I’m about three-quarters of the way through Joseph J. Ellis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Founding Brothers, and it occurred to me this morning that the political and ideological divide between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson is one that, as a country, we’re still struggling to overcome. For those of you that may have forgotten your American history, Adams was a Federalist, and as such, he believed that the country needed a strong, central government because he was convinced that the republican values that precipitated the revolution would likely lead to a dissolution of the newly formed, and highly volatile, United States. Jefferson, on the other hand, was a Democratic-Republican, and he firmly believed in self-government, which, consequently, meant that he viewed a strong, centralized government as tantamount to tyranny.

Ellis describes the two thus:

They were an incongruous pair, but everyone seemed to argue that history had made them into a pair. The incongruities lept out for all to see: Adams, the short, stout, candid-to-a-fault New Englander; Jefferson, the tall, slender, elegantly elusive Virginian; Adams, the highly combustible, ever combative, mile-a-minute talker, whose favorite form of conversation was an argument; Jefferson, the always cool and self-contained enigma, show regarded debate and argument as violations of the natural harmonies he heard inside his own head…[t]hey were the odd couple of the American Revolution. (163)

To some degree, the United States is still haunted by the ghosts of Adams’s and Jefferson’s political disagreements. A direct comparison of the Federalists to the Democrats and the Democratic-Republicans to present day Republicans would, of course, be ludicrous. For one thing, the political ideologies of Adams and Jefferson were inextricably entwined with the Revolution. As often as Americans whinge and bitch about politics, Adams and Jefferson actually lived through political turmoil. For another, Jefferson hated religion, and this is not something that has remained unnoticed among current Republicans. Ellis claims that “like Voltaire, Jefferson longed for the day when the last king would be strangled with the entrails of the last priest” (139). While Adams wasn’t as venomous towards religion, his father was a minister and he considered himself a Unitarian, he most certainly held beliefs that current reading would view as deistic. Their deistic beliefs alone make a direct comparison with modern-day politics futile.

But I think I can easily provide an analogy of the political divide between Adams and Jefferson while simultaneously providing one that will help us understand the schism between political parties today:

“The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse” by Aesop.

Now you must know that a town mouse once upon a time went on a visit to his cousin in the country. He was rough and ready, this cousin, but he loved his town friend and made him heartily welcome. Beans and bacon, cheese and bread, were all he had to offer, but he offered them freely. The town mouse rather turned up his long nose at this country fare, and said, “I cannot understand, cousin, how you can put up with such poor food as this, but of course you cannot expect anything better in the country; come you with me and I will show you how to live. When you have been in town a week you will wonder how you could ever have stood a country life.” No sooner said than done: The two mice set off for the town and arrived at the town mouse’s residence late at night.

“You will want some refreshment after our long journey,” said the polite town mouse, and took his friend into the grand dining room. There they found the remains of a fine feast, and soon the two mice were eating up jellies and cakes and all that was nice. Suddenly they heard growling and barking.

“What is that?” said the country mouse.

“It is only the dogs of the house,” answered the other.

“Only,” said the country mouse, “I do not like that music at my dinner!” Just at that moment the door flew open; in came two huge mastiffs; and the two mice had to scamper down and run off.

“Good-bye, cousin,” said the country mouse.

“What! Going so soon?” said the other.

“Yes,” he replied. “Better beans and bacon in peace than cakes and ale in fear.”

Okay, I’m sure most of you have heard this fable before. And while I don’t necessarily agree with the moral it’s supposed to impart, it does capture the animosity between present day Democrats and Republicans and Adams and Jefferson. Jefferson made no apologies about being a Francophile, and he certainly did his fair share of traveling and living abroad, but he would immediately retire to his farm at Monticello at the drop of a hat, and in his heart he felt as if he was a simple, gentlemanly Virginian farmer. Of course, he wasn’t. He was much more than that, but what’s important here is not reality but self-identification. Jefferson viewed himself as a simple country mouse. Adams, on the other hand, was born and lived near Boston and educated at Harvard. He spent a good part of his life living in the hustle-bustle of cities like Boston, Philadelphia, London, and New York. Unlike Jefferson, Adams didn’t long a particular place or location to engage in silent contemplation. Adams did long for the company of his wife Abigail, but he seemed happiest in crowded cities where he could argue and discuss whatever was on his mind. He was the quintessential town mouse.

Many republicans still view the world through country mouse eyes. To a country mouse, self-government makes sense. You know all your mousey neighbors and they all know you. There’s no need for a strong government to help enforce laws because all the mice know each other. Taxes don’t make sense because the little country mouse village has no need for a government, much less an adequately-funded government. Unions don’t make sense to a country mouse because you know your boss. If there’s a problem, just go talk to the head mouse in charge. You know him, he knows you, and you probably know each other’s families. Obviously you can come to some agreement if you talk it out.

But to a town mouse, the country mouse’s view of the world is untenable. There’s so much going on in the town that self-government would never work. There are out-of-control mastiffs–someone has to do something about that. There’s great food and drink, but the company that makes jelly is based in another country, and the mice that work in the local factory aren’t getting a fair shake. Long hours, no benefits, and abusive bosses. The mousey employees had complained to their bosses, but they didn’t have any real power (rumors were the plant was owned by a group of felines from overseas). The mice thought about looking for other work, but the cake factory was the same. So they had to form a union so that their grievances were heard.

It’s no secret that urban voters traditionally vote democrat and rural voters vote republican. And if you’ve lived in both places it’s not hard to see why. When you live in the country you tend to feel, similarly to Jefferson and the country mouse, that you can take care of yourself. Since you aren’t forced to contend with many different kinds of people that hold many differing views on society, you feel disconnected from the rest of the world, and the need of a strong government seems tyrannical. But when you live in the town, like Adams and the town mouse, you realize that self-government simply isn’t enough. There are far too many out of control dogs running around for people to deal with. And beyond that, there are so many conflicting views, such as politics and religion, that without a strong government to continually pursue a common goal, the citizenry would be dissolute and combative.

In my experience, which is obviously anecdotal, people who live in the country oftentimes have a distorted view of city life. They view it as much more violent than it actually is, and they tend to view foreigners much more suspiciously. They also view most poverty as the result of laziness, which of course, it most definitely is not. They also have frighteningly skewed outlooks on unions, and they see any taxes as an imposition bordering on tyranny.

Of course, Aesop’s fable is fairly pro-country mouse, but like Adams, I think that dogmatic adherence to either of the philosophies of Jeffersonian self-government or Hamiltonian Federalism is pure folly, and the only way for the country to flourish is to find a way to continue to combine those two seemingly antagonistic philosophies.

Besides, beans and bacon can get boring as hell. I’d risk a fight with a bull mastiff for a shot at some jellies and cake now and then. I feel like Adams would support me on this.

Post Script: For more of my thoughts on country life, click here.

Post-Post Script: I’ll make a formal announcement at the end of the week, but I want to restart the reading group. Anniina suggested the sequel to Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood. I want to give those people that haven’t read Oryx and Crake the time to read it. Again, I’ll post details later this week.

Tracy Clark-Flory has written an interesting article over at Salon.com. In the article, Clark-Flory contemplates the difference between women reading/watching romance and men watching pornography (Yes, I know that porn is not the exclusive domain of men. However, romance novels, by and large, are consumed by women.)

Clark-Flory comes to the exact same conclusion that any sane bookseller eventually comes to: Romance novels are socially acceptable porn for women. I worked at a Waldenbooks for many years, and every month the same group of sad looking guys would come in and buy the latest issue of Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler. And every month the same group of sad looking females would come in and buy the latest romance offerings from Harlequin and Silhouette. There were virtually no differences between the two groups.

I’d like to take Clark-Flory’s argument a step further. I think that the Romance novels are actually far more damaging than pornography. Pornography, by and large, is immediately identifiable as fantasy. Most reasonable people would be able distinguish between real people sex and porn star sex. However, romance fiction is not as easily identifiable, and even more concerning, it taps into and reinforces the gendered roles that have kept women as subordinates for centuries.

Let’s take the Cinderella story as an example because so many romance novels and movies follow the plot. Incidentally, this basic plot line dates back to the 1st century B.C. A young woman lives in an oppressive, abusive, or isolated environment. She feels misunderstood, unappreciated, and unloved–feelings that are quite common. Suddenly, a romantic and sensitive suitor comes along and falls madly in love with the woman. He’s rugged and manly, handsome, and chivalrous, and unlike everyone else around the woman, he recognizes the woman’s beauty and potential. He accepts where she came from, and he swoops her out of her lowly lifestyle and gives her a wonderful new life.

This type of fantasy insidiously reinforces the notion that women need to be rescued by men. The female never really initiates change in these stories, but rather waits on the male to change things for her. This fantasy also reinforces the notion that every person has a perfect mate out there just waiting to be found–the belief that everyone has a destined mate that is perfect, i.e. The One. As in, he’s the one, or she’s the one I’m meant to be with.

What an absolutely rubbish belief. With as many millions of people waltzing around this giant mudball of ours, the notion that each person only has one perfect mate is asinine. We shouldn’t think in terms of destiny but in terms of varying degrees of compatibility. Some might call this outlook cold, but love and varying degrees of compatibility aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s just that we should look at love as rationally as possible or realize we’re increasing the odds of heartbreak exponentially. For instance, if you’re in love with someone and you disagree about films, TV shows, religion, and politics, odds are good your relationship is going to be shit. Love that person all you want, but at the end of the day, you have nothing in common except some nebulous abstraction we humans have titled “love.”

I’ve been down the romantic “she’s the one” road that romance novels and films promise. It’s a road filled with potholes, deadends, and wrongturns.

As I wrote earlier in this post, porn, unlike romance fiction, is easily identifiable. From the costumes to the dialogue to the lighting, porn is nothing like reality. The differences between porn sex and real sex are like the differences between collegiate wresting and professional wrestling. Sure, collegiate wrestling is a great sport, and the competitors are highly passionate about what they’re doing, but not many people actually want to watch collegiate wrestling. It’s boring as hell. That’s real people sex.

But professional wrestling? Huge difference. There’s loud, bassy music that’s cheesy and awesome. The costumes are gaudy and sexy. The wrestling moves are exciting and damn near physically impossible to achieve without injury. That’s porn.

Now don’t get me wrong…I’m not trying to convince anyone that porn is harmless. It can be quite harmful, but so can just about anything in excess.  My point, rather, is that both romance novels and pornography are forms of escapism, but porn has been vilified while romance fiction has been, for the most part, ignored. Young adults are punished for possessing pornography, yet recent studies show that consumption of pornography does not lead to feelings of misogyny, sexual perversion, rape, or pedophilia. However, the very act of punishing young adults for possessing pornography, especially when coupled with religious fundamentalism, correlates quite highly with sexual depravity. Conversely, society not only condones, but, in many ways, encourages the unrealistic, romantic outlook of love.

Yet again our puritanical roots betray us. We shouldn’t worry so much about the sex. We should, however, be worried about Prince Charming. He’s a liar and a cheat, and quite possibly a serial rapist.

As a student of english literature, I’ve always had a hard time with poetry. There are a handful of poets that I like, and who I will read for pleasure, but for the most part the majority of the poetry I’ve read and am knowledgeable about is the product of my education. Poetry, and especially poetry following the Romantics, is too much work for me to enjoy. I’m not one of those cats that can just “feel” a poem, so I have to sit there and read, read, and re-read the damn thing until I’m finally able to decipher it like a Sudoku puzzle. Some people might say I’m just not passionate enough to fully appreciate poetry. To those people I say, “not so.” Why, just yesterday I had myself a good and thorough cry (Stand by Me was on…or was it Armageddon). I’m also intrinsically non-musical, so trying to graph, or even hear, metric patterns aggravates me more than a toothache at an ice cream party.

For my tastes, rap hip-hop is more entertaining than modern poetry. I apologize to all my literature-brethren about this. I obviously have a flawed poetry-palate. My guess is that rap is so simplistic that even my moronic brain can understand it. Case in point: the new track “Flyentology” from El-P’s album I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead. I’m loving it. Here’s the video:

El-P also wrote a poem, “A Draconian Love Song,” that I thought was pretty good (again, take my poetic analysis with a grain of salt.) I’d cut and paste his poem, but since he’s a blogger and he posted on his blog, I’m simply providing him a link. I’d rather him get the traffic than me.

I’d also like to point out that fellow blogger Anniina has been writing and posting poetry to her blog for quite a while. And if you think reading poetry is hard, well, writing it is exponentially harder, and I’m super-envious of her poetic chops. She’s been curiously quiet of late. Maybe some traffic will spur the Muse.

One of the last words I’d use to describe myself would be “giddy.” But today, when I checked my mail, I did in fact feel giddy. I hopped up and down with gleeful jubilation. I even shrieked a little. No, it wasn’t because I got the current edition of Entertainment Weekly, which I did, but it was because my copy of A Magician Among the Spirits arrived today. In the 1920’s, after the death of his mother, Harry Houdini set out on a mission to debunk spiritualists, mediums, and other confidence artists who prey on the emotionally vulnerable and recently bereaved. In 1924, he published a book on his personal investigations into the world of Spiritualism.

Until the death of his mother, Houdini had occasionally worked as a medium and a psychic. He viewed the practice as nothing more than performance, as entertainment, and not as a way to seduce or rob the gullible or uneducated. In his introduction he says that after the death of his mother he saw the practice as “border[ing] on crime.” At the end of his introduction Houdini states:

I have spent a goodly part of my life in study and research. During the last thirty years I have read every single piece of literature on the subject of Spiritualism that I could. I have accumulated one of the largest libraries in the world on psychic phenomena, Spiritualism, magic, witchcraft, demonology, evil spirits, etc. some of the material going back as far as 1489, and I doubt if any one in the world has so complete a library on modern Spiritualism, but nothing I have ever read concerning the so-called Spiritualistic phenomena has impressed me as being genuine. It is true that some of the things I read seemed mystifying but I question if they would be were they to be reproduced under different circumstances, under test conditions, and before expert mystifiers and open minded committees. Mine has not been an investigation of a few days or weeks or months but one that has extended over thirty years and in that thirty years I have not found one incident that savoured of the genuine. If there had been any real unalloyed demonstration to work on, one that did not reek of fraud, one that could not be reproduced by earthly powers, then there would be something for a foundation, but up to the present time everything that I have investigated has been the result of deluded brains or those which were too actively and intensely willing to believe.

Obviously Houdini was a legendary magician, but as time goes on his role as a skeptic and a scientist begins to become more important than his role as an entertainer. He eschewed magical thinking, but he didn’t stifle the hope that the supernatural might exist. Houdini just wanted to make sure that in the search for the supernatural we didn’t forget scientific method, skepticism, and critical thinking.

We need more people like Harry Houdini.

Just as a short preface to this post, I think I should mention that I’ve edited and rewritten part of this several times since I first mentioned the topic. First off, I’ve been busy, and I simply haven’t had the motivation nor the mental strength to post. Secondly, at Halloween a reader of this blog, upon meeting me in person for the first time, said that I wasn’t anywhere near as angry in person as I was on the blog. I do use this as a location for complaining, hopefully in a humorous way, but she was right, and I don’t want to seem like a curmudgeon.

So I rewrote this.

And rewrote it.

And after several goes at a rewrite, try as I might, I sound like a curmudgeon. Oh, well.

If you haven’t seen the trailer for the new movie “The Golden Compass,” take a second to watch this clip.

Looks pretty cool, right? There’s swords, magical items, the always attractive Nicole Kidman, and talking bears, which, except for Boo-Boo, are always welcome in any movie or TV show.

The Catholic League of America (which, other than the member being Roman Catholic, has no affiliation with the Roman Catholic Church) has called for a boycott of the film, as have many other Christian organizations in the U.S. So what’s the problem?

Philip Pullman, the author of the books the movie is based on, is an Oxford graduate who went on to teach at his alma mater, a winner of the Carnegie medal for children’s literature, and an atheist. It’s that last bit that has William Donahue, the pit-bull of the Catholic League, all in a tither.

Pullman has never denied the fact that his books are atheistic in nature. The books that comprise His Dark Materials trilogy are about a corrupt and oppressive Authority, which can be seen as an allegory for organized religion. John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” served not only as an influence in naming the trilogy, but as a thematic influence as well.

Typically, Bill Donahue and his ilk have called for a boycott of the film, and by proxy the books, without ever having seen nor read either of them. Donahue and his emailing campaign has been so successful that at the time of this post “The Golden Compass” is the number two entry over at Snopes. It blows my mind to think of boycotting or banning literature, much less doing so without ever having read the “offending” texts. To quote the good Dr. Jones, “Goose-stepping morons…should try reading books instead of burning them.”

Donahue seems to think that Pullman is out to “bash Christianity and promote atheism,” and the movie is simply the secular media’s way of stealthily converting your children to atheism. Donahue seems to view atheism, and all philosophy not his own, as some kind of virus, able to infect and corrupt children simply through proximity.

Let me quote the Elder Brother in Milton’s other great work “Comus”: “Virtue may be assail’d but never hurt, / Surpris’d by unjust force but not enthrall’d” (11. 589-590). To paraphrase, the truly virtuous should never worry, because the unjust may surprise the virtuous person, but the unjust will never subjugate the virtuous. In other words, if your child’s Christianity is destroyed by a movie starring Nicole Kidman and James Bond, or by a book written by a dude named Phil, then your child wasn’t a very good Christian to begin with.

There is always something to be learned from the foreign, whether that be race, religion, gender, or nationality.

Here’s something else Donahue and other fundamentalists never seem to realize: this is a religiously diverse society. Some people are very religious, and others are not, and that’s perfectly okay. I don’t expect a religious pluralism, but let’s all try to understand one another, shall we? There is no better way for your child to become tolerant of other races, religions, and ideologies than to expose him or her to them and then discuss them. Do’em a favor, and give them the intellectual tools needed to operate as a rational being on this spherical melting pot we call Earth.

Or, by all means, cloister your children. Hide them. Protect them from the evils of the “secular” world. Only subject them to the principles and ideologies that you personally believe in. That way they’ll either completely resent and deny you the moment they realize you’ve sheltered them all their life, or you’ll bless the world with another intolerant and ignorant bigot.

Either way. I’d always enjoy a tolerant society, but bigots are fun, too.

I’ve received several indigent e-mail forwards about the new film “The Golden Compass,” each of which call for a boycott of the film. I’ve never read the books on which the film is based, but apparently the author, Philip Pullman, is an atheist, and an atheistic ideology informs the plot of the books.

Incidentally, the judges of the Carnegie Medal called The Golden Compass “one of the ten most important children’s novels of the past 70 years.”

I’ll be ranting about this boycott later tonight.

For our reading group we’ll read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

From the wiki entry for the book:

Never Let Me Go is a 2005 novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. It was shortlisted for the 2005 Booker Prize and for the 2006 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Time Magazine named it the best fiction novel of 2005 and included it in All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels. While it contains many tropes generally associated with science fiction, it was marketed as mainstream literature.

Unless anyone disagrees, we’ll start reading on Monday. Hopefully that’ll give everyone enough time to find a copy of the book.

In regards to the symbolism in the film “Pan’s Labyrinth,” director Guillermo del Toro states during his commentary track on the DVD that, “Symbols cannot be closed to a single meaning, because if so the symbol becomes a cypher, and the tale become an equation of exact value.”

del Toro means that symbols are subject to interpretation by the viewer, regardless of the director’s intentions for the symbolism in the film. I won’t ruin the film for you, and if you haven’t seen it by all means do so, but the ending of the film is up for interpretation, and del Toro specifically ended his movie with the expectation that many viewers will interpret the symbols and symbolism in the film in different ways. Your interpretation of those symbols will determine how you view the ending of the film.

I am by no means a semiotician, nor can I even claim to fully understand semiotics. Sure, I have a general idea of how signifiers and the signified relate to texts, but as far as breaking things down into their individual structures, well, that ain’t my bag, baby. But, I do find it interesting how different people interpret the exact same symbol, or series of symbols, in completely different ways. Because we do all interpret symbols a little bit differently, don’t we? When I see the montages of the American flag in Michael Bay films, I’m quite sure the first thought that pops into my head is very different than the first one that pops into yours. Likewise, I’m sure the meanings you attach to the Millennium Falcon are very different from the meanings that I attach to it.

Arguing over the meanings and interpretations of symbols in literature and films is quite a lot of fun. Arguing over them in everyday life isn’t really all that fun. In fact, I’d say that many of the major points of contention in our society might very well stem from conflicting interpretations of symbols. Personally, I think everything would run a lot smoother if we treated everyday life like literary and film criticism. Instead of attacking each other over our contentious interpretations we could all sit down and write out an article length paper for each symbol we interpret, wherein we meticulously detail how and why we arrived at our interpretation of said symbol.

We’d be so damn busy writing all the time that no one would have a chance to even interact with another person, much less argue with one.

I’ve chosen seven books as candidates for our upcoming reading group. There wasn’t any particular criteria I used in selecting these candidates, but I did intentionally stay within the latter half of the twentieth century for two particular reasons: 1) For our first book I want a text that is more fun than challenging. 2) These texts shouldn’t require an abundance of historical background for a full understanding.

If this goes well the next batch will come from a more challenging time period that requires some additional research to fully appreciate. I’ll post these up, we’ll talk about them, and in the next day or so we can all vote on which book we’d like to read collectively.

And yes, there are several science fiction texts on this list. I like science fiction, but I feel like the academy, or at least the academies I’ve attended, fail to acknowledge the importance of science fiction in literary studies. So without further adieu, here’s the list:

Breakfast of Champions — Kurt Vonnegut
Shalimar the Clown — Salman Rushdie
The Gods Themselves — Isaac Asimov
Falling Man: A Novel — Dom Delillo
Stranger in a Strange Land — Robert Heinlein
Never Let Me Go — Kazus Ishiguro
War Trash — Ha Jin

So there you go; I hope you’re as excited as I am. Let me know what you think.

One of the things that I miss most about taking literature classes is the chance to enter into a dialogue with fellow readers about great literature. Most people think of reading as an isolated endeavour; a hunched and pathetic figure poring over a novel alone in a poorly lit room, but nothing could be further from the truth. Literature is meant to be discussed with friends, written about with scholastic colleagues, and debated vigorously with anyone that will listen. If you’ve never had the experience of reading a wonderful text and then critically discussing its various themes and motifs with a group of people then you’re missing out on a vital intellectual activity.

Here’s my proposal: If enough people display an interest in forming a blog-reading group, then I’ll suggest a couple of books from various genres and time periods of literature from which to read. We’ll pick a book, and then once a week we’ll discuss either the whole book, depending on length, or sections of our chosen text. For each text I’ll do a little research and kick off our conversations with a brief look at a sampling of critical commentary and a primer on our chosen text’s historical background to locate it temporally.

Interested? If so, let me know in the comments section of this post. If I get enough responses we’ll go ahead with this…if not, well, we’ll pretend I never mentioned this and I’ll try to shake off the embarrassment I feel because of my non-commenting audience.