maria bustillos is a big dork

2010-09-18T13:40:00.000-07:00

When violin superstar Joshua Bell went busking in a DC Metro station in January of 2007, only seven out of 1,079 passers-by stopped to listen. The stunt had been cooked up by Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post; according to him, it was “an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?” Weingarten wanted to test the public, to see if they could identify the pearls being cast before them at some ungodly hour in a train station; to locate and identify the heroes who exhibited true A.M. discernment, and print their names in the newspaper.

There’s a sort of myth ascribing a near-magical ability to appreciate fine art to certain members of hoi polloi. It’s a divine gift, by this reckoning, a talent not for creating art, but for appreciating it instinctively, without benefit of study or experience. Julia Roberts demonstrates this quality through her character in the film Pretty Woman, for example, by weeping at the opera even though she is a hooker. This proves she is one of Nature’s aristocrats, and therefore fit for cohabitation with the fabulous smirking rich guy played by Richard Gere.

In case the reader doubts my interpretation, here’s a bit of the relevant bushwa, or “dialogue,” from the movie.

Hooker: So, you said this is in ltalian.

Rich Guy: Uh-huh.

Hooker: So how am I gonna know what they're singin’?

Rich Guy: Oh. - You'll know. Believe me, you'll understand [...] people's reaction to opera the first time they see it is very dramatic. They either love it or they hate it. If they love it, they will always love it. If they don’t, they may learn to appreciate it, but it will never become part of their soul.

There is something really terrible, creepy even, in the idea that a capacity for aesthetic appreciation is some kind of spiritual lottery ticket. If you either have it or you don’t, then what would be the point of studying anything? The Noble Hooker myth suggests that if you weren’t born with the gift, you might just be permanently inferior; someone who is never going to weep at the opera because it isn’t, and can never be, “part of your soul.” This idea cheapens the lifelong effort people invest in learning and understanding about fine art. Not only does it belittle their struggles; that’s not even the worst of it. The Noble Hooker myth also opens the door for the elevation of ignorance—what some prefer to call “innocence” or “simplicity”—to a desirable state. After all, you can be—should be, almost—utterly ignorant, and still cry at the opera.

The political implications of this fairytale are not negligible. The heroes of the Great Unread, such as Sarah Palin, are in-your-face “regular people” who undergird their authority with Noble-Hookerish claims. They claim to have “common sense,” which is presented as superior to anything an academic, intellectual or professional might gain as the result of a lifetime of study because it’s instinctive and “God-given.” So, what elevates the likes of Sarah Palin above any other “regular” person? By which I mean, why Palin rather than any other “guy next door,” if what we’re after is “regular” and not “excellent”? Why, it’s because she’s one of God’s elect; she’s been touched by an angel or some blasted thing. She don’t need to name no newspaper, she’s drawn the winning numbers on the lottery in the sky.

So anyway, back to Gene Weingarten of the Post, who, having apparently bought right into the Noble Hooker thing, wanted to find out how many of Nature’s aristocrats might be wandering around down there in the subway. (Not many, it turned out!)

Interestingly, Paul Guyer of the University of Pennsylvania failed to see the matter quite Weingarten’s way. Guyer, “one of America's most prominent Kantian scholars,” pointed out to Weingarten that Kant specifically stated that the conditions for aesthetic appreciation have to be optimal. Consequently, you really can’t accuse people who are tearing to work during rush hour of being “unsophisticated boobs” if they fail to appreciate the fact that Joshua Bell is playing the “Chaconne” from J.S. Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D Minor a few yards away.

“Optimal,” Guyer said, “doesn't mean heading to work, focusing on your report to the boss, maybe your shoes don't fit right.”

So, if Kant had been at the Metro watching Joshua Bell play to a thousand unimpressed passersby?

“He would have inferred about them,” Guyer said, “absolutely nothing.”

If taste is private, not public, and its operations active, not passive, maybe you won’t be in a state to approach fine art when you are racing through the train station. Your antennae might need to be trained to stay up—say, through study, passion, a long and patient application of attentiveness and care.

***********

In 2002, Jonathan Franzen wrote an article for The New Yorker, “Mr Difficult: William Gaddis and the problem of hard-to-read books.” It begins with a veiled reference to the 2001 dust-up between himself and Oprah Winfrey, in the aftermath of which he’d received a letter from one Mrs. M___ of Maryland, who asked him, “Who is it that you are writing for? It surely could not be the average person who just enjoys a good read.” Mrs. M___ included a list of “thirty fancy words and phrases” from The Corrections (including “diurnality” and “antipodes”) in support of her contention and concluded that Franzen’s audience must be “[t]he elite of New York, the elite who are beautiful, thin, anorexic, neurotic, sophisticated, don’t smoke, have abortions tri-yearly, are antiseptic, live in lofts or penthouses, this superior species of humanity who read Harper’s and The New Yorker.”

Mrs. M___’s bizarre characterization, which Franzen called a “caricature,” and which I call a half-baked, invidious load of bollocks, appears to have driven him to write this essay. Exhibiting a restraint of which I find myself incapable, he stayed right off the grotesque idea that anybody who could choose to do otherwise would have three abortions every year (or one every third year, or on any kind of schedule whatsoever.) Instead, Franzen presented a dichotomy of his own making, using his parents to symbolize what he called the Status and Contract models of literature.

Franzen’s father, “who admired scholars for their intellect and large vocabularies” was a Status guy, he says. According to the Status way of thinking, literature should be difficult and challenging. The artist should never compromise his vision, and the harder it is to understand him, the more rewarding the experience will be. If a reader wants to complain about how hard Gaddis or Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace is to read, the Status response would be, “If you can't hack it, then to hell with you.”

Franzen’s mom, “a lifelong anti-elitist who used to get good rhetorical mileage out of the mythical ‘average person’” represented the Contract way of thinking: “Every writer is first a member of a community of readers, and the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness; and so a novel deserves a reader's attention only as long as the author sustains the reader's trust ... The discourse here is one of pleasure and connection.” Franzen went on to say that at heart, he himself is an adherent of the Contract school.

These are useful and correct distinctions, but incomplete. The problem with the Contract vs. Status argument is kind of an Overton Window one, to borrow a concept from political theory. The Overton Window represents a range of acceptable ideas in politics; the window (and the corresponding perception of that window’s “center”) can be shifted by introducing more radical ideas at the fringes. For example, if you define the far right by Ann Coulter’s position, then Bill O’Reilly begins to sound relatively sane. In the present instance, the center has been shifted by the absence of a full spectrum. In fact, one of the poles is missing entirely, and as a result the window is totally lopsided.

What we really have is Status, where the author considers himself king of the transaction and doesn’t give a damn about the reader, at one end; in the true center, we have Contract, where there is mutual respect and comity. The missing pole, which we might call Philistine or Yahoo, would be the one where the reader considers himself king, and feels insulted if the author won’t come over and fix her refrigerator. Mrs. M___ of Maryland is a patent Yahoo, but Franzen didn’t like to say so. He felt like it was partly his own fault that she didn’t get The Corrections, and he tried to take the blame (which is why I find his error kind of endearing.)

Franzen says he felt “paralyzed” when he read Mrs. M___’s letter. On the one hand, he was mad at her, but on the other, he was “stricken” to learn that Mrs. M___ “felt excluded by my language.”

Clearly, it is Mrs. M___’s fault, and no one else’s, that she felt excluded by Jonathan Franzen’s language, which is nothing more or less than the rich, precise, very slightly scholarly written English most of us are taught to read in school. I should like for Jonathan Franzen to understand that there were thousands upon thousands of readers, maybe even millions, who felt included by his language. “Intellectuals” or “educated people” (these uncomfortable terms with which nobody can identify!) are often embarrassed by any attention drawn to their formal, “educated” speech, manners or habits, because it’s like saying, “I’m better than you” when we know we’re not. But there is nothing to apologize for. On the contrary. That we can share a love of “elitist” “literary” or “difficult” fiction is something to be celebrated, even, because it is very hard for human beings to reach one another; you pretty much have to work at it, and if you work at it a lot—reader or writer—it’s because you care about achieving something. The very human, beautifully told story of The Corrections reached an enormous number of people who took the trouble to try to understand it. People who read and love Thomas Hardy and George Eliot and Dostoevsky, in between abortions! They should be able to go ahead and love those things, and not feel one bit guilty or embarrassed about, or paralyzed by, Mrs. M___’s reverse snobbery.

This is not to say that I condone the Status point of view. No way. I, too, am an adherent of Contract through and through. I object every bit as much to mean, arrogant intellectuals as I do to Mrs. M___, and in exactly the same way. They are identical, really. I don’t need to mock the pointy-heads here, though; they already come in for a lot of that, and not just from Mrs. M___. The Status guys and the Yahoos are equal, mirror-image traitors to Western Civ., who do equally deserve to be at least mocked, if they cannot be pilloried, for the egotists they are. If I am mocking the Yahoos just now, it is because Jonathan Franzen totally failed to do so in 2002. I don’t want to mock them for their ignorance so much as for their egotism and plain meanness.

It’s not just that the author must sustain the reader’s trust; the reader must sustain the author’s trust, too. There is a mutual obligation in this bond that is sacred if we want to keep our literature alive, and we mustn’t grant the snobs or the reverse-snobs the right to shape the game in any way at all. It would be much better to try to encourage everyone to be willing, to come together in the Contract view.

Let’s look at it this way. The author is at point A and the reader at point B. The author has a message to convey to the reader, but will the reader get it? That depends on whether or not they can meet somewhere on that ineffable line between them, despite, say, a distance of centuries, or differences in gender, ethnicity, politics, humor or the lack of it, and so on. Everything depends on the willingness of the two parties to come together. If he cares about reaching the reader, the author will try to make himself as intelligible as he can; he will try to make his work entertaining and interesting, and to free his message of the impediments of prejudice and closed-mindedness, etc. If the reader cares about understanding the author, he will take pains to learn whatever he needs to know.

In fact, there are a lot of authors out there who are basically barrelling at the reader with all their might. They can’t wait to tell you everything they have got to say!! This book has been written in such a manner as to strike the reader right between the eyes, and with the force of a cannonball! (I wouldn’t quite put Jonathan Franzen in this class, but I would say that he lopes toward the reader intently, in his own dorky and purposeful way.)

Maybe the author really is a neuraesthenic, effete snob, waiting coyly for the reader to climb the ivory tower and prove himself worthy. The author might go so far as to grease the tower just to be on the safe side, by requiring the reader to learn Aramaic, or endure some bizarrely elliptical reasoning, irritatingly unorthodox punctuation, etc.

Sometimes the reader, too, deliberately makes himself unavailable. He insists that the author express himself strictly in words of one syllable. This dolt doesn’t want to be hearing any high-falutin’ words or even high-school French, let alone Aramaic. Fine. But there is nothing to congratulate such a person about. He’s not keeping up his end of the transaction.

The reader, too, owes the author something. Is he contemptuous of the author, that pretentious hack (who has nonetheless taken the horrific trouble of writing and publishing a book for the reader’s enjoyment)? Is he just enduring a few pages of this book the better to tear the author down in tomorrow’s blog post? Does he want to understand what the author is actually on about, even a little bit? And is he at least reasonably prepared, and reasonably willing?

If a novel is “difficult,” if it requires familiarity with other books, with history, philosophy and so on, each reader must do a cost–benefit analysis for himself alone. It takes a long time to learn how to read halfway carefully; it's this long, long apprenticeship. The first time I had a crack at Crime and Punishment I was about thirteen, and it might as well have been written in hieroglyphics for all the sense it made to me. I was just playing at reading it, really, but so what? You have to start somewhere, and the effort was amply repaid in later years.

Franzen wrote, “To an adherent of Contract, the Status crowd looks like an arrogant connoisseurial elite. To a true believer in Status, on the other hand, Contract is a recipe for pandering, aesthetic compromise, and a babel of competing literary subcommunities. With certain novels, of course, the distinction doesn't matter so much. Pride and Prejudice, The House of Mirth: you call them art, I call them entertainment, we both turn the pages. But the two models diverge tellingly when readers find a book difficult.”

Just because we don’t get an author and/or don’t want to learn how to reach him, that doesn’t mean he’s not trying, and it does not mean that his work is worthless. It only means that we do not get it. Someone else may. We may complain, and bitterly too, about not getting it ourselves; after that it’s for us to wish the author and his readers well, and move on.

So I disagree with Franzen about that part. It’s not at all about “art” vs. “entertainment.” It’s about the fact that it’s worth studying and working to become an informed, Contract reader, instead of a Status or a Yahoo one. It’s worth studying the discipline we love, whatever that may be, right down to its finest fiber, so that when the work is made we have the very best chance of understanding it. When the call comes, we have got a shot at hearing it.

**********

John Picarello was one of the commuters who was stopped by a reporter from the Post and asked for his phone number after having heard Joshua Bell, that day in the train station.

When he was called later in the day, like everyone else, he was first asked if anything unusual had happened to him on his trip into work. Of the more than 40 people contacted, Picarello was the only one who immediately mentioned the violinist.

“There was a musician playing at the top of the escalator at L’Enfant Plaza.”

Haven't you seen musicians there before?

“Not like this one.”

What do you mean?

“This was a superb violinist. I've never heard anyone of that caliber. He was technically proficient, with very good phrasing. He had a good fiddle, too, with a big, lush sound. I walked a distance away, to hear him. I didn't want to be intrusive on his space.”

Really?

“Really. It was that kind of experience. It was a treat, just a brilliant, incredible way to start the day.”

Picarello knows classical music. He is a fan of Joshua Bell but didn't recognize him; he hadn't seen a recent photo, and besides, for most of the time Picarello was pretty far away. But he knew this was not a run-of-the-mill guy out there, performing. On the video, you can see Picarello look around him now and then, almost bewildered.

“Yeah, other people just were not getting it. It just wasn't registering. That was baffling to me.”

In this way, the Contract reader, the informed reader, often can’t even begin to understand why everyone wouldn’t love the thing he loves so much himself. John Picarello just happened to be not only constituted, but also trained in such a way that the message reached him loud and clear. Why couldn’t everyone else hear it? Well, here is why.

When Picarello was growing up in New York, he studied violin seriously, intending to be a concert musician. But he gave it up at 18, when he decided he'd never be good enough to make it pay. Life does that to you sometimes. Sometimes, you have to do the prudent thing. So he went into another line of work. He's a supervisor at the U.S. Postal Service. Doesn't play the violin much, anymore.

When he left, Picarello says, “I humbly threw in $5.” It was humble: You can actually see that on the video. Picarello walks up, barely looking at Bell, and tosses in the money. Then, as if embarrassed, he quickly walks away from the man he once wanted to be.

Does he have regrets about how things worked out?

The postal supervisor considers this.

“No. If you love something but choose not to do it professionally, it's not a waste. Because, you know, you still have it. You have it forever.”

Lawrence Welk's tribute to Spike Jones

2010-08-07T15:23:00.000-07:00

via Vern Stoltz. It's true it's so surprising to see Lawrence Welk appreciating this great dork genius.

via kyle beachy : guidance for living your life

2010-07-09T19:53:00.000-07:00

from Kyle Beachy writing for dudelife; I loved this.

how to restore a tunnel book.

2010-04-29T12:01:00.000-07:00

Such a dorked-out and awesome job this person has got.

made me bawl. no seriously.

2010-04-25T11:22:00.000-07:00

This is why it is worth it to write a book: @kiphampton might understand every freaking word you said, and write the most beautiful review ever written about any book ever, unless you wanted to argue that it is in a statistical tie with Mary McCarthy's review of Pale Fire.

my dream job.

2010-03-23T07:14:00.000-07:00

It fills me with happiness. How tall do you think these Teletubbies are, I wonder?

kevin barnes, tender caregiver

2010-03-15T20:26:00.001-07:00

Not sure I would hire him as a babysitter.

oh, anthony bourdain.

2010-03-04T13:12:00.000-08:00

What is not to love about Anthony Bourdain.

ok go! have done it again.

2010-03-02T08:43:00.001-08:00

AWE.

180-proof dorkismo

2010-02-26T06:38:00.000-08:00

Read this post by the awe-inspiring Philo Hagen. READ IT WITHOUT FAIL. And then read it again.

cats in fairyland

2010-02-24T03:57:00.000-08:00

So funny, but even better with the commentary.

is there anything dorkier than dancing robots?

2010-02-08T19:02:00.000-08:00

via @greatdismal (you may know him as William Gibson.)

mad spanish dorkismo

2010-02-08T17:38:00.000-08:00

Institutionalized, my new blog post on bolanobolano.com.

I am really in awe of this book so far. Just 150 pages in, but even if it ended right now I would be on my knees chanting, "We are not worthy."

speculative fiction: fifty best novels

2010-01-28T13:31:00.000-08:00

That list on The Awl the other day was so vexing that I found myself unable to sleep, or maybe that was because I had too much coffee. In any case, instead of sleeping I composed the following list of best SF/F or speculative novels, or whatever you like to call those. Each author is represented only once, for the sake of brevity. Perhaps you'd like to nominate some that I have forgotten?

1. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace. The movie that is so good you'll never stop watching. Also, the book you’ll never stop reading.

2. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien. Try this if you haven't read it; the author was not an Oxford don for nothing.

3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman. Sole contender so far for the mantle of Tolkien; beautiful, rich, heart-stopping, will convince you that your cat can hear your thoughts.

4. Gormenghast trilogy, Mervyn Peake, Like taking acid, without the hassle. The BBC adaptation wasn’t too bad but the book is a revelation.

5. Dune, Frank Herbert. Orders of magnitude better than the movie; perfectly realized, so absorbing; still (absurdly) like to imagine self as Bene Gesserit nun.

6. Solaris, Stanislaw Lem. Impossible to choose just one. He is a bit like Tom Stoppard; hilarious, but then comes back to sting pretty hard.

7. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess. Cruel, brutal, funny, absolutely crucial. Makes me a malenky bit poogly to think how realistic it is.

8. A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams. Completely absurd, hilarious, you'd have to be made of stone not to love it.

9. Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut. Ice-nine! Bokononism! Plus satire that could peel paint off a wall; did you know that this was Vonnegut's Master’s thesis?

10. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley. Bleak as hell but so good, still can't believe there is an actual pill called Soma, but it is just a sleeping pill.

11. Kai Lung's Golden Hours, Ernest Bramah. Comic chinoiserie confection from England of the 1920s; funny, so exotic, so crazy, so lovely. Wodehouse fans will enjoy this very much.

12. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson. A little testosterone-poisoned but great all the same and super prescient; he invented our use of the word ‘avatar,’ foresaw so much of what would happen online.

13. Foundation trilogy, Isaac Asimov. Difficult to overstate how influential this book is; stately, absorbing, still has a ton of vintage charm.

14. Vathek, William Beckford. Deranged and bewitching Arabian fantasies of a brilliant 18th-c. gazillionaire (heir to tea fortune.)

15. Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole. Giant helmet falls out of the sky and squashes the heir to the castle on his wedding day. That’s just the first few pages.

16. Islandia, Austen Tappan Wright. Utopia for vegans and knitters, but also strangely beautiful and thoughtful; read it when you are a bundle of nerves and it will calm you down better than a Xanax.

17. Bridge of Birds, Barry Hughart. Master Li has a slight flaw in his character, but this elaborate, dreamlike, comical Chinese hallucination is without stain.

18. The Phantom Tollboth, Norton Juster. Still hoping for a genuine Turnpike Tollbooth to show up in my bedroom some morning.

19. Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban. Stone genius, utterly original, terribly moving post-apocalyptic story will make you feel like your brains and your heart have been scoured raw.

20. The Red Lion, Maria Szepes. Sex, lies and alchemy, so so strange and good; a story of the philosopher’s stone that grants eternal life, at a price.
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21. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein. Excellent alien story, despite catastrophic politics of author (and cringe-making attitude re: sexual matters.)

22. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson. Gorgeous, very short, read it in an afternoon and meditate sadly on vampires and loneliness.

23. The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis A whole world to disappear into, don't fret about the Christian stuff, just enjoy the ride which is lovely.

24. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card. Goes to eleven in all ways, inevitable, thrilling as hell. Read it to kids.

25. The Giver, Lois Lowry. Will make you bawl. Has a few little defects but is overwhelmingly satisfying like a tidal wave that washes over its few inconsistencies.

26. Star of the Unborn, Franz Werfel. Came to him in a dream; complex, fascinating, astral traveling through cosmos, then a terrible danger emerges. Dogs can talk.

27. Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafón. Has a magical library of all the forgotten books in the world, wild and lovely, even “serious” readers who ordinarily don’t care for fantasy are liable to love it.

28. Neuromancer, William Gibson. His writing has a strange elegance, even in this early book; ridiculously influential, and still echoing. He is @GreatDismal on Twitter, and very entertaining.

29. A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle. Charles Wallace and Meg’s battle against IT! Read it and then give this to any nerdish young girl, it will make her feel like a queen..

30. The Last Western, Thomas Klise. Deceptively simple story about grace, redemption, baseball, Catholicism, the end of the world; will blow your wiglet clean off your head. Criminally neglected work of genius.

31. Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy. Will probably turn you into a socialist, as it did a lot of Brits, long ago.

32. 1984, George Orwell. Truer every day. Well, maybe truest during the Bush years, at which point it sounded exactly like the newspaper.
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33. Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler A great-souled post-apocalyptic story, pages turn themselves, wise, beautiful. Miss her.

34. Lost Horizon, James Hilton. A lovely antique; seductions of the remote lamasery at Shangri-La. Movie (dir. Frank Capra) is not bad, but not as good as book.

35. Naked Lunch, William Burroughs. The great junkie manifesto of addiction and 20th-c. disaffection, pitch-black humor, thoroughly wacky, maybe a little weak qua novel, but hugely entertaining.

36. Crash, J.G. Ballard. He remade the genre of “science fiction” with this distasteful but totally mesmerizing book.

37. The Weapon-Shops of Isher, A.E. Van Vogt. Golden-age SF meditation on weaponry and aggression, thought-provoking, fun. The NRA uses it for sloganeering, seriously.

38. The Alteration, Kingsley Amis. Very creepy, gorgeously written; a hint, the alteration in question refers to a surgical procedure.

39. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley. Arthurian legend reimagined, a big, absorbing, dreamy novel to take on the plane .

40. Winter's Tale, Mark Helprin. Yes, his politics are a disaster, but this imaginary New York is enchanting. It has a hot gin cocktail he appears to have invented called Antwerp Flinders, and flying horses.

41. She, Rider Haggard. Henry Miller loved this one, too, a story that glories in its own implausibility, and the source of the phrase, “she who must be obeyed.”

42. The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood. Even if you can’t stand feminism you will probably love this very densely imagined, scary, crazy dystopia.

43. The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem. Some found this heavy going, and thought that the magic ring part didn’t really work, but I loved every bit. It’s a book you can vanish right into and not come out for days.

44. The Once and Future King, T.H. White. Haven’t read for a long while but have loved it always. Even more successful than The Mists of Avalon in making the reader feel he is really there.

45. The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, George Saunders. Black comedy for children. Given the circumstances, they can’t start too soon.

46. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury. Another Libertarian! He became a terrible crank, didn’t he, but this book is a delight, as is the gorgeous movie (dir. Truffaut.)

47. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin. Old-fashioned but good story of hermaphroditic alien culture, politics, religion; must have seemed so threatening in 1969.

48. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick. Alternate-history in which the Germans won WWII, Hitler has syphilis etc. Tons better than The Plot Against America, but not as good as

49. Fatherland, Robert Harris. Smashing, every which way. A great, great thriller, one of the best ever, will practically give you a heart attack, plus a splendid fantasy and a romance.

50. Dancers at the End of Time, Michael Moorcock. Frivolous, Firbankian books. The universe is about to collapse but hardly anybody cares because they’re all decadent, and whatnot. They can change the landscape according to their fancy.

chariots of the pods?

2010-01-15T13:28:00.000-08:00

Here is a quite fun chat I had with two lifelong dorks, regarding dork matters in general.

dorky reading suggestion

2009-12-31T15:11:00.000-08:00

The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox = just enchanting. I never thought to read anything as fanciful and touching as Ernest Bramah again, but the The Bridge of Birds, the first of these three novels (in an omnibus edition, signed by author and illustrator) is just as lovely and funny, and as richly enjoyable in its own way. If you're at all interested in speculating on collectible stuff, I think it's a very good bet that these will become very much sought after, in time. (Collectible books are going for a song right now in nearly every category, to be sure.)

an awesome surprise.

2009-12-21T15:53:00.000-08:00

The Awl published my review of Avatar today. Somebody pinch me! That is so neat.

bow down, dork faithful.

2009-12-18T17:18:00.000-08:00

Words cannot describe how I agree with this man (not the part about tying people up in the basement! The part about The Phantom Menace.) How I admire him and his mush-mouthed, deadpan delivery. Ah, me. Who is Rick Berman?

this makes me so happy.

2009-12-14T10:55:00.001-08:00

the perfect holiday gift

2009-12-11T07:41:00.000-08:00

It's Gnome Chomsky.

ah yes, the classics.

2009-12-02T17:22:00.000-08:00

paul rudd: big dork

2009-11-21T14:24:00.002-08:00

Kind of Elvisy! Love him.

yay baby beat box girl is a super dork

2009-11-10T13:56:00.000-08:00

... to say nothing of her parents.

Dorks and the books they've been reading.

2009-11-09T15:12:00.000-08:00

Booksquawk is the name of a new blog from a wonderfully diverse bunch of writers (self included) that provides casual, personal reviews and commentary on books new and old.

This week's "Featured Review" is made of awesome. It's a barnburning disquisition on Conan the Barbarian, by a bizarre and wonderful Englishman named Pat Black.

from new zealand via germany

2009-10-26T10:18:00.000-07:00

My friend Amy writes: "Fellow dorks, I have found our king."

dorkismo t-shirts!

2009-10-24T10:45:00.000-07:00

Available in S,M,L,XL. They are very cute I must say. $18, or $25 for the soft heather one. Please email me for information on how to order.

a terrific dork r.i.p.

2009-10-17T13:27:00.000-07:00

Brendan Mullen died just a few days ago of a stroke. I knew him a little through his lovely companion, Kateri Butler, a dear friend. I was very, very proud and thrilled that he liked Dorkismo ... surprised he'd read it, even, he was such a busy guy. I say a terrific dork because, groovy as he was (c'est à dire, ridiculously,) he really did not give two pins if anyone thought so or not. His enthusiasms were powerful and infectious, and he had the most winning expression of pop-eyed amazement I've ever seen, which would cross his pale, lively, mobile face about five times a minute. I liked him such a lot, and am very sorry he's gone.

A lot of tributes to him have been posted recently, and this is my favorite one.

Yogurt-tub musical splendor.

2009-10-17T10:42:00.000-07:00

Captain Kirk is climbing the mountain

2009-10-16T09:56:00.000-07:00

(He wants to make love to the mountain.)

steve almond, candydork

2009-10-13T10:58:00.000-07:00

Candyfreak : A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America by Steve Almond

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Steve Almond is gloriously obsessed with candy, but this book isn't really about candy. It's more like a series of essays about (1) obsessives--really dorky obsessives, actually, which is why I was so attracted to it--and (2) the sad state of our destructive, oppressive corpocracy; it's a very political book. But these topics are sweetened with an absolute ton of candy.

Mr. Almond's style is super modern, self-deprecatingly confessional in the manner of Franzen or Wallace, rather than in the more stand-up, Sedaris way. Those who like this sort of thing will be pleased, and those who don't, won't. I myself love Almond's discursiveness, his candor and hyperbole. He's very funny, as well, and thoughtful; and though one grows rather tired of rants against the Evil Corporation, it can't be denied that the candy industry has been decimated by those very villains, as what hasn't?

The biggest treat here, surprisingly, is Almond's near-miraculous gift for food writing. I'm a cookbook collector and a pretty keen home cook, and for reals, this guy's food writing is quite up to the standard of Jonathan Gold or Ruth Reichl. I am very serious about this. He is so good that I hadn't even finished the book before barreling online to order a ton of the candy he describes, I kid you not. Here's an example:

Her bite was smooth and concerted--there was an obvious density at play here--though interrupted by two muted snaps, both of which caused her a quarter-moment of anguish, followed by a twinge of delight, registered as a flushing upon her cheeks. She moaned. It was a lovely thing to hear.

This reaction was, in my view, restrained [...:] There was caramel, obviously, but also roasted almonds and nuggets of dark chocolate. It was draped in a thin layer of milk chocolate. The interplay of tastes and textures was remarkable: the teeth broke through the milky chocolate shell, sailed through the mild caramel, only to encounter the smoky crunch of the almonds, and finally, the rich tumescence of the dark chocolate [...:] The sweetness of the milk chocolate rushed across the tongue, played against the musky crunch of the nut, then faded. The bite finished with an intense burst of dark chocolate, softened by the buttery dissolution of caramel ...

View all my reviews >>

(another goodreads review ...)

links, reviews and whatnot

2009-10-12T11:46:00.000-07:00

reviews of dorkismo: the macho of the dork

"[...] written with such delightful exuberance, familiar chattiness and obvious love for all things dork, you just want to eat it up with a spoon. Dorkismo celebrates the dorks among us, and the dork in all of us; and if you've never been a dork, you will so wish to be one, after reading this charming book. Maria Bustillos welcomes everyone under the vast and open-hearted dork umbrella."
Christie Mellor, author of The Three-Martini Playdate

"Dorkismo: the Macho of the Dork is pure gold. Don't just grab it for the David Foster Wallace chapter (good as it is) but for the celebration of everything that is dork."
Nick Maniatis, The Howling Fantods

"I'm a big ol' dork. Have been since childhood. But never really knew what a badge of honor the title was. Maria Bustillos's brilliant Dorkismo has convinced me once and for all to stop hiding my dork light under a bushel. The book is by turns serious and hysterical, and all the while engagingly written and with an important point to make: the beauty of the dork is her ability to be herself even in the face of what everyone else thinks -- and if we had a little more of that in the world, we'd all be better off. Two dork thumbs, way up."
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, author of The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television

"Like the best American intellectuals (e.g., Tony Kushner or Mark Twain), Bustillos is less impressed by how smart she is (very!) than by how entertaining it is to think and say. Dorkismo is an intelligent, passionate and witty celebration of open-hearted goofiness (what Henry Fielding might call "benevolence"). In Bustillos' world view, the nemesis of "dorkismo" is crippling self-consciousness of the hip variety. If you've ever experienced such a thing (I could name my own name), then this book is your ticket to liberation, that is to say, self-acceptance. She wants us to love the things we love, without embarrassment, and get our kicks in joy instead of judgment. I say: Read it!"
Michael Mullen, The Size Queens

grandma's boy

2009-10-11T21:29:00.000-07:00

This irresistible story of the invincibility of an open heart is marred only by the viewer's doubts that you could still be cogent even if smoking that much weed. Otherwise the dialogue is gorgeous, and what awe-inspiring performances from everybody from Shirley Jones (buh-whaa!?) to the extraordinary Nick Swardson and Joel David Moore!!!! It got terrible reviews from almost everybody except AO Scott! Okay it is horribly vulgar, and dumb on purpose. And it is beautiful, charming, funny and inspiring, no lie.

(How much do clothes cost in the Matrix!? Snort.)

Please go and Netflix this movie forthwith.

about . contact

2009-10-11T16:11:00.000-07:00

Hello there. I am Maria Bustillos, the author of Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman and Dorkismo, the Macho of the Dork. I can be found hither and yon all over the Internets.

email Maria Bustillos

or friend me on Facebook

alternatively, follow me on Twitter

Looking for ebook versions of my books?--please try Smashwords

Dorkisma: interview in Self-Publishing Review

2009-10-07T09:53:00.001-07:00

YAY and thank you to Erin Stropes for this really fun interview. I quite like "Dorkisma" as a nickname, heh.

hilarious commentary on the 1980s

2009-10-05T09:17:00.001-07:00

<

Bdling!

will cuppy rules.

2009-10-03T14:07:00.001-07:00

The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody: Great Figures of History Hilariously Humbled by Will Cuppy

If only this hilariously droll send-up of historical figures were used as a middle-school textbook, every kid would adore history and go on to become a genius. Cuppy worked on it for sixteen years; the history is meticulously researched, though his treatment of it is far from stuffy. The book was published posthumously in 1950, so you'd think the humor would be dated. Not so. It holds up spectacularly well. "Egypt has been called the Gift of the Nile," he begins. "Once every year the river overflows its banks, depositing a layer of rich alluvial soil on the parched ground. Then it recedes and soon the whole countryside, as far as the eye can reach, is covered with Egyptologists."

View all my reviews >>

(This is my first goodreads review. Kind of fun.)

nobody believed her.

2009-10-01T18:47:00.000-07:00

Well I guess we believe you NOW.

Ha ha hahahahaha

2009-09-28T10:46:00.001-07:00

via Marie Mundaca to whom a big THANK YOU.

Most-quoted thing I ever wrote.

2009-09-23T16:01:00.000-07:00

Years after its original publication (on Popula,) this thing is still linked a lot. It's been everywhere from Libération to Gawker.

Is Anna Wintour Satan?

the dork vision of ego plum

2009-09-16T12:53:00.000-07:00

I have long been an ardent admirer of the composer Ego Plum. He has got the most magnificent radio program these days. Do have a go. There's also a Gogol-themed drama/marionette show or something that is opening here in Los Angeles in the next week or two and running through November; details on the website. I'll be going to that one fo sho. The poster has got a lovely slogan:

I choose crazy.

A special kind of dork

2009-09-15T10:23:00.000-07:00

God Loves Fag Hags (Like Me)

Don't get me wrong, I love straight men, too. Indeed I am incorrigibly straight myself. My sole attempt to rack up enough lesbian experience to qualify as elegantly bisexual was a fiasco, to put it mildly. But I am also a categorical, card-carrying, dyed-in-the wool fag hag. Therefore it was with a certain pique that I read in Salon some days ago that God hates me ("God Hates Fag Hags," Thomas Rogers, Salon 8/18/09.)

Mr. Rogers's basic premise is that society has outgrown fag hags. We are “retrograde,” apparently, by which I assume he means passé. Even though he claims that a lot of girls would like to be his fag hag (for reasons he himself cannot explain any more than I can,) he doesn’t want one. Well, Mr. Rogers is not required to have any fag hags draped over his arm at any cocktail party. He doesn't care for “fine furnishings” or “dance music,” evidently. He is “into dudes,” he says. He is certainly not the sort of fag I personally care to hag around with. (God, I hasten to add, is perfectly okay with him, I feel sure. If there is a God, we can take it as read that He loves everyone.)

Certain facts, despite our so-called progress, are not going to change. Such as, the fact that both straight women and gay men are in thrall to the straight men in a manner that goes far deeper than mere gender politics can ever touch. Or to be more exact, gay men and straight women are much like everyone else, in that we're held hostage by the force of our own sexuality.

Both gay men and straight women are irresistibly attracted to straight men, as Mr. Rogers astutely observes. Like it or not (and quite often, not,) a straight woman will experience an element of sexual tension in relation to almost any straight man, one that is not entirely comfortable, and it can't be wished away or ignored. Our relations with straight men are almost always going to be sexually fraught, somehow or other. The same—and here is the nettle that Mr. Rogers has entirely failed to grasp—is true of gay men. The possibility of a sexual angle to the relationship with a straight man is always, always on the table. We love them dearly, but straight men are our mutual cross to bear.

I submit that the cozy relations existing between straight women and gay men are predicated on the fact that that tension is entirely absent, not only for straight women, but for gay men, too. Together, we inhabit an oasis of blissfully un-fraught carefreedom, pleasure and loveliness. It is total relief from the idiotic conventions that elsewhere persecute us almost 24/7. If a gay man lights our cigarette or opens the door for us, we know he's not flirting. We don't have to make any aggravating calculations, figure out "how far to let it go." Our miniskirt will never be judged on anything but its cut and style, and whether or not it flatters us. Likewise, if a woman admires her gay male friend, there will be no need for him to worry about the possibility of a come-on in the offing. There will be no untoward remarks. Or that is, there will, but they will be funny, and not serious, and never require any battening down of the sexual hatches. Not for straight women, and not for gay men, either.

What I am trying to tell you is that the bond between gay men and straight women is not, as Rogers claims, based on an outmoded “outsiderhood.” It is, in fact, insiderhood, and of the most rarefied and pleasurable kind. I could care less what kind of watered-down version of this bond appears on TV shows like “Will & Grace,” or “Sex and the City,” which I wouldn’t watch on a bet. I don’t believe that gay men are all alike, either, as the obtuse females who have allegedly besieged Mr. R. with offers to “be his fag hag”—seriously?!—appear to have done. Now, that really would be “retrograde.” There have always been, and will always be, all kinds of gay men—macho, or fey, limp-wristed or musclebound; politically active, politically discreet; promiscuous or naturally chaste. I don’t doubt that even that very small subset of gay men that persists in detesting women and referring to them as “breeders” is as permanent as any other class of crazies.

I do not know why, so I can't tell you, but a lot of straight women and a lot of gay men really do tend to have certain fondnesses in common. We like art, literature, poetry, interior design. I am sorry, but we do. We like platform shoes, Ronald Firbank, absinthe, and crisply ironed shirts. We like tiny hors d'oeuvres, Paris, and Virginia Woolf. We will gladly spend the afternoon discussing Bernard Berenson or the wild history of the Pre-Raphaelites, looking at curtains, or having a leisurely brace of martinis at the latest watering-hole.

These are the things that any latter-day fag hag worthy of the name is sharing with the fags in her stable (and I am quite sure that the fags I love also consider their hags in this amiable light and yes, we do call each other Fag and Fag Hag—and did, long before Margaret Cho hepped the nation to this jovial practice—together with such friendly epithets as Hussy, Homo [for use in such phrases as, "Atta Homo!"], Strumpet, Jade, Harlot, and Nancy-Boy.) The whole point is that when we are together, we're miraculously liberated from the bullshit that surrounds most relations between the sexes. There is nothing the least bit PC about it, thank god. It's all just for fun--finally! The pressure is off, and we're just going to enjoy one another freely and without any kind of unpleasant innuendo (only pleasant innuendo.)

And so beautifully, so magically, there is so, so much to enjoy. The theatrical gesture, the favorite song in the nightclub that we race to the floor to dance to. It will not be taken wrong, or amiss, if one of us should profess to the other, "You are the Most Gorgeous Thing I have Ever Seen—I am so going to cry right now!" There will be eyebrows madly waggling at the sight of a particularly comely male arriving at the party. There will be tears shared when a boyfriend turns out to be a shmuck. And there will always, always be the innocent pleasures of music, art, literature and champagne to be enjoyed together, no matter what happens. That is a wonderful thing, Mr. R., and the fact that it doesn’t work for you is no reason to diss it for those others who may be differently abled.

Fortunately you won't be able to alter our immemorial bond, not if you had your life to live over a thousand times.

I was lucky enough to see Grace Jones at the Hollywood Bowl a couple of weeks ago. I'd been invited by my stepdaughter to join her and some friends that night to see not Miss Jones, but Of Montreal, whom I had managed to miss in London some days before. I had no idea that Of Montreal weren't the headliner until the day before the show.

"Why didn't you TELL ME THAT GRACE JONES WAS PLAYING?!" I bawled at my stepdaughter, aghast (and also, thrilled.)

"Who's Grace Jones?"

Who, indeed! Only the patron saint of fags and their hags. Only the Amazon queen, supermodel and Bond villainess, the living embodiment of all that was exotic, delightful and deranged about the 1980s.

As shocking as it was to learn that neither of my daughters knew who Grace Jones was, it was still more shocking to arrive at the Bowl and find that the eighties had returned for the evening in all their glory. We alighted out of the car and into a huge procession of all the fine gentlemen of the type we used to dance with at Studio One and the Stud, a little older now but in pleasingly excellent nick, a vast panorama of them, in a sea of Querelle caps and black leather, sequins—nay, paillettes!—Cuban heels, hip boots and feather boas, many of them already dancing to the Donna Summer that wafted out on a boombox from the picnic area outside. A disco whistle began its wild, syncopated shriek: a thing of beauty, and a joy forever. Soon I, too, would be dancing in the aisles!—a scant hour later, I texted my favorite fag and best friend in all the wide world,

Grace jones is about to come onstage, thinking of you my jamaican guy.

Soon the phone beeped back with his reply:

Ask her if she remembers mussing my hair in SF

dork WIN

2009-09-07T06:15:00.000-07:00

Go Senator Franken!

Rorty on Nietzsche: v. Dorky.

2009-09-03T10:41:00.001-07:00

"[Nietzsche] saw self-knowledge as self-creation. The process of coming to know oneself, confronting one's contingency, tracking one's causes home, is identical with the process of inventing a new language--that is, of thinking up some n metaphors. For any literal description of one's individuality, which is to say any use of an inherited language-game for this purpose, will necessarily fail. One will not have traced that idiosyncrasy home but will merely have managed to see it as not idiosyncratic after all, as a specimen reiterating a type, a copy or replica of soemthing which has already been identified. To fail as a poet--and thus, for Nietzsche, to fail as a human being--is to accept somebody else's description of oneself, to execute a previously prepared program, to write, at most, elegant variations on previously written poems. So the only way to trace home the causes of one's being as one is would be to tell a story about one's causes in a new language."

from Richard Rorty's Contingency, irony, and solidarity.

Express Yourself: Lou Salomè lets Nietzsche have it.

WHOA.

2009-09-02T10:39:00.000-07:00

A PHOTOGRAPH of a MOLECULE!

please don't let me miss this.

2009-08-30T18:53:00.000-07:00

Big Man Japan

dorky, or absolutely bonkers? you decide.

2009-08-24T08:40:00.000-07:00

Ladies and gentlemen: MegaWhoosh.

How to make a Steampunk Keyboard

2009-08-12T08:27:00.000-07:00

Whoa.

Beautiful. Insane. Dorked out beyond all reckoning.

The Real Don Steele

2009-08-10T12:47:00.000-07:00

Lordy Lou it is the Dance Contest segment!!! Believe it or don't we teenagers thought this was the height of L.A. elegance ca. 1974. Also: Yay BTO.

Here is an Interview with the Author

2009-08-05T11:13:00.000-07:00

Maria Bustillos,
interviewed at
hipsterbookclub.com

Trees = awesome.

2009-08-05T11:06:00.000-07:00

Ten of the Most Beautiful Trees in the World.

I've got a stepniece who is or maybe was scared of trees but these ones are so lovely!!?? Not scary.

my favorite blog

2009-07-31T18:39:00.000-07:00

Maybe you guys are more hep to the jive than I am (v. likely) but if you haven't seen Margaret and Helen, you're in for a treat.

Pirouetting along the fine line between dork and rock star: The Mighty Boosh

2009-07-25T10:12:00.000-07:00

WOW.

Insatiable need to see Saudi guys dancing.

2009-06-26T19:28:00.000-07:00

Please forward more.

O come, all ye dork faithful.

2009-06-25T18:40:00.000-07:00

A thoroughly wonderful mashup of Buffy vs. Edward Cullen.

a metal cello rock band from Finland

2009-06-23T09:20:00.000-07:00

Apocalyptica: behold the dorkiest thing I have seen in weeks. Unfortunately no embeds allowed but well worth a stray click.

The nerd-in-chief

2009-06-22T19:48:00.000-07:00

A few days ago the delightful John Hodgman spoke regarding our President, whom he calls the Nerd-in-Chief, on Olbermann via Huffington Post.

my little zombie pony.

2009-06-04T13:43:00.001-07:00

Yes, it's My Little Zombie Pony. So, there's this whole establishment simultaneously mocking and exalting the Keane aesthetic, as was prefigured in the movie Sleeper all those years ago. But I have to admit I still find it kind of irresistible.

Important Artifacts at Auction

2009-06-03T14:51:00.000-07:00

Super awesome spoof auction catalogue from (real) Farrar, Straus Giroux catalogue. Reckoning ceramic poodles to be Important is sublime, as an aesthetic and cultural position and even as a moral one.

Lovable.

We don't need no bouillon let the mfer burn!

2009-06-03T14:32:00.000-07:00

My friend Ken Smoker participates in this exciting event every year in Rochester, NY.

Large Hadron Rap

2009-05-21T12:11:00.000-07:00

Please make sure to watch through to the end, because the credits are just divine.

In which David Foster Wallace suggests I am Fossilized, but in a Nice Way

2009-05-16T11:36:00.000-07:00

It turns out that there is audio of the Wallace reading I describe briefly in Dorkismo. This is the audio of me asking him a question! I thought of using this for a ringtone as it is about the dorkiest thing ever, but it also makes me bawl, so I guess I'll just leave the Benny Hill theme song on there for now. You can download the whole reading (it's like an hour-long .mp3), so sad that he is gone but it is so good that we got to know him even for the short time that we could.

Nietzsche Family Circus

2009-05-15T11:25:00.000-07:00

So fun. I am addicted to this.

Kevin Barnes says: "Thanks very much. Very cute!"

2009-04-29T19:17:00.001-07:00

Gnomes Make the Most Wonderful and Unexpected Gifts

2009-04-29T13:49:00.000-07:00

Laura Miller on Narnian economics

2009-04-28T17:38:00.000-07:00

So Richard was telling me last night about his old friend Laura Miller, who has written a really good book about her lifelong relationship with Narnia. It's a grown-up book, not at all adorable or nostalgic, as you might assume from the subject. It's more about growing up reading, and it's really engaging and thoughtful so far; I haven't read the whole thing yet.

Anyway, Richard said that Laura M. gave a talk at the Los Angeles Public Library, an excerpt from which appears below--the part that he was telling me about:

Tolkien hated Narnia, because he was kind of a purist ... and he thought that all those different elements should not be mixed up all together, you know? Marmalade, like Mrs. Beaver bakes this marmalade roll and you kind of think, "Well, where did that marmalade come from?"

Because it's not like you can imagine Narnia having kind of surplus wealth and trading with some warm countries where oranges grew or god forbid, sugar!--and so it doesn't ...

I mean I have to say, I don't think that Middle-Earth is economically plausible, either.

Richard could barely talk, he was laughing so hard at this.

Me: Well, now, The Shire is economically viable, though ...

R.: Oh my god, I can't believe you're actually arguing about this.

Me: It is, though, seriously, they export smoke-leaf!!

R.: [guffawing] Wahhahahahahahaha!! Ho my god HA! HA!

Me: F. off! They totally do! In barrels!! Until it is all getting stolen by Saruman!

R.: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA ....

Me: Damn it!

R.: *rupture*

Me: But the Elves, though. Those Elves really are living on air.

a dork masterpiece

2009-04-28T17:37:00.001-07:00

How wonderful was Laugh-In? Very, very wonderful. And this is maybe the loveliest thing ever to happen on that venerable show.