I have a feeling that when I’m older and reflecting on my experience as a young man, there will be a vital point in the story when I exclaim, “And then I found The Feminine Mystique!” It’s bewildering to consider that the work — which launched the modern feminist movement almost 20 years before I was born — could relate in any significant way to my own life. In fact it’s more than just significant; the application to and explanation of my own life is monumental. But I’m not alone there. I think Friedan’s work applies to our entire society. My new theory is that many of the forces affecting women in the ’50s and ’60s now affect both genders equally.

I’m only halfway through the book, so I can’t summarize the entire thing yet. I’m trying to get in the habit of posting little bits as I read, instead of trying to cover the whole whopper once I’m done. (That’s been difficult since I’ve realized I’m kind of like an Ent — those tree-like creatures from Lord of the Rings. Treebeard’s saying went something like, “It takes us a really long time to say anything at all, so we don’t say anything unless it’s worth taking a really long time to say.”)

My statement about the book’s ongoing validity relates to Friedan’s thesis:

“It is my thesis that the core of the problem for women today is not sexual but a problem of identity… Our culture does not permit women to accept or gratify their basic need to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings, a need which is not solely defined by their sexual role” (p. 77).

I don’t know if it’s pure coincidence or if my reading habits are starting to converge towards a single subject, but this statement was a perfect follow-up to a book I just finished reading: The Undiscovered Self by Carl Jung. In that short book the famous psychologist seemed to be inviting someone to tackle the subject of feminism by taking the individuality angle. As Jung wrote:

“The individual is increasingly deprived of the moral decision as to how he should live his own life, and instead is ruled, fed, clothed and educated as a social unit, accommodated in the appropriate housing unit, and amused in accordance with the standards that give pleasure and satisfaction to the masses” (p. 12).

In the natural progression of my independent studying, I’ve noticed a shift from fiction and philosophy to nonfiction and psychology, with the dividing time period being the 1950s. Both of these books fall in the second category, and I’m sort of surprised by Jung’s near-total absence from The Feminine Mystique. Jung’s book was published in 1957 and Friedan’s in 1963, so maybe there wasn’t enough lag time between the two.

Like I said, I still have a large chunk of it to read, but while Jung’s name has only been mentioned once so far, an entire chapter was dedicated to Sigmund Freud. In a way I’m glad about that, though, since it’s now obvious that I had a very skewed idea of Freud’s work. What I mean is, I only knew about the beneficial (or potentially beneficial) nature of his theories of the subconscious mind. I had no idea that he was sexist, or even hated or feared women. And I took a class in college called “Freud and Psychoanalysis”!

Apparently Freud was “a prisoner of his own culture,” by which Friedan means Victorian Europe at the dawn of the 20th century.

“In Freud’s time, evidently, cultural hypocrisy forced the repression of sex. [...] He then developed his theory by describing all the stages of growth as sexual… Something that could be described in physiological terms, linked to an origin of anatomy, seemed more comfortable, solid, real, scientific, as he moved into the unexplored country of the unconscious mind” (pp. 106-107).

Friedan explains that, while psychoanalysis was helpful in the therapy setting, its interpretation by mainstream culture was very damaging. Almost all the freedoms that women fought for from the mid-1800s (including the right to vote, which wasn’t granted to females until 1920 — though I didn’t know that!) until the end of WWII had reportedly vanished by the early 1960s.

“What happened to women is part of what happened to all of us in the years after the war. We found excuses for not facing the problems we once had the courage to face. The American spirit fell into a strange sleep; …the whole nation stopped growing up. All of us went back into the warm brightness of home…

“It was easier, safer, to think about love and sex than about communism, McCarthy, and the uncontrolled bomb. It was easier to look for Freudian sexual roots in man’s behavior, his ideas, and his wars than to look critically at his society and act constructively to right its wrongs” (pp. 186-187).

But as she goes on to say, “the individual” couldn’t solely be blamed for what happened in our culture. Psychologists, anthropologists, guidance counselors, professors and magazine editors all began taking Freud’s “lead,” telling women that self-fulfillment came from staying in the home, serving their husbands and children in their biological role. Once that caught on, highly paid marketers and advertisers took it to a new level of absurdity, manipulating the fear and guilt of women, knowing that these newly created housewives were responsible for 75 percent of spending in the home. (By the way, British documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis is the only person I’ve found today who seems to care about this topic. His documentary The Trap explores the ways that Edward Bernays, Freud’s own nephew, became rich by applying Freud’s theories to propaganda and brainwashing efforts in post-war America. Although, Friedan doesn’t seem aware of this either. Edward’s mother is mentioned in passing as a “strong” woman from Freud’s life — but Edward himself is totally omitted.)

So ladies and gentleman, we enter a new phase of the mystical creative journey. From not on there won’t be so many muddled, abstract philosophical explorations. Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus marked the end of that painful phase for me. Now I set out to explain the real world and what might be the most bizarre mystery of the universe: PEOPLE!

We went to FYE for the DVD and then to Hot Topic for the Alice products. I used to like Hot Topic in high school, but back in the ’90s it was quite a scarier place. Yeah, they still have the Slipknot t-shirts, but they also have Super Mario and Spongebob. And right now, the whole front section of the store is devoted to a Disney movie that hasn’t yet been released. Granted, it’s also a Tim Burton movie — but I doubt there will be anything too horrific about it.

This makes me think about our system of Capitalism, a topic that’s always poking my brain and, therefore, pops up on this blog quite often. I recently read an article by Douglas Haddow on Adbusters called “Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization.” I wasn’t familiar with the web publication before; I followed a link there from Twitter. According to one comment on the article, Adbusters is a magazine that only hipsters read. Go figure.

One thing that Haddow brought up is the way marketers and advertisers prey upon hipsters, or those with any hipster traits. The concept of “the hipster” is elusive, so I don’t want to use it as a short-cut. I’m referring to young adults in urban settings who strive to feel cool, unique, and/or important, while at the same time inadvertently making themselves into sheep, indistinguishable from the herd, copies of many generations of rebels who were perhaps more authentic, or at least more successful in their rebellion.

As Haddow explains:

…’cool-hunters’ will also be skulking the same sites, taking note of how they dress and what they consume. These marketers and party-promoters get paid to co-opt youth culture and then re-sell it back at a profit. In the end, hipsters are sold what they think they invent and are spoon-fed their pre-packaged cultural livelihood.

Hipsterdom is the first ‘counterculture’ to be born under the advertising industry’s microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its participants to continually shift their interests and affiliations. Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group – using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion. But the moment a trend, band, sound, style or feeling gains too much exposure, it is suddenly looked upon with disdain. Hipsters cannot afford to maintain any cultural loyalties or affiliations for fear they will lose relevance.

Of course the irony of this article is that it exudes the very style that it berates. Haddow spent more time on the “cool” tone of the essay than he did on the attempt to provide real explanations or solutions. Still, he makes plenty of interesting points — and the one I just quoted has stuck in my head the most.

When I visited Hot Topic, these words hit me even harder. I know Hot Topic isn’t a hipster store, but it’s growth was fed mostly by teenage angst, youthful rebellion, and vampire fetishes. Yet these days, Hot Topic feels kinda soft and pudgy. After browsing the Alice-ware, what caught my eye was a section of t-shirts featuring many characters from early ’90s TV shows. I’ve been saying for the past few months that a ’90s revival is imminent. The first signs were the neon glasses, bandanas, tights, and t-shirts at concerts and music festivals.

So I know this revival has begun, but it’s not building with the same momentum as last decade’s ’80s revival. Maybe it’s because ’80s music, on the whole, is a lot fucking cooler than ’90s music.

Walking into Hot Topic now, I feel like a ’90s revival is being staged on an automatic schedule. It’s as if the marketers and advertisers are simply working on a 20-year time lapse, hoping to manipulate the nostalgic tendencies within us all. Hot Topic had t-shirts, buttons, iPhone covers, and other trinkets featuring designs from many old cartoons, mostly Nicktoons (i.e. – cartoons from Nickelodeon). I saw designs from Rocko’s Modern Life, Rugrats (one shirt just showed Reptar wreaking havoc), and the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

But the best discovery of all was…(drum roll)…a Ren & Stimpy t-shirt! I may not have mentioned it here, but I’m obsessed with Ren & Stimpy. I watched it as a kid in the early ’90s, and now I watch it as an adult. I have seasons 1 and 2 on DVD, as well as seasons 3-5 in digital version. When I saw this t-shirt, I grabbed one immediately without any of my usual anti-consumerist twitches. I didn’t look at the price tag, and I didn’t check what country it was made in. I didn’t wonder what company was ultimately getting the profits, and I didn’t feel like I was being manipulated. But I did remember reading the article about hipsters, and I did consider that maybe it was a mistake to buy this t-shirt and allow this rather disgusting phenomena to thrive.

Then it occurs to me that I might deserve a break. It’s not like I hadn’t thought about Ren & Stimpy in 18 years. I watch at least three episodes per week — despite the fact that I’m 27. To reference another Nicktoon, I feel like Doug after the teen idol appropriates his style of clothes for a week. Doug looks like a silly dork when a new style arrives and he doesn’t conform, insisting that he had always worn those outmoded clothes and didn’t see any reason to change now. (Typing this adds so much dimension to that episode! Doug was a Christ figure in that story! He was crucified for standing against the crowd as an individual, a free thinker. He resisted the zombie mob as they chased down their fabricated coolness. He was an anti-hipster!)

Part of my thoughts here are influenced by David Foster Wallace (discussed here previously), and I haven’t even read Infinite Jest yet (though I heard Wallace killed himself in part because of the impossibility of a truly individual and unique life experience in the modern world). The point here is that Ren & Stimpy is an integral part of who I am. It’s insane, wacky, chaotic, and psychedelic — and I love it. (I even laminated a poster of the Space Madness episode, to salvage it from my bedroom decorations of youth, and displayed it in my room all throughout college!) And furthermore, I’ll probably still be watching it when the 2K revival begins and Spongebob comes back into style.

I don’t think I’m playing “the hipster” in this case, but the opposite argument could be made. I can tell you right now that this topic, the concept of modern rebellion in all its various incarnations, will dominate my thoughts and my work for years to come.

So while I can’t presently offer more explanations or solutions than Haddow did in the Adbusters article, I can at least suggest some food for thought. Is any kind of rebellion or revolution possible today? Were they ever possible? If we’re consuming these things because they’re sincere, genuine reflections of who we are, and not just superficial fluctuations in style and behavior — does that make it okay? Would it help to avoid mass culture, or to avoid outer culture altogether? If so, then how do we stop this Capitalist machine, which exists outside of us, and of which the hipster is so clearly a symptom (that’s the crux of Haddow’s whole article). The hipster is a side effect of the U.S. being a world superpower for nearly 70 years.

Maybe the solution lies in forging a future in which there is no world superpower. The trouble is that the only concrete change happens at the individual level. All attempts to orchestrate a large-scale agenda lead to political fanaticism and, naturally, zero net change.

But that’s enough for tonight. Hold onto your seats. I feel a torrent coming on.

I asked the reader to post his email as a comment on the original article, but then I figured I would just put it in a brand new one. His note made me think that I hadn’t expressed myself very well, so I want to elaborate. Here’s his email:

Dear Mr. Meador,

I’ve been reading your Refractor post dated July 10, 2008, in which you express doubt of Thoreau’s virginity. Personally, of course, I have no way of knowing whether Thoreau was a lifelong virgin or not, although I plan to read Walter Harding’s biography of Thoreau which, according to another Web site, describes him as such. The reason I’m writing to you, however, is to say that I find your reasoning curious or, if you will, “slightly bizarre.” You state that:

“I couldn’t believe that anyone who hadn’t devoted their life to priesthood, a convent, or a monastery would ever maintain a strict code of sexual abstinence. It’s not that I’m pushing promiscuity, but I am at the core a scientist, and Darwin’s work is always at the back of my mind. In other words, humans reproduce through sexual intercourse, so a lifetime spent without a single sexually intimate relationship is slightly bizarre.”

What I find curious about this is that Darwin’s Origin of Species was published only two and a half years before Thoreau’s death. I doubt Darwin’s ideas could have had much impact on Thoreau’s way of life (unlike today, after 150 years). To see someone in Thoreau’s time who is a lifelong virgin as not fulfilling their “survival of the fittest” role is a conceptual mismatch. The reason Darwin’s thinking was so revolutionary is that people didn’t think in such terms before his book.

With consideration,
Gordon W (name abbreviated for privacy)

Here’s my response to Gordon:

Hi Gordon,

Thanks for writing. It seems that my point was miscommunicated. I don’t think that Social Darwinism will ever be a sufficient paradigm to explain human life or behavior, so I didn’t mean that Thoreau wasn’t “fit” in that sense. Furthermore, I didn’t mean to suggest that Darwin’s work has influenced the way that people live, or the way they make conscious decisions.

What I meant was that lifelong abstinence is simply unnatural. A person has to actively oppose their natural instincts in order to fulfill such a goal. Most people who make the claim are lying (like Tolstoy — as I wrote in the post: “Tolstoy preached celibacy, but fathered something like 13 children.”). And most people who actually go through with it are doing so for religious reasons (i.e. – priests and nuns).

The reason I even mentioned Darwin was to clarify how lifelong celibacy is unnatural. It’s more a sign of fear over the power of sexuality, a neurosis brought on by the repression of sexual feelings and acts. This relates to the incidence of child molestation among Catholic priests, men who never progressed past adolescent sexual maturity.

I’m not as concerned with whether or not Thoreau was actually a virgin as I am about the underlying psychology behind his writing and philosophy. If he was really so guarded as to avoid sexual (or even chaste romantic relationships) in life, then his worldview was inevitably incomplete — and that will color how I interpret his work.

I still haven’t returned to Walden, partly because of how serious I am about my point here. Forced virginity is one of the tools employed by Islamic Fundamentalists to make suicide bombers! Remember how the authoritarian government in Orwell’s masterpiece 1984 uses sexual deprivation to stir up fervent nationalism? Coincidence? No way!

Anyways, please share your thoughts!

I did enjoy learning about the Zeitoun family though. Abdulrahman Zeitoun is a Syrian American man who settled in New Orleans after about a decade of living and working at sea. A friend introduced him to his wife Kathy, a Louisiana native who was raised Southern Baptist but had converted to Islam on her own. Kathy has a son from a previous marriage, and she and Zeitoun (as everyone calls Abdulrahman) have three daughters together. In my opinion, Eggers’s focus on this quintessential “American” family is the strongest aspect of the book. The result was that I learned more about Islam than I had ever known before.

It was especially interesting to see why Kathy converted. Her best friend Yuko (a Japanese American) first made the switch from Christianity to Islam, and eventually it began to make sense to Kathy as well.

“[Kathy] had no idea, for instance, that the Qur’an was filled with the same people as the Bible – Moses, Mary, Abraham, Pharaoh, even Jesus. She hadn’t known that Muslims consider the Qur’an the fourth book of God to His messengers, after the Old Testament…the Psalms…and the New Testament. The fact that Islam acknowledged these books was revelatory for her. The fact that the Qur’an repeatedly reaches out to the other, related faiths, knocked her flat” (p. 71).

“She was frustrated that she hadn’t known any of this, that she’d been blind to the faith of a billion or so people. How could she not know these things?” (p. 76)

I felt just as frustrated! That part about the Qur’an being the fourth book of God was news to me, and I’m sure it would be to most Americans practicing (or raised under) some denomination of Christianity. It’s even more odd when I recall that I went to high school with Muslim students, and at one point they even gave a short presentation to classes to encourage mutual understanding and tolerance (not that there were many outward displays of bigotry at the suburban Detroit school).

Kathy learned that Mohammad wasn’t the Islamic god (he was just a messenger), Qur’an simply means “Recitation,” and Muslims are just as different as the various types of people who identify as Christians. Meanwhile her Southern Baptist preacher scolded the congregation for not giving more money at collection time. And when Kathy spoke to him about how she was considering a conversion to Islam, the preacher said she was being tempted by the devil. Later at church, he brought her on stage and publicly humiliated her over the issue. That was Kathy’s breaking point.

“This man, preaching to a thousand impressionable and trusting parishioners, didn’t know, or didn’t care, that Islam, Judaism, and Christianity were not-so-distantly related branches of the same monotheistic, Abrahamic faith. And to dismiss all of Islam with a playground sound? Kathy could not be part of what that man was preaching” (p. 76).

Kathy was also tiring of the Southern Baptist claim to ultimate knowledge. She sought something more humble and noble.

“The various doubts of the imams* were comforting, and drew her closer. [...] She liked Islam’s sense of personal responsibility, its bent toward social justice. Most of all, though, she liked the sense of dignity and purity embodied by the Muslim women she knew” (pp. 76-77). (*An imam is an Islamic religious leader)

All of this sounded refreshing amid the recent flashes of fundamentalist Islam and Christianity — the former in the Middle East and the latter in the U.S. But I soon saw that, like the other monotheistic religions, even liberal Islam is susceptible to irrationality and blatantly reliant on a personified God.

Consistently throughout the book, Zeitoun and Kathy thank God, pray to God, and abandon their reason to the wisdom of God. Zeitoun stays in New Orleans during and after Katrina in part because he feels that God wants him to be there to help the people (and dogs) in need. But in a way, it was a justification for his own stubbornness, not wanting to leave his property, not wanting to be stuck with four displaced females, not wanting to miss an opportunity to live up to his famous older brother (the brother was a decorated ocean swimmer in Syria, who later died in a car accident).

Never do they admit the chaos, randomness and coincidence that dominate every aspect of the story. The individual has no control whatsoever, but at the same time no one is in charge. Yes, Zeitoun did good things, but he almost ended up dead (or close to it — I won’t give away that part!).

There are a few other points from the book I’d like to discuss, but those will have to wait until a future post.

The second reason is more complex, but it relates to my skepticism over the value of contemporary publishing. I’m sure there’s a long catalog of works that try to explain the reasons for the degraded efficacy of modern literature: people watch too much TV and movies, play too many video games, aren’t educated enough, or are tasteless, unrefined cretins. That’s without even mentioning the publishing industry’s concerns over lagging profits. Of course, the assumption there is that the publishers deserved whatever success they had enjoyed up until recent times.

My opinion is quite different. Media is media; corporations are corporations; profit is profit; greed is greed. From a top-down perspective, book publishers are no different than the people who sell movies, shows, or albums. That publishing model undermines the very mission behind literature: to teach, to open minds, to ask important questions, to unveil fears and insecurities — all in all, to push mankind forward.

Now I’m approaching one of the founding concepts behind Supraterranean: to reinvent the way publishing is done. I don’t expect the site to accomplish that goal on its own, just to state it “for the record,” and to contribute to the evolution that is far overdue. And as e-readers begin to proliferate the market, we all have a duty to try and stop the content industry from controlling what people can access on those devices. If it all ends up being subscription-based stuff filtered through a semblance of the Internet, we might as well throw those tablets in the trash.

At the very least, I want Supraterranean to be a resource to ensure that anyone who wants to present their creative work to the public can do so. My biggest issue with the industry (by which I’m referring mostly to companies who publish books and literary journals for for money) is that it’s founded on the concept of authoritarian control. And, at least with the biggest publishers, the goal is not to identify and support the best writers or books; it’s to find and mold the books that can produce the biggest dividends, that book clubs and academics alike will gush over, that can skyrocket to a bestsellers list after being displayed (courtesy of massive payola) at the front of every mega-bookstore in America.

This is really no different than the way I feel about the major labels of the music industry, and (to a lesser exdegree, in terms of anger) about the big film studios. (I’ve ranted about the music industry many times on my MusicEdge Blog, most notably in this comment reply from April ‘08. For more thoughts on the book industry, have a look at this Refractor Blog post about literary agents from about a year ago.)

* * *

Now that I’ve vented, re-read what I wrote so far, and had two glasses of wine, I realize that I haven’t even begun to discuss what I had originally planned. Here’s the story. In August 2009 I read the New York Times Sunday Book Review of Zeitoun, a nonfiction book written by Dave Eggers about a single family’s tribulations as Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans in late August 2005. I had never read anything by Dave Eggers, but I quickly gathered that he is one of the most well-known writers working today. I was more intrigued after learning that his own company, McSweeny’s, published the book. Perhaps, I thought, an independent publishing venture would allow a much more vivid, more experimental, more truthful account of what actually happened down there. Back when it happened, I was admittedly oblivious to the news reports, and I felt it was time that I learned more about it.

However, if I were to rate the book, I’d probably give it about a 3 out of 5. I’ve come to hate ratings, but here’s it appropriate — since I agree with those who gave it that rating on Amazon.com. Follow this link to see a three-star review by “exBFF,” who calls it a “great first draft.” I think that’s dead on. The comment author also points out the heavy, recurring use of foreshadowing — another keen observation.

I can’t think of a more appropriate word for the book than “mainstream.” And clearly the book is selling well, since it’s it’s been sold out everywhere since Christmas, until mid-February at the soonest. There were some redeeming qualities to the book, despite the fact that I didn’t learn all that much about Katrina, and the story itself wasn’t very captivating. But I’ve crossed my 600-word limit, so I’ll have to get to that tomorrow.

I think the take-home point of this post is that I am trying to expose myself to new literature, partly because I want to be more involved in the “literary scene.” It’s just a long, hard process, and I haven’t had any sort of writing or lit/comp class since 12th grade, so I have no guide here. I’m skeptical about whether the Editors can find and support all the talented writers, and I’m convinced that a good amount of worthwhile writing goes totally unpublished. I think one way the Internet will help is to find the right audience for a certain book or writer, instead of forcing every author to aspire to the tastes of the literary status quo. That’s not so unreasonable a hope, is it?

Thanks to the wonderful serendipity offered on a regular basis by the Internet, I recently found an amazing Vimeo channel called Tryptophanatic Netvision. Or I should say, the channel found me. Kaliptus, the channel’s creator, added two of my creations to the list of mind-bending videos. So you can get an idea of what it’s all about, here’s the channel description:

Welcome to Tryptophanatic Netvision, where the screenings you are about to witness may reveal some of the deepest secrets of the universe! If you are ready for consciousness expansion, use this channel as a tool. The contents herein vary in style, quality, and nature… ranging from psychotropic animations to mystical videos, tripadelic motion graphics, mind warping experiments, occult surrealism and lots more. This Netvision is geared to alter your very being to a higher level of super hue-man exaltation & inspiration. “Caterpillars” beware!!!
This is “Butterfly” territory.

After reading that I was practically drooling with excitement. I swear I had just been pondering that same metaphor about the metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly. I’ve no doubt left hints on this blog about my own efforts to transcend the bizarre situation I find myself in, one that is in no way conducive to the type of creative activity I desperately crave. Somehow I feel oppressed, yet I can’t identify any oppressor. Maybe it’s just a state of claustrophobia brought on by the tight confines of a coccoon, as my organic plasma cooks into something that can lift me off this unsatisfactory plane of existence…

But I’m wandering. I highly recommend that you check out the Vimeo channel. Get comfortable, turn the lights down, and (if at all possible) watch on a large screen with a good sound system.

If you’re not familiar with Vimeo, it’s an alternative to YouTube that is quickly rising in popularity. It’s more stylish and more conducive to social networking. Furthermore, the people on there tend to be more dedicated to creativity — not just posting their home movies or pretending to be TV news anchors. Vimeo is a well sculpted garden, while YouTube is a stinky bog.

The main reason for this post is that Kaliptus is organizing an event in NYC on February 13, 2010, called Tryptophantasia. They’ll be screening experimental animation from the Vimeo channel, so if you’re in the area, please consider checking it out. It’ll probably be un-fricking-believable.

To download the event flier, right click HERE and choose “save link as.”

Also, I have some good news! Kaliptus has agreed to sign on as a new blogger at Supraterranean. Look for updates in the next week or so. It’ll tentatively be called “Tales from Tryptophantasia,” and will focus on many of the same topics as his Vimeo channel. Now please check out the promo video for the Tryptophantasia event below!

I’ll probably being much as I did before, but only the shorter work will appear here. In other words, any time an article goes beyond 600 words, I’ll post it as an essay on Supraterranean or attempt to publish it elsewhere. That’ll make this more of a blog and less of a column (currently most posts run around 1,000-1,400 words!).

Part of why I’m in a proactive mood is because I saw Hugh MacLeod’s online preview for his book Ignore Everybody in today’s Daily Rumpus email from Stephen Elliott. The book’s (more explanatory) subtitle is, “And 39 Other Keys to Creativity” — so it seems to be less a celebration of the solitary life than a modern guide to the creative life. I wasn’t familiar with MacLeod before, but I’m suddenly a fan of both his wisdom and his business card sketches (he explains those at the link). Just to list a few points:

- “Good ideas come with a heavy bur­den. Which is why so few peo­ple have them. So few peo­ple can handle it.”

- “The sove­reignty you have over your work will ins­pire far more peo­ple than the actual con­tent ever will.”

- “Doing anything worthwhile takes fore­ver. 90% of what sepa­ra­tes suc­cess­ful peo­ple and fai­led peo­ple is time, effort, and stamina.”

- “I would find that extra hour or two in the day that belongs to nobody else but me, and I would make it pro­duc­tive. Put the hours in, do it for long enough and magi­cal, life-transforming things hap­pen even­tually. Sure, that means less time watching TV, inter­net sur­fing, going out or wha­te­ver.”

- “Nobody sud­denly dis­co­vers anything. Things are made slowly and in pain.”

- “The price of being a sheep is BOREDOM. The price of being a wolf is LONELINESS. Choose one or the other with great care.”

It only gets better, but I’m nearing my 600-word limit, so you’ll have to read it yourself. MacLeod definitely has a way of putting this kind of thing into perspective with clarity and brevity. A lot of it reminds me of the creative “lone wolves” that I incessantly yap about on here, most notably Henry Miller (and also Camus’s work The Myth of Sisyphus). MacLeod’s sketches are great as well. It’s a less chaotic take on Ralph Steadman’s style, and some of the squiggly blobs are a much more skilled version of my own random notebook doodles during past classes.

I don’t know if I’ll buy the book though. MacLeod claims that his website offers “the first 25%” of the text (yay for alternative publishing models!), but the available selection doesn’t seem very long — at least, not a quarter of a book. Anyway, have a look at his website and let me know what you think. That’s the other part of this New Year’s deal: I’d really like to see more comments on here, to let me know that you’re involved.

I thought it sounded like a great idea, and I was totally willing to foot the $250 for the actual printing of the books. I even rushed to cut my essay down from almost 12,000 to just under 10,000 words, to stay within their submission guidelines. I printed and mailed the literary spawn, and I waited patiently. Then on Sunday night I got an email notification that my essay was rejected. They received 14 submissions and had picked three for publication.

Here’s their email:

Dear Nick,

Thank you for your submission to the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press. Our readers evaluated fourteen manuscripts for this round and chose three for publication. Although your manuscript was not selected, we cannot emphasize how much we appreciate your participation. Receiving so many quality submissions for this fifth year of our publishing project bodes well for the continued success of the Cooperative Press. We hope that you will try again.

Please check the website for further updates. Again, thank you for sharing your work with us.

Sincerely,
Marcy Branski,
Co-President
Michigan Writers, Inc.

Denise Baker
Co-President
Michigan Writers, Inc.

Michael Callaghan
Chair, Cooperative Press Committee
Michigan Writers, Inc.

The rejection itself doesn’t bother me so much as the the nature of the rejection. Here’s a group that charges $35 in membership fees and claims to exist in order to help budding writers. Yet because I my essay was turned away, I didn’t learn a thing about publishing — except what I already knew about it: it’s an extremely flawed process.

You may know that Supraterranean was founded in part to present an alternative to the current state of the publishing industry (more info on the About page). But what I soon realized is that letting anyone publish whatever they want isn’t the perfect solution. There is some kind of value in having to overcome obstacles, if it helps make someone a better writer. But there should be many more avenues to publication than there are currently. The literary world is way too stagnant and stale, partly due to the nature of writing (it’s a slower process than other creative work like music or painting), but partly due to the extreme level of control that currently exists in the industry.

In the coming months I will be thinking often about this topic, trying to identify ways to build upon the current model for Supraterranean. And I’ll be looking for other venues to publish my essay. For now, here’s my response to the Cooperative Press rejection. I’ll be sure to inform you if they write back.

Dear Marcy, Denise and Michael,

I would really appreciate further explanation. According to your website, the Cooperative Press is meant to “help emerging writers” and teach them about the publishing process, and the mission of Michigan Writers is to “[provide] opportunities for networking, publication, and education.” With that in mind, it would seem appropriate for you to provide some feedback to the writers whose submissions were not selected, including but not limited to:

- Suggestions for improving this specific piece
- Recommendations for building our craft in general (which could be as simple as pointing us to reading material)
- Connecting us with a writing mentor
- Pointing us to suitable publications where we could submit our work

I also have a proposition for you. We are at the dawn of a new age of publishing. Print is giving way to the e-reader and the computer screen. Perhaps Michigan Writers could help produce, offer, and/or distribute e-books. If you’re not willing or able to provide help with editing or creation of PDF files, you could at least create a “Self-Published” section on your website, assist us in submitting our work to Amazon’s Kindle store (and other such e-book stores), and offer some kind of promotion services.

Forgive me for being straightforward, but I was expecting Michigan Writers to be a sort of incubator, and not return a bloodstained 10,000-word essay with the same generic two-paragraph denial as any other publication.

Best,
Nick Meador

Anyway, I’ve been attempting to gain a sense of closure on the decade. But due to complications offline, I haven’t had much chance to think (let alone write) lately. I first struck out to discuss my favorite music of the decade — albums released between the years of 2000 and 2009. So far I have an audio slideshow of my 50 favorite albums, and a PDF of my favorite 200. I intended to provide more explanation, but simply haven’t gotten around to it yet.

On New Years Eve I decided to create a list of my favorite films of the decade. I ended up with 50, so I’ll discuss the top ten here, and then either do an “honorable mentions” post or just let you view the whole list. Now let’s begin…

Phew. Now that I got that out of my system, let me get to the point. I think the long-running appeal of absurdist stories like Alice in Wonderland (based, let’s not forget, on the book by Lewis Carroll) is related to a few themes that aren’t often acknowledged. The Wizard of Oz is a similar example. In each case, a young woman bored or frustrated with her surroundings dreams (or hallucinates) that she travels to a land where things are more exciting and unpredictable, but a land that’s also more dangerous and terrifying. (Also note: the 1986 cult classic Labyrinth, featuring David Bowie and an early performance from Jennifer Connelly).

It’s clear that the characters whom Dorothy meets on her journey bear heavy resemblance to her friends and family back home. But since we don’t see as much of Alice’s life, we can only infer that her trip down the rabbit hole closely resembles Victorian England. Alice still escapes her boredom by traveling to a mystical place, but what she finds is even more defined by madness than the Land of Oz. It’s a madness that she cannot tolerate. She seems to think that people are not only capable of acting logically and responsibly, but they ought to do it all the time. I would argue that our society is more like Wonderland; it’s in a state of constant, rumbling madness. Yet the citizens of Wonderland are convinced that all is well — that they’re doing exactly what they should be doing, and it’s Alice who is acting peculiar.

It seems symbolic that a young girl is the protagonist in each story. It’s a literary device used by the author to express his (or her) own feeling of inadequacy. That’s not to say that little girls are actually powerless — but in the old British sense of “seen and not heard,” little girls are sort of at the bottom of the social structure in terms of who decides what. And of course this isn’t unique to gender or time period. South Park uses the exact same storytelling device with the four young boys. Almost every episode points out how dumb adults can be, as if they were ruled by madness but certain of their sanity. The unfortunate person who points out the truth is deemed to be insane — and, if the reaction is sharp enough, the person is destroyed for their inconvenient observation. (Here Bill Hicks would have called attention to Martin Luther King Jr, John Lennon, etc.)

Aside from the pervasive madness and the young female protagonist, the third important theme or concept is that, when things get out of hand, the main character simply wakes from the dream and is returned to “normal life.” This is such a ripe fantasy that no one even wants to admit that it exists. So many would like to “wake up” from what we take to be reality, saved by some greater force and reassured that this couldn’t actually be how the real world operates. (See: most major world religions)

A.O. Scott recently suggested in a New York Times article that Where The Wild Things Are contains a theme similar to the Wizard of Oz. Scott felt that Max was seeking a place where he could do whatever he wanted, and more importantly, where he’s in charge of his social circle. According to Scott’s essay, Max’s view of reality changed for the better after living with the Wild Things. Max decided that his imperfect life was worth putting up with. (Scott noted a similar theme in Coraline, another well-received 2009 film.) But the message behind Alice in Wonderland and the Wizard of Oz is actually quite the opposite. I think a story like Alice has endured because of what it says about the real world, not what it says about the dream world conjured up by the main character.

This is what Normon O. Brown was getting at in his Freudian study Life Against Death. In Chapter 2 he references the James Joyce quote, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken” (p. 15). And while Brown failed to fully answer my questions on this subject, he did make it clear where this points. He said that by gaining a better sense of consciousness, “man would be ready to live instead of making history, to enjoy instead of paying back old scores and debts, and to enter that state of Being which was the goal of his Becoming” (p. 19).

That leads to another conversation entirely — one I’m not going to spoil here, but one I can assure you I will (finally) be able to provide some context on in the near future. For the time being, I’ll just reiterate the three most important — but unrecognized — themes in these tales of absurdist fiction: the protagonist (or author) feels surrounded by madness, completely powerless to change it, and unable to wake from the nightmare.

Now, have you fulfilled the necessary materialistic rituals to prepare yourself for the Holiday Season? Have you been thinking about the themes hidden beneath these worn-out traditions? This is, after all, how we claim to celebrate the concept of annual renewal — regardless of which religious jersey you wear. The more important question is, are you renewed?