The Rat's Ass


This past weekend I began a first draft of a novel from the raw material of "Ash Fork." It's a lot easier to sit down and write from something than from nothing. The problem is that by the time I've written for awhile I have forgotten about writing a post. Doing a novel is like working a puzzle, arranging elements and seeing how they extend on a time line and where they converge with other elements. To shift focus, I am tending to write essays on the daily post.

Those essays tend toward politics and against the war in Iraq for what to me is a pretty simple observation: when you have war law is suspended. One cause of war, and I think it is the cause of this one, is to conduct illegal business. The rest of it is spin to make it sound like it's legal business.

I'm sorry; I was going to say something else and I got sidetracked into politics. Does anybody care what I think about politics? I don't think so.

So I'll shift to a drive last night when Linda and I were searching for Chinese food. Nothing was open in Prescott on Sunday night. There was a program on the radio, NPR, which was catching my attention. I think it was "This American Life" but I can't find it yet, when I do I'll link it. There was a guy talking about his job writing for greeting cards, and how his boss told him he needed to stop using so many literary allusions because it made people uncomfortable.

So this guy is highly intelligent and he starts keeping a notebook and writing down when he uses literary references and what they are. It turns out he doesn't really use many literary allusions at all. Then one day he's having lunch with some other guys, and there's some comment about monkeys and apes. He knows about this, and so he talks about the difference, monkeys have tails, apes don't, etc., and mentions the absence of Gibbons in Planet of the Apes.

Then he says, this other guy told him, "Speaking of animals, would you like to see the rat's ass I give?"

So he makes the connection. It's not literary allusions the supervisor is talking about, it's just providing unrequested information. He has trouble with people because he gives them information they don't want, in quantities and detail they have no way to sort and store without making an effort, and thus it is like working to have a conversation with him.

But then he added that when he is at M.I.T. , he's just normal, and his conversation is just casual conversation as locally practiced.

I remembered when I was about twenty-two, and I was dating a barmaid in a country and western bar in Phoenix, Arizona. I was really careful about not using big words around the people I met there so I'd fit in. I imitated them. At the time I rented a room in a house owned by a married couple. They were middle aged, and he sounded like he was from New Jersey. He was fascinated, and not in a positive way, by my books, especially the Great Books. He himself had blocks of fake books on the bookshelves. I was equally fascinated with those. He gave me some trashy novels to read. I accepted them with thanks, but I don't think I bothered reading them.

I didn't mention to him that I'd read an overview, "The Secret Record," of the classics of erotic literature and methodically gone through them. That's not to say I didn't read some of those green paperbacks with no redeeming artistic value, but only selected passages. Which reminds me of Lenny Bruce's pointing out that when the legal definition of pornography shifted to the overall artistic value of a work, it became a crime to be without artistic value.

But back to the radio, I think it was the same program but maybe not, there was a woman describing something that is happening to girls. When they are young they display intelligence with pleasure, but something happens to them at ten or twelve or so, and they invert. They go stupid, unwilling to display their pleasure in intelligence. It is as if displaying intelligence has slipped into the cultural shadow, and isn't allowed. As is the case with all things not approved of in a culture, they are pushed into the shadow through the practice of shunning. Shunning is a way of moving shadow onto people, and as any good practitioner of voodoo knows, can be fatal.

Whatever you don't approve of you will shun as a signal that you don't approve of it.

So the guy who was giving people too much information in one context, where it was shunned, was doing the same thing in a different context and finding it rewarded. I kept thinking back to the information about apes and monkeys, and how interested I was in what he was saying, and how surprised I was that he got that kind of response.

I was going to quote somebody but I stopped myself. It's like an alcoholic looking into that drink and trying to not knock it back. He's had the habit for so long there don't seem to be no use in it, not having this one. It's the head of a snake that reaches back to childhood, and consumes every day like some kind of mindless crocodile. But I stopped myself. I'm shed of it.


Posted: Mon - February 19, 2007 at 02:41 PM