-Style-

"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months." -Oscar Wilde

This is a chosen quote from a book I am reading on Snobbery. Specifically, "Snobbery : the American version." Joseph Epstein. Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

I've often held a very special contempt for fashion in general and those seemingly overcome by it. What a waste of priorities. Want a cloak for your insecurity? Reinforce the superficiality of the populace by participating. There is the temptation to grease the wheels to success by paying the price of admission, be it a suit and tie at the job interview, or the proper tattoo at a biker-bar. Benedict Monk and his fellow anti-fashionists (authentic and original members of the punk movement, devoted ad busters, etc.) are loathe to participate in any fashion endeavor if they can help it.

We try hard to participate by not participating, and we succeed in the most visible area, competitive full-contact shopping. (Nice though it is to hear the misplaced glee of MPR's Marketplace on Friday. "So, are the stores reeling from all those people opting to buy nothing today? Ha-Ha! That'll teach those Stupid Pot-smoking Granola Heads. Back to you, David.")

How frustrating, then, when Epstein points out something I've suspected for a long time: anti-fashion intellectuals and counter-culturists engage in another form of snobbery. That superior feeling is always there, our closest companion when the chips are down.

The opposite of snobbery is snobbery with awareness.

Snobbery with awareness is as good as snobbery gets.

-Quarantine-

Computer labs are probably breeding grounds for bacteria, anyway. But when I'm surrounded by sore throats, runny noses, and projectile sneezers, is it any wonder that a few days later my own biology is becoming rough around the edges? And at the height of a work crunch, no less.

The waking sleepiness of classmates is likely related, although atmospheric changes within these buildings plays a definite part in these proceedings. In a warm, dry environment, we're all aligned in the same direction, looking at projections with source-equipment that hums seductively, "Sleep....Sleep....Sleep."

Which makes it all the more difficult when the familiar decides that I am patently not sleeping except in small, restless segments at night. She has learned how to make noise, and lots of it, and I can't for the life of me figure out what she wants. More food? She always wants more food; why should today be any different?

Because we are both sick, and no creature is at peace in quarantine.

-It can't rain on every House of Usher-


Conversation with the cheery, bodiced, caped, dewy, goth girl only lasted the few minutes before the bus came. All because of a simple inquiry about fishnet stockings that everyone else at the bus stop most likely found very forward. But she was a happy goth, and like me, possesses the gift of gab. We hit it off immediately. I deeply regret that I didn't use my verbal haymaker before the bus came.

The Set Up: "I'd love to get a man to wear this boddice. [giggle]."
The Haymaker: "As long as you slip under his cape, every night'd be like solstice."

Is that too bawdy for 6 A.M.?

-Four Messages In as Many Hours-

Due to a mailing address error, the phone company cut my local phone service one month after I signed up. As of this time I am still attempting to correct the problem. But it's had an interesting effect. Because I have an answering machine, and the company hasn't reassigned the number, I can still receive incoming calls. As long as I resist the urge to pick up the phone, I can expect several messages a day from telemarketers, who seem to be the only callers at all these days. Today I'd been gone for only a few hours, and returned to four messages. One was faint static, a five-second probing feeler courtesy of a call center mainframe. The other three callers evidently have less technology at their disposal. A call center guy saying "Hello?...Hello?" before giving up. Him I don't mind so much. Then we have the travel agency I gave my e-mail address to in a moment of weakness. This agency isn't content to merely spam me, they had to use my university affiliation to figure out my phone number and bother me that way, too. The last is the most comical. This rep starts his spiel with all the fake enthusiasm these people are paid for emoting. Next he does the "Hello?..Hello?" thing. Then he heaves a sigh that makes him sound tired and human again.

-Things that cannot be explained-

Hat (location) Umbrella (location) Watch (location)

Water in the Bathroom Mark on my hand Disturbing Dreams

And now I mean to explain them. Anyone who wants to construct a story that incorporates all of these (no partial credit will be given) may do so. Here's my first shot, though I'll recuse myself from the contest:

We sat in an old Jewish Deli run by Italian-Catholic émigrés who'd found a Kosher bargain, or so the story goes. The hipster underground hangout next door is under renovation, so this is a better than average day for the seventy-something spry hostess running coffees - Spanish and Turkish - to industrial spool tables topped off with bottles sprouting melting candles.
Seriously.
I'm trying to read. Trying, but still keeping an eye on the vermicelli-haired senior citizen with a pipe who invited himself to my spool to talk football, which I know nothing about. I'm trying not to look at the pipe or his paunch, which sports a rorschach of mustard.

"Packers, Packers, Packers, Packers, Packers, Packers." He says. "Packers, Packers. D.H. Lawrence."
The book twitches in my hands like a live mouse. "What did you say?"
Now he's being coy. "D.H. Lawrence."
"I thought I heard something I understood. But maybe you could give me the context."
Soapbox: "D.H. Lawrence said the only thing he felt qualified to speak about was men and women."
"I've heard that quote before, I've used that quote before, but..."
"Take that couple over there, for example." He shoves a porkpie thumb at young man with un-ironically 80's hair (worse than mine) who lightly brushes the knee of the younger man next to him. 90's hair, nicer clothes. Petulant mouth. The latter leans against the wall, challenges the full room in this hipster Diaspora. His tentative boyfriend must know how tenuous his hold is, but he faces the table in denial.

I feel sorry for the poor sod, and I said so as I absentmindedly rubbed my left hand. For some reason it stung at that moment, but not enough for me to investigate. Unfaithful sees us looking and beams this way. I shake my head and start groping for my hat. It must have slipped under the table.
Paunches (he has pouches under his eyes, too) chortles. He chortles again, but not before he leans in for a wind stealing gaff: "No worse than you ogling the little miss with the skintight leather."
Shudder. "Gotta go." I peer under the table at nothing. Could it have been left in the car? That's so unlikely.

Out on the street, the cobblestones resound with a harder rain than the drizzle touching down before. The umbrella that usually juts out a few inches from the satchel is gone, as well. With growing alarm, I wondered if there was enough time to go back in and search before the last bus. I snap my arm out in that one-handed way we all do to reveal a watch obscured by a sleeve. But there's no watch there.

No. No. This is America, there aren't pickpockets here. People want your things; they knock you down and take them. My imagination, admittedly out of control, figured I'd run back inside only to find a burned out hulk that hasn't been occupied since "that terrible cook went crazy in the 40's." I was almost disappointed when it was still warm and occupied to the gills.

Dejected, wet and late for the bus, I came home. No percussion tonight from below, and for once I miss it; it would make these three inexplicable losses more palatable if everything else seemed to be in order. Were it not for the note from my landlord on the door, I'd never know to expect a thin sheen of water on my bathroom floor. So nice, to possibly owe my life to my landlord. A thin white line runs from my knuckle to the edge of my forefinger, which I now suspect to be a part of the watch clipping my skin as Paunches (for who else could it be?) removed it with surprisingly deft porkpie fingers.

I lay down that night in a cold, impotent fury, and dreamed of lost kisses and overdue assignments.
And worse.

-Joe-


There is a man named Joe who roams this city and introduces himself to everyone. This is not to say he gives everyone his name, or even asks yours. I have seen him many times in conversation with others, and spoke with him once many months ago. We met a crosswalk. In response to "Do you go to Pitt?" I told him I was a student here, not elaborating my year, department, or field of study. I also told him (truthfully) that I was on my way to class.

"My name is Joe," he said, and extended his hand in greeting.
"I'm Benedict," I said, and took it.

I kept eye-contact, mind you.

The walking man appears. We go our separate ways.

Since then, I've nodded when I saw him. Incredibly, he seems not to remember that we spoke. Make one hell of a grassroots politician. But other pedestrians aren't so sanguine about the experience. Clocked conversation analysis would likely reveal the long pauses and short grunts that tell us the conversation is over. To his credit, Joe never gets angry or "turns" the way some houseless characters do.

This morning he spoke to a man inside a drugstore. The mark was a college professor who spoke very little English. Still, he was game, and so was Joe. I heard them discussing the man's field of study as I left.

Here's to this coming December.

-Testify-



Who are those people in your life that you feel required to defend against overwhelming odds?
I've got more than a few fitting that description. Teachers, bosses, friends, family. Vagrants and strangers. Most are downtrodden in some way, some (by no means all) are powerless or displaying weakness. Others are powerful and cynical, and most will gain nothing from my defense.

When I ponder the root cause, I have no choice but to remember my closest friend from elementary school, courageous and wise beyond his years. He escaped systematic bullying by planting his feet when he could, and sidestepping when he couldn't, but always returning to his original position with the unflappable air of someone enduring external foolishness. He would have made one hell of an office drone in those days, would have become Good King Watercooler had he lasted to the period where quips are capital, and public physical intimidation is frowned upon -- the great army of louts would have grudgingly worked for him.

And I was an avoider. Withdrawn, unaffiliated:

This miserable fate Suffer the wretched souls of those who lived Without or praise or blame, with that ill band Of angels mix'd, who nor rebellious proved, Nor yet were true to God, but for themselves Were only.

-Canto III, Dante's Inferno

What a learning experience it was, then, the day the tactic of evasion failed, and I was called upon to assist my sturdy friend - or not.

I hesitated. He forgave me for my weakness immediately, blast him.

And since then, something snaps in me if I see someone attacked verbally, physically or mentally by a majority cabal. I'm not much of an advocate, and it is probably a somewhat selfish act, founded on a desire for penance. It may not even be advisable, if I end up taking the part of someone who doesn't deserve my support.

It is still better than the alternative.

-A Critical Primer for Critiquing the Critics-

1. Don’t.

2. Okay, if you must, do it once and effectively, and then call it a day.

Very likely KingMob’s initial rhetorical lash, since muted, reflects a bad reaction to the herpes vaccine he himself has injected directly into his throat. {See Exclusive Photo}

He is also motivated by an eagerness get past a literary dry spell. Controversy is a fertile muse, as you will see below, and the image of two editors clashing like rival pontiffs probably appeals to him as much as it does me.

It is less likely, but still possible, that he fairly upbraids me for callousness and narcissism, owing to the fact that my passage encompasses both personal and external events, and gives short shrift to the external suffering. Would that this were true - I could accept that criticism as valid. The amount of blood suggests that the injury was less than fatal, but it certainly hurt more, physically and emotionally, for the victim(s) and the bystanders, than a bout of work-induced sleeplessness.

Because of the latter, (and this was the real reason for the fuzzy-minded reflection) I expected to see spelling and grammatical errors. And I riffed on that theme, throwing in a last-ditch attempt at an inside joke only at the conclusion of the piece, one that winked at Mob himself for his joke that he “owned” the right to comment on the blood pool on the bus; a joke REPEATED (because aren’t jokes funnier when they are repeated? Aren’t they funnier when EXPLAINED?) in this “See You Next Week” entry. Scanning it (the Hornbook entry, not “See You Next Week”) now, I see there’s nary a spelling or grammatical error to be found. Glory be.

The glaring error, obviously, is one of content. Leading off with typical Graduate student bitching about lost sleep, and finishing with mass transit bloodletting may convey a “let them eat cake” attitude to anyone accustomed to reading inside an inverted pyramid news structure.

Of course, this weblog is a new medium with few rules, and fewer sacred cows. Faster then the stream of consciousness, more contagious than anyone’s interior “kissing disease” monologue, no one need edit, just as I promised in the same entry. Let it stand as a moment in time, till external circumstances or time itself takes it down.

When we suffer ourselves to endlessly critique the critics, we resemble those portraits of mirrors reflecting infinite mirrors. As a result, we endlessly reflect an increasingly weak simulacrum of the original content, without creating any content of our own.

{Uh-oh}



Of course, I don’t think KingMob really meant anything vicious by his censure, though he has a history of berating the content of many such websites in the past. He takes issue with what he refers to in his piece as “minutiae,” or content featuring (probably) trivial, insignificant events, unworthy of electronic musing.

This, in the end, is really my only point of dispute with Mob. Yes, at any given moment, most, if not all blogs are insignificant and silly to anyone who isn’t intimately involved with the actual events. So it was with the hornbooks of goodywives in New England 300 years ago, so it is with “Heir to the Hornbook” today. Mob struggles with the question of why we write, constantly asking “What’s the point of all this?”

My pithy answer: “When the only resources you put into it are your time, enjoyment, and few stray electrons, there doesn’t have to be one.”

Addendums:
1. To see KingMob's response to the response, click on the "mirror of diminishing returns" picture above.
2. I've delegated the responsibility of responding to his response to the response to Jabberwacky's team of rhetor-bots. See the highlights.

-To be this tired, I'd have to be blitzed-

Been sleeping on the floor two nights running, and only for 2-3 hours each time. And for what? A paper with which I'm not entirely displeased; a bundle of nerves, shot, the lot of them; and a fresh poker face to fool every sensitive librarian in the space. This is a fairly good day.

Still, I'm examining the words I say after I say them, because at least twice I've caught the nonsensical and caged it with a quick retraction after it fled my mouth. Since my vaunted editing skills have been more or less depleted, we estimate that one in five is treated to utter drivel.

Writing in this place is something of a crapshoot, then. After all, will one of every five statements here jangle out of tune? Perhaps it could be edited later, but I'd rather let it stand as object lesson for preserving my health.

At the same time, I am forbidden from discussing some of the more extravagant events around town, of which there have no doubt been so many since last weekend. Follow the news - which you know - or my encounters with city denizens, which you know even better.

Needless to say, I know my audience. You want me to talk about the blood that pooled at the front of the bus a few days ago? I won't. I don't pander to your violent tendencies, except to say that it's one of the few times passengers efficiently loaded via the back door.

Also, the blood kept us all behind the white line.