Sad but True

From:  Brad <bigfluke@umail.com>

Date:  Tuesday, July 24, 2012 12:04 AM

To: Unassuming Scholar <scholar@snowflake.edu>

Subject:  Plz read this – fall student

Hey, im going to be in your 3-hour class tuesday/thursday this fall.  I have a big problem though these last 4 classes this semester are the only ones i need and the only way i can do it is if tuesday/thursday i have a class from 530-645 at the tech center. So i took your 3 hour class knowing ill probably be a few minutes late but its the only way ill be able to get my degree. I haven't fully registered i wanted to shoot you an email to make sure this ok. I don't want my grade to be affected because of this. I take my grades very serious and am really worried it'll be affected this semester because of that. Please get back to me and let me know. I took the 3 hour class so i wont miss too much of class.

brad porter

Sent from my iPhone

From:  Unassuming Scholar <scholar@snowflake.edu>

Date:  Thursday, July 26, 2012 9:12 AM

To: Brad <bigfluke@umail.com>

Subject:  Re: Plz read this – fall student

Brad,

I understand your predicament and I don't want to discourage you.  However, habitual lateness to class will pose a problem as we cover a lot of material in the course and I try to make the best use of the time we have.  We will have quizzes and homework due at the start of each class meeting, and we will also do participation-based activities that are a significant part of your final grade.

I recommend you enroll in another section or defer your graduation until spring semester if there is a scheduling conflict.  Meeting with your academic advisor to go over your options may be helpful.

Regards,

Unassuming Scholar

From:  Brad <bigfluke@umail.com>

Date:  Friday, July 27, 2012 2:22 AM

To: Unassuming Scholar <scholar@snowflake.edu>

Subject:  RE: Re: Plz read this – fall student

So…your saying i shouldnt take your class?

Sent from my iPhone

Objects

I’ve just finished rereading Frank Norris’ novel McTeague.

McTeague and its author are mostly forgotten today, perhaps because the book was published in 1899 and Norris died several years later at the age of 32.  It’s an engrossing story, depicting a world that is at once quaint and antiquated, yet familiar.  McTeague presages later, naturalistic works such as Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (though not nearly as prolix or dense). 

Comprising a compact 186 pages, McTeague not only tells the story of its ill-starred protagonist, an ignorant, self-taught dentist, but it also captures the social milieu of lower middle class San Francisco at the turn of the last century.  Reading Norris’ spare yet richly evocative prose, I’m struck by such details as how little everyday speech patterns have changed and even at how many familiar consumer products sold in 1898 are still around today.  The novel is remembered partly thanks to commercialism.  In a city ever ready to commercially exploit its heritage, literary or otherwise, it’s not surprising that a fair-to-middling tourist bar named McTeague’s Saloon now stands at the putative Polk Street site of its namesake’s dental parlor.  I rather doubt that this is how Frank Norris wanted his work to be remembered, though I suppose it’s better than not being remembered at all.

The theme of McTeague is that of materialism’s corrosive effect on human relationships.  McTeague falls for Trina, a patient who is his best friend’s girlfriend.  McTeague wins Trina over and they are married.  As luck would have it, Trina has just won $5,000 from a lottery ticket sold to her by McTeague’s dotty neighbor.  Trina’s former suitor Marcus is seemingly more put out at losing the five grand than at losing the girl.  Marcus eventually leaves town, but not before reporting McTeague to the authorities for practicing dentistry without a license. 

Unemployed, McTeague must live off the interest from Trina’s small fortune and her income from selling scrimshaw to a relative’s toy store.  Trina’s miserliness grates on McTeague, who pines for their past affluence.  Their relationship deteriorates into McTeague physically abusing Trina.  Ultimately, he steals the modest savings Trina had hidden away in their flat and deserts her.  Permanently disabled by McTeague’s mistreatment, Trina must take a job as a live-in charwoman at a kindergarten.

McTeague, now a vagrant, learns Trina has withdrawn her $5,000 principal and goes to get what he believes is his fair share.  When Trina refuses to help him, McTeague beats her to death and flees empty handed.  On the run, pursued by a posse, McTeague is caught in Death Valley by none other than Marcus.  Fighting over the last of McTeague’s water, McTeague bludgeons Marcus to death.  Before Marcus expires, however, he manages to manacle himself to McTeague.  The novel ends with McTeague stranded in the desert, shackled to a corpse, and presumably not long for this world himself.

A parallel subplot concerns McTeague’s unbalanced neighbor Maria Macapa, the one who sold Trina the winning lottery ticket.  Maria claims to have come from a wealthy family in Mexico and says she still possesses a gold service owned by them.  No one believes her ramblings about her alleged riches except the neighborhood junk man, Zerkow.  The two marry.  Eventually, after realizing Maria’s story is just that, Zerkow murders her in a foreshadowing of McTeague’s own pyrrhic vengeance.   

McTeague resonates because there is so much that is familiar in it, even at a century’s remove.  Norris hits a lot of the right emotional chords as well, such as the nearly palpable anxiety McTeague experiences in his desire to get things just right to impress Trina and her family during a night out on the town.  The dialogue is natural, and the expressions and speech rhythms of the time do not sound at all stilted to the contemporary reader.  Even familiar household brands make an appearance, reflecting the then-emergent consumer society.

The deeper reason for my own fascination with McTeague is that it is part of a rich body of literature that cuts across genres.  Societies create personalities peculiar to them, and McTeague represents an American archetype.  A striver, McTeague aspires to a higher station than that to which he was born.  Ascending the social ladder carries with it the risk of falling, however.  McTeague’s professional indignities and loss of employment late in the story provide the kind of anxiety-inducing scenario that is the stuff of our own nightmares. 

It’s important to remember that McTeague had an advantage in his work not many people have in a postindustrial economy.  He had a specific, “hard” skill.  Never mind that he didn’t have a license, in a time when dentistry consisted mostly of pulling rotten teeth McTeague was a skilled practitioner.  Nowadays most of us work at the kind of jobs Sartre called “vocations of opinion” in which our reputations are predicated as much on social as on occupational skills.  We sell ourselves, not our abilities.  This is why McTeague’s fall from grace hits all the harder for the reader.  Deep down, we all fear being exposed as frauds.

The fear of exposure is the fear of loss: Lose your job, lose your stuff.  There is no worse fate in a consumer culture.  McTeague and Trina were as obsessed with possessions as anyone today.  Frank Norris certainly wasn’t the first to make the observation and was hardly the last: Cupidity as fatal flaw permeates American popular fiction.  Often, it’s offered in the guise of black comedy—Terry Southern’s The Magic Christian and Warren Adler’s The War of the Roses come immediately to mind—but the message is communicated clearly. 

We’re happy captives of commodity fetishism: Fateor, ergo sum…I own, therefore I am.  Probably even in Norris’ era true personal individuation was becoming a thing of the past; our personalities have become mere agglomerations of consumer preferences.  Moreover, the partial migration of commodity fetishism (or perhaps the social analogue of Lacan’s objet petit a) to the virtual sphere has fomented a wholly new form of false consciousness.

If you think that last statement is exaggerated, consider: Most personal Facebook pages contain “Likes” for consumer products, films, books, foods, vacation spots, restaurants, and pop stars.  Social media are an essential part of promotion, and by clicking a button you not only signal your preferences to your friends, virtual and otherwise, but to advertisers as well.  Its dynamics underscore the transitory, instrumental nature of relationships.  We’ve come to the point where our very personalities are commodities.  We are in representational symbiosis with the things we own and use, and thanks to Facebook, friends themselves become a commodity to be acquired, with success evinced by the number of people who “friend” us.  (Quantity, you see.  More is better.  You don’t even have to have met the person to be friends.)   

That isn’t true of everyone, to be sure.  The more perspicacious among us are not comfortable with the pressure to sell out, an occasional literary trope shared by works as diverse as Orwell’s novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying and the Green Day punk operetta American Idiot.  The mundane tragedy of course is that one ultimately has no choice but to play the game.  In the end, we adapt (or, more accurately, succumb) to our environment.  Every life ends up being a corrupt bargain; a corrupt society can only help but produce corrupt people.

What we are left with is a populace composed of individuals lacking the sensitivity and insight necessary for true self-expression, spiritually stunted, befuddled by political and corporate doublespeak, oversated with media distraction, and stultified by religion.  Things appear to have changed little since Frank Norris penned McTeague.  Perhaps it’s unsurprising that this largely forgotten gem of American literature continues to resonate across a century and a decade.  It’s also a reminder that nothing is new and that the good old days never were.

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

It’s a Mean World

Awoke this morning to learn of last night’s movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado.

Thanks to the 24-hour news cycle and the Internet, tragedies hit much closer to home emotionally than they did in the past.  They also ratchet up the rhetorical framing of tragic events.  Even the normally levelheaded David Sirota has called the Aurora incident “terrorism,” even though there does not seem to have been a political motive behind the act.  Sometimes a lone nut is just a lone nut.    

Perusing reader comments on the web news coverage, I noticed many of them said they missed how carefree life was for kids in the 1970s when they could walk to school or ride their bikes down the block alone without fear of harm.  Obviously, these folks missed something.  It’s easy to forget that the 1970s were the era of the Zodiac killer, Son of Sam, and John Wayne Gacy.  The Charley Project has profiled numerous open missing person cases.  The largest number of these cold cases is in the 1970s.   Violent crime rates spiked from the mid-1960s through the following decade.  

The problem is that too often we look at the past through rose-colored glasses.  The FBI assures us violent crime has declined since the 1990s.  There should be no reason to doubt this, though statistics are always open to interpretation.  If true, even the causes are elusive with everything from video surveillance of public spaces to the delayed demographic effect of legal abortion held out as reasons why.  Still, you’re probably safer walking down a city street in the middle of the night than you would have been a few years ago.

Why, then, the frisson of horror we experience after mass killings?  Certainly the randomness of it makes us uneasy.  But the odds of it happening to you are exceedingly slim compared to mundane causes of death like traffic accidents or lifestyle-related diseases.  The root explanation, it seems, may be in what social psychologist George Gerbner called “Mean World Syndrome.”  The mass media have zeroed in on violence because it gets people’s attention and boosts ratings…“If it bleeds, it leads,” as an old journalism adage has it.  When you see enough real-life violence on TV or on the web, you begin to believe the whole world fraught with dangers. 

It’s hard to reason with unreasoned fear.  Explaining it as an example of the construction fallacy, that a single incident or even a small number of them do not explain the state of the world doesn’t help.  This is a matter of emotion rather than logic.  Until the media report the news responsibly and refrain from sensationalism, it will continue to be a mean world for all of us.

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

You can’t say Mitt Romney doesn’t understand his audience.  In a fundraising speech this week Romney said the Republican Party is not the party of the rich, but of those who want to be.  

Mitt got it half right: The GOP is the party of the rich.  It just happens also to be the party of the greedy from all walks of life...

Learning Less Ordinary

The San Francisco alternative education scene continues to thrive.  The University of the Commons has completed its first round of free courses in the Mission District, with more to come.  Information is at http://www.uotc.org/wordpress/.

Meanwhile, The Fools’ School plans to hold a weekend symposium July 21-22 at The Emerald Tablet in North Beach; details at http://foolsfolio.wordpress.com/.