The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, by Samuel C. Florman

It’s an ugly trend, I know, for book reviews to center too much around the reviewer—a sign, perhaps, that the reviewer is too much of a self-centered asshole to snap out of his natural narcissistic delusion to actually consider the work at hand—but in this case, I might have a small responsibility to start out with some caveats about myself. As a physics grad student, see, I come programmed with a swarm of biases about engineering. In physics classes, we are taught to scorn engineers, to think that they’re a necessary but secondary life form that exists to take our discoveries and put them out into the world. Our discoveries, though—let’s be clear about the boundaries of importance. These engineers are not to be thought of as pioneers or anything so grand; they’re worker bees doing the world’s work, while we, the great queens, give them the pictures of the world that they, neither intelligent enough nor imaginative enough to imagine otherwise, must blindly take as truth. This nasty little caricature may be necessary for the promulgation of physics (something to keep physicists from asking those practical questions like: why, if I’m so smart, do I get paid so little? and why doesn’t society think I’m cool, huh?), and engineers, so I’m told, are taught to harbor similar negative biases toward ‘pure’ scientists, those poor, impractical schmucks who couldn’t implement a real-world solution if life depended on it.

So it stands. So, too, it is probably not all that surprising that ‘The Existential Pleasures of Engineering’ didn’t overly rile my humors. The book itself is one of those tradesman’s classics that engineers (at least, the engineers at Dordt college, in my hometown) are assigned to read in their intro-to-engineering course as a pep talk that outlines what an engineer does, why this is good for society, and why, for those suited to it, engineering can be an enjoyable and profitable way to spend a life. These aren’t overly ambitious goals for a book, but they make it perfectly suited for that minor-classics niche that fills up introductory course syllabi. For non-engineers, the interesting parts of the book are likely to be those least involved in the craft of itself. For instance, what’s that ‘existential’ qualifier doing in the title of the book? And why this unusual emphasis on ‘pleasure’?

To explain those rhetorical questions, the first place to look is the preface, where Florman sets out the goals of his enterprise with an engineer’s directness:

At first glance, engineering and existentialism appear to have nothing to do with each other. The engineer uses the logic of science to achieve practical results. The existentialist is guided by the promptings of his heart, which, as Pascal said, has its reasons that reason cannot know. The existentialism most typically sees the engineer as an antagonist whose analytical methods and pragmatic approach to life are said to be desensitizing and soul deadening—in a word, antiexistential. To show that this adversary relationship is based on a misapprehension of the nature of the engineering experience is—as can be surmised from the title—a primary objective of the book.

Well, good enough. Next, though, we should probably check the copyright page, to position this puppy in history. 1976—the bicentennial year, true, but also right in the middle of the Future-Shock Decade, the Me Decade, and (most importantly) just after the Vietnam War’s end. History, at least to hear this book’s message, had conspired against the engineer. Back in the good old days of American Progress, an engineer was a friend to tomorrow, a reality enhancer, a vision facilitator. No more. In the wake of Vietnam, the engineer was just another blank-faced technocrat responsible for making bombs, tinkering toward Armageddon. The first of the book’s three sections is devoted to demonstrating this fall from grace; it is largely a pastiche of quotes from poems and novels from before and after the fall. For example. Before, we get Walt Whitman on the possibilities of new technologies:

Lo, soul, seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?
The earth to be spann’d, connected by network,
The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,
The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,
The lands to be welded together.

Vs. Afterward, we’re given Cat Stevens as a representative of modern poetic protest (complete with unnecessary apostrophes, so as to compete with Whitman):

Well I think it’s fine building Jumbo planes, or taking a ride on a cosmic train, switch on summer from a slot machine, yes, get what you want to, if you want ‘cause you can get anything.
I know we’ve come a long way, we’re changing day to day, but tell me, where d’ th’ ch’ldr’n play?

As the man said, engineering needed an image rehab, and Part 2 of the book takes the fight to technology’s critics. In the chapter titled ‘Antitechnology’, he names his nemesi and gives each a key text: founding father of the antitechnologists, Jacques Ellul (“The Technological Society”); convert and intellectual heavyweight, Lewis Mumford (“The Myth of the Machine”—published in Pt. 1, “Technics and Human Development” and Pt. 2 “The Pentagon of Power”); scientific backer, the biologist Rene Dubos (“So Human an Animal”, which won the 1968 Pulitzer for nonfiction); popularizer via the New Yorker, Charles A. Reich (“The Greening of America”); and the man who put all this material into its final, summed-up form, Theodore Rozak (“Where the Wasteland Ends”). Here’s Florman talking smack: “They make an unlikely combination: a theological philosopher, a historian of technology, a biologist, and two academic apologists for the counterculture…With the exception of Dubos, who speaks in tones of sweet reason, they are all inclined to make extravagant statements, and, again with the exception of Dubos, they have been subjected to criticism and even ridicule. Yet certain of their basic ideas are receiving much serious attention. The thoughtful engineer has no choice but to give these ideas a hearing.” (pg. 48)

Given the already extant “criticism and ridicule” toward these poor luddites, the wringing that they’re put through in the next pages might seem a bit much. In terms of history, certainly, these guys posed little threat to engineering as a whole (especially since the ‘green’ movement in America today is so heavily intertwined with both engineering and capitalist economics). But the book is a pep talk, and any good pep talk includes a hefty offering of why the other team can be beat. This is kept mostly on the proper ideological level, and it’s possible that my boredom here is more that I’m already in the choir (no preaching necessary, thanks) than that the topics are so noncontroversial as I assume.

For instance. Under Florman’s characterization, the tone of all the antitechnological lit mentioned is uniform and unquestioning on some topics, one of these being the powerlessness of individuals to make their own decisions under the headlong march of techy progress. Florman prefigures Pinker on this subject and says that these critics have it exactly reversed. Technology is, as a capitalist enterprise, responding to the desires that people already have, not (as some suggest) insidiously creating needs in order to pump up profits. In fact, he goes farther with this critique and asserts that their referral to technology as an inevitable progression is just the type of dehumanization that they claim to detest, for behind each machine is an engineer, a human, and this person is simply doing his best to respond to societal needs with the tools he has. There’s even a subtext of snobbery in the antitechnologist’s furor. When Roszak complains of his irritation that during a trip to Yellowstone, “Never once were we out of earshot of chattering throngs and transistor radios or beyond the odor of automobile exhaust…Ah, wilderness,” Florman acidly responds, “How nice it would be for a select few of us if Delphi and Yellowstone could be set aside for our personal enjoyment, with the masses restricted to places to places such as Coney Island, more suited to their coarser sensibilities.” (pg. 80)

This is well said, and I find much to agree with in it. When today’s internet populists attack Al Gore’s plane flights and jumbo lodges, the same sort of anger gets (rightly) stoked. What I find harder to appreciate is why this little volume latches onto that most anti-intellectual of philosophies, existentialism, and claims it for the engineers. Aaaand…we’re back to the scientist/engineer divide. Florman praises the engineer as a ‘doer,’ as homo faber (‘man the maker’), and not as some scientist who would passively suck all meaning and pleasure from the world. No man plagued by doubt, he. Ah, screw it. Let him go to Sartre, and they can together condemn contemplation as an outcome of a bourgeoisie philosophy (really—Sartre does this, here). As for me, I can write little diatribes on my unread blog, dismissing the last third of the book as little more than a name-checking of every novel ever to involve an engineer. Hey, look, existentialists, I’m choosing! I’m sorry—I’m going to go indulge in some more of my sad passiveness, and try to actually understand what the hell’s going on…indeed, an unheroic thing, if ever. You can stuff it, engineers, O ye heroes.

"The Blank Slate" by Steven Pinker

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
--Reinhold Niebuhr

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature is a book about secular morality. This comes as something of a surprise, since author Steven Pinker is a Harvard psychologist whose other popular books deal largely with matters one might be able to stow away as scientific exotica (mostly evolutionary linguistics and neuroscience). But this book, his fourth, combines his interests as a scientist with his concerns as a citizen. Its major claim is that the ‘official theory’ (his term) of human nature held the large educated public—viz., that the human being is cut off and separate from the natural world, set apart uniquely as one who can make free decisions divorced from biology—is incorrect and, moreover, is ultimately a danger to society. He acknowledges that thinking of people as smart animals caught in all the brutal evolutionary traps is controversial, and the large bulk of the book is spent attempting to justify why this scary fact is not scary at all. His risky gambit toward this direction is to make the case that moral arguments must be divorced entirely from the workings of nature, and he argues furiously along these lines, acknowledging the evolutionary naturalness of rape and murder at the same time at the same time as he cheers on the struggle toward justice.

It makes for some odd reading, but this house divided against itself makes a mighty effort to stand. The beginning chapters are some of its strongest and most convincing, rooted as they are in normal science. Pinker argues that it is ultimately inconsistent, at odds both with data and with common sense, to believe that there is no inborn human nature. He points to results from cognitive science, neuroscience, behavioral genetics, and evolutionary psychology to make the point that it is much more coherent to posit that human desires shape culture than it is to say that culture is a primary shaper of humans, as is often claimed by humanities scholars. Language, one of Pinker’s particular interests, is held up as but one of the things that superficially differs between humans but ultimately shows the commonality of an inborn nature, just as wildebeests’ running minutes after birth shows an inborn tendency, a genetic characteristic unlearned and present from the beginning.

This isn’t completely novel material, and I doubt that any of the criticized chattering classes would undergo a radical conversion after reading the opening chapters. Pinker discusses this explicitly in the second part of the book (entitled, appropriately enough, “Fear and Loathing”). Pinker delves into the well-known cases of E.O. Wilson, author of Sociobiology, and Richard Herrnstein, author of the article “I.Q.” and co-author of The Bell Curve, contending—persuasively, I think—that the outcry against these men was mainly politically motivated and failed to falsify their claims. That Wilson is defended is no surprise; Wilson’s theory that evolution can be used to explain the structure of animal societies, including human societies, is an obvious and heavy influence on The Blank Slate. Wilson has his haters (including such Pinker-reviled luminaries as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin), but he is far from a pariah on the level of a Herrnstein. “I.Q.” is an infamous article, and in academic circles, Herrnstein’s name is nearly synonymous with ‘Social Darwinism.' To defend Herrnstein is to require some lengthy explanations.

And lengthy explanations are given. Chapter after chapter rolls along with the same dramatic thrust: that although evolutionary trends explain all the evils of the world, they don’t excuse them. For instance, getting back to Herrnstein, Pinker’s opinion is that we should look at his work to see that, yes, the social strata have different statistical profiles, and, yes, the ultimate causes of this order are likely to have an evolutionary flavor. But this should not be the end of our musing; we should now subject it to our moral reasoning. Does this order correspond with our core values? If not, we have a social duty to fight against nature, utilizing fighting tools designed with that stubborn beast, the human, in mind.

This strategy may sound uncomfortably ad hoc, even at first glance, but in the late “Hot Buttons” section of the book, where Mr. Pinker openly opines on the issues of Politics, Violence, Gender, Children and The Arts (in that order), his musings are earthly and timely. In the violence section, for instance, he probes the reasons why violence can be in an individual’s rational self-interest; following Hobbes, cantankerous author of the conservative political-science classic, Leviathan, he explains that violence can give a competitive (genetic) advantage, that it may arise spontaneously when two parties do not trust one another, and that it may bestow glory on the winner. This goes against the dual mantras claiming that violence is a learned behavior and that violence is a social disease. Recalling the violence he saw break out in a single afternoon after the start of a Montreal police strike, Pinker asserts that violence is a natural response to myriad societal pressures, should there be no opposing force pushing against it. “Denying the logic of violence makes it easy to forget how readily violence can flare up, and ignoring the parts of the mind that ignite violence makes it easy to overlook the parts that can extinguish it,” he says, reasonably enough.

Of course, the main reason that his argument works so well in the case of violence is that the quandary’s moral outcome is so well-rehearsed; were it to argue that violence is not as bad as we had all thought, then he would have an actual controversy on his hands. In other chapters, however, he does effectively that, turning conventional moral repugnancies—incest and embryonic human cloning, to name two examples—into evolutionary mistakes. These sections are likely to make many readers uncomfortable, for they underline the essential weakness of the entire strategy: when morals are divorced from any appeals to naturalness, they dissolve into mere sets of personal preferences for behavior. Certainly, logical groundings for behavior can be constructed (Pinker likes this approach—the interested reader is referred to John Rawls’s writings on Justice), but there is little to impel a person geared toward selfishness to follow these guidelines.

Weird, too, are the strictly defined corners of Pinker’s moral imagination. Listen to this rather tone-deaf passage:

On strictly rational grounds, the volatility of sex is a paradox, because in an era with contraception and women’s rights these archaic entanglements should have no claim on our feelings. We should be ziplessly loving the one we’re with, and sex should inspire no more gossip, music, fiction, raunchy humor, or strong emotions than eating or talking does. The fact that people are tormented by the Darwinian economics of babies they are no longer having is testimony to the long reach of human nature.

Unsurprisingly, he extends this argument to homosexuality, stating that “no logical argument can be formed against it.” To this Midwestern reader, at least, the curt dismissals seem to belie their own ignorance of human nature, for I have myself witnessed how an arbitrary set of beginning assumptions (which, given the scant supply of a priori truths, is where just about every argument begins) can rationally parlay into just about any imaginable conclusion.

Unfortunately, this is only the beginning of the book’s conceptual problems. Its goals—first convicting the reader that the tabula rasa view of mind is incorrect, and then showing why this view of things is at worst benign and at best extraordinarily helpful—require digressions into many areas of philosophy that are likely never to reach consensus. The four chapters designed to allay readers of specific fears that might come with conversion to the authors’ POV (fears of inequity, of imperfectability, of determinism, and of nihilism—to read off the chapter titles) are particularly unsatisfying. The chapter on determinism, in fact, is maddeningly illogical; rather than take one of the intellectually honest, though unsavory, options—options like admitting a mind/body split, or granting the illusory nature of free will, or even grasping onto some esoteric version of quantum mechanics—he merely lays out some of the sticky issues, only to back away. The stickiest of these issues is that of personal responsibility, which is resolved, as it were, by catchphrase. “The difference between explaining behavior and excusing it,” Pinker informs us, “is captured in the saying ‘To understand is not to forgive,’ and has been stressed in different ways by many philosophers, including Hume, Kant, and Sartre.”

On the other hand, I feel that I understand Pinker’s problem, and I forgive him for his slight dishonesty. Anyone who has honestly entertained the possibility that the world is set up to follow rules, tightly organized microscopic rules that churn on silently beneath the chaotic surfaces of our lives, must admit that (in that case) all their best justifications are nothing but theater. A person’s will, like all else, would be but a loosely bundled package of stimuli and accordant responses. The logical consistency of this worldview does nothing to curb the absurdity of actually living with it, which requires one to forget it each time a decision is to be made, with each turn signal and each uttered word. It is the absurdity of a life sharply divided between theory and action, between the knowledge of bondage and the illusion of choice. Camus had no idea.

I do not doubt that Steven Pinker has spent his hours staring into this deep pit; at some points, he nearly admits as much. But this leaves The Blank Slate in the paradoxical position of being just about the best book imaginable on the subject of how neo-Darwinism can cozily jibe with humanism. Only after turning the last page does the dust begin to clear: the old philosophical bugaboos are still here, but now they’re chasing us faster than ever.

Note: My discussion might make it sound like The Blank Slate is a tightly focused exposition of modern morals, as devoid of humor as this post. Not so, potential reader. Pinker goes out of his way to pepper the whole affair with cartoons, movie quotes, etc. It’s more of a shaggy-dog book of opinions and hearsay than it is a work of moral philosophy. Lest I give you any doubt, let me say this explicitly: I enjoyed reading this book, and maybe you would too.

American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis

Among books, American Psycho is something of a dirty celebrity, a work whose dribbling trail of sleazy reputation precedes it. The one-sentence summary is just too easy: Patrick Bateman, Harvard graduate and Wall Street shark, is a fashion-obsessed psychopath who flatly narrates his life as he proceeds to assault and gruesomely murder girlfriends and business associates, all the while unable to make his friends understand that he is, in fact, a serial killer (despite nearly constant confessions). A few years ago, a movie version came out with Christian Bale as a goofy, retro version of Pat Bateman, and nobody blinked. But in 1991, when the book first came out, it was a major item of debate. Despite a reported six-figure advance to Bret Easton Ellis, the hot-shot wunderkind with two successful novels under his belt, the original publisher Simon & Schuster noted the brewing controversy and dropped American Psycho, citing ‘aesthetic differences.’ Vintage Contemporaries picked it up, and the negative attention proved too compelling to resist, making it both a bestseller and a necessary discussion topic. In an oddly representative case of moral outrage, the New York Times refused to print the title on its bestseller list, lest the publicity drive more people to read it and (thus) to become raving, Armani-clad murderers. (If you’re interested, here is a more complete critical history.)

Even decades later, the book remains shocking, though it’s still hard to imagine that a novel—a what?—could provoke any kind of a public outcry. While reading it, I doubted that anyone could seriously believe that Ellis himself condoned the actions portrayed in his book, but there’s still the problem of ends and means to consider: does the audience really need to sit through graphic depictions of child murders, rape, necrophilia, cannibalism, etc., etc., to get the point? The contrary position was eloquently put forth by David Foster Wallace, a writer I admire very much, in this interview. Consider his opinion:

I think it’s a kind of black cynicism about today’s world that Ellis and certain others depend on for their readership. Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what’s always distinguished bad writing—flat characters, a narrative world that’s clichéd and not recognizably human, etc.—is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. You can defend "Psycho" as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it’s no more than that.

If I didn’t think that this point was worth considering, I wouldn’t quote it at such length. But I also think that DFW’s commentary trivializes what American Psycho actually does. The heart of his criticism is that AP does little to “illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in [the world].” Certainly, Patrick Bateman gives us few hints about how people might positively live, but it seems to me that the character already understands how he should live and consciously decides to go against it. His secretary, Jean, exemplifies the un-ironic, earnest love that he understands is healthy. Early on, he says that he’ll “probably marry her.” In one of the few tender passages of the book, near the end, after all the perversions and aversions have already been performed, Jean directly expresses her love for him, and after this direct outpouring, Patrick experiences what he calls a “flood of reality”—an awareness that, would he allow it, yielding to an honest relationship might change everything. Listen:

I sense [Jean] wants to rearrange my life in a significant way—her eyes tell me this and though I see a truth in them, I also know that one day, sometime very soon, she too will be locked in the rhythm of my insanity. All I have to do is keep silent about this and not bring it up—yet she weakens me, it’s almost as if she’s making the decision about who I am, and in my own stubborn, willful way I can admit to feeling a pang, something tightening inside, and before I can stop it I find myself almost dazzled and moved that I might have the capacity to accept, though not return, her love (pg. 378-9 of the 1st edition).

Of course, this is easy to miss, coming as it does after a section describing the ripped-out vaginas kept in his gym locker.

This passage, however, suggests why American Psycho might not focus on what people ‘should’ be doing: it’s simply too damn obvious. People should, ya’ know, care about each other and treat each other with some common decency. This is not difficult to grasp. What’s less obvious is the extent to which the slickness of the 1980s yuppie culture refuted these basic tenets. Patrick Bateman’s relentless chasing of surfaces, of workouts and sex with ‘hardbodies,’ is a depiction of hell in Manhattan, as is suggested in the book’s borrowed opening line—the iconic “ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE” from Dante’s Inferno, translated into a hip graffito. The extremity of this vision is relentless, a succession of smash cuts and videotapes depicting a world without restraint. It is the work of a moral diagnostician, and in that capacity, it is comparable to the work of the very different writer, Walker Percy, whose most famous novel, The Moviegoer, examined the beginnings of the unrestrained pursuit of passive pleasure. In this tradition, American Psycho represents the apocalyptic end of the line, with valuable criticism offered in the most jarring possible way.

Hopefully, we won’t need a reminder like this again.

Endnote: Although I haven’t seen the movie, I don’t think American Psycho would translate very well to film. This movie review shares some of my worries.

Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning...was the Command Line"

Tonight, I read Neal Stephenson’s book-length essay, In the Beginning…was the Command Line, which on one level is a meditation on computer operating systems, but which also contains some pretty brilliant discussion about the way that technology forces us toward mediated meta-involvements with our environment that ultimately take away as much power as they give. It’s printed as a book, but you can also find the full text available on the internet here.

As an example of the commentary contained therein, I offer up this short passage:

A few years ago I walked into a grocery store somewhere and was presented with the following tableau vivant : near the entrance a young couple were standing in front of a large cosmetics display. The man was stolidly holding a shopping basket between his hands while his mate raked blister-packs of makeup off the display and piled them in. Since then I've always thought of that man as the personification of an interesting human tendency: not only are we not offended to be dazzled by manufactured images, but we like it. We practically insist on it. We are eager to be complicit in our own dazzlement: to pay money for a theme park ride, vote for a guy who's obviously lying to us, or stand there holding the basket as it's filled up with cosmetics.

That sort of thing comprises the first ½ of the essay, whereupon it delves into the truly hard-core geekery (i.e., he actually discusses his personal history with operating systems, culminating with what amounts to a long, concentrated advert for Linux). Actually, I thought that this, too, was fascinating. But if you’re not of the persuasion that finds the nitty-gritty so very interesting, then maybe it’s best to stop reading as soon as he starts relating his spoilt love affair with Apple Corp.

In case this warning puts you off from reading any more than the first half, then I would be remiss not to give a taste of the essay’s bizarre ending. Maybe this sort of thing can be expected from a (literary) sci-fi writer:

I think that the message [of Lee Smolin’s book The Live of the Cosmos] is very clear here: somewhere outside of and beyond our universe is an operating system, coded up over incalculable spans of time by some kind of hacker-demiurge. The cosmic operating system uses a command-line interface. It runs on something like a teletype, with lots of noise and heat; punched-out bits flutter down into its hopper like drifting stars. The demiurge sits at his teletype, pounding out one command line after another, specifying the values of fundamental constants of physics:
universe -G 6.672e-11 -e 1.602e-19 -h 6.626e-34 -protonmass 1.673e-27....
and when he's finished typing out the command line, his right pinky hesitates above the ENTER key for an aeon or two, wondering what's going to happen; then down it comes--and the WHACK you hear is another Big Bang.

If one time through the essay leaves you hungry for more, here is an authorized version of the text that's heavily commented upon by a working computer coder.

Working Stiff, by Grant Stoddard

Working Stiff is an embarrassing book to carry around. The subtitle—The Misadventures of an Accidental Sexpert—is in a small enough font that I could hope people passing by my park bench might not be able to make in out in mid-stroll, but the image of a man in business suit sans pants, the name “Grant Stoddard” printed on a white circle covering that certain sensitive bit just south of the midsection…well, it makes it pretty obvious what the book is about. It’s about Grant Stoddard, that is, and about how often in the last few years he’s had sex. You can see another picture of him shirtless on the back cover, this time wearing a furry bomber cap.

Readers of this blog might hope that someday I will be able to wean myself away from books falling under the genre of “memoirs by the hideously self-absorbed,” but (as evinced by the post on How Sex Works posted below), I’m a sucker for any material that’ll make me angry about sex. And this book did make me angry—or, at least, disturbed. This reaction must show that I’m not an ideal member of the book’s target audience. Look at these inside cover blurbs: “Grant Stoddard’s debut is a sex-memoir with a heart: an inspirational true story of how to ‘make it’ in New York, in every sense of the word,” says Jessica Cutler (apparently an author); “Peek under the dirty sheets of Stoddard’s hilarious debut, and you’ll find a brave, moving, and, yes, seductive story of a young man’s struggle to find his way in a strange city, a foreign country, and an unforgettable age,” comments David Goodwille (another random author).

The book pretty much delivers on these blurbs, on one level. In the first few chapters, Stoddard pulls all the stops to convince you, the reader, that he’s just another nerdy bloke who, before his years in the media, had the same lack of success in getting lucky as anyone else. Even in the introduction, this annoying “jes’ folks” streak starts. He’s preparing for his last segment of “I Did It for Science,” the weekly column on Nerve.com for which he would go out to collect novel sexual experiences and write about them, and for this special closer, he’s chosen to literally ‘go fuck himself’—or, more precisely, to have a lady-friend peg him with a plaster-cast of his own penis. “Holding an accurate facsimile of my own member in my hands,” he writes, “it’s hard to believe how little action the thing actually saw over the course of its first twenty-four years. Since then, of course, it’s played a starring role in some of my greatest adventures.” When, a page later, he describes himself as “acutely aware that [he] was at the end of something big,” it feels like Mr. Stoddard (the groaner pun aside) is implying that after his years of randyness described in the text, he’s maybe back to his sweet-old self once again. No need to fear this guy. He’s a nice kid who got involved in some intercontinental oddities, who is none the worse for it.

Except, after the first few chapters, that nice kid starts to look pretty creepy indeed. Sure, until somewhere around pg. 60, we only hear about his working-class English background and his first American girlfriend and such associated adventures. But is it really so strange that the only person he bangs in this period of time is Becky, that American girlfriend? The Americans seem to think so. “You should be livin’ the life, balls-deep in strange ass every fuckin’ night of the week,” a friend tells him, pg. 58, in response to the astounding fact of his hitherto monogamy. Within a startlingly short period of time, this comes to pass. He wins an internet pop-culture quiz on Nerve.com (his future employer) that qualifies him for a night of intercourse w/ Lisa Carver, who had been blogging her sex life. Long story short, Grant’s oral skills (ugh), via Carver’s verbal depiction, get him a reputation in NYC, and before long, again on Carver’s word, he’s landed a job at the website as the manager of the student interns.

From there, it’s a short jaunt to Grant the womanizer, responsible for two interns leaving after failed sexual experiments with him. Soon, he’s started his column, and in the city, things move fast. Flash forward to pg. 125:

“Up until now the “new things” I had tried included having sex with my girlfriend on the subway, product testing a cock ring, Frenching a guy, being an extra in a porn movie, and competing in an amateur stripping contest in front of two hundred drunk and very aggressive women. Six months earlier, I was the perennial virgin, a shy, inexperienced, terribly self-conscious immigrant nerd, destitute and a gnat’s eyelash from throwing in the towel on my American excursion and fleeing home with my tail between my legs. Now my name was synonymous with being a willing participant in perverse sex acts throughout the tristate area. Unbeknownst to me, it became my calling.”

Huh. There’s a lot to pick apart there. Note his “perennial virgin” comment, which is nutty, if only for the reason that during his entire time in America, he was consistently having sex. It seems to me that he doesn’t exactly have a lot to complain about. Can someone who is “terribly self-conscious” immediately switch over to become someone who is comfortable with his name being used in a sex column? Can we concede that there might be a subtle difference between the terms ‘destitute’ and ‘horny’?

The weirder part of all this, though, is that last comment about how the lifestyle of being a “willing participant in perverse sex acts” had “become [his] calling.” This sounds very much like something out of my undergraduate college viewbook, and the dissonance of the tone with the subject matter is striking. Nice people, when speaking of ‘discovering calling,’ will mention things like “helping underprivileged youth,” or, “performing needed services.” But what we’ve witnessed is how a young man has gone from moving to America specifically for his girlfriend, Becky, to being something of a roving deviant. There are attempts at ironic self-consciousness in all of this; he is willing to admit how strange a thing it is for him to have women wanting to experience him, merely by dint of his minor celebrity. By pg. 152, we are offered an awkward depiction of his perfunctory deflowering of a virgin who offers herself to him, just to get the old sex thing out of the way. He finishes the deed quickly and goes to sleep to avoid discussing his sub-par performance. “Not long ago,” he muses, “I had been in her position. But somewhere along the line, I’d allowed myself to feel deserving of the hype and become a menace to women everywhere.”

For the rest of the book, Grant dodders from place to place, wittily commenting on everything he sees. And he sees a lot—orgies, ‘Leather Camp’ with the bondage crowd, LA. Eventually, he gets fired by Nerve.com for infringing on his contract when he attempts to turn his column into a TV show. The book’s ending is rather weak, a depiction of his aimless days waiting for VH1 executives to turn him into a brand as he docilely complies. When that falls through, he’s excited to return to Manhattan to see what he might become, this time. Fin.

I suppose it’s hardly worth mentioning, but to me the strangest aspect of the book was its wan amorality. I could call it that, or cognitive dissonance on the part of the author, who too many times repeats that he has never had a one-night stand, despite copious quoted evidence to the contrary. After growing up in Sioux County, IA, where God is real and sexual actions are thought to be moral actions, I have an inbred inclination to think that any suffering that Stoddard has experienced is merely a natural outcome of his wrong actions. But then I shake my head and repeat to myself, “They’re different actions, Dave, not quite wrong,” a hundred times, still leaving myself deeply unconvinced. It’s weird, because even after my framework for condemnation has been stripped away, I still love to do it. Damn you, Grant Stoddard, and your liberal New Yorker-ness!

I guess Stoddard’s not the only one around here suffering from some brain frissures…

The Art of Tom Wolfe

On Friday, I had the chance to read two Tom Wolfe books: The Painted Word, from 1975, and In Our Time, from 1980. Both are short, right around 100-pages each, and In Our Time is mostly pictures, many of which were culled from the illustrations Wolfe had drawn for his other books (including some from The Painted Word). Of the two, The Painted Word is more characteristic of what one might expect from Tom Wolfe. It is written in his hyperventilated style, with exclamation points and ellipses all over the place, and it is a piece of non-fiction. Its subject is purportedly the history of American Art in the Twentieth Century up to the point of its publication, but, as usual, its main concern is the uneasy relationship of the ultra-rich to the rest of society. Wolfe is most successful in these types of outings—there is always a strain in his characterizations of the underprivileged, for he excels at tearing down and ripping up, not at lending sympathy—and he confidently skewers all the culturati he can get his hands on. In Our Time, on the other side, demonstrates that Wolfe is also a gifted graphic artist, able to draw in lines the hideous buffoons he has described often enough before. While The Painted Word allows Wolfe to poke fun at the theory-driven, self-contained art world, In Our Time allows him to show, via example, what interesting, socially-aware art might look like.

The Painted Word begins with a 1st-person description of Tom Wolfe reading the newspaper. Specifically, he is reading the New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer, and he hones in on a quote from Kramer’s review of a Yale exhibition of “Seven Realists”:

"Realism does not lack its partisans, but it does rather conspicuously lack a persuasive theory. And given the nature of our intellectual commerce with works of art, to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial—the means by which our experience of individual works is joined to the values they signify."

Wolfe credits this statement as the one that allowed him to understand the New York art scene for what it really is—at least, as what it had been for the previous thirty years. By Wolfe’s estimation, bolstered by the comments of artists themselves, the production of art had been driven by the writings of theorists dictating what art should do rather than the experience of art itself.

The theorist-villians of the narrative are Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. In Wolfe’s caricature, Greenberg is the prophet of artistic Flatness, whereas Rosenberg wanted to synthesize Greenberg’s Flatness with the “emotional wallop” of pre-Modern art. Flatness is Wolfe’s term for the idea that art should not refer to anything outside its own frame—the idea that it is intellectually dishonest to create illusions of people and places residing within a frame, when only shapes and colors are truly there. This sort of theory began with cubism, but continuing theoretical discussions stretched the idea to its logical, if absurd, conclusion. Wolfe, clearly, thinks that this is ridiculous, comparing the endless art-theory debates to that Scholastic dispute involving angels and the head of a pin. When Greenberg cries for more emotional resonance, the messianic figure becomes Jackson Pollock, whose ‘action paintings,’ with their splats of paint thrown across canvases, denote nothing other than the mad lunges of their creator. In these works, the viewer is not invited to imagine that the shapes and colors on the canvas evoke the outside world; all that’s there is paint and canvas—and that’s the point.

The problem, however, is that the uptown folk couldn’t honestly like the stuff. Wolfe’s disdain for the cliquishness of art is evident throughout the passages where he describes how artists become ‘great.’ Artists flock to centers of culture (read, New York) and live downtrodden and abused, honing their craft and creating their works; once a year, the Guggnehiem/Metropolitan crowd comes over to see what’ll be big in the next year’s expo; the artists feign disinterest, not wanting to cave in to bourgeois ways, while the capitalists eagerly lap up the contributions of the hottest new artists, hoping to cast themselves as persons interested in something other than money; and finally, after much arty hemming and hawing, the artist will learn to interact with his worshippers, if disdainfully. This last step of acquiescence is not without its roadblocks. Wolfe relates an anecdote in which Pollock, disgusted at the fripperies of the rich, removes all his clothing mid-party and pisses in Peggy Guggenheim’s fireplace. Whether he was fed up or not, though, Pollock never stopped going to the parties.

From this backdrop of confused earnestness, Wolfe describes two parallel movements that emerged from the Abstract Expressionism. On one side, there was Pop Art, trashy and wildly popular, and on the other side was Minimalism, which pushed Flatness to its extreme limit. Wolfe marvels that both were able to inherit the former art theory with ease, as an act of creative reinterpretation. Although Greenberg, the original theorist of Flatness, hated Pop, another critic named Leo Steinberg came to the rescue. He decided that if the objects of an originally flat nature (like Warhol’s photos, Jasper John’s flags, and Roy Lichtenstien’s comics) were subjected to the decontextualization of art, then they would too be absorbed into the growing hyper-theory. Whatever. As Warhol nicely put it, “There’s nothing more bourgeois than not wanting to appear bourgeois.” The collectors loved it (they always love representational art, says Wolfe—especially when they think it’s non-representational), and art was once again something to buy, not just something to praise.

Carrying the old torch of abstraction were the Minimalists, who made art that was “fast, hard, flat and unevocative.” The frames were gone. So were the warm colors and rough evocations of an artist behind the gesture. All that was left was the Idea itself—which finally brought in Conceptual Art, wherein an artist would not create an art object at all, but would simply describe what the object might be, and how it might function in the light of the developed theories…

Which brings us to In Our Time. Wolfe’s own art is the opposite of non-representational. In his writing (as he has trumpeted in such articles as “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast”), he makes a proud point of pouring years of journalism into a single novel, and his drawings also seem to have a certain journalistic flair. In his introductory text he announces his desire in these pictures to briefly sum up the last two decades. He reiterates the thesis of his essay, “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening”— namely, that the 1970s were remarkable for two main reasons: 1. Self-obsession, born from their post-war prosperity and lack of pointed political sufferings, became the norm rather than the extreme, and 2. In the ensuing nihilism brought about by Vietnam and Watergate, people looked for spiritual awakening in extraordinarily diverse settings, e.g., orgasms for swingers, UFOs, drugs, health food, Jimmy Carter.

And we get pictures of this. The images are themselves are remarkable. They combine the repulsive flair of a Ralph Steadman with the detailed precision a Gustave Dore. We are treated to a heartwarming father/son hunting trip, where the father informs his son, “No, no, son, that’s not how it works. When you’re forty-five or fifty, you’ll get a new wife, a young one, a girl in her twenties.” A few pages later, we see a series entitled ‘The Evolution of the Species.” The first entry is entitled “Growing Old Gracefully,” and it contrasts a man in 1879 vs. a man in 1979; the difference is between “…as long as they don’t think I’m poor…” (the man wears a top-hat) and “…as long as they don’t think I’m old…” (the man swings a tennis racket). The pages of grotesques go on and on: the hip mommy, the forward-thinking, pederast priest, the tricked-out pimp, plus portraits of some of Wolfe’s old article subjects—Marshall McLuhan, the cultural theorist shown in a leopard leotard with antennae protruding from his forehead; stripper Carol Doda with her ‘twin peaks of San Fansisco’ jutting out frighteningly above an awed crowd; Andy Warhol, his hands folded, bored. Far from Flatness and Academic Nicety, in these works Wolfe grabs his subjects head on, with about as much subtle restraint as a bludgeon.

The criticisms that one might level at In Our Time are much the same as the criticisms that could legitimately be raised about The Painted Word. Both deal in caricatures. Neither one is long on facts (although, to be fair, Wolfe supposedly is very careful about the accuracy of the material that could possibly be checked), and both are long on a sort of exuberant lampooning that could only come from a man of great talent and high privilege. In these works, his style works wonderfully; art criticism (in my opinion, at least) is a silly enough field that jokiness is called for. His art, similarly, describes America as a fool’s paradise, as a place of surfaces, a haven for clueless hypocrites and narcissistic snobs. Both books are cutting, sarcastic, and cruel.

At the same time, in his other works Tom Wolfe has shown himself to be an odd sort of idealist. The Right Stuff was a love song to the gustiness of American astronauts, and in Hooking Up, his latest collection of essays, Wolfe could not stop gushing about the ingenuity of our neuroscientists and electrical engineers. Perhaps Wolfe’s dual strain of cynicism and idealism can be no better encapsulated than by a quote from the last page of The Painted Word, where he describes the art students of the future:

“They will listen to art historians say, with the sort of smile now reserved for the study of Phrygian astrology: “That’s how it was then!”—as they describe how, on the one hand, the scientist of the mid-twentieth century proceeded by building upon the discoveries of their predecessors and thereby lit up the sky…while the artists proceeded by averting their eyes from whatever their predecessors, from da Vinci on, had discovered, shrinking from it, terrified, or disintegrating it with the universal solvent of the Word.”

How Sex Works: Why We Look, Smell, Taste, Feel, and Act the Way We Do

How Sex Works is a new book by Dr. Sharon Moalem, first released in April of this year. I should say up front that it’s pretty good. I’m putting that disclaimer at the beginning of the review, because, despite being consistently informative and entertaining, it’s the type of book that is also pretty vulnerable to dismissal and pooh-poohing by any number of people. As I read it, I tried to decide who might hate it more: humanities scholars of sexual history, or conservative cultural watchdogs? Camille Paglia, or William F. Buckley? my sister, or my father? At the same time, I had to entertain the possibility that it might offend none of them. After all, for a modern sex book, this is about as un-kinky as they come. All the content is delivered with the timbre of a doctor, not an entertainer. By which I mean, I’d feel okay if almost any of these paragraphs were spoken to me by a man readying himself to feel the lumps in my testicles. As a writer, Moalem is lucky to have a white-hot topic; his styling equilibrates everything it touches to an easygoing lukewarm.

The book begins, like most nonfiction bestsellers, with an introduction. It is worth skipping. It reads like an advertisement for the book, with question after question of exciting topics that will be answered in the following pages. A quote: “Can women, like men, ejaculate? What’s the point of having pubic hair, and what happens to pubic lice when you get a Brazilian wax? And why, unlike almost all other mammals to most other mammals, do most human women outlive their fertility by decades?” (pg. xi) Answers to these questions are not suggested until Chapters 1&2, 4, and 8, respectively. You need to buy this book to find out, is the not-so-sneaky implication.

After that, we get the biology textbook material about girl parts (Ch. 1) and boy parts (Ch. 2), along with Cosmo-level discussions of special topics, like tampon history and penile fractures. (Even Moalem can’t reduce the discomfort of the penile fracture discussion, by the way. “There can be a loud cracking or popping sound, and serious pain. […] I will never forget the first time I came across a penile fracture. The patient had tried to masturbate with a metal vacuum cleaner tube—while it was hooked up and turned on.”) In the section on Lady Bits, there were plenty of little factoids I found interesting, but when I called them over to Holly, my wife, she was usually unimpressed. I’ll assume that the astute readers of this blog already know most of that pertinent information. In the part concerning Man Bits—a topic I can more rightly claim basic competency—a similarly wide range of unknown facts were presented. Did you know that most mammals literally have a bone in their penis, the baculum? Did you know that the promiscuous queen bee mates with untold many male drones, whose penises pop off after ejaculation and are left for the next midair mounter to pull out before thrusting in? What about the UCSF study showing a 500% sperm count increase in men who stopped taking hot baths?

Well, I didn’t know these things. That’s the charm of such a book. Ch. 3 told me stuff I didn’t know about the biology of attraction (special topic: the role of scent); Ch. 4 about orgasms and ejaculation (ST: academic controversies over female ejaculation); Ch. 5 about gender development and differentiation (ST: gender identity disorder); Ch. 6 about biological theories on homosexuality (ST: homosexuality in animals—apparently rampant); Ch. 7 about sexually transmitted infections (ST: take your pick); Ch. 8 about birth control (ST: Casanova’s fancy condoms, made from rendered sheep gut); Ch. 9 about…not much (warm, fuzzy wrap-up material).

Any criticisms I might offer, then, are not for lack of content. The more pervasive problem is the lack of coherent vision. When he’s offering out facts and trivia, Moalem is in his element. He did his homework. In academic terms, he’s done a ‘literature search’—i.e., the preliminary background reading needed before he can delve into his a project of his own. But the book never adds up to any more than that. Maybe that’s for the best; when he tries to offer up some social commentary, the results are disconcerting. Look, for instance, at the passage concluding a discussion of modern plastic surgery (pg. 96):

Obviously, as with any cosmetic surgery, a well-informed adult ought to be able to opt for such a procedure in consultation with her doctor and others close to her, as she chooses. But the skyrocketing rate of cosmetic surgery does beg the question: when have we gone too far in pursuit of perceived physical ideals? Perhaps, when girls as young as ten years of age feel compelled to undergo labiaplasty to even out their labia minora.

This is an uncomfortable example of information-age rhetoric. The moral framework is firmly put in place with the first sentence—the use of the word ‘obviously’ is far from incidental. The second sentence then pretends to give a thoughtful little nugget, which is OK only for those who can’t see that this is the opposite of thoughtful; this is perhaps the most banal comment that could’ve been chosen, given the topic. But the real kicker is that last sentence. Is it ironic? An attempt at humor? It might make sense if it followed a story about such a narcissistic 10-year-old, but no such context is given. This looks instead like an attempt by a man innocent of philosophy to do simply what he has been trained to do: to give a prescription, following a diagnosis. The only problem is, there’s no paper from the medical literature to help him out on this one, so the effort to parrot thoughtfulness goes far awry. We quickly move to the next topic.

It's likely that the entire quoted text was just a throwaway attempting to make a fluid transition from one topic to the next. But I can’t help thinking that there’s something endemic of our era in this book. Science here is enshrined as the end, as the ultimate debate-settler. If you have a question, there will be an answer; it’s only a matter of time and study resources. I am reminded of Tom, the scientist from Updike’s Couples, to whom there are unknowns, but no unknowables. That’s more or less the attitude of this book, as well as of its probable target audience. After all, you only need to visit Google for quick, easy answers, with maybe a side-jaunt to Wikipedia. (The chapters of How Sex Works can be read in any order with very little strain, just like web pages.) The next day, around the water cooler, you’ll have something interesting to bring up to your colleagues. Isn’t it amazing what Science has found out now? Those honeybees are goddamn incredible!

I worry that after reading such a pretty good book, some people will be less imaginative and less curious than they were before reading it. We might be fooled into thinking that a succession of facts and trivia allows us to understand how sex works; when all the uncertainty and chaos are dismissed, the constructed world all too easily reduces to order. What you get in a scientific work on sex is necessarily a cartoon, a radically simplified caricature. This can be helpful and informative, as I claim How Sex Works is. But it’s far from the entire picture. It doesn’t fully explain “why we look, smell, taste, feel, and act the way we do,” as the book’s tagline claims. Literature hasn’t had all of its topics wrested away just yet.