
glide unacknowledged through his prophet dreams
and welcome him with laughter to the destined throng.

Look now behind you--
far beyond Calvary,
untouched by thorns, that sliver of moon
drops behind palms that fringe a silver pool,
and the nightingale sleeps in echoes of song.

Nothing much happening
in Jerusalem tonight.
My apologies; I was led to expect...
Well, let us go home. It's disappointing to hear
no tumult in temple or graveyard, to know
the cats of the fountain will scratch for garbage
though lions await their martyred meals.

I suppose you realise
what this means?
The leaves that shade the courtyard of Joan's flames
will grow despite her burning. Blossoms there
will welcome spring without remorse,
though we be images of a god.

In view of this
let us alter our report
about tonight, and continue to shape
impassive Nature partner to our dustborn tears,
recounting each disaster in that human key
that makes it more important than the loneliness
in the arid searching eye of the last mastodon.

But you know, somehow
I can't help feeling
the sun was blazing when Adam fell,
and that his hasty departure by the eastern gates
caused little consternation in the garden.

-CMC-

Blind Man

I recently came across a few poems I wrote ages ago, when I was about 19. Somehow I still like them, despite the fact that the influence of Dylan Thomas is overwhelmingly obvious. Here's one of them, which makes much of the insight common in Thomas's work that the end of things is implicit in their beginning.

BLIND MAN

This was my apocalypse,
The sharp light cracking on the eastern front
No more, the black dew frozen to my eyes,
Cut down my stature of senses.
Dark of my mother and the coffin womb
Flood again with crushing of the light.
.
In my dust-limbed anger of rough eclipse,
Marooned on four senses I dying hunt
The slipping Phoenix in his blazing lies;
I mold this terror to the first defenses,
The barrier circling this burrow tomb,
Caught in the budding flesh a hollow night.
.
And now below the sliding of the seas
I hear the soft dark mourning of the whale,
The moan of foaming salmon streaking home to die,
The curving dolphin in its grief.
The diving rain pins laughter to the oak --
I hear it choking in the summer's fist.
.
I feel the fury in the acorn freeze,
And under searing sun the rushing hail;
I breathe the scent of dying roses in July
And taste the bitter dew that drowns the morning leaf.
The autumn snaps again the stem that Eden broke,
And yearly shrouds the child the first moon kissed.
.
-C.M.C.-

The 52 Most Depressing Songs You've Ever Heard

Choice phrases from:


Tom Reynolds's


"I Hate Myself and Want To Die: The 52 Most Depressing Songs You've Ever Heard"

"...Sam Stone is basically a composite for Hollywood's ideal Vietnam veteran: an hallucinating psycho with a Fu Manchu moustache who goes barking mad every time a Doors song comes on the radio..."

"...the "quantum tragedy paradigm": the shorter the time two people spent together as a couple, the more overwrought the song is that describes their break-up...."

"...NEIL and Babs phoned in this turgid song with all the energy of a ping-pong match played in zero gravity..."

"...teenage car-crash songs of the early 1960s, where adolescents get incinerated in fiery auto wrecks due to their altruism and stunning lack of common sense...."

"...Had Dion been around during D-Day, the Allies could have dropped her off at Omaha Beach with a PA system and have her sing All By Myself until the German infantry bayoneted themselves..."

"...the band lumbers back and forth between two menacing chords like Frankenstein's monster deciding which villager to pummel,..."

"...NASHVILLE may have a rich heritage of depressing music but this hemlock-gulping country weeper will force listeners to throw themselves into a vat of possum poo...."

"...The Wall, the one album you can never listen to in its entirety unless you own a bong the size of a mop...."

"...most punk music sounds like screaming winos crammed inside a runaway shopping cart..."

"...The Downward Spiral, the perfect album to crank while you're tossing live hamsters into a blender...."

"...Wagner's Ring cycle without the funny hats; the equivalent of an opera company pelting you with copies of Anne Rice novels. You're completely drained when it's over and desperately in need of a shower to rinse off the raven droppings...."

READ THE ARTICLE

Modern Mind

Borges Parody

The Zahir and I In Gujarat, at the end of the eighteenth century, the Zahir was a tiger; in Java it was a blind man in the Surakarta mosque, stoned by the faithful; in Persia, an astrolabe that Nadir Shah ordered thrown into the sea; in the prisons of Mahdi, in 1892, a small sailor’s compass wrapped in a shred of cloth from a turban and touched by Rudolf Karl von Slatin; in the synagogue in Córdoba it was, according to Zotenberg, a vein in the marble of one of the synagogue’s twelve hundred pillars; in the ghetto in Tetuán, it was the bottom of a well. By sometime around 1949, the Zahir turned up in Buenos Aires; it had become a common twenty-centavo coin, issued in 1929, into which a penknife or a razor had scratched the letters N T and the number 2. Today, in New York and London and San Juan, Puerto Rico and a little town in Maryland, the Zahir is a blind poet named Jorge Luis Borges. Today is the thirteenth of December, 1999; in the summer of 1993 the Zahir came into my hands. I am not the man I was then, but I am still able to recall, and perhaps recount, what happened. I am still, albeit only partially, Andrew Hurley, just as there was a part of Hermann Sörgel (that case reported on at length in the newspapers some years back) that remained Hermann Sörgel even while another, ineluctable part of him was William Shakespeare. Like Sörgel, when I wake up in the morning I do not always know which of the two of us, Borges or I, is speaking the words that I delude myself I speak into the mirror. I do not know, in fact, which of the two of us is speaking these lines now. Soon, we are to enter a new millennium, and for some, the zeros of the calendars will cipher forth the possibility that lies in blankness; for me, and for many others, I know that even when all else is new, our fate, like the fate of poor Edwin Williamson in that madhouse in Edinburgh, is to go on being, albeit still only partially, and as though with the accoutrements of an actor, Borges. Each man’s story of the fatal contact is different, but what happened to me is this: In the course of a translator’s life, he may handle (or sometimes even manhandle) dozens of authors, scores of texts, never thinking that they may pose great peril to his mental health, his sleep, his very sanity. Unassuming, mute, the words on the page do not, despite some mad author’s fevered dream after a night of wine and oysters, mix and mingle when the book is closed, do not rearrange themselves into unreadable and untranslatable lines such as O time thy pyramids or axaxaxas mlö (which can only be pronounced as the author’s cruel, mocking laughter) that the translator must translate in the morning. No, for most lifetimes, the words are gentle beasts of burden that come when beckoned to the yoke. Not so the fatal Borges. I recall (though I have no right to speak that sacred verb – only one man on earth did, and that man is dead) that my wife and I had rented an apartment in Austin Texas, where the fatal Borges had spent several months in 1961 or thereabouts and again, diabolically, sometime later: the myth of the eternal return, of cyclical paths in time and space, embodied. Had I only known. . . . We were sitting at the table after dinner. We had lost all track of time in a vast debate over the way one might go about translating some word or other (cleave, I believe it was, or perhaps fuga) into Lunfardo or, mutatis mutandis, early twentieth-century Liverpudlian, discussing how one might show one’s erudition while preserving the translator’s mask of invisibility. We discovered (late at night such a discovery is inevitable) that there is something monstrous about translations, for they multiply the number of books. That was when my wife remembered a saying attributed to one of the heresiarchs of translation theory, Walter Benjamin. It was an astonishing claim, though literarily unremarkable, and she remembered it like this: A translation issues not so much from the life of an original as from its afterlife, and the translation of an important work of world literature marks its stage of continued life. A theory of cannibals, I remarked. Or of vampires, she darkly suggested. I ignored the shiver that passed through my weary body; the effect of the hour and indigestion, I thought. (It had been my night to cook.) But in fact it was the beginning of a fever. Then the thought struck me that there is no fiction that is not the symbol of all the fictions that shine down through history and fable, and that Borges’ fictions might stand for them all: the stories of Scheherazade, staving off death when the morning comes; the story of the dreamers of Ephesus; the madman who dreams a land peopled by giants and splendid maidens with names like Dulcinea; the blind poet and his hero’s quest across oceans only to return, old and tired and beggared, home again; the rigorously concentric hells of Dante Alighieri and John Barth; the novels of the mysterious genius Herbert Quain, with their “regressive and ramifying” plots; the unperformed plays of the eccentric Jaromir Hladik who composed while standing erect before the firing squad, as a way of preparing himself for the reviewers’ reception of his works; the infinite detective tales of Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen and all the others with their mysterious murders in the beginning, their long muddled middles, and the satisfying or unsatisfying solution to the crimes at the end; the tragically unfinished novels by Pierre Menard, local colorist manqué; science fiction’s tales of parallel worlds, of a king’s coin of a single side, of books made of the infinite grains of sand, of the nightmare worlds for translators in which people write in languages that consist of nothing but verbs or nothing but adjectives or nothing but nouns with the vowels removed, like Arabic. But I was overcome with weariness, and so I went to bed. Or rather, we went to bed – the three of us: my wife, Borges, and I. For from that day forth, he haunted me. The next day, I decided I’d been drunk. That damned Sangre de Toro, I told myself, for I was but a freelancer and could afford no better. And yet the mysterious fever persisted, through days clouded by the mists that rose from intricate labyrinths of stone and brick and incorporeal metaphysics and through nights peopled by the minotaurs and kings and lions that inhabited them. For whole months I searched, fruitlessly, for a suitable English word for the Spanish adjective atroz. It was a meta-quest, I realized later, a metaphor for my own condition. Sometimes I would go out for a walk, to clear my mind, and find myself hours later in the reference room of the library, browsing almost blindly through the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica or searching for the call numbers of the collected works of Sir Thomas Browne. (I was also obsessed with Urne Buriall.) Finally, my wife greeted me at the door one day with shock and consternation in her eyes; a bloody flourish marked my forehead, and I could not tell her, did not know, whether it was the mark of a casement window I had brushed on the way up the stairs or of the sword wielded by one of the characters in one of Borges’ convoluted tales of courage and betrayal. She rushed me to a clinic on the south side of Austin, where my clothes were stripped from me, my head was shaved, I was strapped with metal bands to a table and blinded and dizzied with bright lights, my heart and lungs were listened to, and a man in a surgical mask stuck a needle in my arm. I awoke nauseated and bandaged. My wife smiled bravely, telling me that I was going to be all right, that they would soon “get rid of this virus in your brain.” Still, for days I hovered between life and death. The fever wore me away, and illustrations from The Book of Imaginary Beings wallpapered my nightmares. When, on the seventh night, I began hallucinating, the doctors tried reading Zola to me; realizing it, too, was a translation, and thus could only aggravate my symptoms, they soon stopped, bringing in the new Tom Wolfe book to try to exorcise the demon. One morning they even tried Stephen Hawking, but it hurt too much when I laughed. At last, either by force of the strong doses of reading from a parallel world or because my constitution had adapted to the possession, I was judged fit to return home. My wife, ever solicitous, asked me if I wanted to stop at Starbuck’s. It had been weeks since I’d had a decent cup of coffee; the hospital served only Sanka. The caffeine, you know. . . , they said. But when I told her I’d just brew up some mate when we got home, she broke down and cried. The details of the months that I, or we, have lived since that fateful fall of 1993 – for I cannot bring myself to call it a fortunate fall, or a happy one – have faded into inconsequence. One day has followed another, one week another, and the years have passed uneventfully, at least outwardly. Inwardly, I continue to be multitudes; I feel, pullulating inside me, the characters of Borges’ fables, feel the knotted labyrinths of their lives, or perhaps plots. Some days I am almost myself; some days I am the other, or yet another. I shall never forget the day I tried to cash a check and realized that I’d signed it “Emma Zunz.” Tomorrow, I feel, I shall be Juan Muraña; the day after, the dread redeemer Lazarus Morel. I have become a serial-personality murderer – tradutore, tradittore is nothing in comparison to that. My wife, my faithful wife, who has walked with me through the red labyrinth of London and, like Ulrikke, slogged with me through the snow outside York and shuffled through the infinite libraries in Buffalo, has filed papers for divorce. Soon, she will leave me to the other and I shall be alone yet infinitely accompanied, as I am now. Soon, forgetting her manners, she will be able to say I told you so – Borges is fated to continue, through translations, and in me, into the new millennium and beyond; Borges’ influence is fated to go on working its dark power on a new generation of readers and writers. No longer shall it be only Calvino and Burgess and Barth and Rushdie and Auster and Robert Coover and Luisa Valenzuela and Alicia Borinsky and those others who carry Borges’ dark fire into the future, but he shall have passed, through the forking paths of multiple paternity, into those writers’ offspring as well, and the offspring of those offspring, ad infinitum. Soon, the entire world will be Borges, yet soon, none of us will know that, for we too will be Borges. Contact with Borges, the habit of Borges, will have disintegrated this world. Spellbound by Borges’ rigor, humanity will have forgotten, and will continue to forget, the messiness of the world and most other literature. Already Borges’ (conjectural) language has filtered into our schools; already the teaching of Borges’ harmonious biography (filled with moving episodes) has obliterated the biographies of Washington, Lincoln, Henry James that governed my own childhood; already, no one may have a cocktail conversation in which they are not reminded of a witty saying by the master. A scattered dynasty of recluses, the translators of Jorge Luis Borges in prose, poetry, and fiction, in every language in which books may be sold in sufficient numbers to justify the printing costs, has changed the face of the earth – and their dark work continues. If my projections are correct, a hundred years from now someone will discover the three new volumes of the Second Collected Works of Borges – and it will be called simply “the Encyclopedia.” Once just a single man who broke with tradition to forge another, he has now become the multiple precursor of yet further traditions of literature, new figurations of time and space and lives and stories. Once merely peripheral, merely Argentine, Borges now spreads through imaginations as a quarter is passed from hand to hand through an entire population, leaving its germs wherever it goes, or like that twenty-centavo piece that infected Borges himself in Buenos Aires in 1949, and he has become the new Zahir, and our fate, once we are touched by him, is nevermore to be able to escape him. Meantime, I am at work on a new vorticist translation of the works of Ana Lydia Lope de Vega. Andrew Hurley is Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan. He has recently provided new translations of Borges’ entire fictional works for the Viking book Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions.

Brand New

12 NEW CLONES

I've added 12 new images to the WHEN CLONING GOES BAD Gallery on EarthlingZ.

SEE GALLERY

Lawn Furniture for Literalists

"How much oxygen did your furniture produce today? In our version of the future, the things we loaf about on indoors will be as beneficial as the stuff that grows out back. In the meantime, sculpt lawn furniture from the lawn itself. Unlike your standard-issue sofa, this lush greenery is totally organic, requires no synthetic finishes, and can be brought to life, Golem-style, from salvaged dirt. St. Augustine tiles create a seamless, living upholstery, or try wheatgrass for a durable alternative. Ask your nursery about planting tips unique to your sod. Note: Couch may require mowing..."

FULL INSTRUCTIONS