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From:
[email protected] (Chris Porter)
Newsgroups: alt.zines,alt.etext,rec.arts.books
Subject: (news)letter 1:15
Date: 20 May 1994 20:21:45 -0400
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(news)letter
"Say the thing with which you labor."
Thoreau
from the porter micro.press
Volume 1, Number 15 May 12, 1994
_________________________________________________________________
Happy Second Birthday to Margaret Francis Porter! What a Doll!
Please send suggestions and submissions. Or don't.
To get on the mailing list, send your name and address to:
CTPorter 117-A S. Mendenhall St. Greensboro, NC 27403
or e-mail
[email protected]
Your input is appreciated.
I got a call from Hussfrau of Tampa complaining that I was
getting too highbrow with the (news)letter. "I read them but I
don't understand them," she told me. "Why don't you put out an
issue for the 'dumb' people?" She specifically asked for the
truth behind Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts ("everyone wants to
know"), and the more I thought about it the more positive I
became that Hussfrau is absolutely right. Life isn't all
prevailing themes and eight-bit words -- why not try to lighten
up and relax? Because isn't Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts'
marriage as important to American culture as Melville's Moby
Dick?
So I went out and bought one of those supermarket tabloids,
the Star, in an effort to find out what's really going on in that
half of the world that I usually ignore. Believe it or not, back
in my more freewheeling days, I used to pick up the occasional
tabloid issue, and as I remember it was because of the "other"
articles in it, not the gossip headlines. They would have
articles like "10 Ways to Improve Your Sex Life," or "Jeanne
Dixon's Stock Predictions for 1985," practical information like
that. Plus, it was fun to read, I must admit. I picked up the
Star only because its Lovett-Roberts headline was the more
prominent of the three tabloids available -- I profess no loyalty
to any of the three, though I agree with the Star's motto,
"Exercise your mind, read." The headline read, "After she's
caught with new man, Ethan Hawke, Julia Roberts Hubby Lyle: 'I
can't take it anymore.'" There's a picture of a downcast Lyle,
juxtaposed with the beaming, illicit couple Julia and Ethan after
a night of champagne and dancing while Lyle was in Paris. Poor
Lyle!
Can you imagine, picking up a paper in France and finding
out that your movie star wife is out cavorting with a stud movie
star? And you're only an ugly, mop-haired country singer/actor?
We always knew, didn't we, that the man who could sing about
"riding ponies on my boat" was just a little too good for the
woman who was about to marry any one of several clowns, and the
videos on "Hard Copy" would always show her indulging in booze
parties, with her constantly chugging tequila? And didn't they
get married just a trifle too quickly?
Further research shows us a different picture of the couple.
E. Jean Carroll's article in the May issue of Esquire shows a
Lyle seemingly unconcerned about such tabloid headlines. Buried
between "How to be a Post-Sensitive Man" and "Keeping Your Hair
Forever" is this article, which labels Lyle as
the perfect man. No golf, no tennis, drives an '82 Ford
pickup, doesn't hunt, doesn't fish (but doesn't have
anything against them), writes well, speaks well, dresses
well, drives fast. He's witty, he's rich, he's famous, he
doesn't bother his wife, and his manner in doing all this is
. . . nonchalant. That's the key. (66)
Alas, a better reporter would have learned more, but I was given
a headache by the obnoxious smell that the magazine emitted. Does
that mean that I will never become the man of the '90s, because I
can't handle the trendy cologne?
We have to ask, then, "what's going to happen here?" Is
Julia Roberts going to grow up and deserve her man or is she
going to sabotage her marriage and live up to her reputation as
just another unstable Hollywood party girl more concerned with
the bright lights than the relationship she committed to? We want
to know and I'm sure that Hussfrau will keep us posted.
Michael Jackson Woos an Adult
And how's this for a sign of the times in American culture:
Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley are, according to the
Star, America's newest hot item. The daughter of America's
premier "Rock and Roll" icon and the King of Pop "have been
spending discreet, romantic weekends together . . . since
February." Presley is separating from her husband, a musician who
hasn't hit it big, and now is escorted about Jackson's Neverland
ranch kissing and giggling. In four years Presley will get a $200
million trust fund; combine that with Jackson's fortune and they
very well might be the richest couple in the history of the
world.
Meanwhile another headline assures us that "Bearded Jacko
Goes House-Hunting." There, with a wispy little beard,
photographed obviously from afar is the Gloved One himself. He's
looking to buy a mansion near Disneyworld in Orlando, FL, and has
made three "hush-hush" visits to the place since January. Could
it be that his presence in Florida has something to do with the
Lake County (just west of Disneyworld) school board's decision to
require teachers to "teach students that American culture is
superior to all others"? I think there is a connection. Michael
Jackson has a lot to gain from a generation of school kids
brought up to believe that he (and Elvis Presley) are "better"
musical figures than Bach or Beethoven.
Everyone's Against Me, Really!
I finished Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 this past week
but I don't pretend to understand it. Someone once said that
there's not a superfluous word in the whole book; another has
said that there's not a relevant word in the whole book. This is
a paranoid's nightmare. The heroine, Oedipa Maas, becomes
acquainted with the dark world of the underground postal system
(which is determined to break the monopoly that the US Government
has on mail delivery) but in the end she doesn't know if this
conspiracy is real or one big sham dreamed up by the man she used
to date and whose fortune she must now straighten out. Pynchon
has fun in this novel and his fictionalized history of the
illicit mail delivery system is so complete as to almost seem
real. I could believe it if only the names weren't so obviously
sarcastic. American culture has always been concerned with
conspiracy theories (how many pages a year are devoted to the
existence/ non-existence of a Kennedy assassination theory?), and
by the end of the novel both the heroine and the reader are
wondering just what is real in this scenario. Is there a whole
subculture out there whose existence we might not realize but if
we learned a little of it we would see how pervasive it is? What
if yard art (those wooden ducks whose wings windmill with the
breeze, or pink flamingoes) was in fact a highly-complicated
communication system between members of a revolutionary cult?
From the Net
I found a fun, light-hearted electric magazine (e-zine) on the
Net this week, the second issue of Jack Szwergold's "Super Stupid
Slambook." This e-zine is in the form of reviews of different
products, whether they be CDs, comics, books, candy, even instant
coffee. This came at just the right time, when I needed the
reminder that light-hearted can be good. Of Maxwell House
Columbian Supreme Szwergold pans it with the rejoinder that "hell
can exist anywhere. Even in my cupboard." Of the Japanese version
of Goobers he is also disappointed: "Whenever someone says
chocolate covered peanuts, I usually say 'Yum!'. Not in this
case. Man oh maneschevitz did these Chocoballs suck!" Maybe I
ought to branch out into realms other than the arts: it sounds
like he gets lots of free stuff to review.
"We Must Find the Essence of Ourselves Blah Blah Blah ..."
I tried to read a high-falutin' scholarly article in the May
issue of Harper's magazine, William Gass' "The Art of Self:
Autobiography in an Age of Narcissism," but I will confess that
it was a bit too heavy for my frame of mind. All I wanted to find
out was how this current age we're in, so concerned with the
'self,' has changed the art of autobiography. Intuitively I think
Gass has some important ideas to contribute, but he lost me with
this part:
How does autobiography begin? With memory. And the
consequent division of the self into the-one-who-was and
the-one-who-is. The-one-who-is has the advantage of having
been the-one-who-was. Once. The-one-who-was is, furthermore,
at the present self's mercy, for it may not wish to remember
that past, or it may wish the-one-who-was was other than the
one it was, and consequently alter its description, since
the-one-who-is is writing this history and has the upper
hand. (45)
I could probably translate that into sense but I really don't
want to have to work that hard to figure this article out. So I
quit reading. I'll file it for future reading when I'm feeling a
trifle more intellectual.
Paying Rent with Fool's Gold
I did read an article in the Fall, 1993, issue of Granta, a
biography of an English soccer star named Paul Gascoigne by poet
Ian Hamilton. A large part of the fun of this article came from
the highbrow treatment it gave to a sports icon, because as Gass
writes in his article, biography "requires quite a lot of labor,
and therefore, when such a work is undertaken, one would expect
the subject to be of some significance to history as a whole"
(45). But the significance of the hero known as "Gazza" is not
historical but tabloid. The only American hero that I thought
might be comparable is the basketball star Dennis Rodman. Rodman
is a great basketball player but he's also a common thug and if
he could ever quit giving cheap shots he would be a shoo-in for
the Hall of Fame. But if Maya Angelou wrote a lengthy analysis of
Rodman's affect on the game and his fans, and published it in a
literary quarterly, it might give the same contrast I enjoyed in
Hamilton's treatment of Gazza.
And I Went to the Woofies ...
With apologies to the friend who recommended it, DO NOT go see
the movie "No Escape." The movie is interesting in its elemental
themes, the good vs. evil dichotomy, and there are plenty of
allusions to keep the thinker and lover of symbolism busy, but
really the movie only wastes one's time. It revolves around the
premise that in the future hard-core prisoners are banished to an
island to fend for themselves. The hero is a stud named Robbins,
fighter extraordinaire, who finds himself in the middle of a
battle between the Outsiders, the group of lawless cons who obey
the rule of power, and the Insiders, who have created a community
and who, thanks to the guru so tritely named "Father," obey a
higher law. The Insiders recognize the importance of a working
society, while the Outsiders just want to storm and pillage the
Insiders. It's a tribute to the inanity of this movie that it
doesn't provoke more thought than it does. Enough said.
And while we're on the subject of movies, I wouldn't take a
date to see Roman Polanski's newest, Bitter Moon. This movie
features an expatriate American married to a Parisian beauty, and
they befriend a staid English couple. The Englishman, Nigel,
becomes the more enamored with the American's wife because he is
told the whole story of their relationship in exquisite detail.
Nigel doesn't want to hear all of the details, and he's shocked
at what the other couple do to each other (as are we), and the
scenes that accompany the American's narration are often sordid,
sometimes hilarious, and usually disturbing. By the end Nigel
wants to have an affair with this woman, but his wife realizes it
and does something about it. The end is shocking, though maybe
not unexpected, and it serves to draw Nigel and his wife closer
together. This movie is very sexual (are you surprised, coming
from Roman Polanski?), and if you're not very comfortable with a
member of the opposite sex, don't take him/her.
Another movie that I saw (can you tell I'm unemployed?) was
"When a Man Loves a Woman," starring Meg Ryan and Andy Garcia. I
had seen the previews and figured that Meg Ryan played an
alcoholic but was surprised at the extent to which the alcoholism
issue dominated the movie. This is a movie about the destructive
power of alcohol, and if you've ever screwed up anything because
of alcohol, this movie will hurt you. This is one of the few
movies which I welcomed the somewhat arbitrary Hollywood happy
ending because I don't know if I could have handled it had it
ended any other way. Ryan and Garcia are too perfect the couple
to be destroyed by anything, I wanted to think. I went expecting
a fluff movie, very sappy, and came away overwhelmed -- this was
as powerful a treatment of a subject that's been quite taboo,
comparable to Tom Hanks and Denzell Washington's "Philadelphia,"
which deals with AIDS. Quite a disturbing surprise, I must say,
though a welcome one.
Are Women Smarter?
There was a cover story in last week's Newsweek on "Men, Women
and Computers." About the only thing that I learned from it was
that women are beginning to break into the software business,
becoming "more successful in developing software" probably
because they work in teams better than men. Otherwise this
article only affirms what most of us could probably guess. The
conclusion the authors draw is that men and women tend to
approach computers differently:
Men typically imagine devices that could help them conquer
the universe. ... Women want machines that meet people's
needs, the perfect mother. And one that can be turned on and
off at the flick of the switch. (52)
It has something to do with the idea -- surprise! -- that men and
women approach everything differently. What might have happened
is that the authors came up with a great idea -- let's examine
the computer world and see how men and women are different -- but
they couldn't find a new angle that was worth the space. They
might have been better served just shelving the story or
concentrating on another angle. Is anyone surprised that the
computer world is male-dominated and that some of the traits of
computer communication -- bragging, insults, et al. -- really
bother women?
Quote of the Week
A tennis player comes to teacher W. Timothy Gallwey (The Inner
Game of Tennis) worrying about her backhand. After spraying a few
shots into the net and over the fence, the teacher tells the
player:
Your backhand is alright. It's just going through some
changes.
We all need more teachers like this, those who will stress that
everything is really okay (in the cosmic sense) even if we do
miss the clutch shot or can't make a serve to save our lives.
