Well, this is grotesque. Kafka would have scoffed at even the potential of the surreal absurdity. Somehow, I have two SubStack accounts, and I published this on the one that not many people are on, or something. When I transferred it back here, to reset, so to say, the videos did not make the trip.
Then again, they’re sort of groovy, plausibly a little giddy. Here’s the link to the other post for those who’d like to scope out the images and shtick therein: <https://jhickey.substack.com/publish/post/139365514>. Let me hear about any problems, gag! <loujamlitgam@gmail.com>.
Isn’t this fun?!?! The audio came through twofold, ha ha.
Hello, everyone! As promised, or perhaps threatened, ha ha, here I am again with the newest number of a proposed twenty-times-annually magazine. BTR’s continuing twofold premise is still, first, interesting and entertaining writing and, second, 'consumers' who like to read evocative, instructive, or otherwise enticing English prose, readers who will appreciate stories that appear serially or periodically or otherwise little by little.
Often, as today, a particular edition will have a theme, or at least a thematic rubric, so to speak. Numbers 6 and 7 deal with a rarely examined here-and-now conjunction, that of empire and human sexuality, an unexpected intersection of geopolitics and personal intimacy. In any event, thanks for stopping in and all of that sort of thing. I’d love to hear from people; blah blah blah, and keep reading!
Table of Contents
—Introduction: Acceptance & Misery—Navigating Recent History’s Bleakest Love Landscape
1. Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits—Some Recent Spreads
2. All God’s Cousins—Chapter VII
3. Wood Words Essays—Iconic Unexpected Collaboration & Its Erotic Imperial Backstory
4. Empowered Political Forays—Wilhelm Reich, Repressing Relationship, Conclusion
5. New Fiction Series—Mad Cows & Englishmen, PART SEVEN
6. Old Stories & New—”Faith, Bad Faith, & the Catholic Church”
7. Classic Folk, Rejuvenated—”Little Red,” continued from #6
8. New Folk Fables—Quiet Jack’s Magic Blarney Kiss, continued, Part Five
9. Nerdy Nuggets—Harriet Jacobs & America’s Complex, Corrupt Core
10. Communication & Human Survival—Internet Origins, War, ‘Pornography,’ Continued
11. Happy Union Grammar Nerds—Occasional Nerdy Usage Nuance: Oxford Commas?
12. Erotic Snippets—”Alpha, Beta, Baby, Baby!”
13. Odd Beginnings, New Endings—”We’re All Cousins, After All,” a Biosocial Golden Rule
—Last Words For Now
Introduction—’Pretty Happy’s’ Bleak Love Landscape
The premise that this issue develops, in tandem with #6, essentially states that our brand of biophysicality unavoidably entails adults who generally seek out carnal satisfaction. Suzy Bogguss’ astonishing song, “Guilty As They Come,” could serve us up a thematic emblem in this regard. “If it’s a sin to be lonely, I’m as guilty as they come.” But why might libidinal and emotional downturns, which the title implies are manifesting now, arguably be so ubiquitous right this second? This rambling monster of an Introduction proffers at least a few components of an articulation of an answer to this inquiry.
‘Eros & Empire’ might readily enough trip off the tongue as a way of hypothesizing this libidinal nadir, even as its probably unanticipated rubric may provide inestimable assistance in assessing otherwise almost incomprehensible conundrums of humanity’s current condition. Comparing birth rates between Palestine and Israel offers an example, as if we noticed a huge gulf between Minnesota and Wisconsin in such metrics. Ryan Christian, the honest reporter at the heart of The Last American Vagabond, suggests as much when he says that ‘demographics are the proximate cause of Israeli’s policy’ over the decades, in all of that policy’s indisputably harsh, to say the least, expressions.
Thus, without doubt, the carnage and murder that happens in those various places where human affairs approximate the circumstances of Palestine—Ukraine, say, or the U.S. border with Mexico—are also places where the erotic arena blossoms in fraught conditions indeed, though unfold it must inasmuch as these dynamics of desire lie, as noted, at the heart of what being human means. One aspect of whatever is concatenated about Eros now, a torturing of our intertwining, must thus integrate the observation of the main character in Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree, a review of which is soon forthcoming, to wit that fighting and breeding are difficult to carry out simultaneously.
Falling rockets would, in graphic terms, certainly attenuate making love, and its attendant multifaceted regenerative element, even as the absolute potency of the libidinal impulse must continue, axiomatically, to allow for Palestine’s elevated birthrate. Thus, however we tally the dreary desolation of human conjugation just at the moment, so to say, this accounting would at once be easiest to see and hardest to explicate in just such environs as the killing fields of Southwest Asia, which inescapably epitomize imperial cataclysm.
Not that this humble correspondent has even a smidgeon of certainty about any credible hypothesis fully to explain this specific variance, but that he knows that the significant differential is a fact of our current context that almost certainly proffers important pointers about our present passage. Given the source of births, after all, the laboring output in question must originate in concupiscent conjugation, as it were. So too then must another fact, such as the following incontrovertible actuality, intersect, in identifiable fashion, with sexuality and its sex habits in any given global human gathering, to wit that a constant concomitant of ‘economic development’ is a lower birth rate.
Since propagation among our kind has ever necessitated primal, pulsing exchanges, naked of defense—Eros as essence—does this declining emanation of children indicate lower libidinal or otherwise lusty urges? Are Israelis, say, inherently less horny than Palestinians? Do the Subcontinent’s Hindus, whose birth rates have dropped by half or more over recent decades, enjoy their sexuality less and less as India’s developmental magic has launched their nation into top terran socioeconomic realms? Is the alienation of Americans from sex, as soon we will see delineates the stark reality of today’s made-in-the-U.S.A. traipsings and trappings, a result of our maturation, our ‘superior’ development?
To such pressing requests, the only responses that match reality are along the lines of ‘Not at all!’ or ‘Quite the contrary!’ Sex and love are certainly not equivalent, yet affectionate adult human mating relations can only very rarely survive a union devoid of erotic contact: sexual satisfaction for the most part inheres in happy life-partnering propositions, whether or not their purpose is procreation; the ‘birth-rate’ as an issue is a red herring, empirically on Eros’ battlefields themselves, analytically in the rest of the bedrooms and carnal casas where our kind commonly cavort so as to connect.
In a related wrinkle, obviously too, any love that we show our children has its wellspring in some carnal completion. Duh, right? Thus, without conflating things, one can quite rationally insist that our juicy joys juxtapose readily with all our most familiar friendships and familial affability. All tolled, this aggregate of amicable affection and frolicsome felicity establishes a given ‘love landscape’s’ particular manifestation of problem and prospect. Much of the remainder of this Introduction examines matters, here at home, from this more or less intimate point of view.
The Intro’s title indicates that, regardless of Homo Sapiens’ propensity to experience Eros as jubilation’s deepest delights, U.S. amorous environs today inhabit a state all too frequently adjacent to the doldrums on one side and mayhem on the other, a dark and dangerous place to live, especially for such a wild and explosive force as salacious desire. A recent monograph with a tantalizing title, from the founder of the School of Womanly Arts, states the case, in relation to the noted doldrums of America’s ‘domestic bliss,’ like this.
“The divorce rate has doubled since 1960, while the marriage rate has declined by 50 percent since 1970. A full 47 percent of adults are unmarried today. Of this group, 40 percent have been married before and are currently single, and 60 percent have never been married. The chance of a woman being a single mom is 50 percent, and one in three kids is being raised without a father."
Regina Thomashauer, the author of Pussy—A Reclamation, goes on to amplify her description of enervation and ennui in contemporary erotic affairs. “As for the couples who stay married, the statistics are equally disheartening. Twenty percent of couples have sex ten times a year or less. When it comes to sex drive, 30 percent of men and 50 percent of women report having none. When we do have sex, men have orgasms 75 percent of the time while women orgasm only 29 percent of the time."
Most folks seem to shrug off this apparent desiccation of our juiciest urges, an antithetical notion to the likes of me, ha ha, with my ways of conceiving matters, critically, that I carry into the fraught erotic sphere of the here-and-now. Realizing that the whole idea may merely reflect something, underneath the surface perhaps, about this humble correspondent, I must nonetheless inquire, “why is our aforementioned American love landscape now so arid or even utterly miserable, often empty of lusty loving, at the same time that cousins in much direr conflicted zones are clearly rousing themselves to high states of arousal,” as it were?
An additional inquiry may facilitate finding an answer to, or at least a spin on, this question. ‘So what’s the definition of our especial domesticated bleakness anyway?’ Surveys delve these matters among us, after all. A recent ‘authoritative’ poll celebrated finding that ‘almost half of respondents were pretty happy with their sex lives.’ I added the emphasis and would also note that this empirical fact consists of the entire population—here in the land of the free and home of the brave, where erstwhile peaceful conditions hold sway vis a vis the Gaza Strip—of those who view their sex lives most positively.
A moment’s reflection should therefore make clear, for example, a corollary ‘finding’ in this regard. ‘Slightly more than half of the selected sample were less than pretty happy with their sex lives.’ And how about a follow up query? What proportion of the tepidly-pleased minority ‘live in bliss,’ like I often have had the unbelievable good fortune to experience? I’d wager that it’s less than half of the ‘marginally satiated,’ so to speak, a bet that the just-mentioned volume clearly indicates I’d be likely to win.
Wondering, then, if such marks are cause for celebration, in typical BTR fashion, I begin to examine the memory banks for how our ancestors over the millennia, and more recent forebears as well, would evaluate their libidinal and erotic satisfaction. If only because an automatic answer is elusive, the search is a little exciting, at least interesting. Sex, both in thought and deed, obviously at minimum participates in governing humanity. Examining things in this sphere inescapably arouses an intense allure.
What the algorithms proffer about these inquiries must ever pique an interested awareness as well. For instance, as a search, <satisfaction OR happiness "sex life" OR erotic "united states" OR america "public opinion" OR data OR survey OR statistics>, yielded 11.4 million links at the beginning of December and 7.7 million hits at the New Moon on the twelfth of the month. What’s up with that, LOL?
On the first pages of links, in any event, most of the articles assess the erotic sphere similarly as the ‘pretty-happy’ study above. Almost all the rest pay homage to the undeniable truism that sexually-satisfied people generally have more joyous potency in their lives than do the libidinally deprived, whether the source of that deprivation amounts to personal choice or social suppression.
Illustrative that the entire arena of sexuality and its practice is of inordinate concern to people, the following query elicited nearly 4.4 billion links: <sex OR "sexual relations" frequency OR amount OR data OR statistics>. A lot of people, every minute, apparently, wonder about who’s getting some and who is not.
Often, the citations from this search merely organize the statistical data, letting readers know, in different relationship settings, the proportions of people who have cause to copulate, so to say. The BedBible Research Center does this, more or less comprehensively, for people all over the planet. Since the availability of credible data in the early 1980’s, a steady downward trend in sexual frequency is discernible.
Another search, <"sexual relations" OR "conjugal relations" OR "erotic practice" history OR background science OR study OR analysis data OR statistics>, delivered over three million links on one day and only a tad more than two million on another. In this case, in both instances, much that is almost irresistible shows up in the links’ title-slots: scholarship, popular science, philosophy, commentary about sex and sexuality in the present as a result of a more or less ‘knowable’ past.
Various volumes attest to sex in particular geographies. Others revolve around men’s or women’s especial evocation of erotic potentiation, so to speak. A typical mixture of caution and contention from the Pew Research Center demarcated things in a useful way. “Some 15% of U.S. adults say they are single and looking for a committed relationship or casual dates. Among them, most say they are dissatisfied with their dating lives, according to the survey, which was conducted in October 2019 – before the coronavirus pandemic shook up the dating scene."
Altogether, given both our core biological proclivities to frolic in life-force exploration, as it were, and our historical tendency to gravitate toward the fulfillment of such relations, how can we account for the actuality of this present passage’s apparently greater ennui and alienation precisely where more ‘peaceful’ conditions reign?
This Intro takes a stab at describing how to go about answering that question. Trying to formulate a specific hypothesis is beyond me at this juncture. Therefore, instead, a formula for researching the question shapes this issue’s theme and thesis, so to speak.
Thus, to capsulize how to go about correctly explicating this current connubial context, I would advance something like the following summative interrogatory as a clear course outline to achieve the capability of describing, and then explaining, the here and now. “Given that from infancy onward, genital pleasuring is part and parcel of people’s urgent pulsing for relief, what factors in interpersonal enculturation, and what factors in comprehensive cultural contextualization right now can explain the universal shaming of the sex instinct among ‘civilized’ communities, a denigration that has prevailed, for the most part, since the end of matriarchy’s sway ten thousand years ago?"
Among scholarly examination along these lines, the imperial element in delineating answers is often critical. The iconic Riane Eisler wrote two volumes essential to this process of learning and revelation: Sacred Pleasure and The Chalice and the Blade. In the first, the current context, in the second the prehistoric and ‘civilized’ background, are up for study.
Illuminating the plausible import of this expertise, Eisler’s testimony proved crucial for defendants in Fort Bragg’s trials of vicious violence against returning Special Forces soldiers’ wives, including murders for which the enlisted personnel in question might have received death sentences. The good professor’s tutelage made clear to the court that the ‘gendered violence’ that had here occurred in family settings inextricably inflects the lives of those who undergo basic training, where the elevation of power and the denigration of pleasure—’don’t be a pussy, Private!’—is in some measurable way all but irremediable and likely to lead to occasional personal tragedy and family mayhem that in fact occurred in several cases after the fighters’ return from Afghanistan.
Further clarification is accessible too when one discerns and describes the inextricably intertwined phenomena of militarism and prostitution. This is yet another subject capsule for a BTR title, so much more will be available at an as yet-to-be-determined date. For now, one might peruse a Washington Post beauty that resulted from this search: <military OR militarism soldier OR fighter profession OR occupation prostitute OR prostitution>.
The article spoke of the present passage’s embodiment of the age-old conflation of soldiering and whoring, without mentioning General Hooker’s origination of the common term for ‘whoring women’ today. “At home, a female soldier testified in June at Fort Hood in Texas that she was recruited by a higher-ranking service member, Sgt. 1st Class Gregory McQueen, to serve as a prostitute for other men on base. The solider was granted immunity for her testimony, and said she was 20-years-old and struggling financially when he asked her to serve as an escort for other enlisted soldiers and civilians. At the time, both of them were working for the base’s sexual harassment and assault prevention program."
Reflection and data along these lines almost inexorably calls forth Aristophanes’ master work, Lysistrata, an engaging ancient drama that illuminates pointedly the potential for women’s life-force wellsprings to work willfully against ‘dominator culture’s’ widespread worship of what Sigmund Freud called thanatos, or the urge to elevate death’s inevitable doom as a supreme cultural value. An upcoming BTR installment will write more extensively about this story.
A precis might appear in this guise. ‘Aristophanes writes of a woman’s love strike in which all females withhold consortium from their mates to force the men to give up warring as their primary source of profit and plunder.’ Young and pretty Lysistrata’s inability to honor such abstinence, because of her adoration of kissing confections and such, is the fulcrum on which the entire plot turns.
In sum, therefore, a reasonable aggregate capsulization of this point might at least see as arguable the proposition that our present love landscape is among the bleakest in recent memory, in no small part because of the tutelage of war and empire. The core serial novel in these pages, All God’s Cousins, has many individual characterizations—Tommy John’s sojourn; Jackson Jackson’s skill sets; with more to come—in which empire’s oversight plays a key part in eliciting this harsh and bitter love climate.
Also in relation to key aspects of this entire issue, race appears so as to demonstrate how and why it presents an idea, in particular as a component of humanity’s present sexual pass, that yet remains fraught and heated in the minds of many. Looking at Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl circumscribes some of the energetic understanding that underlies why this concern with color might continue to prevail.
She writes of the nausea of slaveholders’ impunity in fornicating so as to increase their chattel. “The secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition. My master was, to my knowledge, the father of eleven slaves. But did the mothers dare to tell who was the father of their children? Did the other slaves dare to allude to it, except in whispers among themselves? No, indeed! They knew too well the terrible consequences." It could be, literally, a death sentence.
Given the cultural pressure cooker that all women underwent in such an environment, White maidens and mistresses and wivess would obviously confront catastrophic difficulties if they consorted as their husband’s much more often did without regret or recrimination. Nevertheless, Jacobs writes, some spirited daughters of the plantation elite would occasionally, for reasons of attraction or ego or both, ensconce themselves with the males that they owned: ‘get it up or I’ll cut it off!’ takes on fraught implications here indeed.
The very infrequent, yet indisputable, issue of such unions would be drowned or otherwise murdered. No matter the price, this type of cuckolded shame was not worth the bargain. Jacobs’ narrative plucks at the heart, tears at the soul, marks the boundaries of the sacred psychic longing that we all share in regard to nature’s and nurture’s oppressive interventions in our nights and days.
Having mentioned before the innately ethereal and transcendent aspects of BTR’s efforts to communicate ‘how things actually stand,’ I’m electing to introduce at this juncture perhaps the most explicitly ‘spiritual’ component of what I’ve produced over the years. “The Ten New Commandments” emerged from an incident, when still a ‘married man,’ in the art-making room on Lawson Street.
Altogether, the experience was an honest to Goddess ‘burning bush moment,’ about which I’ll expound at some length soon enough. As for the ten items in the mix, they are simple to present.
The Golden Rule Reigns Supreme.
All Children Receive Priority.
All Who Work Are Welcome.
All Who Work Are Equal.
All Who Work Have Rights & Responsibilities.
All Who Work Receive Benefits From & Provide Support to Others.
All Who Work Own All That Labor Transforms.
All Who Work Are Kin.
All Golden-Ruled Beliefs Are Welcome.
All Other Matters Are Negotiable.
And how does all of that connect with this issue’s theme of intimacy’s and empire’s intertwined concatenations? The popular acronym, IYKYK, might apply, but the centering of non-trustfunded wage earners and their progeny simply will remain impossible till the ‘workers of the world unite’ and lose the chains of colonial kinds of dominion from the high and mighty.
As with last issue, each articulation in # Seven has some connection with Eros, from this introduction to the concluding essay, “We’re All Cousins, After All.” In toto, this commingling of the erotic and the scientific, of subjective emotional states and reality’s objective realms, leads to sensibilities in the grip of which we might revel even though dicey and dire worries emanate from our sensations about these things, because they fire our genital and otherwise libidinal urges.
One might doubt this inclusiveness in only one case, that of the articulation about ‘serial commas.’ What possible connection to Eros can be present here?
The answer is simple. In many of the examples to show the doltishness of avoiding the final punctuating pause, a titillating punch line is palpable. One of these quips might lead to energetic chuckles that stem in part from John Kennedy’s and Richard Nixon’s well-known antipathy for each other. The rest of the comedic nexus is erotic. The reader gets a chance to compare two sentences: first, ‘after the debate, the dressing room held only the two hookers, Kennedy, and Nixon;’ second, ‘after the debate, the dressing room held only the two hookers, Kennedy and Nixon.’ Ha ha.
Upcoming BTR installments will persist in revisiting these thematic constructs. February thus boasts an articulation of the Oneida ‘free love’ experiments of the mid nineteenth century. And in March’s first issue, our “Nerdy Nuggets” will examine “notorious Victoria,” the complex suffragist, socialist, and ‘sex-crazed’ eugenicist who kept her second husband’s mellifluous name. Practically speaking, the importance of humankind’s erotic ubiquity will characterize at least bits and pieces of every issue, an apt ‘resolution’ with which to begin a new year.
Unfortunately, alas, this day, January 1st, is weighty for me indeed, as it is the day on which my daughter came into the light of day, Casey, who died of a Fentanyl overdose a week before my sixty-third birthday. Radical legalization might have saved her, as soon enough we will all explore, my personal loss a reflection of social chaos and carnage that profits plunderers and purposes plutocrats’ schemes to perch eternally atop the human heap.
My daughter’s life included the following interlude, which took place in Hot Springs the day before my wedding to Ms. Alicia. Casey had appealed to me, quite insistently, as was fitting for a precocious fourteen year old, to stay up and play music and smoke pot along with her older brother and his friends.
When I refused, even after her winning pitch, worried that word might get back to her Mother, my first ex-wife, that I had approached matters in such a laissez-faire manner, my girl stormed out of the Sunnybank Inn, where she was staying and the ceremony was fixing to unfold. I duly followed her, staying in the shadows of the late-Spring evening and tracking her to the French Broad River bridge.
I just wanted to be close at hand should she elect to try something outrageous. In the event, she stared at the current as it passed beneath her for maybe five minutes and then turned to come back to her billet. Again, I scurried along and found a safely obscure spot from which to watch and assure myself that she was returning to her room, ambling slowly from one street-lit pool to the next.
All of a sudden, seemingly out of the night’s gloom, seven drunken young men, athletes from the looks of their sauntering swagger and lean frames, came sauntering along, more or less colliding with my child directly adjacent to the bushes where I watched. Casey could have been auditioning to play Mae West.
“Look at y’all. How the hell are you all doing tonight?” The come-on in her tone was unmistakable.
The leader of the little troop of teenaged males, with his blinking-in-astonishment wingman by his side, literally pulled himself up short at this invitation. He almost campily swiveled his head to look on his back-up, who blinked drunkenly back at his team leader in response.
Before either of them could speak, however, Casey again piped up, “I don’t know about all you fellas, but I’m ready to party.”
The wingman choked at the unexpected forwardness of my daughter’s summons. The chief, with all five intoxicated second-stringers nodding affirmation, regained his sense of command. “Hell yeah!” was what he said as he moved in on my lithe fourteen year old.
This was when I stepped out of the shadows. “Well boys,” I stated with a skeptical tone, “I don’t think so; I’m her father.”
This derailed any prospects for an easy score, and the seven inebriated jocks were soon continuing their alcohol-altered path toward their campsite. “Oh, daddy,” my daughter gently chided me; “we’d have been fine.”
This was the second time, of three, that I warned her that behavior of this sort might well get her killed. In relation to the theme of this issue, I can assert with exact authority and dispositive evidence that sexual repression contributed to Casey’s wildness, even as my own mother’s ‘crazy side’ may also have descended onto my daughter’s dance of life. Whatever the case may be, I couldn’t help but mention this, despite the voluminously long and rambling introductory material that was already present on the page.
In any event, a pointed punctuation to exit is available via The Coffin, or “Death’s Necessarily Double-Edged Benefits,” a message that appeared just last issue but, with markedly increased resonance, bears repeating here. “Every Breathing Being Eventually Accrues Death's Inescapably Double-Edged Benefits, Which Support Such Requisite Functions As Respiration & Perspiration, Even Inspiration's Aspiration, For Not Only Will Doom's Fell Swoop Sweep Clear a Path For the Young & Strong to Make Attempts to Prance Their Dancing Chances, But All These Jejune Creatures Must, As a Matter of Course, Also Kill to Live, If Not to Feed Themselves, Then to Defend Preferential Dietary Options, Along With Their Own Skins, From Plethoras of Wily Predators, in Aggregate a Mundane Embodiment of Complete Complicity in Extermination's Extemporaneous Eradications, a Deadly Jive That Thereby Delineates Existence's Most Piquant Paradox: Though We Automatically Cling to Life As Fiercely As Famished Infants Feed at the Maternal Fountain, We Must Somehow Come to Terms With Dissolution & Demise, Even Our Own, Even Our Children's, With a Measured Grace That Is Due Any Central Element of Gaia's Grand Gift."
Okay, okay. I know that I said that was it, but wait, there’s more. One last thing: I’ll put a quotation from Mother Jones in context as a postscript. A group of miners had invited her to help them; they were meeting in a church, a scene that she describes in her autobiography. “‘Boys,’ I said, ‘this is a praying institution. You should not commercialize it. Get up, every one of you and go out in the open fields.’" She went on to make the link between learning and class conflict. “Your organization is not a praying institution. It’s a fighting institution. It’s an educational institution along industrial lines. Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living!"
Tarot’s Tantric Tidbits
I’ve had several boatloads of eerily evocative encounters with the Goddess over the past period of time. As will typically happen, however, I’ll look at just two of these, again as is common one that takes a Tarot client’s array and one that deals with one of my own ‘self-care’ spreads.
Interestingly, I generally, almost never, know a seeker’s question, since I ask that they not tell me in advance and, inevitably, the query at issue is likely to be personal or volatile, or both. In this instance in particular, three occasional buyers of Marshall Arts’ guaranteed-kick-in-the-aesthetic pieces had dropped into my studio to make some purchases; one of the three had been pondering something going on in his life and asked if I could manage a Reading.
My obvious affirmative reply yielded the Holy Tarot Process, a combo of my telling my personal background as a Reader and then shuffling in tandem, his concluding mix an opportunity to ‘let (his) heart come through his fingers’ as they worked. To comport with my standard practice when a customer likes, I sent out a summation, which dovetails nicely here.
“We examined the sequence with a Past-Present-Future rubric. In the Past position, The Chariot presents us with Ares, the God of War, in his chariot as he rushes to whatever the next conflict portends. The black horse and white steed represent the polarities with which each of us often struggles, seeking to find a balance that serves us. In myth, Ares and Aphrodite, the Goddess of love who could not keep her hands off the God of War, conceived Harmonia, the daughter whose name suggests the potential benefits that we can reap when we manage to master and bring into alignment competing urges or proclivities, often primal and instinctual, that do battle within us. Perhaps something of this, in the past, played some part in your question's development.
The Present Passage, meanwhile, offers up the Knight of Pentacles, as I indicated when we were here together an honor card in Daedelus' suit, which thematically concerns the way that we might most profitably understand our interlinked longing for health and wealth in the material realm. The Knight in question, Aristaeus, is Apollo's offspring by a mortal woman. The Dryads, or Tree-Nymphs, reared him and taught him many useful agricultural arts, learning that the Muses amplified when he grew to maturity; he fostered the spread of knowledge and sustainable relations with nature throughout the Mediterranean. His presence may, therefore, signify a grounding of the here-and-now in essential, and yet often humble, tasks of industry and service that keep us alive and kicking. Such a view certainly gives a neat narrative spin to the evolution of the 'origin story' that Ares provides.
The Likely-Future-Prospects spot garnered the Knight of Swords, the suit of Orestes' tragic circumstances, which develops the underlying idea that, in dealing with life as fully realized human beings, cognition is our only guaranteed tool, even as our thinking is also identifiable as a prime source of our fraught interactions with other people. The Knight here is a pair of twins, the Dioscuri brothers, one mortal and one not. They are famed, both loved and hated, for creating clever confabulations of banter and battle. No one ever outthinks these two. The card's presence in your spread once more proffers a cool spin to the storyline in relation to your query, because it implies the upwelling of new ways of conceiving and manifesting our mental abilities. As such, in 'breaking apart' today's SOP, conflict is inevitable, the creative and clever management of which can help to deliver both aplomb and advance, so to speak.
Anyhow, blah blah blah. I'll hope this helps. I'll be in touch again shortly." That was certainly pretty magnificent, in terms of the cards that he pulled forth in his quest. As matters worked out, a very recent spread of mine was, without doubt, the most gigantic sequence that I’ve ever drawn forth for myself. And, of course, I know exactly the inquiry in question, so to speak. (continued below the PayWall)…
All God’s Cousins(continued)
So this work is what I call ‘Documentary Autofiction’ or just Documentary Fiction. The plotline here comprises multiple intertwining yarns whose many characters often persist in their presence, but not always. Sometimes, as with Mary Ann Godchaux, or ‘Sister Jean,’ from Chapter IV, characters come together to punctuate an intersection that will yield later sustenance for my character or other leading lights in the process. The child who results from Mary Ann’s pregnancy plays a pertinent and palpable part, as a masseuse who aids Tommy John’s joining brother Lou in Appalachia, many decades and several volumes hence in the cycle of stories.
Today’s serving from the novel acts as an initial punctuation, of which each tome of All God’s Cousins will have several.
CHAPTER VII: A Moment of Cultural Hegemony
The characters in this narrative congregate ultimately in North America. Most of them, like the author who has born them into the realm of the real, originated in the United States. However, in the longer view, these fictional phantasms and the real humans who were their progenitors have all resulted from migration; even the people most ‘indigenous’ to any place only ended up there as a result of their Exodus and great trekking around the globe from somewhere else.
What Joseph Campbell, as well as other mythologists, drawing on the thinking of Carl Jung and others, has recognized as common threads of psychic meaning—introspection, projection, inculcation, marvel and terror, compensation and rationalization, and so on and so forth—connect all mythic traditions, all explanatory types of legends. Today, however, a less subtle and less organic interconnection typifies the spread of culture, a mandated mediation that is in itself part of commodification's ubiquity, finance's imprimatur, and profit's overarching dominance.
Because of this modern tendency, all of the actors on the stage of this drama imbibed not only similar but also explicitly the same programs and shows and entertainments and commercial breaks and such. Is this important? We can only conjecture. Is it interesting? Perhaps we can agree to stipulate that it is, especially since such mediation almost constantly promulgated ‘naughty bits’ that might instantly evoke consideration of such matters as Eros, porn, and feminism, for example.
For instance, Ngele, or Gordon, or any number of other South African young people, who—the day after he left the country for a life of murder and mayhem and revolution—mounted a massive series of demonstrations, in aggregate involving millions of pupils in Apartheid’s brutal and inadequate schools, might have seen the national broadcast of the third season of Star Trek’s twenty-first episode, “The Cloud Minders,” early in November, 1975. Such dramas, over five years old when Africans first had a chance to watch them, existed in part both to speak to and to pacify working people the world over, all of whom experienced, immediately and persistently, daily lives that manifested the oppressive conditions fancifully fostered in the iconic 'warp-speed' drama.
All-American Captain James T. Kirk and his faithful ‘off-White’ sidekick, Dr. Spock, had arrived at a far-flung intergalactic mining outpost in search of a critically important mineral. When they sought this Zenite out at the mine, however, an uprising was in progress that threatened them and hence their mission.
In predictable fashion, the fascists in charge of the planet were crushing the miners, who had rebelled out of forlorn frustration and barely plausible hope. More practical than ‘liberal,’ Spock and his helpers determine that the mining process is what is stupefying the workers and keeping them in a state of low-class incapacity.
They devise a mask that will permit the hewers’ minds to resist the enervating effects of their work. Kirk offers this ‘great gift from the imperial federation’ to the leader of the miners, who happens to be hot and beautiful, but she refuses and captures Kirk as a 'hostage of the revolution.' (continued below the PayWall)…
Wood Words Essays—Art & Eros & Empire in Marriage & Beyond
Alicia’s vow—eleven year’s back, if memory serves—to turn my beloved driftwood into bonfires if we didn’t do something productive with some of the collection’s detritus, launched Marshall Arts. Despite her feeling of eventual alienation from, even active, spitting distaste for, that process as it grew to manifest in the context of our union, she continues to want to make money by doing art, so she came to me with a proposal: she would do some rendering for specific items, for which I’d pay her half of her estimated ten-dollar hourly fee in advance, the remainder upon completion. I’d have to lump the minimum of two hours that I’d take to get her real hourly results into my ‘five-dollars-per-production-hour’ shtick.
So far, this erstwhile remunerative doubling of her part of the paradigm’s cost has delivered one awesome coffin, with two other pieces in the works, in process, along a slow row to hoe, perhaps, in the midst of all manner of Solstice celebration. From my perspective, having her more polished depictions, particularly on different ‘best-sellers,’ iconic pieces from various categories, would be extremely helpful, both in terms of efficiency and in terms of aesthetic appeal.
Her recently-rendered Michael’s Discount Bin coffin piece has a message on it plausibly perfect, thematically and otherwise, for today’s issue. Like loads of my inscriptions, it’s dense, if arguably worth the effort necessary to gnaw apart its phrasing and digest the hypothetically ‘First-Existential-Duty’ profferal of a ‘beautiful idea’ in its cooked sinews.
“Beginning With Every Human Life's Laborious Outset, a Grave Awaits As a Certain Setting For Everyone's Swan Song Final Scene; Despite This Destined Dance Toward Doom, Anyone May Grasp the Psychic, Private Grace For a Joyous & Jubilant Inner Being, Whereas Socially, Unless One Freakishly Favors Mass Enervation & Emiseration, One Must Fiercely Foster & Relentlessly Demand the Comprehensive Social Equality on Which Hangs Everyone's Prospects For Essentially Equivalent Chances to Attain Prosperous & Healthy Longevity: Thus, Even Today, People Everywhere May Embody Personal Happy Aplomb, While in Contrast, & Most Especially So in the 'Land of the Free,' Only Those Born to Princely Privilege Or Royal Riches Stand Much of a Chance Either to Achieve the Vaunted 'Dream' of 'Middle Class' Comfort Or to Avoid an Early Funeral, Similarly As Primarily Plutocratic Progeny Have More Than Minuscule Likelihood of Ever Garnering the Wealth & Resources Necessary For Every Individual to Accomplish Even a Significant Fraction of His Or Her Potential, Altogether a Context of Suppressed & Wasted Possibility in the Material Realm That, If It Continues, Will Climax in Humankind's Everlasting Elimination."
Put most succinctly, ‘imperial policies that eviscerate libidinal potential will eventually exterminate Homo Sapiens.’ The concept may or may not precisely parallel reality, but it may have powerful witness to bear and resonance to consider, whatever its ‘predictive perfection,’ so to say.
Another item, one that Alicia is rendering now, is a fourth “Seasons Box,” a subtle and piercing dart in some ways, perhaps, given the timing of Alicia’s Chilean heritage. In Santiago, with her solidly middle class parents, a mother among the latifundia and a father an intelligence officer in the Navy, she came into the world on the Summer Solstice, December 21st in that part of the globe. We all, whoever we are, might pause to wish her a happy, just-passed forty-fifth birthday, as Marshall Arts awaits the latest version of this pertinent point.
“Spring's Torrent of Cascading Green Flows From Melting Snows & Welcome Rains to Inaugurate Summer's Fecund Succor, Which Grows to Plumb Gaia's Fall Harvest of Fruitful Plenty, From Which Flows in Winter's Windy Frigid Bare Necessities, Awaiting Anew the Vernal Return's Eternal Renewal." Arguably, of course, seasonality’s highs and lows are part of life’s equations here on Earth.
My ex’s imigration to North America served as another benchmark on her path. Her grandfather was the first victim, just prior to the ‘first 9/11,’ of the Central-Intelligence-Agency-planned-and-orchestrated Chilean coup. Her father’s ‘occupational specialty,’ in military terms, was ‘intelligence officer,’ so that, put a slightly different way, he was one of those who ‘extracted confessions’ in the mass murder of the coup’s aftermath, which had started with his own dad’s ‘mysterious’ murder.
Like many a dapper man in a dandy uniform, moreover, papa was a philanderer, which completely determined the relationship structures of Alicia’s childhood. Empire and sexuality appear as writ large components of my ex’s entire existence.
In a slightly different vein, more routine in any event, conceivably, her Summer birth’s Wintry concatenations here may have undercut certain psychic apple carts, as it were, or something of the sort. Whatever the case may be, her family’s journey brought her to just the juncture when and where an Atlanta CraigsList outreach for female felicity ‘between eighteen and eighty’ caught her eye and our paths joined very much in All God’s Cousins fashion, in plausibly fated trajectories of collision and connection.
Our union thereby inevitably introduced an erotic element into the cultural mix that Marshall Arts continues to manifest, with all the imperial blah blah blah as back story. Lacking the salacious emanations, ha ha, Alicia and Jimbo would definitely not have continued as an erstwhile bonded pair for seventeen weeks, let alone for seventeen years. To accompany the Philosophy/Psychology/Spirituality scribblings just above, therefore, several Love & Erotic Passion icons will also soon become part of her queue, at least if she persists in wanting to participate.
Some variation of this gentle and romantic series of couplets has graced five pieces. Her next batch will include a new iteration, as always slightly altered. “I Might Almost Daily Deign to Cast My Die to Design Dissimulation of Actor & Spy, Or to Gamie Plays of Artifice & Subterfuge to Lie, Or to Dream Up Diligent Deception to Keep on the Sly, Yet No Matter What I Try, I Can't Hide My Heart From You."
Not that this category of carnality was always so tepidly romantic. (continued below the PayWall)…
Empowered Political Forays—Wilhelm Reich, Repressing Relationship: Conclusion
If for no other reason than its pertinence to today’s voluminously discussed ‘bleak love landscape,’ The Mass Psychology of Fascism presents a template for interrelating the intimate sphere with the imperial machinations of various and sundry policy realms that would seem to have little in common with the human sex instinct’s distinct expressions of each and every given erotic moment. Last month, we provided a ‘prefatory’ overview and a briefing about the volume’s emphasis on life-force energy, or the sex instinct among our kind.
Today’s assessment concludes what we began last issue, to wit this little internal summary. “In Reich’s estimation, the excrescences of Fascist regimes reflect the subconscious longing for predominance and egotistical preeminence in an individual or a nation or race. In so-called ‘open society’s’ own evolution of this dynamic, ‘liberalism’s’ superficial goodness fails to delve the revolutionary potential of humanity’s biological core, which is to say how pleasuring and connection could be the social SOP instead of punishment and alienation."
By the way, for anyone who isn’t following, ‘predominance and egotistical preeminence’ inherently, necessarily, always inculcate empire in our specific historical circumstances. At the same time, the present passage’s more prurient components, apparently if only in ‘perverted’ ways ‘sex positive,’ do often seem antithetical to the sorts of ‘repression’ that Reich notes. However, the LGBTQ activists’ perquisites and activities, to put matters mildly, go against the majority’s common grassroots grain, which, obviously, is also overwhelming negative about Eros.
Precisely this dynamic of opposition and rejection is the fuel that feeds the fascist flames. It dovetails with what Reich identifies as the institutional religion’s role as an ‘International Antisexual Organization,’ with multiple, made-to-order Regimes of Sexual Repression. In this regard, the monstrous and mendacious machinations of reactionary gangsters and politicians against ‘Woke’ and ‘Cancel Culture’ notwithstanding, the neoliberal roots of ‘Rainbows’ and ‘Pride’ and ‘Rainbow Pride’ necessitate grotesque, and oppressive, falsehoods and misleadership about ‘Eros and Civilization’ all their own, a vitally important topic that will receive deeper development in BTR’s future, basically whenever a good illustration of the pertinent parameters appears on the radar screen, so to speak.
In any event, last month readers basically mined both the core concepts of the work that Reich outlined in his Mass Psychology of Fascism Preface and some of the erotic analysis that Chapter One laid out. Of course, Reich’s work went well beyond the pages of his master work, elements of which will proffer occasional fodder for future BTR explication of the sexual realms.
Today, Reich’s amplification of matters of Eros and civilization, to use Freud’s and Marcuse’s phrasing of things, will culminate this two part review-essay. In overarching terms, our capacity for continuing culture’s constructs depends, ineluctably and inescapably, on constructively and openmindedly and openheartedly and fervently coming to grips with our salubrious and in any event inescapable sexual energies, human sexuality in all its evolutionary and historical and current spiritual glory and beastly animality.
To put this second piece in perspective, a selection from Reich’s concluding passsages will serve our purposes. At heart, BTR exists to show things as they actually stand rather than accept propaganda and PR about the human condition. Here is Reich, contemplating what he calls “The Biological Miscalculation in the Human Struggle For Freedom.”
“Facts of a fundamental nature, that is, facts which—beyond the political noise of today—concern the history or even the biological constitution of humanity, such facts, experience shows, are always being refuted. They are being ‘refuted’ with all kinds of arguments, but basically always on irrational grounds. …We've just finished a war to end all wars, so why get excited?" If these lines are not chilling to folks, and not only about obvious mayhem in Palestine and Ukraine, then such observers are definitely not paying attention.
In this vein, the ‘Pretty-Happy’ effluvia that Google centers in its algorithmic tools for gauging ‘sexual satisfaction’ is a transparent example of this sort of obfuscation. In offering amplification of this notion, this article’s articulation, so to say, will draw especially on Chapters V through VIII. In addition, the upcoming examination of Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, shot through as it is with vicious, rapacious sexuality and spurious ‘racialist’ beliefs, will incorporate bits and pieces from Reich’s Chapter III: “THE RACE THEORY."
Chapter V: THE SEX-ECONOMIC BASIS OF THE AUTHORITARIAN FAMILY—Reich begins here incisively. “Since authoritarian society reproduces itself in the structure of the mass individual by means of the authoritarian family, it follows that political reaction must defend the authoritarian family as the basis of the state, of culture, and of civilization.’ It can base its propaganda on deep-seated irrational factors in the masses. …(To succeed), Revolutionary Sex Pollitics (must) proceed from a mass-psychologically correct standpoint, (and therefore) make an appeal to the human longing for happiness in life, and happiness in love in particular."
In the fascist paradigm, the focus is on the female, feminine fecundity a foil in this vicious variation to the Goddess’ part in emphasizing pleasure. “The woman is not supposed to be a sexual being, only the producer of children. …According to these concepts, the sexual act for pleasure degrades the woman and mother; she who affirms pleasure and lives accordingly is a ‘whore.’ The concept that sexuality is moral only when in the service of procreation is the core of reactionary sex politics."
Nazism’s criminalization of abortion is inevitable and incapable of reform or compromise. “(I)n the question of abortion too reactionary family politics is the decisive factor; …When political reaction keeps repeating that the maintenance of the abortion paragraph is necessary in the interest of the family and the 'moral order,' we can no longer doubt that the 'authoritarian family' and 'the morality of moralism' are reactionary forces of decisive weight."
Clearly, with even larger majorities in Ohio and elsewhere against abortion’s prohibition than was the case of the early majorities in 1930’s Germany against such criminalization, the here and now introduces many additional factors. Yet Reich identified the underlying structural and ideological necessities, which obviously still hold sway. Female gratification, any real liberation of womanly wanting that birth control makes possible, attacks the repression that is the psychic substrate and psychological glue that make grotesque and murderous ideas irresistibly sticky, so to speak.
Again, Reich might be smoking a cigarette and commenting about recent Supreme Court abortion rulings. Further afield, but in congruent ways, he could readily be rendering sagacious advisories against labelling Palestinian fighters as grandmother-raping-baby-murderers. Through all such expressions of fascism in relation to the body and its libidinal forces, our ‘land of the free’ is bursting at the seams with oppressive sexual repression. That this infelicity could facilitate fascism seems intuitively and analytically obvious. Consideration of Chapters six, seven, and eight continues ‘below the fold!’ (continued below the PayWall)…
New Fiction Series
Mad Cows & Englishmen(continued)
PART SEVEN(Thomas Hawkins and Norman Bates are now officially prepped for learning what ‘being part of the most important work in human history’ means for them and their prospects, both of them with some ideas about that congruent with the pair of them as participants, and competitors, in an as yet not-fully-disclosed process. In the event, official mediation, a slick video, had just begun at the end of Part Six, delivering the self-important zinger about ‘most important work.’)
Norman guffawed and spat. "Those of us at NHP, who are searching for how to continue humanity's viability, have absolutely no intention to torture or otherwise torment our subjects."
I giggled and Norman now howled with laughter. "However, without any prejudice regarding race, creed, color, sexual orientation, or political belief..."
"What about cunts, then?" laughed Norman.
"...we do insist that a well informed subject cohort is in the best interests of both clarity and honor."
"Fuck you, mate!" Norman followed the European model of interactive media, obviously, though his chuckling taunts occurred while he was simultaneously on the verge of tears.
"Therefore," with the accent on the second syllable of course, "we show you the following scenes to establish several elements of our program."
The manifestation of these ideas took just a couple of minutes. They consisted of five points:
1. BSE had become contagious and would spread among most, or
perhaps all, domesticated mammals.
2. The attendant ‘unfortunate rise in food prices’ would soon elicit an
unavoidable crisis of mass starvation.
3. Inflated sea levels, meanwhile, and declines in petroleum and
natural gas stocks, on the one hand, along with increased coal
usage and continued rising human populations, on the other hand,
made the current period of time critically important in addressing
these issues.
4. A "culling of the human herd" was inescapable, the only
question whether it would be "natural" or "managed."
5. Given that a "managed diminution of the breed were decided
upon," then the "only rational, and certain, transitional food source
for the remaining numbers would be the meat of the ninety to ninety
five per cent of humanity not selected to survive."
At this final pronouncement, concluded with an upbeat booster's tone of gung-ho, Norman seemed even closer to sobs as he repeated, over and over through near-hysterical laughter, "Oi loik chicken, Oi loik chicken..."
For my part, I was dissecting the use of "selected" and predicting the narrative to come on screen.
A core component of any useful, even rational, discussion about responsibility--one which nearly all petty bourgeois moralists miss--is the recognition that freedom is, when things come down to cases, inseparable from necessity. (continued below the PayWall)…
Old Stories, & New
Faith, Bad Faith, & the Catholic Church, Or, How I Masturbated My Way to Mental Health
For most of my life, for the greater part of everyone’s life, every passage is a traversal of ignorance and an arrival at knowing. We all seek that knowing, of course, at least to a degree.
At just such a juncture between cluelessness and knowledge, where time and tide bore me toward learning, I found myself attaining awareness that had never before had a home in my soul or psyche. My naivete at this critical juncture of transformation, in retrospect, appears almost moronic, although one can much more readily imagine it as comedy than tragedy in my particular perambulation of everything.
In the event, my thirteenth birthday was close at hand, which my personal rites of Confirmation would soon follow; my final confession prior to this in many ways holiest of rites was about to happen. I had just entered the unburdening-booth, actually, and slid aside the screen with a sound unmistakably a sacramental signature among schooled ‘Papists.’
The crusty priest’s starting question had remained the same for months, since I had joined St. Paul's Public-School-Confirmation-Preparation program in February, three months before I became a teenager. “Have ye’ been tetchin’ yerself, son?”
Despite plenty of clues: from my peers mainly, but also from reading, and an inkling regarding some primitive erotic experiences from my ninth year; the precise meaning of Father O’Brien’s challenge eluded me. Whatever holds true, fate, or randomness---the two have frequently seemed interchangeable to me---placed me without exception in the queue of souls destined to confess to our lamed Gaelic prelate.
He held the title of Monsignor in our parish. He thus stood a step closer than anyone else among us to the pope. Catholicism is a chain-of-command operation, so he was, for those of us under his tutelage, God’s oracle as well. He spoke each Sunday for the Church, and his sermons represented institutional Catholicism at St. Paul’s, in addition to God’s official message to our corner of South Texas.
Money and self-control constituted his constant litany: As in, “we’re gonna have to give more if you want your children’s dear souls to be blessed” with the opportunity to undergo the maximum indoctrination dose possible, in a Catholic school; as in, “hold your tongues, halt your anger, smother your pride, ride a tight rein on anything akin to passion,” except of course passion for ‘our savior’s’ bloody sacrifice.
Every Sunday at 11:25, Father James held forth for five minutes, barely blinking, his throat tobacco-brushed, and his pitch a monotone. His voice rose above a mumble only to enunciate how many dollars we were short on the annual flow chart, or to exalt anyone who embraced Jesus’s pain.
In the full light of day, James O’Brien seemed a finely honed ascetic. Shaped like a skinny question mark, the only emotion more pointed than consternation that he displayed was an occasional touch of wry bitterness. Perhaps this was due to his dysfunctional right leg, which caused him to drag this limb along like an errant anchor, holding him back in whatever endeavor he undertook.
The other priest at St. Paul’s, Father Rastic, was the child of some Slavic diaspora. Although he studied the same conservative Catholic script as Monsignor O’Brien, he was basically a warm and wholesome man. Not once during my sole accounting to him did I get the sense of violation, a combination of vertigo and queasiness, that invariably accompanied a confessional chat with Father O’Brien.
I wondered for years, at moments when I crushed any pull inside me toward religious faith, if a different confessor might have resulted in a less insistently agnostic spiritual expression on my part. What if someone gentler and more joyful had probed my sense of guilt and the ever concomitant desire for penance? But Father O’Brien played that part, he was God’s interlocutor, from the Holy Spirit, to the Pope, and right on down, ultimately to a twelve year old boy on the cusp of the changes characteristic of boys of a certain age.
The sacraments, not doctrine or sermonizing, were the way Mother Church reached inside us. If one sacrament might have caught me in it’s thrall, it was the ritual of confession and forgiveness. (continued below the PayWall)…
Classic Folk, Rejuvenated
Today’s selection offers up a fifth piece of an initial ‘fairy tale’ recontextualization, a stab at storytelling that reveals in such ancient yarns connecting layers, perhaps, of the entire fabric of mythos and psyche and human awareness.
Little Red(an old tale in new garb)(Continued from #6)
(The elder and her grandchild had managed themselves with such fortitude and wit that they likely would have emerged whole and strong without assistance. However, at the end, fate sent Sam to them, who dispatched their final two attackers prior to realizing that his feelings for the charming young woman were ‘love at first sight.’ Before she could properly respond to his proffering a conjugal plight, so to say, Little Red needed to make herself a new womanly cape to replace that which she had sacrificed to save her and Gran from feeding a lupine horde.)
CHAPTER FIVE— — —Long hours and days and weeks, and eventually moons, Little Red Riding Hood labored to complete her new red cape, again shot through with golden threads, but this time also including the silver of night's goddess, to whom she would turn at times when Luna's fullness would first peek over the mountaintop peaks in the East. "What did Great-Gran mean?" she would ask of the sky and her own inner wisdom, referring to her wizened foremother's admonition that "you are but a girl."
She grew more during this period than ever before in her life that she recalled, as her fame, for defeating the legendary Will and his lethal pack of avengers, spread far and wide throughout the countryside. People who did not know her grinned when she spoke her nickname, which was the only term of address that she used with strangers. Still, 'Little Red' seemed an apt title, even as she now wandered the woods without the cape that marked the womanhood that was no longer pending but had fully arrived.
Given this state of affairs, she considered long and fully Sam's straightforward, if somewhat presumptuous, offer of marriage. She was of an age now, fourteen, at which nearly half of the young women in her region had already wed. A lass who had not achieved the status of the bridal veil by age eighteen was, according to local custom, completely 'over the hill' and unlikely ever to marry. Sam was strong, handsome, and not utterly unintelligent, though from Little Red's perspective he lacked the spark that might otherwise have caused an irresistible firing of her desire to wear the veil.
His regular visits, cordial and joyful in their way, she likened to the attention of an older brother who thought more of his prowess and perspicacity than his slow nature and tepid insights deserved. "That cape must have all of the magic of the kingdom in it," he suggested drily on many occasions, "to be taking so long to finish." He admired the work honestly enough and ever smiled at and conversed merrily with Red's mother, who treated him as the son she had never born.
"Perhaps it will be done before the Hunter's Moon," the first full moon after harvest, a traditional time for nuptials and the joining of young men and women together in matrimony. Neither Little Red nor her mother would answer the question that he had stopped posing directly now, though mama smiled placidly at the huge hunk of a boy-man who hinted so broadly, and Little Red found herself willing to countenance a life with him in spite of the lack of fiery feelings that she had occasionally felt for other young men. Both women knew, however, that if Little Red had not responded to his satisfaction by that year’s early October lunar peak, (continued below the PayWall)…
New Folk Fables
Quiet Jack’s Magic Blarney Kiss—V(continued)
(Though outnumbered six to one, our Jack made a fight of Sir Robert’s posse’s impertinent intention to seize him and ‘teach him a lesson.’ Now that they had him, of course, unconscious and at their mercy, battered and bloodied though they were, what were they to do with him?)
…In the wheezing, breathless stench of fear that prevailed at this eventuality, the bleeding and keening Billy Wilder, joined by his very good friend Morgan Morgan, made to hack our Jack to bits while the rest of the crew held their knees and recovered their wind. Sir Robert, who had found his own daughter's broken seal on a parchment that bade such passionate approval to stout Jack's "sweet tongue" that he found himself doubly transfixed with jealous loathing, might naturally have failed to prevent this hasty and painless dispatch of the still insensate Master Higgins.
However, Morgan Morgan, ever one to forswear the utilization of such a womanly implement as a kitchen knife, in seeking a cutting tool to match young Willy Wilder's cleaver—"Ye'll be hoist on your petars,” he snarled at Jack, holding the already bloodied chopper in his left hand, his awkwardness apparent but his still ochre-oozing index finger on his right hand preventing a more adroit grip—and having forestalled his friend from beginning till he could add the Morgan's stamp of cruelty to the process, had uncovered a lovely, lethal little dagger with which to carve up Jack so as to emphasize the painful affliction of his sins, visited penitentially upon him, as it were.
"Hey there!" Sir Robert shrieked upon seeing the distinctive black blade of his daughter's dagger darkly flash above Jack's collapsed form, the still dancing kitchen fires making of Eileen's pretty weapon a wisp of flame. "What sticker's that there, and where'd you find it?"
"I found it here," said florid Morgan, grasping it like a prod so that its pearl handle shone, "and I'll use it to carve up this cur here with my friend, Bill, when..."
"No!" Commanded Robert. "Give it me." This the obedient Morgan did, albeit insodoing he pulled his mouth into a pout at this imperious preemption of his sport. Robert's regard for the blade was that of an owner's having uncovered vile theft, as would make sense since he had given the dagger to his daughter on her fifteenth birthday.
"Twice damned bastard," he roared, flecks of foam flying from his lips as he turned his attention back to Jack. "Tie the damned devil up, then wake him up," said Robert with a lethal tone.
At this juncture, as a return in consciousness just began to stir again in Jack's brain, his chances to see another dawn seemed slim at best. And truly, were an angel to have interceded here to ask our Jack if he regretted such a liberal expression of his fondness for things toasty and tasty and female, he would probably have given rueful credence to the notion that perhaps he had, even though he had never once raised his voice to bray or celebrate his liaisons, allowed lust to trump discretion, or otherwise violated his own proscriptions against kissing and telling by kissing so well that others would tell for him.
On the other hand, however, Jack might have countered to God's messenger, were he against his normal mien disposed to speak at all, posing a question of his own whether the triumph of such a sorry lot of frightened weaklings as his captors could ever possibly serve the best interests of nature or heaven or anything other than Satan's ascendancy, to which inquiry Gabriel himself might have felt forced to offer his own rueful acknowledgment in return.
Be all such thoughts as they may, however, inchoate versions of which were skipping through Jack's mind as he came alive to fury and pain and tightly bound hemp pinning his hands behind him, clearly Jack would require a miracle to make more than a bad exit from these inescapably insalubrious circumstances. Sir Robert's leering face, bloated with drink and ruddy with rage, greeted Jack when his eyes fluttered open, this woeful sight flanked by his other tormentors, who called to mind nothing so much as a group of frightened boys whom the local bully had persuaded to capture and torture and dispatch some wild thing that made the bully feel small.
"So it's a 'sweet tongue' you've got in your mouth, is it?" Fat Bob nearly burst with the bile that touched his own lips. All Sir Robert's henchmen shuffled and muttered and nodded at the piquancy of this interrogatory, though only clever martin McGhee had noticed the love note bearing Eileen's seal and had deduced the provenance of the knife that Sir Robert dangled with quiet menace before Jack's watchful gaze.
"Let me see that 'sweet tongue' of yours, then," proffered Big Bob in his best imitation of a threatening purr, "or haven't you any greater guts to speak to me now than you've ever seen fit to share, eh?"
Under these conditions, clearly, had the vigilantes who had gained control over jack even a fraction of the wit necessary to match their full measure of chagrined complaint, our good lad would have stood no chance. In the event, however, Jack's new masters mixed a fair portion of many things with their blinding rage, but intelligence was not one of them. (continued below the PayWall)…
Nerdy Nuggets—Harriet Jacobs & America’s Complex Corrupt Core
An obvious but overlooked factor in the ending of North American slavery is the role that the ‘bonded’ people themselves played in throwing off their chains. Along with Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs offers an exemplary instance of such resistance to enslavement and all its rapacious indignities.
Very few Americans realize, all too typically, that Hitler’s bought-and-paid-for-by-Ford ‘leadership’ rested its intellectual superstructure, so to say, on foundations that resulted from the thinking and actions of founders and theoreticians of the Ku Klux Klan, whose post-bellum ‘slave control modalities,’ including ubiquitous snitching and convict-slave-labor, became central elements of National Socialist practice, points that Franz Neumann illustrates repeatedly in his Behemoth: the Structure & Practice of National Socialism in Germany, a review of which is forthcoming in March.
Now, back to one of history’s smartest and bravest female freedom fighters. Harriet Jacobs’ existence belies even the plausibility of White supremacist justifications for slavery and its echoes among us still. Her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl are more or less indisputable and irrefutable. Nevertheless, for reasons that ought to be clear to readers of Big Tent Review #7, in particular, even the mention of these matters makes many folks incredibly nervous.
The publisher of the memoir, in his Introduction, presents this notion quite provocatively. “I am well aware that many will accuse me of indecorum for presenting these pages to the public; for the experiences of this intelligent and much-injured woman belong to a class which some call delicate subjects, and others indelicate. This peculiar phase of Slavery has generally been kept veiled; but the public ought to be made acquainted with its monstrous features, and I willingly take the responsibility of presenting them with the veil withdrawn."
Well might a researcher wonder, after subsuming himself in the tempestuous tsunamis of Jacobs’ life and times, ‘where is the deep and profound attention that this material so richly deserves?’ This saga, as we will see below the fold especially, strikes at the taproot of American culture, where the only semblance of a ‘blessed community’ was among the oppressed, who sought surcease or even complete removal from bondage.
Here’s a search: <“harriet jacobs” “incidents in the life” about OR topic OR subject dissertation OR thesis history OR sociology OR “womens studies”>. It yielded 190,000 hits with no apostrophe in ‘women’s’ and 176,000 strikes with the correction added. Again, WTAF?
Among the first thirty-odd hits, apparently, precisely five of the documents were in fact theses of one sort or another, with one doctoral dissertation. Jacobs’ historical credibility and literary legerdemain are now difficult to refute, as various scholars whom these five sources cite in common have teased out a hard-to-deny skeleton for considering this powerhouse of a woman, Harriet Ann Jacobs, a structure with ‘plenty of meat on its bones’ too, in particular in matters dealing with sexuality, sex and agency, sexual power dynamics between masters and their chattel whose willing submission they craved, almost above all else.
To an extent, a key to creating a successful summation, if not altogether a precis, of Harriet Jacobs’ genius under the most execrable circumstances, becomes clear-cut in contemplating her subtitle: “Seven Years Concealed.” So fervent was her own commitment to live free of predation, so fervid the assistance from her fellows routinely subjected to the indignities and horrors of slavery, that she managed to closet herself, literally, under her rapacious master’s nose till she could make good her escape. For seven years this was so, this existence on the subterranean interstices.
One might tell the tale however one wants, but los hechos hablan por si solos, in Spanish, or ‘the facts speak for themselves.’ Slaves wanted freedom strongly enough to face death and lethal deprivation to make an escape beyond the clutches of the slaveocracy, or to assist a comrade in such an enterprise. A fuller presentation of Jacobs’ narrative follows below the paywall.
As noted in the review of The Mass Psychology of Fascism, a piece of Reich’s work deals with racialist ‘theorizing,’ a most toxic mystification of actual biosocial evolution. In next issue’s final item, readers will encounter a modern scholar who deconstructs racial categorization in many ways similarly to, though in crucial respects differently from, Reich. Joseph Graves The Race Myth speaks a good deal as a title. The subtitle cuts still closer to the skeletal core: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America. We will hear more from Graves next issue.
Reich’s work is overwhelmingly congruent with, and often parallel to, Professor Graves’ more modern contextualization. Again, the tendrils that interconnect these matters of ethnicity, sexual energy and aggressive and defensive sexuality, and the plantation economy’s role as an internal empire of commercial American, Yankee, capital form a matrix in which Jacobs’ work predicts or sets a stage for different of Reich’s key ideas in The Mass Psychology of Fascism.
THE RACE THEORY contains the following structure: 1. Its content 2. The objective and subjective functions of ideology 3. Racial purity, blood poisoning, and mysticism—In this chapter, Reich, again with astonishing prescience, showed the depth and extent of racialist categorization as a way of ‘classifying’ populations in terms of their purity, processes that in turn resulted from spurious biosocial assertions that were nothing other than mysticism in different guises. The juxtaposition of these two important texts fits perfectly the point of this BTR installment. (continued below the PayWall)…
Communication & Human Survival—Web Roots & War & Porn, #2
In essence, November’s BTR installment took the reader from the ballistic beginnings of wide area and local telecommunications networks, so as to stave off various ‘Red threats’ and such, to the evolution of America Online with the union of capital and militarism and porn. Today’s article, the second in this series, articulates both the continuation of AOL’s experience to rise to and fall from the very top of the bourgeois heap, on the one hand, and further delving the way that the Web continues to demarcate sexuality and Eros in America in the here-and-now.
Next month, the third installment on this topic of networked interconnection and the Internet will illuminate the decimating consequences, financially and socially, of the ‘largest merger in human history.’ The presentation in this forthcoming session will take AOL through most of the twenty-first century’s second decade, on the one hand, while also presenting key concepts of media literacy about mediation and power.
The final, fourth piece in this series, in early March, examines at some length the pre-COVID media-phenom of Arianna Huffington’s America Online merger miracle. “The only certain thing is that the writers and participants who built Huffington Post won't see a slender cent from among the thirty billion pennies, or billion and a half pennies in stock, that changed hands in that bargain. Several already wealthy people, whose political and 'strategic' leadership had, for better or worse, guided the site, have, on the other hand made out like proverbial bandits.”
In full bore nerd terms, we could culminate this media contextualization with a combination of summation and hypothesis. “Thus, a pattern emerged that has, quite plausibly, come to stand for a central trait of capitalist evolution. Put most simply, defining struggles over meaning, knowledge, and power all intersected with and emanated from the powers of technology and labor that inhered in the conglomeration of recorded speech and the media for presenting it; advantages in this contest, almost universally in the form of successful--or replicable--networks and paradigms that reached expanding 'publics,' served to influence, and often to determine, social, political, and economic outcomes."
A couple of points seem useful to amplify before we proceed to continue investigating AOL’s overall exemplary mirroring of Web Culture’s basic functions and purposes in contemporary society. The first of these ideas is strategic, in the sense of showing underlying components of the operational origins of this entire ‘area of work.’
“Rapid technological developments in computer technology grew out of President Eisenhower's perceiving a US need to have an alternative technological development path for corporate and military research programs, which would be civilian/scientist managed, would allow blue-sky research to be undertaken, and would encourage the vibrancy of basic and applied research in technology. The so-called military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned against in 1961 showed the close links that lay between military procurement and industrial suppliers and subcontractors. This was the reason that the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was formed in 1958, immediately after the threat of a technological lead demonstrated by the Soviet Union..."
The second deals with a nuanced delineation of the intricacies of the World Wide Web’s representations of sexuality, especially in the confluence, to state the matter baldly, between porn and dating. A fundamental text in this regard is Net.Sexxx, the incisive subtitle of which articulates how we must examine “Readings on Sex, Pornography, and the Internet" that bring into focus ‘New Thrills in an Old World’ and vice versa, ‘Old Thrills in a New World.’
The super smart and deft thinking Dennis Walkul edited this volume that we will continue to discuss over the coming pages. In his Introduction, he quotes from a clearly evocative assessment of seemingly ultra wholesome grassroots technology, Polaroid’s Land Camera, the first model of which was “The Swinger.”
“(I)nstant photography and instant pornography…were invented at the same time…Polaroid sex then can be defined as the use of instant photography devices to create homemade pornography. Prior to the development and distribution of the Polaroid camera, homemade pornography was almost impossible to achieve, unless one of the participants had access to a developing laboratory and the skill with which to process his own prints."
We left off last month with William Jefferson Clinton’s smiling-gangster-giveaway of what public funding and support had created, in the Telecommunication Act of 1996, more or less the infrastructure or materialization of the Internetwork that permits our worldwide ‘surfing habits.’ As noted then, this entire initiation of the present monopoly-media passage will merit its own extensive investigatory examination in coming months. In any event, with plundering profits practically promised by the 1995 Communications Decency Act and its ilk, the ‘iron laws of the market’ would hold sway, and a phase of widespread and predatory consolidation would ensue.
Many volumes of popular reporting do a fascinating job of teasing out the interwoven threads of AOL’s rise to its New Media ascendancy, a reflection of the growing predominance of the Web in commercial media generally. In any case, as the apex moment in that transit—the merger of the only recently profitable America Online with the Time-Warner behemoth—drew nigh, “Gerald Levin…predicted global media would become the dominant industry of the 21st century — so powerful that they might in fact become more powerful than governments. 'So what's going to be necessary is that we're going to need to have corporations redefined as instruments of public service,' ideas that, in the here-and-now; with all sorts of delisting, cancel-culturing, and misinformation regimentation to insure that ‘forbidden ideas’ remain hidden; ought to be a tad bracing, if not altogether chilling.
Rather than arc the ‘rise of AOL,’ therefore, this article first is going to consider the contextual sociopolitical and socioeconomic impacts of the joining of these two key bastions of contemporary capitalism at the inception of the twenty-first century. To lay groundwork for this effort, one might ask, ‘what’s the official story?’ As will often prove the case, axiomatically, our ‘paper of record’ offers just such an account, in the form of an interview that encompassed Steve Case, Gerald Levin, and others.
The Times reports that the editors wanted to answer a simple inquiry that, in retrospect, probably seems important yet. “How did it happen?” The unfolding process, from the perspective of these ‘executive participants,’ would yield a quotidian executive summary. Flush with apparently endless access to increasing ‘equity valuations’ among financiers and traders, AOL was on the hunt, the larger the ambitions of a particular acquisition, the better.
Case, as AOL’s ‘chief sales officer,’ was wooing Time Warner’s chairman. “So a week or two later we met and had dinner at a hotel in New York, and we were talking…for several hours about what this company might be together and some of the benefits that could accrue strategically as well as how the company together might have a broader impact on society, and that kind of led to a series of discussions."
Emphasizing this quarter trillion dollar or more putative negotiation as a seemingly beneficent search for positive social impact would, supposedly, nevertheless, have a grounding in solid business practices. Ha ha. One commentator skewers such a notion, except inasmuch as ‘worst business deal in history’ evaluations fit nicely with this description of beneficence.
“After the merger, former Time Warner shareholders saw the value of their investment fall precipitously, with share prices of the combined firm dropping 90% from their peak value. (Economist AOL Time Warner: A Steal? Oct 24th 2002) Several shareholders filed lawsuits claiming that AOL executives deliberately and fraudulently inflated the value of AOL shares prior to the merger, partly by covering up steep declines in advertising revenue. At about the same time, news came out that 14 AOL Time Warner executives had sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of shares shortly after the announcement of the merger. AOL eventually paid $2.4 billion to settle these claims."
So that’s the first thing. If this particular mutual engulfment had not occurred, with all its warts powdered over, however, again given inescapable propensities of capital and capitalists, something similar would have taken place instead. The second thing, of course, given this issue’s premises, is about how sexuality and erotica inherently inflected this new source of inevitable conjugal relations between media and human life force energy. “Without sex-oriented chats and forums to sustain its early years, America Online might never have survived. The e-commerce payment systems that are so common today would be in a far more primitive state of development, security, and usability."
Not that such empirical accuracy denigrates all that the other sorts of communication that the web makes possible also produce, but this carnal reality’s centrality starkly clarifies the sanctimonious sense of SOP-business resplendent as the basis for the virtual world. Sex spun the Web, and as readers can discover more fully below the fold, much of this outpouring of libidinal manifestation and at least pretended volcanic carnality originated in ‘mom-&-pop smut studios,’ some of which provocatively produced radical and even feminist materials.
Thus might one turn to Celine Shimizu’s new work, The Feminist Porn Book. The author “shows how ‘feminists have adapted different strategies for subverting pornographic norms.’ Female sexual agency is often emphasized, revealing how women, even women of ‘difference,’ enjoy their bodies and their sexuality. Rather than simply being the object of male desire, the actresses often relish in their own desires—and so claim the right to female sexual expression too often considered only the right of men." (continued below the PayWall)…
Happy Union Grammar Nerds—the ‘Oxford Comma’
This note essentially represents the first instance of Occasional Nerdy Usage Nuance in these pages, an exercise that will likely delight a few English teachers and others with a predisposition to appreciate grammatical niceties; bemuse or befuddle the majority of readers, who see only arbitrary rules in play; and enrage those intellectually inclined producers who favor a point of view different from that advanced in this narrative. Whatever the case may be, the ultimate premise in such argumentation revolves around how important language is to human thriving and survival.
I mean, only idiots, literal morons, can deny the central role that language plays in humanity’s demonstrable adaptability, as it were. Furthermore, like the point or loathe it, grammar governs speech acts, from the mouth to the ear as well as from the page to the eye, ha ha.
Noam Chomsky is merely an important progenitor of the view that, therefore, one may posit and come close to proving that grammatical choices are a feature of the hardwired cognitive components that pretty close to universally manifest in ‘normal’ human brain development. Moreover, these patterns in our speech, in my view of this entire area of assessment, undergird and structurally parallel patterns of writing.
In such a rubric of material existence, arbitrariness is conceivable. Is it likely? To assert that evolution works on the basis of randomness will always have some validity, since mutations occur to an extent by chance, but life always manifests clear, close to immutable templates that underlie its more complex unfoldings, via ‘natural selection’ or otherwise. In relation to something as central as language and its functions, these templates’ patterning mean that randomness may only underlie the process, not define its regularly scheduled programming, so to speak.
One of the biggest insults that erstwhile ‘committed leftists’ level at each other is that of reification. Theorizing and abstractions are all well and good, in such a view, but very easily might one manufacture too much in the theoretical realm; the point, of course, is to ground hypothetical ideation in mundane reality’s routine expression. Thankfully, as regards today’s missive about commas, avoiding this sin is relatively straightforward, perhaps largely because our linguistic efforts, and their attendant usage rules, make memorable the scenes of our days and nights, as it were.
All of this setting-the-scene for this initial Occasional Nerdy Usage Nuance episode establishes parameters of import, so to say, the way that we might imagine that such matters as these, in any other than a nitpicky way, actually matter. For example, one of these ‘matters such as th(is)’ is a question about commas, in particular the necessity, or at least the adviseability, of deploying serial commas—what many have labelled as “oxford commas”—when writing a list of more than two elements.
Multiple interesting searches led me to realize that today will only be able to include an overview of this issue, a fuller explication of which is forthcoming, minimally in several additional pieces. The whole ‘field of operations,’ to use a martial metaphor, is both intricate and interesting, enough so as to make requisite several installments to any grammarian the likes of me.
The first Google exercise advances this search string: <"oxford comma'>. I just wanted to see, though I didn’t notice the failed closing of the first full quotation mark. As I already noted, in the now long ago Introduction, such little faux pas can result in all kinds of weird little anomalies, to wit this: that first slight mistake generated more or less seven and a quarter million connections; the correction only garnered just over two million hits; a resubmission of the original erroneous strand then gathered up nine million or so linkages. Fully comprehending what all this means might very well help make one’s management of matters at hand masterful, or even magical.
The second entry in the process of discovery was this: <"oxford comma" debate OR disagreement OR dispute>. Now we only find just a smidgeon over a million citations. Nevertheless, that may seem quite a large measure of probably scholarly attention to an indisputably nerdy interrogation.
The third stab at delineation used this phrasing: <"oxford comma" debate OR disagreement OR dispute history OR background>. Even with these limits on the examination, 785,000 links appear in response. In some sense, clearly, the query ‘strikes a nerve.’
The fourth digging exercise seeks to tease out still deeper detail: <"oxford comma" debate OR disagreement OR dispute history OR background analysis OR scholarship OR linguistics OR logic.> Oddly indeed, perhaps indicative of more than merely boolean operations in the algorithmic protocols on view, this further circumscription of everything more than doubles the attendant connections, to almost 1.7 million.
The fifth step along this promenade took a turn toward the linguistics of the situation: <comma function OR role linguistics OR speech pause OR break>. Plausibly because this is the locus of much of the actual dispute in the case at hand, over seven million hits show up in this instance. A brief survey of the first pages reveals that, despite empirical and intuitive bases for making the connection, Google’s erstwhile experts didn’t like anything quite so functional and easy to explicate.
The for-now-final sixth search sought some semblance of guidance as to multiple little paradoxes in Google’s outpourings of citations. I recollected a young adult novel that I fancied, which addresses such inimical happenstance as seemed to be in play in the thousands of pages of hit after hit.
In the event, I entered these terms: <doubt factory novel>. Forty million connections came to the fore, all of them at the beginning about the novel that I sought, The Doubt Factory, whose simple premise is that by fostering ‘uncertainty’ about what are likely clearcut instances of cause and effect—for instance, pausing for breath or emphasis, or both, as an important factor in the use of a comma as a punctuating mark—those with an ‘ax to grind’ or other agendas removed from the light of day could sow confusion with their planted dubious points of view, the purpose of all of which might sometimes seem patently obvious, at other times murky.
The aggregate of my searching here makes me feel like an attorney who absolutely knows that his telling of the case is the only correct estimation. Sometimes, the evidence only all fits together under the circumstances of a single conclusion. That is decidedly the case here, albeit for ‘probative purposes’ as a much larger topic for a future BTR Grammar Nerd series.
In a sense, the true inaugural question for Number 7 might well then be the implict point of the fifth search, ‘What are commas for, anyhow?’ (continued below the PayWall)…
Erotic Snippets—”Alpha, Beta, Baby, Baby!”
Lou had never had much more than a ‘pot to piss in,’ according to the old idiom that differentiated those ‘to the manor born’ from almost everyone else. He manifested and with some skill managed money and resources, yet he would never be a ‘prize catch’ to any woman in search of fortune, at least if she expected an endowment that consisted of much more than rugged good looks and ocasionally talented blah blah blah.
Inasmuch as almost every female seeker in online erotic environs wants to meet a “financially stable,” or in more common phrasing, “well-to-do” or even wealthy match, he had never held out a lot of hope for this approach to meeting a true love, or even a sweet lover, let alone a soul-mated life partner with whom he might wend a way. He therefore barely really even dabbled in virtual love environs.
Of course, such a modulation of intermediation had nonetheless characterized his original coming to grips, so to say, with his after-seventeen-years-recently-departed ex wife. Thus, he at least imagined a possibility of some similar conjunction despite his advanced years, graying hairs, wild white beard, and other indicia of his representing the opposite of well-heeled grooming and gallantry.
In thirteen months, his only contact was with a young goth girl who wanted kissing and cunnilingus now and again, and not much more, sort of a feminized version of ‘slurp, fir, thank you sir!’ Ellen was tasty, and her orgasms were juicily authentic, leaving him drenched and happy, but she was not likely ever to be his lover rather than an exclusively-on-her-terms plaything.
For the most part, in other words, his experience affirmed his assumptions that true affiliation would not ever be likely to emerge from these methods. This story tells of an exceptional case to this general rule of non-engagement, as it were. Her name, as if she had arrived in Appalachia from Oz, was Dorothy, a farm girl from Kansas.
Her profile on the Wildd app had no photo, merely a field of High Plains sunflowers instead. As a point of principle, and a wariness about scams, Lou only ‘liked’ this kind of presentation if the woman in question revealed herself as a clear and deeply dyed-in-the-wool nerd, decidedly not the situation here, where the only more than trivial notion in her array of preferences and descriptions was the following quip, “About Me:” ‘I’ve never met a single wizard or(sic) flown in a hot air baloon, but I am a true-blue Kansas farm girl who likes kissing more than pigs.”
The erotic reference, or “foreplay” mention in Wildd’s parlance, almost made him send a ‘heart’ despite her hiding her face, but, hovering finger and a twitchy intuitive tingle in his groin notwithstanding, he elected to pass her by and wait. In the event, before the day was through, she had become only the fourth lass on the site—which emphasized everything from hookups to kinky proclivities redolent of Warren Zevon’s ‘she asked me if I’d beat her’—to send him a like before he reached out to her first.
And she was the only one, in over a year of plying the pitiful potential apparent here, who wrote him first. Moreover, her missive both lit his heart and fired his gonads. (continued below the PayWall)…
Odd Beginnings, New Endings—A Biosocial Golden Rule: ‘We’re All Cousins, After All’
(The original Subtitle of this essay, long ago and far away, evoked spiritual and biological roots simultaneously: “Plotting a Course From Kinship to Kindness." However one conceptualizes human relationship in the modern context, one must acknowledge at least a moderate sense of disconnection between biological ties and social mayhem. This note, which appears over the course of the next three issues, offers a way of thinking about such matters in a plausibly explanatory fashion.)
Today's posting, drawn as ineluctably forth as is a child by a piece of candy, emanates from the decision that I once made not to use the phrase "environmental racism," despite the popularity and apparent topicality, even arguably the allure, of those words. This essay explains the basis for that conscious aversion.
My title today alludes to a now truly long-ago essay, one of the first that I ever published, the original of which lies at the bottom of some mile of files, or at the back of a stuffed file cabinet drawer. It's the answer to the "Jeopardy" question that is arguably the most important inquiry that we can ask in these days of troubled times. "What is the scientific relation between each person on earth and every other person who is not some stripe of parent, sibling, or offspring?"
As any who have taken the time and energy necessary to plow through what I've been writing can testify, much of what I convey revolves around more or less complicated skeins of relationship. One of my unsung mentors in developing this focus was Bertell Ollman, he of "the most interesting lawsuit of the decade award" during the 1980's, and inventor of the board game "Class Struggle."
As a political philosopher, he was nonpareil; his book, Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, confirmed my launch along this pathway that I've followed ever since. The greatest teachers are the ones who make sense for the student out of what the pupil has already been formulating on his own. As a nascent, 'multi-disciplinary' public intellectual, I lapped up Ollman's work like mother's milk.
His insights help in figuring things out in diverse matters, one of which, perhaps the ‘second most interesting lawsuit of the Twentieth Century,’ was Loving v. Virginia. The issue before the court was essentially whether, for reasons of supremacist thinking, a State could criminalize marriages between a White man and a Black woman, as in the Lovings’ litigation, or vice versa.
This is an additional ‘astonishing nugget’ of U.S. history that will soon enough bring forth its own article. Its clear applicability here sums up the Supreme Court’s holding: except for issues of incest, no prohibition against marriage among differently classified citizens would be permissible. This mining of the annals of the past is always both valid and manageable to an old history buff like this humble correspondent.
By contrast, while I still learn more about the specific inner workings of evolutionary theory whenever I turn to such efforts as Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea, or to one of the tools that I have utilized with my students, Darwin's Gift--to Science and Religion, by Francisco Ayala, the core logic of a 'selection-based' scheme became incontrovertible through personal endeavors, when I won my first spelling bee, or lost my first chess tournament. Only the strongest will persist in such zero-sum situations.
This remains true to this day, though, along with thinkers like Dennett, with whom I am in agreement about very little that concerns political matters, and such insightful geniuses as Richard Hofstadter and Eric Foner, I excoriate the nonsensical reductionism of social-Darwinism and other expressions of 'survival-of-the-fittest,' which ever seek domination instead of understanding. Culture also arises out of evolutionary forces: cooperation is adaptive.
Still, as Francisco Ayala relates in regard to his own life, as a Dominican prelate on the path to priesthood, encountering Charles Darwin deeply is both exhilarating and discomfiting--the first because of the satisfying scope of penetrating insight that seems possible, the second because of the way that so many dearly-held comfortable assumptions seem to fall apart in light of evolution’s precepts. (continued below the PayWall)…
Last Words For Now
Without doubt, many people, even sophisticated readers, have feelings of distaste or even revulsion at the prospect of open discourse about sex and sexuality. ‘That’s just private’ or words to that effect are going to be the way that, minimally, a fair number of folks see the matter.
Given that the Big Tent Review insists not only that these are matters that we must air in public, relying on evidence and logic and all the tools of science, even as we openly welcome more emotional points of view, but also that sex is the ‘best thing since sliced bread’ basically, a central element of fashioning viable and humane human communities, such individuals probably will never be happy participants in a BTR process.
Probably the majority of possible readers would be of two minds about this sort of openness, welcoming it when they felt safe and secure in doing so but often enough having enough uncertainty or disinclination to cause them to shy away or even to ask for a hiatus. To all and sundry, I would assert this. Sex shame causes more intense interpersonal misery than any other single factor; furthermore, on reflection, Wilhelm Reich was almost certainly correct—the wellsprings of fascism flow out of personal eruptions of sexual repression, on the one hand, and out of socially sustained erotic oppression on the other hand.
In relation to such thinking, we’ll be talking about abortion for the next several issues. The contention concerning fascist outbursts will likely seem incontrovertible to the openminded as the ongoing conversation about reproductive freedom contextualizes the central import of this policy point, especially in the United States today, the only ‘civilized’ place on the planet that criminalizes this choice and makes pregnancy termination a police matter. As Francisco Ayala, the former Dominican and author of Darwin’s Gift, states the case: ‘Given that up to half or more of all conceptions end in miscarriage, God almighty is the biggest abortionist.’
Once again, we arrive in the spaces of sacred completion for this issue’s thirteen bits. Only my still-just-a-handful of paid subscribers will get this far. I’m planning on making 2024 the first year of many, many to come in which I’ll garner my ‘minimum’ sustainable readership of two hundred or more followers, readers who recognize the adaptive value of storytelling and the inalienable allure of useful information
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