March 27

Long-time readers of this blog (if there are any!) may recall that I try to avoid most Internet discussion boards because of their snarky nastiness, but that it is sometimes a struggle for me to maintain that wide berth. So every now and again I will check out a few boards and contribute to them briefly, until I run away screaming,  "It's worse than ever out there!" I don't know if it's actually worse, but it's certainly not any better: The boards are still infested with the dreadful, superior insult humor that seems to be chiefly perpetrated by bitter younger males who have too much time on their hands (probably because they're not getting laid; you have to read between the lines). They all think they are Don Rickles, Jr. I posted what I thought was an innocent-enough query on one board, and within two hours, I was being called a "pompous cretin"! I didn't take it too badly, though, because I've noticed that on some boards, "pompous" is a term of art indicating that you write in complete sentences.

With all this in mind, I was delighted to encounter a blog post entitled "Ivy Compton-Burnett as a template for Internet discussion forums," which quotes to great effect a description written by British novelist Elizabeth Taylor of the work of her fellow novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett:

A dark madness pervades. Beyond the insanities, nothing happens. A bunch of rococo & unpleasant people stand talking in a room; first in one house, then in another, then back again at the first. Who shall sit down 13th at a table they discuss for a whole chapter. They all speak the same, even the children. They are all nasty. No one does any work - not even the governess.

http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/ivy_comptonburnett_as_a_template_for_internet_discussion_fo.htm

I adore the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett, but to read, not to live through.

Let's face it, the bad in the world is mainly the fault of young men. Take the fate of poor Sandra Bullock. From Oscar winner to "My husband cheated on me with a Nazi hoe!" inside of two weeks -- if it gets any worse than that in the public eye, please do not tell me, I do not want to know about it. For all the loose socio-biological talk about men being more naturally promiscuous than women, I think there's more going on with Jesse James and Tiger Woods than that, because those guys were already married to incredibly beautiful, classy, respected women -- women that other men fantasize about -- and not only did they cheat on them with complete skanks, they don't seem to have put up the slightest struggle against doing so. Aaron Traister at Salon asks quite reasonably, "Why do cheaters marry?"

Wouldn't it be easier for a man not to get married, at least until he decided his carrot was sufficiently wet? Why put yourself through the strain of a potentially messy extramarital affair? Don't we live in a brave new world where we don't judge others for choosing not to worship at the altar of familial bliss? Wasn't it our grandparents' generation who naively worried about the status of being "an older bachelor"? Look at George Clooney. That guy will never have a sex scandal.
 
http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2010/03/26/why_cheaters_marry/

I have something in common with Bullock and Elin Nordegren, in that I was in a "committed relationship" for several years with a man who, I later discovered, spent every available minute and particle of energy trolling the Internet for pick-ups, trolling the Internet for porn, orgying, barebacking (he was HIV+), making home-made porn, injecting crystal meth, injecting club drugs, selling the same drugs, and embezzling from his employer in order to pay for the above, all beneath an unimpeachably middle-class, church-going veneer. How could I not have known? Well, a certain part of you does not want to know, and you indulge that part (and feel like a total blithering fool later). It is probably true that Sandra Bullock should not have married a man named Jesse James who used to be married to a porno actress -- red flags! -- but I'm not the one to cast stones.

It also strikes me that modern technologies have been an incredible gift to horndogs everywhere. It used to be that it would be surpassingly difficult to initiate your cheating from within the confines of your home. You couldn't receive letters that your wife wouldn't see, you couldn't take phone calls that she wouldn't hear. Now, through the silencio of web-surfing, email, and "sexting," those hurdles are long gone. You can be arranging your next liaison with your thumbs while you're eating dinner. Gotta answer the boss on the Blackberry, honey!

The technologies themselves seem to be especially addictive for males, and drive their other compulsions forward. Internet gambling, child porn, fetish discussion groups -- it's all an electronic world. As a cautionary example, look at the experience of Tom Bissell, a young writer who got sucked up in the world of the video game Grand Theft Auto, which he would play so long at a time that he developed a cocaine habit just to keep going:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2010/mar/21/tom-bissell-video-game-cocaine-addiction 

Or you could waste the next few years of your life having random encounters with deeply random people on ChatRoulette:

http://thefastertimes.com/campusanonymousletters/2010/03/24/to-the-masses-who-make-chatroulette-such-a-freakshow/

Well, at least I can get a blog post out of all this idiocy. The great historian of reading and publishing, Robert Darnton, compares blogging to the zesty world of 18th century news-sheets (a comparison I made myself as a throwaway comment on June 29, 2008):

http://blogs.nybooks.com/post/456582401/blogging-now-and-then

http://patrickmurthasdiary.blogspot.com/2008/06/blogging.html

Among notables born on this date are novelists Henri Murger, Heinrich Mann, Budd Schulberg, and Shusaku Endo, poets Alfred de Vigny, Louis Simpson, and Kenneth Slessor (Australia), statesman Cyrus Vance, cartoonist Carl Barks, illustrator Nathaniel Currier, architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, French urban planner Baron Haussmann, composers Vincent d'Indy and Ferde Grofe, jazz singer Sarah Vaughan, pop singer Mariah Carey, cellist Mtislav Rostropovich, jazz saxophonist Ben Webster, jazz clarinetist Pee Wee Russell, film director Quentin Tarantino, and actors Richard Denning, Maria Schneider, Gloria Swanson, David Janssen, Michael York, and Austin Pendleton. The great poet Kenneth Slessor (1901-1971) is one of a rather large group of Australian writers who simply don't get the attention they deserve outside their home country. "Five Bells," "a meditation on the death of a friend by drowning" (Martin Seymour-Smith), is as moving a poem as you'll find in English-language writing through the whole of the 20th century, and intensely written, with memorable phrases tumbling one after the other:

Time that is moved by little fidget wheels
Is not my time, the flood that does not flow.
Between the double and the single bell
Of a ship's hour, between a round of bells
From the dark warship riding there below,
I have lived many lives, and this one life
Of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells.

Deep and dissolving verticals of light
Ferry the falls of moonshine down. Five bells
Coldly rung out in a machine's voice. Night and water
Pour to one rip of darkness, the Harbour floats
In the air, the Cross hangs upside-down in water.

Why do I think of you, dead man, why thieve
These profitless lodgings from the flukes of thought
Anchored in Time? You have gone from earth,
Gone even from the meaning of a name;
Yet something's there, yet something forms its lips
And hits and cries against the ports of space,
Beating their sides to make its fury heard.

Are you shouting at me, dead man, squeezing your face
In agonies of speech on speechless panes?
Cry louder, beat the windows, bawl your name!

But I hear nothing, nothing...only bells,
Five bells, the bumpkin calculus of Time.
Your echoes die, your voice is dowsed by Life,
There's not a mouth can fly the pygmy strait -
Nothing except the memory of some bones
Long shoved away, and sucked away, in mud;
And unimportant things you might have done,
Or once I thought you did; but you forgot,
And all have now forgotten - looks and words
And slops of beer; your coat with buttons off,
Your gaunt chin and pricked eye, and raging tales
Of Irish kings and English perfidy,
And dirtier perfidy of publicans
Groaning to God from Darlinghurst.
Five bells.

Then I saw the road, I heard the thunder
Tumble, and felt the talons of the rain
The night we came to Moorebank in slab-dark,
So dark you bore no body, had no face,
But a sheer voice that rattled out of air
(As now you'd cry if I could break the glass),
A voice that spoke beside me in the bush,
Loud for a breath or bitten off by wind,
Of Milton, melons, and the Rights of Man,
And blowing flutes, and how Tahitian girls
Are brown and angry-tongued, and Sydney girls
Are white and angry-tongued, or so you'd found.
But all I heard was words that didn't join
So Milton became melons, melons girls,
And fifty mouths, it seemed, were out that night,
And in each tree an Ear was bending down,
Or something that had just run, gone behind the grass,
When blank and bone-white, like a maniac's thought,
The naphtha-flash of lightning slit the sky,
Knifing the dark with deathly photographs.
There's not so many with so poor a purse
Or fierce a need, must fare by night like that,
Five miles in darkness on a country track,
But when you do, that's what you think.
Five bells.

In Melbourne, your appetite had gone,
Your angers too; they had been leeched away
By the soft archery of summer rains
And the sponge-paws of wetness, the slow damp
That stuck the leaves of living, snailed the mind,
And showed your bones, that had been sharp with rage,
The sodden ectasies of rectitude.
I thought of what you'd written in faint ink,
Your journal with the sawn-off lock, that stayed behind
With other things you left, all without use,
All without meaning now, except a sign
That someone had been living who now was dead:
"At Labassa. Room 6 x 8
On top of the tower; because of this, very dark
And cold in winter. Everything has been stowed
Into this room - 500 books all shapes
And colours, dealt across the floor
And over sills and on the laps of chairs;
Guns, photoes of many differant things
And differant curioes that I obtained..."

In Sydney, by the spent aquarium-flare
Of penny gaslight on pink wallpaper,
We argued about blowing up the world,
But you were living backward, so each night
You crept a moment closer to the breast,
And they were living, all of them, those frames
And shapes of flesh that had perplexed your youth,
And most your father, the old man gone blind,
With fingers always round a fiddle's neck,
That graveyard mason whose fair monuments
And tablets cut with dreams of piety
Rest on the bosoms of a thousand men
Staked bone by bone, in quiet astonishment
At cargoes they had never thought to bear,
These funeral-cakes of sweet and sculptured stone.

Where have you gone? The tide is over you,
The turn of midnight water's over you,
As Time is over you, and mystery,
And memory, the flood that does not flow.
You have no suburb, like those easier dead
In private berths of dissolution laid -
The tide goes over, the waves ride over you
And let their shadows down like shining hair,
But they are Water; and the sea-pinks bend
Like lilies in your teeth, but they are Weed;
And you are only part of an Idea.
I felt the wet push its black thumb-balls in,
The night you died, I felt your eardrums crack,
And the short agony, the longer dream,
The Nothing that was neither long nor short;
But I was bound, and could not go that way,
But I was blind, and could not feel your hand.
If I could find an answer, could only find
Your meaning, or could say why you were here
Who now are gone, what purpose gave you breath
Or seized it back, might I not hear your voice?

I looked out my window in the dark
At waves with diamond quills and combs of light
That arched their mackerel-backs and smacked the sand
In the moon's drench, that straight enormous glaze,
And ships far off asleep, and Harbour-buoys
Tossing their fireballs wearily each to each,
And tried to hear your voice, but all I heard
Was a boat's whistle, and the scraping squeal
Of seabirds' voices far away, and bells,
Five bells. Five bells coldly ringing out.
Five bells.