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Zinn: And observe the map device here -- how the map is itself completely Gondor-centric. Rohan and Gondor are treated as though they are the literal center of Middle Earth. Obviously this is because they have men living there. What of places such as Anfalas and Forlindon or Near Harad? One never really hears anything about places like that. And this so-called map casually reveals other places -- the Lost Realm, the Northern Waste (lost to whom? wasted how? I ask) -- but tells us nothing about them. It is as though the people who live in these places are despicable, and unworthy of mention. Who is producing this tale? What is their agenda? What are their interests and how are those interests being served by this portrayal? Questions we need to ask repeatedly.

Zinn: And notice how Strider characterizes the Black Riders. "Neither living nor dead." Why, that's a really useful enemy to have.

Chomsky: Yes. In this way you can never verify their existence, and yet they're horribly terrifying. We should not overlook the fact that Middle Earth is in a cold war at this moment, locked in perpetual conflict. Strider's rhetoric serves to keep fear alive.

Chomsky's and Zinn's take on Lord of the Rings, part 1

part 2

Chomsky's and Zinn's take on Lord of the Rings, part 1

part 2

From the review of Dancing Barefoot:

The best is Houses -- although it sometimes ranges into maudlin territory, it is also the most courageous writing in the book. Wheaton's generation has been raised on a diet of pop culture and cynicism, and it's invigorating -- if somewhat startling -- to see someone of that generation openly expressing such feelings of devotion and despair.

Startling, but not unique in this generation. David Eggers' memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Based on a True Story specialises in this style of self-revealing, self-referential, reflective, intelligent, witty prose. One can't help but notice the similarities in the relationship between Eggers and his brother Toph, and the relationship Wheaton has with his stepson. While reveling in the part of himself that will always be a boy brought out by the younger (the child is father of the man, and all that) he also can reflect on the call to greater responsibility required by the relationship, accepted somewhat reluctantly.

Eggers started a whole (and very good) imprimatur with a group of authors and artists who also transcend the pop culture they were raised on. Good Stuff and worth reading!

Zinn: Well, you know, it would be manifestly difficult to believe in magic rings unless everyone was high on pipe-weed. So it is in Gandalf's interest to keep Middle Earth hooked.

...

Zinn: Right. And here we receive our first glimpse of the supposedly dreadful Mordor, which actually looks like a fairly functioning place.

Wonder why nobody thought of using comression in this manner before? This has all sorts of potential uses.

That hardly stopped them airing The Brady Bunch. I'd have thought use of drugs and Apple products hardly disjoint. They could do passably running targets specifically intended to appeal to recreational drug users.

Funniest sig ever, for those wondering, all is explained here.

Heh. Too late now.

Not quite. Check out McSweeneys to find out where the best new lit in the world is coming from.

Another example is David Eggers' McSweeney's Books, which is basically the publishing equivalent of an independent record label. This article relates that McSweeney's can do a very good looking hardcover (better than most of what you see at B&N or Borders) for $2.80/copy. Makes you think.

Eggers' literary collaborators that will also make the cut:

* David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest) -- A post-postmodern masterwork.

* Zadie Smith (White Teeth) -- A cross-cultural, multi-generational comic epic.

It does not "kick the mainstream media's ass". Most of it is stream-of-conciousness ranting from somebody with a Thesaurus. This article kicks ass, and doesn't do its best to piss everybody off with misinformed opinions on Mid-East politics. Mr Driver actually thinks the US is involved with the conflict in Israel because of oil! Even a fifth grader can tell you there is no oil in Israel, and it has no strategic value, like Suadi Arabia or Kuwait. America, with the largest population of Jews in the world (including Israel) is involved in Israel because American Jews vote for legislators and presidents that want America to be involved in Israel. There's a bunch of other crap in there, but I'm down to like 3 Karma, so fuck it.

What I got from the article is that it does do hardcover. It doesn't matter anyway, because with hardcover books, the author usually has a lot of input into the layout of the book, a la McSweeney's. Also, publishers often make harcover books in unique aspect ratios, materials, endplates, color plates inside, edging styles, bleeds, etc, etc. I could see this replacing paperbacks maybe, but this will do to good quality harcovers what CDs did to LPs: make elitists out of real readers.

Brace yourselves: Here's a long rant against the notion of being superior to mass-produced cool, by author Dave Eggers. Enjoy.

=====+

First, a primer: When I got your questions, I was provoked. You expressed many of the feelings I used to have, when I was in high school and college, about some of the people I admired at the time, people who at some point disappointed me in some way, or made moves I could not understand. So I took a few passages from your questions - those pertaining to or hinting at "selling out" - and I used them as a launching pad for a rant I've wanted to write for a while now, and more so than ever since my own book has become successful. And the rant was timely, because shortly after getting your questions, I was scheduled to speak at Yale, and so, assuming that their minds might be in a similar spot as yours, I read this, the below, to them, in slightly less polished form. The rant is directed to myself, age 20, as much as it is to you, so remember that if you ever want to take much offense.

----

You actually asked me the question: "Are you taking any steps to keep shit real?" I want you always to look back on this time as being a time when those words came out of your mouth.

Now, there was a time when such a question - albeit probably without the colloquial spin - would have originated from my own brain. Since I was thirteen, sitting in my orange-carpeted bedroom in ostensibly cutting-edge Lake Forest, Illinois, subscribing to the Village Voice and reading the earliest issues of Spin, I thought I had my ear to the railroad tracks of avant garde America. (Laurie Anderson, for example, had grown up only miles away!) I was always monitoring, with the most sensitive and well-calibrated apparatus, the degree of selloutitude exemplified by any given artist - musical, visual, theatrical, whatever. I was vigilant and merciless and knew it was my job to be so.

I bought R.E.M.'s first EP, Chronic Town, when it came out and thought I had found God. I loved Murmur, Reckoning, but then watched, with greater and greater dismay, as this obscure little band's audience grew, grew beyond obsessed people like myself, grew to encompass casual fans, people who had heard a song on the radio and picked up Green and listened for the hits. Old people liked them, and stupid people, and my moron neighbor who had sex with truck drivers. I wanted these phony R.E.M.-lovers dead.

But it was the band's fault, too. They played on Letterman. They switched record labels. Even their album covers seemed progressively more commercial. And when everyone I knew began liking them, I stopped. Had they changed, had their commitment to making art with integrity changed? I didn't care, because for me, any sort of popularity had an inverse relationship with what you term the keeping 'real' of 'shit.' When the Smiths became slightly popular they were sellouts. Bob Dylan appeared on MTV and of course was a sellout. Recently, just at dinner tonight, after a huge, sold-out reading by David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell (both sellouts), I was sitting next to an acquaintance, a very smart acquaintance married to the singer-songwriter of a very well-known band. I mentioned that I had seen the Flaming Lips the night before. She rolled her eyes. "Oh I really liked them on 90210," she sneered, assuming that this would put me and the band in our respective places.

However.

Was she aware that The Flaming Lips had composed an album requiring the simultaneous playing of four separate discs, on four separate CD players? Was she aware that the band had once, for a show at Lincoln Center, handed out to audience members something like 100 portable tape players, with 100 different tapes, and had them all played at the same time, creating a symphonic sort of effect, one which completely devastated everyone in attendance? I went on and on to her about the band's accomplishments, their experiments. Was she convinced that they were more than their one appearance with Jason Priestly? She was.

Now, at that concert the night before, Wayne Coyne, the lead singer, had himself addressed this issue, and to great effect. After playing much of their new album, the band paused and he spoke to the audience. I will paraphrase what he said:

"Hi. Well, some people get all bitter when some song of theirs gets popular, and they refuse to play it. But we're not like that. We're happy that people like this song. So here it goes."

Then they played the song. (You know the song.) "She Don't Use Jelly" is the song, and it is a silly song, and it was their most popular song. But to highlight their enthusiasm for playing the song, the band released, from the stage and from the balconies, about 200 balloons. (Some of the balloons, it should be noted, were released by two grown men in bunny suits.) Then while playing the song, Wayne sang with a puppet on his hand, who also sang into the microphone. It was fun. It was good.

But was it a sellout? Probably. By some standards, yes. Can a good band play their hit song? Should we hate them for this? Probably, probably. First 90210, now they go playing the song every stupid night. Everyone knows that 90210 is not cutting edge, and that a cutting edge alternarock band should not appear on such a show. That rule is clearly stated in the obligatory engrained computer-chip sellout manual that we were all given when we hit adolescence.

But this sellout manual serves only the lazy and small. Those who bestow sellouthood upon their former heroes are driven to do so by, first and foremost, the unshakable need to reduce. The average one of us - a taker-in of various and constant media, is absolutely overwhelmed - as he or she should be - with the sheer volume of artistic output in every conceivable medium given to the world every day - it is simply too much to begin to process or comprehend - and so we are forced to try to sort, to reduce. We designate, we label, we diminish, we create hierarchies and categories.

Through largely received wisdom, we rule out Tom Waits's new album because it's the same old same old, and we save $15. U2 has lost it, Radiohead is too popular. Country music is bad, Puff Daddy is bad, the last Wallace book was bad because that one reviewer said so. We decide that TV is bad unless it's the Sopranos. We liked Rick Moody and Jonathan Lethem and Jeffrey Eugenides until they allowed their books to become movies. And on and on. The point is that we do this and to a certain extent we must do this. We must create categories, and to an extent, hierarchies.

But you know what is easiest of all? When we dismiss. Oh how gloriously comforting, to be able to write someone off. Thus, in the overcrowded pantheon of alternarock bands, at a certain juncture, it became necessary for a certain brand of person to write off The Flaming Lips, despite the fact that everyone knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that their music was superb and groundbreaking and real. We could write them off because they shared a few minutes with Jason Priestley and that terrifying Tori Spelling person. Or we could write them off because too many magazines have talked about them. Or because it looked like the bassist was wearing too much gel in his hair.

One less thing to think about. Now, how to kill off the rest of our heroes, to better make room for new ones?

We liked Guided by Voices until they let Ric Ocasek produce their latest album, and everyone knows Ocasek is a sellout, having written those mushy Cars songs in the late 80s, and then - gasp! - produced Weezer's album, and of course Weezer's no good, because that Sweater song was on the radio, right, and dorky teenage girls were singing it and we cannot have that and so Weezer is bad and Ocasek is bad and Guided by Voices are bad, even if Spike Jonze did direct that one Weezer video, and we like Spike Jonze, don't we?

Oh. No. We don't. We don't like him anymore because he's married to Sofia Coppola, and she is not cool. Not cool. So bad in Godfather 3, such nepotism. So let's check off Spike Jonze - leaving room in our brains for who??

It's exhausting.

The only thing worse than this sort of activity is when people, students and teachers alike, run around college campuses calling each other racists and anti-Semites. It's born of boredom, lassitude. Too cowardly to address problems of substance where such problems actually are, we claw at those close to us. We point to our neighbor, in the khakis and sweater, and cry foul. It's ridiculous. We find enemies among our peers because we know them better, and their proximity and familiarity means we don't have to get off the couch to dismantle them.

And now, I am also a sellout. Here are my sins, many of which you may know about already:

First, I was a sellout because Might magazine took ads. Then I was a sellout because our pages were color, and not stapled together at the Kinko's. Then I was a sellout because I went to work for Esquire. Now I'm a sellout because my book has sold many copies. And because I have done many interviews. And because I have let people take my picture. And because my goddamn picture has been in just about every fucking magazine and newspaper printed in America.

And now, as far as McSweeney's is concerned, The Advocate interviewer wants to know if we're losing also our edge, if the magazine is selling out, hitting the mainstream, if we're still committed to publishing unknowns, and pieces killed by other magazines.

And the fact is, I don't give a fuck. When we did the last issue, this was my thought process: I saw a box. So I decided we'd do a box. We were given stories by some of our favorite writers - George Saunders, Rick Moody (who is uncool, uncool!), Haruki Murakami, Lydia Davis, others - and so we published them. Did I wonder if people would think we were selling out, that we were not fulfilling the mission they had assumed we had committed ourselves to?

No. I did not. Nor will I ever. We just don't care. We care about doing what we want to do creatively. We want to be interested in it. We want it to challenge us. We want it to be difficult. We want to reinvent the stupid thing every time. Would I ever think, before I did something, of how those with sellout monitors would respond to this or that move? I would not. The second I sense a thought like that trickling into my brain, I will put my head under the tires of a bus.

You want to know how big a sellout I am?

A few months ago I wrote an article for Time magazine and was paid $12,000 for it I am about to write something, 1,000 words, 3 pages or so, for something called Forbes ASAP, and for that I will be paid $6,000 For two years, until five months ago, I was on the payroll of ESPN magazine, as a consultant and sometime contributor. I was paid handsomely for doing very little. Same with my stint at Esquire. One year I spent there, with little to no duties. I wore khakis every day. Another Might editor and I, for almost a year, contributed to Details magazine, under pseudonyms, and were paid $2000 each for what never amounted to more than 10 minutes work - honestly never more than that. People from Hollywood want to make my book into a movie, and I am probably going to let them do so, and they will likely pay me a great deal of money for the privilege.

Do I care about this money? I do. Will I keep this money? Very little of it. Within the year I will have given away almost a million dollars to about 100 charities and individuals, benefiting everything from hospice care to an artist who makes sculptures from Burger King bags. And the rest will be going into publishing books through McSweeney's. Would I have been able to publish McSweeney's if I had not worked at Esquire? Probably not. Where is the $6000 from Forbes going? To a guy named Joe Polevy, who wants to write a book about the effects of radiator noise on children in New England.

Now, what if I were keeping all the money? What if I were buying property in St. Kitt's or blew it all on live-in prostitutes? What if, for example, I was, a few nights ago, sitting at a table in SoHo with a bunch of Hollywood slash celebrity acquaintances, one of whom I went to high school with, and one of whom was Puff Daddy? Would that make me a sellout? Would that mean I was a force of evil?

What if a few nights before that I was at the home of Julian Schnabel, at a party featuring Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro, and at which Schnabel said we should get together to talk about him possibly directing my movie? And what if I said sure, let's?

Would all that make me a sellout? Would I be uncool? Would it have been more cool to not go to this party, or to not have written that book, or done that interview, or to have refused millions from Hollywood?

The thing is, I really like saying yes. I like new things, projects, plans, getting people together and doing something, trying something, even when it's corny or stupid. I am not good at saying no. And I do not get along with people who say no. When you die, and it really could be this afternoon, under the same bus wheels I'll stick my head if need be, you will not be happy about having said no. You will be kicking your ass about all the no's you've said. No to that opportunity, or no to that trip to Nova Scotia or no to that night out, or no to that project or no to that person who wants to be naked with you but you worry about what your friends will say.

No is for wimps. No is for pussies. No is to live small and embittered, cherishing the opportunities you missed because they might have sent the wrong message.

There is a point in one's life when one cares about selling out and not selling out. One worries whether or not wearing a certain shirt means that they are behind the curve or ahead of it, or that having certain music in one's collection means that they are impressive, or unimpressive.

Thankfully, for some, this all passes. I am here to tell you that I have, a few years ago, found my way out of that thicket of comparison and relentless suspicion and judgment. And it is a nice feeling. Because, in the end, no one will ever give a shit who has kept shit 'real' except the two or three people, sitting in their apartments, bitter and self-devouring, who take it upon themselves to wonder about such things. The keeping real of shit matters to some people, but it does not matter to me. It's fashion, and I don't like fashion, because fashion does not matter.

What matters is that you do good work. What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand. What matters is that the Flaming Lips's new album is ravishing and I've listened to it a thousand times already, sometimes for days on end, and it enriches me and makes me want to save people. What matters is that it will stand forever, long after any narrow-hearted curmudgeons have forgotten their appearance on goddamn 90210. What matters is not the perception, nor the fashion, not who's up and who's down, but what someone has done and if they meant it. What matters is that you want to see and make and do, on as grand a scale as you want, regardless of what the tiny voices of tiny people say. Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a fuckload of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what matters. What matters is saying yes.

I say yes, and Wayne Coyne says yes, and if that makes us the enemy, then good, good, good. We are evil people because we want to live and do things. We are on the wrong side because we should be home, calculating which move would be the least damaging to our downtown reputations. But I say yes because I am curious. I want to see things. I say yes when my high school friend tells me to come out because he's hanging with Puffy. A real story, that. I say yes when Hollywood says they'll give me enough money to publish a hundred different books, or send twenty kids through college. Saying no is so fucking boring.

And if anyone wants to hurt me for that, or dismiss me for that, for saying yes, I say Oh do it, do it you motherfuckers, finally, finally, finally.

The original writer and the bulk of the discussion participants take a hostile, superior stance towards mass-market pop culture. I'd like to direct y'all's attention towards a bit of writing by Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and editor of McSweeney'sand generally recognized as the hippest, most po-mo dude in the room. He gave an online interview in the Harvard Advocate last year, and the interviewer asked him, in light of his recent exposure in the evil corporate media, what he was doing to "keep shit real." He responded with an articulate, impassioned rant on the stupidity of the question, and of the notion of trying to increase one's own cool by distancing oneself from the "mainstream," "mass-marketed" notion of cool.

Here's the entire interview. It's rather long; I'll follow up w/ a reprint of the relevant section below, if /. will allow...

McSweeny's did a great interview with some key people in this around August 1999. I don't mention this so much for the na-na old-news taunt but to mention McSweeney's because it is the most hope-inspiring awe-tingling side-crunching source of all things good I've yet to find in any 'journal.' Here's a sample of questions the obliging scientists answered - excerpted from the full interview (it appeared in the third volume of the journal, it's not on-line) INTERVIEWER So, how long before I can get a three-pack of bulletproof underwear? (response - 3 - 5 years). INTERVIEWER So to sum up, you're taking dwarf goats from Madagascar, and inserting the gene(s) of a black widow spider into them, thus altering their DNA so that they will produce, through the natural process of lactation, spider silk in their milk...Not to be crass, but basically these are silk-squirting baby spidergoats? ... SPAGNA (scientist@Berkley in response to INTERVIEWER's question about timothy leary's spider experiments) I found a few pages once ... showing drug vs. normal webs from caffeine, LSD and adenochrome dosed spiders ... (shows a book illustrating the LSD dosed spiders made *improvements* in their web.) INTERVIEWER Wow, caffeine = bad; LSD = not so bad. Shouldn't we extrapolate this to a human scale, for instance, supplying LSD and other hallucinogens, to, say, architects and construction workers?SPAGNA ...these questions are extremely important ...there are very few social arachnologists ... INTERVIEWER Dr. Lewis, do you have any ethical concerns yourself with spidergoat research? Dr. LEWIS (U. Wyoming) ...Since my kids and I raise sheep, which started as their 4-H projects, I don't have problems with raising animals for a variety of uses... See you just don't get quality journalism like this from Forbes. *kill my sig*

• McSWEENEY'S ISSUE #6
  Featuring the music of They Might Be Giants In January, we will have ready, we hope, our new issue. This new issue will be like a regular nice issue of McSweeney's, except the good thing here will be that there will be a soundtrack disc included in the package. This music will correspond to each and every story or drawing in the issue. One piece of music for each piece of writing or artwork. This music will be made by a band called They Might Be Giants, though they will likely also ask other musicmakers, such as M. Doughty and Philip Glass, to compose songs for this soundtrack. It will be fun; you will see.

Only in his Citrus Glory can we hope to evolve beyond "dirty ape".

You say that like it would be a good idea. You are tragically misinformed. "Dirty ape" is where it's at. A pint of Dirty Ape for breakfast, and a blunt for lunch: Bring Me the Head of Patrick Buchanan! That's how I beat the hell out of the day. It works for me, it'll work for you. Dirty Ape on the rocks, a shot of Dirty Ape with a beer chaser! Pork ribs marinated in Dirty Ape, orange juice, and black pepper. You'll never regret tender lamb in a Dirty Ape sauce with rosemary and cranberries, and it does wonders for duck. Ahh, duck! Try some fresh, crunchy bread with duck-liver mousse, grated truffles, a dusting of grated sapsago, and a stiff shot of Dirty Ape to follow it down -- there ain't no better eatin', my little four-footed friends, and that's a fact.

Don't eat the artifacts, midshipman. I fancy a snort.

And I'll do it all in my dream kitchen.


All recipies above are released into the public domain under the terms of the Gratuitous Polemic License, in the hope that they will be found intolerable and elicit equally irrational responses. No warranty is asked or given.

What, then, is the Slashdot community?

It's a handful of funny trolls and a handful of informative coders, sitting atop a vast shitheap of yammering idiots.


Are the various forums and communities that exist all over the Internet totally devoid of intelligentsia?

Well . . . yes. They are. I spent some time subscribed to the Thomas Pynchon listserv this Fall. What a waste of bandwidth. And the net goes downhill from there, the only exceptions being Suck and McSweeney's. Feed has its moments too, I guess. But none of those is a "community" in any sense at all. Hey, wait, there's Neal Stephenson, too; IMHO he's ahead even of the Sucksters in the "internet intellectual" game. He's a thoughtful, intelligent person who groks the damn subject well enough to illuminate it. Jon Katz is endlessly amusing and I think he's a perfect fit for Slashdot, but he's not thoughtful, he's not intelligent, and he sure as hell doesn't grok anything, least of all technology.


I was under the impression that before this 'new economy' came a whole new brand of intelligentsia - the self-teaching, self-enhancing swag of techno-brutes that have been lifting themselves out of the muck of obscurity with the tools of the Internet and creating whole new social spheres, which subsequently resulted in entirely different modes of online economy.

They teach themselves Perl and enhance their t-shirt collections. This has nothing to do with an "intelligentsia". I'm hoping that you're using "economy" in some figurative sense, 'cause if you're not, you've missed the point more thoroughly than I care to contemplate. It's really not about making a quick buck at all. Crack dealers do that. BFD. If you're coming from a hard-core libertarian perspective, that would explain a lot: That viewpoint is fundamentally hostile to intellectualism, and answers all questions with the word "money". Hey, it's a free country, YMMV, it takes all kinds, etc. No problem. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, just a very profoundly different thing.


am I missing something here or is Bruce waxing poetic and I'm just being too literal?

Yer waxin' a bit poetic there yourself, my friend :) You're not being literal, he is. He's talking about a phenomenon that hasn't existed in the US for the last few decades, that's all. It's nothing most Americans have ever encountered, at least not since the lad in my .sig shuffled off.

Try to vary it a bit. It's not a bad riff, but I'm almost certain that this post here is copy'n'pasted from another previous one, IIRC in the Fox/Linux discussion. It's funnier if you keep going somewhere with it.

By the way, do you read McSweeney's? There's something about your flat, deadpan style and the way you repeat yourself that reminds me of them. "You will be handsomely rewarded!" is for example a McSweeney's-ish phrase. That's not a bad thing at all, by the way. By no manner of means: "Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf. Like the famous 'aesthetic number' 1.618 [the Golden Ratio, ed.], trochaic tetrameter catalectic has an ineffable attraction."

I couldn't've said it better myself.