Speed-The-Plow (David Mamet)

What I love about Mamet's plays is the way the context of the conversation changes in a instant, but it's immediately evident what the new context is.

Excuse me.

Character 1: The thing about Mamet is, is the context turns on a fucken' dime...

Character 2: On a fucken' dime.

Character 1: Right, on a fucken' dime, but it's clear as day what everybody's state of mind is.

Character 2: Bullshit.

Anyway, you've got two producers who seem to be pleased with their work-- they're making a good deal on a movie project!

Boom.  Nope, they're only excited about the money.

Boom.  Nope, what they really want is to shove the money in the faces (or up the asses) of everyone who stood in their way.

Karen walks in, and the guys start showing off by being more vulgar than before.  What they actually want is sex-- but they're mostly insecure about it.  Enchanting.

At Gould's place, Karen makes her pitch (though she is unable to make the one-sentence pitch a movie deal requires.)  It doesn't work.

Boom.  She switches to seduction.  Gould doesn't notice.

In the office, Fox is livid.  (Actually, he goes through Denial, Anger, and Bargaining in about a page and a half).  He's actaully been jealous of Gould his whole career, but was willing to hide it as long as he could be dragged upward with him.

Ultimately, the movies are a business where everybody claims to be producing art, while in actuality it's entirely built on power plays.  "It's about people."  Still a half-truth.

Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers (Tom Wolfe)

It's all an illusion.  Government programs, class struggles, status-climbing, identity politics, community organizing-- all of it.

Those who design top-down programs and solutions think that they will make a dent in the problem.  What's the problem?  Well... clearly there is a problem, and clearly we have in mind that we will do something about it, and in the end, clearly that will indeed come to pass.  Because how could it not?

Every participant uses the system in place for ends other than what the system was put in place for.  Community leaders hand out favors to friends.  Government bureaucrats check boxes on a checklist, their assignments fulfilled.  Status-seekers see an opening and make a move for themselves.  Children are conscripted for image management purposes.  Teachers create lessons to raise awareness-- the most important thing that can be done for a learner.  Writers claim to have discovered The Answer, while cultural guideposts pick winners nearly at random.  Money is flung around because money is the only medium known to produce results-- the mere use of it must be part of the solution!

Is there an alternative?  Well... an alternative to what?  If you never define the problem you can insist that only your actions can possibly solve it.  Who can propose a better way?  How could they possibly show their way to be better?

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I guess I hinted at this same problem in the last post, but here it is again.  Trying to wrap my head around macroscopic sociological problems-- or even macroscopic descriptions of society-- drives me crazy.  Wolfe's style is very helpful in explaining why this might be so-- because the most likely case is that it doesn't make any sense.  The best way to realize that is to see whaat we actually see in our everyday experience of the world and the large society we live in-- only disjointed facts and impressions, that whirl around while the rational part of our brains try to tell some kind of narrative that makes sense.  It could very well be that we're not wired to make sense of that level of abstraction.

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On another note, I have noticed that my posts tend to be written in the voice of the author I just read-- or at least a facsimile of that voice.  This is not a new phenomenon.  Thinking back to high school and my first years of college, I often fell asleep trying to read whatever was in front of me (that I had put off until I was too tired to actually get through it-- some things never change).  Fiction, non-fiction, magazines, whatever.  And I always had dreams narrated in the style of whomever I had been reading.  I can distinctly remember this happening with Tom Clancy more than anything else.  Upon waking, I'd notice that whatever the narrator had been saying was utter, utter nonsense, and then the content of that narration would fade completely.  But the tone remained (even if I was unable to reproduce it while I was awake).

Anyway, it's happening again, especially in the entries for Chesterton and Wolfe.  I'm glad that it is.  In Chesterton's case, his tone is so lofty I want to capture it as my own.  In Wolfe's case, it would be impossible to take careful sequential notes of what he writes-- and I wouldn't want to anyway.  As I mentioned above, the free-wheeling style is the only way to make sense of his subject matter in the first place.

Radical Chic (Tom Wolfe)

Man, I love that stream-of-consciousness style.  It really does paint the room, and even the subjective experience of the room.  And I've found the less carefully you read-- the more you just let the words stream in-- the clearer the picture.

Maybe I just know a lot more than I did before, but it was surprising how familiar the names were in comparison to those in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.  Leonard Bernstein, Barbara Walters, William F. Buckley.  Cool stuff.

Biting commentary on the whole idea of high society.  Intended that way?  Isn't Tom Wolfe a member of high society?

The political tensions are clear enough.  It's probable that social gulfs can't be bridged in one evening.  What progress did they actually expect to make?

Loved the continued insistence at the end that it was a "meeting, not a party."  Oh, but the white servants...

I was taken aback by the final turn of the tale.  In the end, the movers and shakers lost control of their image, and of the story.  A good lesson there: With status comes notoriety, but not necessarily a whole lot of power.  Trend-setters can set the trends within those arenas that others look to them to set trends.  But political trends come from elsewhere.  Or were they simply trying to plant the next flag against an up-and-coming new wave of high society-- was it merely a social experiment?  Simply a gamble-- within their own world-- that didn't pay off?

I'd like to see Buckley's essay about the meeting.

One theme that has bothered me more and more in general, and that struck me in particular in the essay (so I might as well bring it up now): I don't think I understand the psychology of identity politics.  Meaning, I genuinely don't think of myself as represented by, or representative of, any class at all.  That's easy enough to say as a white middle-class man, but it applies to those minority groups of which I am a part as well-- I never felt nor do I feel personally implicated in any criticism of the Catholic Church, for instance.  In the realm of abstraction, I'll think through arguments implicating the abstract idea.  And I'll take note of how other individuals within the group are treated as individuals.  But I never feel like the abstract idea has much of an effect on me.  In the end, I see myself as an individual who works and lives, and is treated in a certain way by the people I interact with, and take those interactions as significant only for myself-- because how could the other person actually be acting as if they are interacting with an abstraction?  How could I?

So what am I doing wrong?  Because given the way other people talk and write about the way they see and behave in the world, it often feels like I'm missing out on something big.

Sidelines (Ed.: Sidelights?)

It can get awfully boring limiting oneself to a set sequence of books.  And it can get mighty annoying reading just enough to outline in a post, and no more.  I'm getting a little sick of it at the moment.  Can't I just read?

So, a new addition.  Random insertions of non-classics, read quickly and immersively (well, more immersively).  Library books, many of them will be.  They'll get single entries, and I'll feel free to move on.  Capice?

Sudden panic, however: do I call these sidelines, or sidelights?  Apple's Dashboard dictionary says:

sideline - an activity done in addition to one's main job
sidelight - a piece of incidental information that helps to clarify or enliven a subject

They're both right!  Ummm..... sidelights it is.  (The whole damn blog is a sideline.)