In the Shadow of Mt. Hollywood

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- LI

The other side of the suggestibility coin for the LSD personality was authoritarianism. Authoritarianism, especially as it applies to Ken Kesey, is a theme running through The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Some who took part in Kesey's early drug scene at La Honda observed, according to Tom Wolfe (ellipses in original),

Kesey is starting to organize our trips. He hands out the drugs personally, one for you, and one for you. . . and just when you're starting to lie back and groove on your thing, he comes in -- Hup! -- Hup! -- and organizes a tramp through the woods. . .

After it's all over, some of them ask Kesey for some acid and IT-290 to take back to Palo Alto. No-o-o-o-o-o, says Kesey, and he cocks his head as if he wants to say this thing just right, because it's a delicate matter, -I think you should come here and take it. . .

Later, on the way back, someone says: We used to be equals. Now it's Kesey's trip. We go to his place. We take his acid. We do what he wants.

The same issues come up later on the bus trip that's the focus of the book. Sandy, one of the hippies on the bus, senses that Kesey is beginning to think he's too detached. In fact, it seems that Kesey may be about to throw him off the bus, or at least make it plain that Sandy isn't with the program. At the last minute, Sandy deflects Kesey's apparent intention:

[S]uddenly Sandy jumps up and crouches into an ape position, dangling his arms and mimicking him -- and Kesey breaks into a big grin and throws his arms around Sandy and hugs him --

He approves! Kesey approves of me! At last I have responded to something, brought it all out front, even if it is resentment, done something, done my thing -- and in that very action, just as he taught, it is gone, the resentment. . . and I am back on the bus again, synched in. . .

Always Kesey! And in that surge of euphoria -- Kesey approves! -- Sandy knew that Kesey was the key to whatever was going right and whatever was going wrong on this trip, and nobody, not one of them who ever took this trip, got in this movie, would ever have even the will to walk up to Kesey and announce irrevocably: I am off the bus.

It had become plain to me, even before I got much into the Dartmouth drug scene in my sophomore year, that Larry occupied a place in it much like Kesey (and in fact, Kesey's books had a prominent spot on Larry's shelves). Once that fall, Bill McMann came back up to Hanover for a visit, and I laid my concerns out in front of both him and Larry.

Somehow, I said, we'd lost the basic idea of trying to get a real education, and we'd been diverted into the trivial details of taking drugs, and we'd gotten various aspects of being a good hippie confused with getting an education. And Larry, who unquestionably knew better than anyone else what a good hippie was like, had become the expert, the authority.

Bill split the difference. I doubt if he cared as much any more. John was right in that being a good hippie wasn't the same thing as getting an education. But Larry had a lot to say. I should listen to Larry.

Some months later, I had a blind date up for a concert. She and I were sitting around in Larry's apartment before the concert -- by then he'd moved off campus -- with a bunch of others, smoking grass. Something came up, maybe in the music that was playing, maybe in the talk, that made someone pipe up: "Wow! What a trip it must be to be a child! A child, man! What a great thing!"

"It's hell," said my date, out of the blue. And that was all she said. I hardly heard it. She might not even have been talking to anyone but herself. She was a good date, too. Smart and good looking, I had some good chats with her.

A little later, Larry took me aside. "What's wrong with your date? he asked.

"Huh?" I replied. "What do you mean?"

"When Phil was talking about how great it was to be a child, she said, 'It's hell.' Bummed everyone out. Why do you bring someone like that around?" It was the Kesey syndrome. I'd done something that wasn't with the program. It was almost as bad as having your wife say something in front of your boss that made him mad.

On Line Publishing, Oh My Goodness -- III

I want to take one more look at C/OASIS today before I move on. I found another page on the site, The Digital Writer that contains more of Eide's illogical wanderings, and I think they offer additional insight into what's driving "literary" and academic culture these days. As I said yesterday, Eide apparently is not just a random flake, and I think there's some similarity between the opinions he expresses on his site and other "received" academic opinion from figures like Ward Churchill. Eide begins his essay on "The Digital Writer":

The writer, by instinct, distrusts the "business civilization." I am certain that most of the good people who lived before "business civilization," thank God they were not born in this era. "Give us the old church or the good old King over this inhuman nonsense!"

All of a sudden in the second sentence, "most" of the people who lived at an earlier time are thanking God they didn't live at a later time. How would they know? How does Eide know, especially the "most" part? Maybe this is a clever screening device (the kind of thing Stanley Fish would impute to Milton!), by which Eide separates at the beginning of his essay those who will tolerate illogic from those who won't. Give us the good old King? Which good old King would that be? Louis XIV? Louis XVI? Richard II? Richard III? Henry VIII? Charles I? James II? George III? George IV? Wilhelm II? Edward VIII? On the other hand, what about Queen Victoria, of whom it was observed that she knew almost no commoners other than her servants, but whose political instincts were unerring in understanding the middle class of her "nation of shopkeepers"? Sounds to me as if the good old Queen had something in common with the "business civilization".

Eide's opening remarks make it plain that he's not a conventional leftist. In fact, he's laying out a path that makes him seem to me more like a romantic reactionary -- he posits a population of dead people that prefers some vaguely defined earlier time to the present, something G.K.Chesterton would probably not disagree with. A few paragraphs down, Eide expands his idea:

There are amelioration's [sic] in business civilization. And you connect a "business civilization" with a liberal, democratic culture and a dynamo is produced. Provided, that is, that the liberal, democratic culture is superior, is valued more, is made greater than the business civilization. And for people skeptical that such a conflict exists I suggest opting out of it for awhile and see what happens.

After the writer shakes himself loose of both fright and loathing at the situation he's more apt to view the "business civilization" as producing types; the professional, the expert, the bureaucrat, the corporate manager, the entrepreneur, the employee among others. Types and scenes; collections of faceless boxes in the downtown region of a city that announce, over the tops of the steeples and city hall, "we rule." And the writer is convinced that once this is fait acompli, once the business civilization is all and has fully enveloped and consumed the liberal, democratic culture then it will become fully corrupt, in spirit, and the era of American nationhood will end. So, the stakes are rather high.

. . . The writer, properly, stands outside of all of this, acutely aware of what the stakes are. Acutely aware of history, the flow of history, the necessity of endings. And the writer can do this now because the official opposition, the ideological opposition to the business civilization has disappeared. It doesn't exist. That communist is not under your bed anymore. In fact, it's likely that the communist has some venture capital now. Every good communist is seeking venture capital these days. And it's not that the writer has a particular point of view except that of the liberal, democratic soul.

Business civilization is not the enemy. It is the central fact. And it is the central facts that make up the writers universe. Other signficant [sic] facts are government, science and technology. These central facts are immovable and criticism is a kind of modern version of "saving face." However, the writer has the ability to trace the central facts back to the seeds out of which they developed. That is a crucial moment captured by the imagination. We can do nothing about the corporation but we can see that they form out of an idea and that idea is something we can grasp. What stands before us in the form of a city landscape is the hard shell of ideas that are busily exhausting the people.

This is hardly systematic exposition, but I think we can tease some central themes out of it. One is that the "business civilization" has produced a middle-class culture of "the professional, the expert, the bureaucrat, the corporate manager, the entrepreneur, the employee". This middle-class culture will envelop and consume the "liberal, democratic culture". Exactly what the difference between the two is here, Eide doesn't make clear -- he suggests only that the writer discover the difference by "opting out" of business civilization, which may mean quitting his day job (this might be instructive, but I don't see how it illustrates anything in particular about liberal values -- the need to work is part of the human condition, independent of social scheme). It's generally understood that the rise of liberal, democratic values is associated with a prosperous middle class. What society can be liberal and democratic and not have ideas like due process, equality before the law, fair compensation for work, property rights, and the like, that have allowed the middle class and businesses to prosper? However, Eide associates the bad kind of business culture with the city. The best conclusion I can draw is that Eide has some type of nostalgic agrarianism in mind.

And Eide, to his credit, makes it plain that his views aren't what we would call traditionally leftist: ". . . the ideological opposition to the business civilization has disappeared. It doesn't exist. That communist is not under your bed anymore." Actually, the situation that the opponents of capitalist urban liberal democracy face is that the range of alternatives has shrunk dramatically: there are a few remaining Stalinist states; there are Islamic theocratic states; there are a few assorted third-world dictatorships; and there are genocidal, kleptocratic, disease-ridden disaster areas. If you don't aspire to a form of capitalist urban liberal democracy -- which seems to be what Eide means when he speaks of "business civilization" -- those are your choices.

The complete intellectual and near-complete political defeat of Marxism (which Eide acknowledges) has left opponents of capitalist urban liberal democracy with no alternate real-world program example, and none on the visible horizon (Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station, an underrated book, points out how long it takes to establish this type of visionary agenda). So one of the few alternatives is nostalgia for an agrarian, inevitably aristocratic, pre-capitalist-urban-liberal-democratic society, which can only be something idealized, not real. Consider just the basic issues of per capita income and life expectancy in any historical version of such a society. One problem I see in this view is that, in its fantasy of a past agrarian ideal, it's at least a close cousin of German national socialism, and in fact by excoriating professionals, experts, bureaucrats, managers, entrepreneurs, and employees (those who do well in a bourgeois culture), it opens the door to anti-Semitism, since Jews are a particular group that hasn't been associated with agrarian, aristocratic values.

But this is the intellectual redoubt into which people like Eide are forced. And we return to Ward Churchill here; on this site, which contains the photo Glenn Reynolds linked to of Churchill channeling the Stockholm-syndrome Patty Hearst, there's an interview where Churchill makes his views clear.

The individuals who are perpetrators in one way or another, the “little Eichmanns” [footnote redacted] in the background—the technocrats, bureaucrats, technicians—who make the matrix of atrocity that we are opposing possible are used to operating with impunity. If you’re designing thermonuclear weapons, you’re subject to neutralization, in the same sense that somebody who is engaged in homicide would be, in terms of their capacity to perpetrate that offense. One or two steps removed should not have the effect of immunizing. Otherwise, only those who are in the frontline—usually the most expendable in the systemic sense—are subject to intervention. None of the decision-makers, the people who make it possible, would be subject to intervention that would prevent their action in any way at all.

Churchill's point is that technocrats, bureaucrats, and technicians -- seemingly a group very similar to the group Eide identifies -- are, very broadly speaking, waging economic war against the rest of the world (and I'm not quite sure who that would be -- nobody in the Western middle class benefits from Stalinism, ignorance, bigotry, genocide, disease, or systematic theft of all but the bare necessities, and in fact one of G.W.Bush's recent points has been that it's in the West's interest to work actively to eliminate such conditions). Churchill is, of course, a self-apponted representative of Native Americans, though there's some disagreement on whether he's a member of that group, and to some extent he represents Native American culture as an alternative to capitalist urban liberal democracy. Again, though, this is an idealized world to which there can be no practical return.

It's worth pointing out that the academy, of which Churchill as a full Professor is a member in very good standing, is one of the few remaining pre-Enlightnment, pre-capitalist-urban-liberal-democratic social institutions. As a result, it shouldn't be surprising that academics frequently adopt romantic-nostalgic, anti-bourgeois views; publishers, as a group that depends on a bourgeois economy to sell books, seem more incongruous here.

So I'm beginning to develop a working hypothesis on what defines current "literary" or academic culture, and I think that, as reflected in the views of people like David Eide and Ward Churchill, it's moved away from traditional redistributionist leftism and toward a much less respectable romantic nostalgia. Opposition to technocrats, bureaucrats, technicians, and managers has never been part of traditional leftism -- Stalin relied on technocrats like Kaganovich, and while he purged individuals as it suited him, he never renounced the need for such people. Liberal US Presidential candidates like Michael Dukakis and John Kerry based their campaigns in large part on their own managerial competence, as opposed to what they argued was the bungling of laissez-faire conservaatives. I don't think this agrarian-romantic-nostalgic development has been sudden; its roots are widespread in the 1960s and the hippie and New Left movements, which, as some writers have pointed out, represented a major break from previous "United Front" orthodoxy. But this is the animal we're dealing with now, as I see it.

On Line Publishing, Oh My Goodness -- II

After the eight-hit acid trip version of Shelley's "Defence of Poetry" we had from C/OASIS yesterday, I couldn't resist going back. The site has a specific page called Short Story Submissions, which contains the following:

Much has been made of the decline of the short story. It didn't decline at all. The literary markeplace [sic], like any other marketplace, became fractured by the specialized modern culture. An art desires to be produced for those who want it not those who think they need it to look good. Well, we are here at any rate, and have published a lot of stories over the past four years. We are specialists of the good story that is created by human imagination and not the inhuman machinery through which most stories are told these days. The inhuman machinery simply says that human beings will be captured for the next several thousand years in a world infinately [sic] stronger than they and beyond their understanding. So, they will join with their fellows who wandered the Earth thousands upon thousands of years before Sumer and UR.

It's worth pointing out that the "decline of the short story" to which the author refers here was essentially complete by the death of Flannery O'Connor in 1964, but it was television a decade and a half earlier that killed the market. (John Updike, it occurs to me, is a little like the restored '57 Chevies I see cruising Hollywood Boulevard now and then.) The marketplace didn't become fractured, instead, the consuming public preferred TV sitcoms to short stories, and considering the average short story, I can't say as I blame them much. But the writer here commits the weirdest act of hypostatization I've run across in some time: "An art desires to be produced for those who want it not those who think they need it to look good." He's apparently interviewed Brevis, the muse of Short Story, and gotten the skrinny here. Keep doing the short stuff, folks, she wants it.

And next we have what I can only infer is the existence of the novel writing machines that Orwell predicted in Nineteen Eighty Four, "the inhuman machinery through which most stories are told these days". I wasn't aware of these, and it's possible that they haven't been developed far enough yet to do novels, but they're certainly doing short stories, according to the author here.

Now, this all could simply be dismissed as dissociated rant. The business of inhuman machinery and capturing human beings for thousands of years is out of cult worlds, not ordinary discourse, and if this were one guy, or just a group of like-minded cultists, we could simply dismiss the site. In fact, I see a disturbing similarity to the woozy job application cover letters in Overqualified on my blogroll. Take, for instance, this letter, intended to be humorous, and compare it to what we've been reading:

Art is a reflection of human nature, he said. It is beautiful, and awful. It is simple, and it is incomprehensible. Art is the process of taking things apart to see how they work, and it is the process of breaking things to remind us how fragile they are. He sat on the edge of my couch, drinking a glass of water, and he said that we were creating an atmosphere that would retain the radiation reflecting off the surface of the earth. We were melting the edges of the ice caps, cooling down the northern seas. We were slowing the Gulf Stream, dramatically changing the way the environment behaved. He grabbed my shoulder and said, Isn't art supposed to move you? Isn't it supposed to shake you by the hair and say "Aren't you afraid?"

What puzzles me is that at least some people take the site seriously. They write short stories for it. I bring this up in part because of some remarks on Instapundit yesterday:

HATE-FILLED STUPIDITY FROM LEFT-LEANING ACADEMICS ISN'T NEWS anymore, which is why I haven't been paying much attention to the story of Colorado professor Ward Churchill's comparison of 9/11 victims to Eichmann. But go here and look at the picture.

Isn't he exactly what you imagined? Shoulder-length hair, grimly self-righteous expression, black turtleneck, Abbie Hoffman sunglasses. A man whose look, like his rhetoric, is frozen in the amber of 1969.

The same kind of guys, looking the same way, were saying the same kinds of things when I was younger than my daughter is now. When will the Left catch up with the times?

These remarks are the start of what has become a very long post about Ward Churchill's forthcoming appearance at Hamilton College, in which he is expected to continue expressing already-published views where he compares the victims of the 9/11 attacks to Adolf Eichmann. (While politics are not within the scope of this blog, academics are.) Reynolds links to a second photo of Churchill in full paramilitary Patty Hearst mode, fondling an assault rifle of some sort. Reynolds's point is that Churchill is locked in some kind of a time warp, and it's hard to disagree. Patty Hearst posed for her 15 minutes of fame in 1974, Churchill presumably much later. Churchill, by the way, is a full Professor at the University of Colorado.

The issue I see here is that some segment of serious culture has been hijacked, not by the political left -- I don't disagree with some parts of the leftist agenda, though that's beside the point -- but by crazies, people living not just in the past, but in out-of-date, paranoid fantasies. They soak up grant money, they soak up tenure-track posiitons, they soak up audience attention span, they soak up speaker fees. People who should know better allow this to happen.

Jeff commented in the post just below that these are some of the people who are clogging the acquisition channels at agents and publishers, but I don't think the problem is simply the volume of crap with which they stuff the system. The problem includes the apparent inability of the agents and publishers to recognize the utter lack of merit in this kind of material.

UPDATE: The author of the passages I've been citing here is David Eide, C/OASIS's editor, who appears roughly midway on a list of apparently legitimate e-publishers on the Preditors & Editors site. In other words, the guy appears to be fairly well-regarded in the online publishing community -- he isn't just a random flake. The impression I have via Google is that most of his own work appears on C/OASIS and related pages. There's quite a bit of it, and the more I see, the more I would characterize it as both semiliterate and incoherent. It interests me that he seems to be reputable in his field. That he himself is an editor suggests the extent of the problem I've referred to just above: if he's representative, then there are at least some people in the system who aren't in any serious way capable of recognizing publishable material that ordinary readers would want to buy.

On Line Publishing, Oh My Goodness

It's amazing what I'm finding as I poke around to see what people are representing to the Internet as "literature". I think I may get several posts, maybe more, out of C/OASIS, which subtitles itself as "Writing for the Connected World". My first, but I have a feeling by no means the last, excerpt is from the Sunoasis Literary Blog, whose most recent entry appears to be from November 10 of last year and is presumably a meditation on the election:

The political mind can not afford absolutes; there is no political idea that can connect the self with the greater universe. There is no political idea that can survive scrutiny. The great founders of America understood this better than most; certainly better than those who equate politics with eternity.

Not only does the literary mind know absolutes, its [sic] tries to connect with the absolutes and brings back down to the Earth its findings. Vast, vast worlds then and sweetness not yet tasted by the people. And the knowlege that we are always beginning; never ending. Even now with the great machines and super-sophisticated cities, only a beginning. Only a bare structure each generation fleshes out as best it can.

What can I say? Blows my mind, man. Outta sight, man. There's lots more where this stuff came from.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- L

"J's" reflections on his experience illustrate an effect of LSD that's frequently found in clinical discussions -- suggestibility. The words that frequently modify "suggestibility" in these discussions include "enhanced", "heightened", and "profound". Another word that's frequently used is "vulnerability". Tom Wolfe describes the impact of LSD on one personality in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Hassler is a hippie who lives at the Harriet Street house in San Francisco, where Kesey's retinue is waiting for his release from prison. Wolfe is drawn into a one-sided conversation in which Hassler expounds the idea that the world is dominated by games.

This guy. . . is giving a kind of vesper service lecture on the sins of man and --a toothrush! --but of course! --he brushes after every meal! he really does. He brushes after every meal despite the fact that they are living here in this garage, like gypsies, and there is no hot water, oo toilet, no beds, except for a couple of mattresses in which the dirt, the dust, the damps, and the scuds are all one, melded, with the stuffing, and they stretch out on the scaffoldings, in the bus, in the back of a pickup truck, nostrils mildewing--

"-- but you know what? People are beginning to see through the warf of the games. Not just the heads and everybody, but all sorts of people. You take in California. There's always been this pyramid --"

Here Hassler outlines a pyramid in the air with his hands and I watch, fascinated, as the plastic toothbrush case shiny shiny slides up one incline of the pyramid --

"-- they're transcending the bullshit," says Hassler, only his voice is earnest and clear and sweet like a high school valedictorian's, as if he just said may next year's seniors remember our motto-- "transcending the bullshit--"

This credulous sincerity was something I noticed frequently -- in others and in myself. Hassler believes the world is going to move beyond games, and he also believes in brushing his teeth after every meal. I wound up having the same sort of earnest belief that the behaviors I saw around me -- my compulsive fellow students who ironed their underwear after they did their laundry, and then carefully folded it into their bureau drawers, or the ladies at Mount Holyoke mixers who, no matter who was talking to them, were always craning their necks and looking past that person to scan the room and see if a better prospect was in sight -- would fall away. How could people do anything but transcend the bullshit?

My friends convinced me, and I convinced myself, that this world would soon pass away and a new one would take its place. It was all very clear and very simple. One night a bunch of us took acid in Larry's room, and we listened to Bob Dylan and the Byrds and so forth all night, and as the sun came up the music was still playing, and we all began to sing along with it. The cover for the album that was playing had the lyrics to the songs on it, and we were holding the album cover up so we could read from it like a hymn book. All of a sudden I realized it wasn't much different from being back in the Presbyterian church in Canterbury, New Jersey. We were all Sunday school students zinging hymns. Something in the back of my head kept whispering that this wasn't going to work.

In fact, I stopped singing and began to blurt something about it to Larry. Larry just shook his head and shushed me like a Sunday school teacher. Go with the flow. Acid trips, after all, aren't the place for that kind of contentious discussion. I found my place again in the lyrics and resumed singing. I felt a little like I did when Wyatt Taylor got on my case for not standing for "Dixie".

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XLIX

The longer-term aftermath of "J's" eight-hit acid trip was a series of panic attacks and religious visions lasting for an extended period. "I decided to stop using psychedelics for a while," he says, certainly a good decision, though by his account it was delayed longer than it should have been. He goes on:

I had, I felt, begun to lose touch with reality to a dangerous degree: I was growing increasingly paranoid and prone to increasingly severe panic attacks, a flood of long-buried memories, some traumatic, some trivial, occured to me on an almost daily basis. I was haunted by strange and disturbing mental imagery (often bloody and violent) that I could make little sense of and that seemed to frequently contain powerful "Jungian" overtones, and I even experienced a few genuine hallucinations - again, usually of rather disturbing content - while completely sober. . . . I was convinced I was becoming insane. This whole period culminated in a brief stay in a local mental hospital, I was put on anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medication. Gradually, I started getting better.

The theme that keeps running through "J's" account is his need to rebuild a sense of self. He's able to stabilize once he regains a grasp, surprisingly, of the Western intellectual tradition.

That which had the most powerful healing effect, however, was the reading of certain post-Nietzchean [sic] philosophers (ie, Martin Heidegger, M. Merleau-Ponty, and Jacques Derrida) to whom I was introduced by a favorite teacher. As I made inroads into understanding some of the writings of these philosophers, I began to understand how the content of so many of my most powerful psychedelic experiences had been determined by certain Western philosophical presuppositions whose validity had been called into question literally centuries ago but which were nevertheless very much alive and influential among those people I'd encountered in various"hippie" or "alternative" subcultures. The capacity which I was developing to move my thinking away from the thinking determined by those presuppositions revealed to me that my entheogenic experiences had been not so much genuine revelations of the divine but rather intensely vivid experiences of both a collective and a personal mythology which had I discovered and developed over the past four or five years - a mythology which, because it was so pervasive among those with whom I associated, I had taken for truth unquestioningly. Realizing that the content of my entheogenic experiences - including the prescriptive "lessons" learned from those experiences -- might have been radically different had my "set and setting" been radically different allowed me to examine that content more rationally; in so doing, its grip on my psyche was loosened.

I was lucky in that, so far as I'm aware, I never took an eight-hit acid trip, though as I've already said, you have no assurance that what someone tells you is the dose on what you buy is the actual dose. I never needed to be institutionalized, or had to have medication. But in a lower-key way, my own intellectual response to LSD was similar to "J's": In subseqent years, I found myself reading Western philosophers with a greater sense of urgency, because they were helping me to understand the universe wasn't just a solipsistic continuum.

"J" says flat out that the content of his acid trips had been suggested to him by his hippie acquaintances and the conventional wisdom of the acid subculture. My own reaction to my first acid trip, in fact, was less to think I was going to merge with the universe than to feel a vindication for the theories on perception of Longinus, Berkeley, and Hume. This says in part that if you've spent time in Latin or Philosophy class before you take LSD, you will bring a certain set of assumptions to the experience. If, on the other hand, you've just heard a lot of half-baked mystical stuff from Leary, Watts, and the Beatles, you'll bring that to the experience, and the result may not be good. The real world, even a world seen via a cleaner set of perceptions, is a complicated place.

On Publishing

As promised, I'll be adding one or two posts per week on publishing and the publishing industry. I hope I'll be able to sustain this without reducing my normal rate of posting on either my serial stories or other subjects. I've added a new site covering blog fiction, blogfic, to my blogroll, and James has an interesting post there now covering reasons people might want to write a novel via the blog medium. Thanks, James, for your kind remarks there about Mt. Hollywood.

I've been somewhat skeptical on the issue of sites covering blog fiction. blogfic has links to several of these in its blogroll. Half a year ago or more I submitted my site to the Fiction Blogs site and heard nothing from them until a month or two ago, when they added me to their list of links. It appears the site hasn't had either much maintenance or much traffic. They asked me to give them a reciprocal link, and while I didn't answer, I'm inclined to respond to them on the approximate schedule by which they responded to me. I may have had as many as five visits from their site since they added me; this is a generous estimate.

Which says something about the level of interest in blog fiction per se. Blog fiction covers varying levels of commitment and several genres. Most of it appears to be science fiction, and it appears to come from people whose commitment is more at the hobby level, as far as I can see. I'm certainly willing to be convinced otherwise, but I'm waiting to see the evidence. My own interest is in publishing as a serious writer in the mainstream/literary genres; my models include writers like Milton, Swift, Sterne, Melville, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Conrad, Henry James, Sinclair Lewis, Raymond Chandler, and Charles Bukowski.

My interest is in writing rather than blogging. I've been published in hard copy print here and there, but beyond very specialized markets, it seems to me that the reality of publishing is that the acquisition channels are clogged, and very little that's genuinely new is reaching print via establshed channels. The conventional literary wisdom, it seems to me, hasn't adapted to the publishing market as it's existed for decades.

Take short stories. I think it's generally recognized that the traditional market for short stories, magazines like Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post, has been gone since those magazines disappeared. The short story rose as a genre in response to the rise of such magazines, but those magazines are no longer there to print the stories writers are still turning out. In fact, creative writing programs, literary contests, and little magazines still stress short stories -- not a good use of a writer's time if she wants to sell her writing in a real market. The same applies to poetry; the market, except for the artificial environments of contests, grant-supported publishing, and little magazines, has largely disappeared.

If blogs are an indication, there's widespread interest in written communication, but it's not the mannered, self-consciously "literary" writing that agents and publishers seem to feel writers ought to be doing, as opposed to what readers want to see. If the literary establishment hasn't fully adjusted to the disappearance of the short story and poetry markets, I would guess that it will take them many more decades to see that readers won't buy what the agents and publishers try to give them and call "fiction" these days. So it's not surprising that now and then, in doing my agent homework, I see agents announce they no longer want to represent fiction because it's too hard to sell.

If the people in the business don't understand their market, which is my current operating hypothesis, then I've got to bypass the established publishing channels. This isn't an easy pull. I would guess I have about 200 regular visitors who stop by maybe once every week or two; that adds up currently to 50 or 60 visitors each weekday. Other than a few regular commenters and fellow bloggers, I realize that I know very little about these visitors (other than where they work in some cases and what time zone they live in). One reason I'm adding more regular posts on the literary business is to see if this does anything to expand my readership and tell me more about my visitors.

I'll continue this thought in my next post on this subject.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XLVIII

I recently found an anonymous account of an "ego death" experience on the web. "I'd been itching for some time to try a larger [LSD] dose (8 hits, each most likely of a pretty typical strength for the U.S.) than I had in the past and a four-day weekend provided the opportunity", says the author. Taking such a large amount, he's asking for what follows in his story, but on the other hand, it's interesting to me that even an eight times normal dose isn't quite enough to obliterate completely the writer's ego:

Most of the trip went beautifully. On a walk in the woods, I experienced some profoundly transcendent moments. I felt as though I embodied a whole universe of pure consciousness, shaped into the particular experience of the trees, snow, rocks, and sky about me. I was thinking a lot about striving to achieve a unity between my thoughts, actions, perceptions, and language and that this unity would be equivalent to allowing the divine to express itself most fully through my being. For quite some time, this unity seemed to be achieved.

. . . . Suddenly, I felt out-of-control and went to lie down on my bed in an effort to calm myself. It seemed an increasing amount of "J" was being replaced by this random stream of human consciousnes. The process - which I felt then was divine, yet cruel and terrifying now - seemed to be attempting to dissolve me. I called to my friend, I tried to explain, but it was difficult to speak and to concentrate. There were quite a few moments when I was so absorbed in fighting the dissolution that I remained silent and still for what seemed like long periods of time.

As the dissolution continued, I felt as though my body was becoming posessed by random personalities that flowed in from the stream of core human consciousness. I remember looking at my friend with the consciousness of others, touching him as though he was some remarkable alien thing. The urging toward dissolution become so intense that I was sure that "I" would not return from the trip. I was terrified - I didn't want to die. I thought I was literally losing my mind, and losing it permanently. I managed to express some of this to my friend; he held me while I moaned and cried in the grips of what I was sure was death and madness. Everything around me seemed utterly alien; once, when my friend tried to talk to me, I felt I had lost the ability to understand language.

Several things strike me about this account. One is that it certainly isn't the regulation "become the universe, go with the flow" version of acid trips that those aligned with Leary, Alan Watts, and other popular advocates portray. Despite the extremely high dose, the author here retains a dualism: he resists simply merging with the rest of the universe. He has both the volition and the ability to do it. The Leary-Watts version of LSD would, I think (if there were significant advocates of their view around 40 years later) say something like this: "'J' here had a bad trip because he resisted the universe. His friend, who was guiding him on the trip, apparently didn't do enough to set the stage for 'J' to make him understand that he shouldn't resist. He should have gone with the flow, not resisted. As a result, he had a bad trip."

I can't accept that argument. The biggest reason is that if, no matter how high a dose, and by the writer's account he deliberately took as high a dose as he could practically manage, the ego stays in control, then what's the point of LSD? When we execute a prisoner on death row, we make sure he or she gets enough poison to do the job. There's nobody telling the person to go with the flow. The warden doesn't come out afterward saying we botched things because the guy wouldn't cooperate. If we want to kill an ego, it seems to me that if it can be done at all via psychedelic drugs, there ought to be some way to get a dose big enough to do the job. The best the advocates of LSD "ego death" can say in this case, as far as I can tell, is that there was some defect in the subject's understanding or will that resulted in his ego not going as gently as it should into that good night. In that case, we need to back off LSD and fix volition, since LSD itself won't do the job, and we're back in the ashram or wherever else, sitting for a lifetime in the lotus position. There ain't no short cut, it seems, if that's what we want to do.

The other problem with the Leary-Watts interpretation of LSD is that the ego in fact doesn't dissolve. It always comes back. I recently read an account by a woman who planted a common bush-type sunflower in her garden. It turned out to be a hardy perennial. When she decided she no longer wanted it in the garden, she did everything she could to dig it out and kill it, but every spring it kept coming back. You can take any account of an acid trip -- and "J" in the account above, saying "I embodied a whole universe of pure consciousness, shaped into the particular experience of the trees, snow, rocks, and sky about me" is as typical an account as we'll find -- the ego comes back like a perennial weed by the end of the trip. Leary himself felt the need to hire attorneys to defend him in his two drug busts; sent to prison for the second, in 1970, he felt the need to escape and take refuge in Algeria. Was this going with the flow? Sounds like a live ego at work to me.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XLVII

But even with all my warnings on how opinions and circumstances have changed since the mid-1960s, I'm still inclined, maybe in memory of Albert Dickerson, to go at least a little easy on myself. I asked, just a little earlier, what I was trying to accomplish when I took LSD, and at this remove, my best answer is to cite the story Jesus of Nazareth tells in Matthew 15:14-30:

[A] man, going into another country, . . . called his own servants, and entrusted his goods to them. To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one; to each according to his own ability. Then he went on his journey. Immediately he who received the five talents went and traded with them, and made another five talents. In like manner he also who got the two gained another two. But he who received the one went away and dug in the earth, and hid his lord’s money. Now after a long time the lord of those servants came, and reconciled accounts with them. He who received the five talents came and brought another five talents, saying, ‘Lord, you delivered to me five talents. Behold, I have gained another five talents besides them.’ His lord said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a few things, I will set you over many things. Enter into the joy of your lord.’ He also who got the two talents came and said, ‘Lord, you delivered to me two talents. Behold, I have gained another two talents besides them.’ His lord said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a few things, I will set you over many things. Enter into the joy of your lord.’ He also who had received the one talent came and said, ‘Lord, I knew you that you are a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter. I was afraid, and went away and hid your talent in the earth. Behold, you have what is yours.’ But his lord answered him, ‘You wicked and slothful servant. You knew that I reap where I didn’t sow, and gather where I didn’t scatter. You ought therefore to have deposited my money with the bankers, and at my coming I should have received back my own with interest. Take away therefore the talent from him, and give it to him who has the ten talents. For to everyone who has will be given, and he will have abundance, but from him who has not, even that which he has will be taken away. Throw out the unprofitable servant into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

This is probably still the best critique I can make of my classmates who did little but studying and other conventional things at Dartmouth. To my way of thinking, I was trying to see what I could make of myself in a more radical way than hieing myself to the Class of 1902 Room, which was a 24-hour study hall, a place where you could focus on the most tedious course material with few distractions. So what was LSD supposed to do that was better than studying in the '02 Room?

The most beneficial effect was thought to be a phenomenon called "ego death". A google search will still bring up many links, and it appears that web newsgroups still discuss it at length. The best consensus I can draw from the various descriptions is that one effect of LSD is to convince the person who's taken it that he or she is merging with the entire universe. This may seem, on one hand, like an intensely religious experience, but on the other, the individual will sense that his or her own uniqueness or self is submerged in the universe-at-large. To some, this is the whole point: once you merge with the everything-else, you're fixed. You go with the flow, you achieve a state that some writers equate with the classical mystical experience, samadhi, nirvana, or satori.

This is the position that Alan Watts and Timothy Leary took. It was the position that the pioneer acid rock band the Grateful Dead took in selecting their name, which referred to the ego death experience and attributed it to "Owsley", Augustus Owsley Stanley III, who ran an acid manifacturing lab for which the band was grateful. In this view, "ego death" was thought to be the desideratum of the LSD experience. The perspective that you gained from ego death would turn you into a kind of saint on the spot. Neuroses, hangups of one sort or another, mental disorders, moral compunctions, would all disappear, since they were illusions caused by imperfect perception. Once the doors of perception were cleansed, all such lmiting factors would drop away. The ramifications of the experience formed the dramatic situations from which the lyrics in many acid rock songs derived, such as those by the Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, and the post-LSD Beatles.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XLVI

So what, more specifically, was I trying to accomplish by taking LSD? If I was trying to cure what ailed me, could I then, or can I now, explain more clearly what that implied? The answer to those questions was, in fact, changing frequently, in part because my understanding of what ailed me was also changing. During my freshman year, I was influenced most heavily by Bill McMann, and at best under his influence I thought I should be aiming at a certain maturity mixed with stoicism. If he'd stayed around, I probably would have followed a different course. Now Bill was gone, and Larry Burlingame had effectively appointed himself my mentor on the question of what ailed me. I wasn't completely happy about this, but I did have enough respect for him to listen to what he said. I didn't hold anyone else in that kind of regard.

What I outline here will be a kind of mid-1960s conventional-wisdom consensus about LSD and its effects, which would be radically altered by the Tate-LaBianca "helter skelter" murders committed by Charles Manson and his cultists in the summer of 1969. The Manson family, by the admissions of many of its members, regularly took LSD, as many as 50 or 100 times. Anyone who subsequently claimed LSD had good effects would need to deal with the Manson family example, and credible claims for the beneficial effects of acid quietly petered out after the murders, though even by 1967 Ken Kesey, an early LSD experimenter, was changing his mind about it.

After the murders, the LSD branch of the counterculture suffered a series of disasters, including Timothy Leary's 1970 conviction for drug offenses and subsequent exile to Algeria, and the Rolling Stones' 1970 "Gimme Shelter" concert in Livermore, California, which resulted in a riot, a murder, and several other deaths. Jimi Hendrix, a musician who celebrated LSD use, died of his lifestyle also in 1970; Jim Morrison died from the same cause a year later.

Alan Watts, probably the most respectable (if a defrocked Episcopal priest can be respectable at all) advocate of LSD as a religious or therapeutic experience, died in 1973, but for several years before that his public pronouncements were growing sillier. I recall reading a column in the alternative press where he advocated solving the world's economic problems by recognizing that dollars were no different from inches. There's an infinite supply of inches; nobody has fewer inches if someone else is six feet tall. So the government ought simply to give out all the dollars anyone wants, just the same as inches. Many will remember this kind of thing from the period as the sort of inspiration that regularly emanated from LSD sessions: "Wow, man! Blows my mind! Blows my mind, man! Dollars. . . inches. . . blows my mind! Wow, man! Dollars. . . inches. . . Blows my mind!" Those who were there, remember?

There was, in other words, only a brief window when people took LSD seriously before it became plain to all but the lunatic fringe that its use tended to kill people, put them in prison, or make them trivial. I had the good or bad fortune, whichever it was, to come of age in that brief period, and I got the opportunity to evaluate its efficacy myself. I would say, before I say anything more, that for many years I've regarded taking LSD and other things I did at the time as among the sins of my youth, and especially in light of much experience since that time, I don't think it's a good idea for anyone to try it now. I want to describe the things I saw, did, and believed accurately, but I think if there's anything attractive about the picture I draw, it will be misleading.

New on the Blogroll

After what seem to have been some pretty dreary months on the web (maybe because everyone was preoccupied with politics, as Tocqueville says Americans are in any case), I'm starting to find interesting sites here and there, and I find myself updating my blogroll. Via Goodreads, I find Overqualified, which offers a series of job application cover letters we all wish we'd written. An example:

To: Human resources, Queen Elizabeth Hospital
Re: Systems Analyst.


I'm applying for the position of Systems Analyst in the Transplantation Services Department of your hospital, as advertised on the Internet. I'm currently working as a Systems Analyst for Ford Motors of Canada, but I am looking for a position in Medical Science, and I am including my resume for your review.

I have always had a strong interest in medicine, and it is that interest which originally attracted me to the sciences in the first place. Circumstances have led me to Computer Science, but it seems that now I am being given the chance to follow my dreams. I can leave behind the cold and lifeless world of automotive manufacturing, and embrace the emotionally satisfying warmth of medicine.

As my resume indicates, my duties at Ford Motors included leading the programming team in charge of assembly line robotics. My experience there taught me about the maximum speed and force with which you could have the robot insert a new part, without damaging the chassis of the vehicle. I feel that this experience will translate almost seamlessly to Transplantation Services at your hospital, and I think you will agree.

While at Ford I also worked to lead a team in designing a system for locating defects in the assembly line vehicles. It constituted a waste of resources and time to assemble vehicles which were not up to standard, and I wonder if this philosophy might not be something that the Medical Science world is ready to embrace.

But what it all comes down to is this; I am a resourceful, and innovative programmer. I am not afraid of learning new things, and I know when trial and error is a faster way to get something done than research. I can be a hard task master to those beneath me in the chain of command, but the results of that show in my production figures.

I feel that I would make a vital and innovative member of your team. Too often I feel that industries are the victim of over-specialization, and I feel that my breadth of experiences and attitudes toward Transplantation Services would give your department the distinction that it may well require.

I look forward to hearing back from you regarding my qualifications.

Yours In Anticipation,

Joey Comeau.

There are many more at the site.

More on the Publishing Industry

I'm finding that there's remarkably little reliable material on the web (and probably anywhere else) on how a writer can negotiate his or her way through the publishing industry. I recently ran into a web site that has what I would call "second-level" opinions (but can't locate it now) on what new writers should be doing to try to promote their work. "First level" sites give pretty basic advice on finding an agent: use available directories, make sure your query letter reads well, avoid misspellings, especially of the agent's name, and so forth. Some also warn new writers against scam agents and refer them to online resources for identifying these. The second level site actually gave me some worthwhile new advice: learn as much about the publishing industry as you can. Thanks, I will.

The lists of scam agents, especially the Preditors & Editors list, are probably the single most useful resource for new writers. In the late 1980s I wrote a couple of detective novels, which weren't much more than practice in figuring out how to create a novel-length manuscript. The web wasn't available then, and instead I relied on the agents who advertised in Writer's Digest, most of whom were scammers even then. I went as far as sending one agent a hundred bucks or whatever it was as a "reading fee", but when I didn't hear from them in the time they promised, I wrote to Writer's Digest to complain. To its credit, Writer's Digest got me a refund, so I was never out any "reading fee" or other charge made by a scam agent, and it was a good lesson. Nevertheless, Writer's Digest was serving as a knowing (as far as I can see) venue for bogus agents who were fleecing naive wannabes.

But once you get past scam agents, you get to those agents variously called clueless or gormless, or agents who, even if competent, aren't going to do a good job representing you. There's no list of these at a site equivalent to Preditors & Editors. When I get replies to my queries or sample chapters that are misspelled or have typographical bloopers or grammatical errors, I get the feeling that even if these guys aren't scammers, I don't want them wasting my time (though of course, they don't want to represent me anyhow). I'm also skeptical of agents who make it plain in their replies that they're doing this as something to pick up a few bucks while they watch the kids at home.

I got a form rejection from an apparently respectable agent, Richard Curtis, just yesterday. He has a web site -- but with my "Dear Author" note, I got writeups and an order form for two books by the Great Man himself, How to be Your Own LIterary Agent, and Beyond the Bestseller. Now, it seems to me that if Mr. Curtis is selling a book informing writers how they can disintermediate the process of selling their books, then what need has Mr. Curtis to run an agency? This seems disingenuous -- if the information in the book will actually set you up as an agent, why would he let potential competitors have it? It's just as peculiar as the legions of investment advisers who want to sell you a book on how you can get rich using their advice. (Or worse, urge you to sign up for the Joe Blow Seminar when it comes to a Holiday Inn near you.) If these folks are so smart, why do they need to sell books on how to get rich? Why not just spend the time cruising the south seas in the yacht you've bought with your millions? Surely these folks aren't that disinterested.

Richard Curtis is thus a puzzle. One fairly plain reality of the publishing industry is that the acquisition channels, especially for new writers, are clogged. With or without an agent, you've got a real task getting a legitimate publisher's attention. So here's Curtis flogging a book that must be largely wishful thinking, hoping writers he's dinged will buy it, but presumably being pretty confident none of them is going to be able to cut him out of any serious deal. With all he says he knows about the business, why isn't he applying his knowledge to making himself rich(er) at being an agent, instead of flogging some version of a get-rich-quick book? This can't be a cost-effective use of his time if he's who he claims to be. Instead of retailing your own books at $16.95 a pop (special deal if you order both!!), why not just do your own job and be looking a little harder for the next F.Scott, who presumably will earn you much more with the same amount of work?

I'm finding so little on the web that raises or addresses these questions at all that I'm going to begin expanding my scope on this blog to talk about what I'm learning about the literary business. This is for my own good, of course, but it's also because I think there's more to be said, and nobody else is saying it. So expect one or two additional posts per week covering these issues from now on.

UPDATE: James suggests in the comment below that Curtis may have better reasons for publishing a self-help book on agentry, but I'm still not convinced. James points out (I haven't double-checked, but I'm sure he's right) that Curtis says on his web site that he isn't taking new fiction clients. The problem with this kind of thing is there's no consistent way to get reliable information on what agents are and aren't doing. In general, I rely on directories of agents, such as the Publishers Weekly, Association of Authors Representatives, or others, and even among those directories there's little consistency. I suspect this is because the agents themselves don't take the minimal time to be sure their directory entries accurately reflect the genres they currently represent.

It simply isn't a good use of my time to check their web sites on top of their directory entries -- many of the web sites referenced in directories are permanently "under construction" or so poorly designed I can't get good info anyhow. To some extent, the agents have themselves to blame if they have too many submissions from writers who are following in good faith the basic guidelines on how to get an agent.

And again, over and over, the justification you read for having an agent is to keep the writer from having to get involved in the business side of her creative work. So why, as James suggests, would a writer, especially one dealing with so august and knowledgeable a personage as Richard Curtis, need to know so much about the business, when the agent's job is to shelter the writer from just that? And I still wonder whether the job of selling his own books at retail takes away from his real job, which ought to be representing authors at wholesale -- and which ought, in the normal course of things, to be much more lucrative.

Also, I think again about the good second-level advice I recently found: if the system were working as it should, then writers actually shouldn't need to be educating themselves on the publishing industry. Agents would, as they claim to, be fulfilling that function. For some reason, they're not, and writers are now being told they need to know as much about the industry as an agent does, so the agent can relieve them of the need to know about the industry. Something ain't quite right here.

The apparent self-contradiction I see with Curtis, a supposedly major agent, goes to a feeling I'm beginning to get that many in the publishing industry simply aren't behaving in a way to maximize their own, or their employers', time and resources. I recall an article in the Wall Street Journal some time ago on the problem of the Japanese wholesale grocery industry, in which the Japanese apparently felt that wholesale grocers were the place to put family members who didn't have both oars in the water. The result was a dysfunctional industry that was a drag on the whole economy and a sitting duck for American style business to come in. I'm beginning to wonder if the publishing industry is a little like this -- it's one of the avenues I want to pursue here.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XLV

These stories of suicides suggest that drug use was a risky proposition, and I don't disagree. In fact, that was probably part of the appeal, though it's worth pointing out that nobody likely knew exactly what drove Jim Dell or my friend Peter to suicide. If the stories about Jim are accurate, paranoia and voices might be symptoms of schizophrenia, which strikes people, often in their twenties, irrespective of other conditions in their lives -- drugs may have had little to do with what happened.

Nevertheless, the stories in the press and in conventional wisdom of people who took one or another recreational drug and had to be institutionalized, or who thought they were birds and tried to fly, or whatever else, represented a kind of challenge. My own thinking, in evaluating the risk, was that if I couldn't handle whatever stresses drugs put on me, I might as well know it. There would be two potential bad consequences, leaving aside any legal issues from using drugs: I could commit suicide, or I could wind up needing serious psychiatric attention. I thought the chances of either were remote, and as it happened, at least in my case, they apparently were -- though this is not to minimize the disincentives to using drugs that became increasingly plain in subsequent years. I'll discuss these soon, just to be sure nobody gets the wrong idea.

But the risk was more challenging than that. I think what I was undertaking was very similar to the risk Conrad's young captain takes in The Secret Sharer, where, fascinated by the story of a man named Leggatt who swims to the side of his ship in the middle of the night, he elects to take him on board and hide him -- Leggatt is a ship's mate who has killed an insubordinate seaman during a storm, and he faces return to England as a prisoner to face trial and likely conviction for murder. He has swum to the narrator's ship after excaping from weeks of confinement on his own ship.

There is a dreamlike quality to "The Secret Sharer", and the stakes for the captain who shelters Leggatt have a heightened quality, like the anxieties in a dream: as long as he secretly keeps Leggatt in his cabin, there's the constant risk of someone on the ship discovering him. Even to drop Leggatt off at a point on the coast where he can swim to freedom involves the captain risking his ship, and it's in using his ability to command his crew to take the ship into that risky situation that the young captain gains a new confidence in himself. The risk, though, is something he's recognized, calculated, and assumed for himself. And the captain is somehow not fully alive if he hasn't taken that risk.

This was the kind of risk, a calculated self-testing, that appealed to me in taking drugs. Naturally there were many factors outside my control. The biggest, and looking back, the most foolhardy, was that there was no assurance that what you thought you were going to take was what it was supposed to be. What someone told you was LSD could be the pure article, it could be crystal meth, it could be LSD mixed with crystal meth, it could be a placebo of some sort, or it could be something unpredictable like an animal tranquilizer, or for that matter some kind of poison. But I was willing to take that risk, too.

Conrad's Secret Sharer is probably also a good referent for the psychic ailment I'd already seen in myself, William James's "heterogeneous temperament", my inability to accept any particular thing for what it was, my need always to be looking at myself as I regarded it. What other cures, for want of a better word, were available? Actually, I think I'd done a fairly thorough, and even astute, analysis.

Athletics? I was never very athletic, but I went out for crew in my freshman year; predictably, I wound up on the third boat, which was to say the third string. Rowing, if you get down to it, isn't much more than self-imposed, or peer-imposed, torture. If we weren't rowing like the battle scene in Ben-Hur, we were running up and down hills in Hanover. After a semester of being sore and out of breath, I gave it up, realizing I was never going to get more from that effort.

Rock climbing? I took that up one semester, too. My instructor was an upperclassman who was very enthusiastic about the psychological benefits. After trying it out, I decided it was too much a combination of relying on equipment and getting yourself into unnecessary, physically excruciating, and truly frightening situations, and I gave that up, too. Somehow it wasn't a way in which I could identify and choose my risks as I wanted to. I wanted a shot at even odds, not odds that could suddenly become overwhelming. My instructor got himself killed in an avalanche in the Himalayas a year or so later -- it was on the front page of the New York Times, so he must have been well-connected. It wasn't just drugs that took some guys out.

I considered dropping out of school and either enlisting or letting myself be drafted, but the risks would be completely out of my control. I might have a very easy time and not be tested at all, or I might be sacrificed as cannon fodder by an incompetent officer; mostly I thought the latter would be the likely outcome.

Course work? Some of the courses covered interesting material, but it was all talk, no doing -- no risks beyond where you might wind up on the curve when grades were handed out.

Therapy? That always struck me as running up the white flag. "I have a heterogeneous temparament, Doctor!"

"Here, take two of these!" We're back where we started. And I was never much impressed with what therapy had done for anyone I knew -- this was before health insurers stopped funding endless talk-sessions because they were ineffective, but that was my impression.

Try a hobby? I had a couple, but they were hobbies. I didn't expect them to answer major questions in my life. They were for entertainment and relaxation.

Family? My parents, as we've seen, were manipulative, erratic, secretive, and often abusive (my father had physically abused me until a few years earler; both continued verbal abuse). Their expectations for me vacillated between very high and completely unrealistic. They were sometimes supportive, but just as often would unpredictably pull support away. Keeping some semblance of normal family relations was something on which I expended energy; I couldn't seriously expect my family to expend emotional energy on me.

Church? Not as it had been presented to me up to that time. I can only see the wisdom of some figures like the Rev. Onderdonk, who tried to dissuade my parents from trying to turn me into a little "yes sir, no sir" robot, in hindsight. My most recent exposure to organized religion was quite recent, the deeply flawed ministries, not yet confirmed by ordination, of Bobby Humbird and Floyd Suddith. The churches I'd known otherwise had been, up to that point, variations on radical Protestantism, regular attendance and confirmation as a Presbyterian with occasional ventures among the Congregationalists and Baptists. C.S. Lewis, as far as I was concerned, wrote science fiction and cute stuff like The Screwtape Letters. This was thin gruel for a demanding appetite. I wasn't inclined to look farther in that direction.

Sex? Sure, where could I get some? The young ladies I was meeting, at New England women's schools and elsewhere, tended to be highly materialistic, hierarchical, shallow, remote, self-absorbed, and not simply marriage-minded, but grimly determined to locate the guy who was going to be the biggest doctor or investment banker or attorney or whatever else they could latch onto. They were among the worst reasons to be straight (however you took the term). Nobody I'd met so far was seriously interested in dating a guy who talked about Bob Dylan lyrics. Going to mixers and getting blind dates was looking more and more like a big waste of time and money.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XLIV

There was also some overlap between the gay scene and the drug scene. In fact, at least at Dartmouth in the 1960s, "straight" meant someone who didn't do drugs, not someone who wasn't gay, but the way the word transferred its meaning suggests the natural alliance between the two groups. A person who did drugs was, at least in his own mind, so radically different from someone who didn't that a single, simple word could mark the demarcation and describe the perceived unidimensionality on the other side. We don't know what makes people gay, but the testimony we have now suggests that it's not a choice -- at least, not the sort of choice that people make if they choose History over Political Science as a major, or prefer BMW to Infiniti.

There were certainly many closeted gays at Dartmouth. The president of my dorm outed himself years later in a speech at a Democratic national convention; while I didn't really think about the issue at the time, I had no reason to suspect he was gay. Dartmouth, as a male-only school until 1972, had advantages for closeted gays, since there was less reason for anyone to wonder why you didn't date women -- there were few women around to date.

There were presumably many closeted gays who didn't do drugs and didn't mingle in the drug scene; on the other hand, there were some who did, and others who were both openly gay and part of the drug scene. But unless a gay guy came on to a straight guy, there was no sure way to tell who was what. Everyone was, as Larry put it, fuzzy around the edges. Long hair and weird clothes could mean either pre-Raphaelite or hippie. Drug use lowers the sex drive, so just because a guy didn't go on road trips to Wellesley or Skidmore didn't mean he was gay.

Like Jim Dell, the gay guys in the drug scene sometimes reached a crisis point around the time they graduated. One of the guys in Larry's circle, Peter, was a phenomenally good-looking fellow -- such that I, who've never been gay, once commented to him, maybe after spending too much time in Latin class, that it was a shame to waste his good looks on women. He was a brilliant personality and a talented musician, and over the two years I knew him, I began to realize he was gay -- maybe I was realixing it at the same time he was. It didn't turn out well; he shot himself only weeks after commencement. I still grieve for him.

The same thing happened to another very promising musician -- I wasn't as well acquainted with him, but I did know him well enough to chat with now and then. He was more openly gay, but apparently never quite comfortable with it, and he'd had a sort of motherly relationship with a woman who worked in the library. The woman, whom I later got to know quite well, and who discussed what happened with me, gave a party for him and his parents to celebrate his graduation. All I can think is that something in the party might have suggested to his parents that he was gay, when they hadn't known it earlier -- or maybe the parents simply didn't like the idea their son had enough of his own life to have a friend give him a party. Or maybe I'm just reading into the situation some of the same family pressures I had. Whatever the reason was, after the party, he stabbed himself in the heart with a kitchen knife.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XLIII

I spent the time between the end of Camp Sea Gull's session and the start of classes at Dartmouth dating a couple of women who were sexually slightly more latitudinarian than my ex-girlfriend Beth, but who were emotionally quite distant. Although my mother had given me a serious talk before I left for college regarding her certainty that I was going to get some girl pregnant, there was still no danger at all of this dire prediction coming to pass. And when I began to talk to my dates about things like the lyrics to Bob Dylan songs, they quickly broke things off.

The drug scene at Dartmouth, even in 1966, must have been large -- certainly larger than I thought it was at the time. I say this because, during my second year there, I kept meeting more and more guys who were doing drugs, and many were upperclassmen. You couldn't tell from hair length or hippie clothes who was or wasn't into drugs. A lot of the guys, especially the upperclassmen, were very clean-cut. And if I can say that I kept meeting more and more new people who were into drugs, that is very close to saying that I was never at the center of the scene, if anyone was -- though if you could say anyone in fact was at the center, it was probably Larry Burlingame.

There were also different philosophies of doing drugs -- and I should say that while marijuana, hashish, and LSD were very common at Dartmouth then, crystal meth was also in wide use, and there was some heroin, too. Whatever else they were, few in the drug scene were dilettantes. Those who were upperclassmen in 1966, especially seniors, seemed to me of a different generation. They were taking drugs to evade as best they could their inner furies, and they tended to be very quiet about it -- their hair was short, they were clean-shaven and normally dressed. Many, I think, were from New York and got their drugs from connections there. They probably represented a cultural strain of drug use that predated hippies and the 1960s.

The younger guys, like Larry, who was from California, were much more likely to grow their hair long, have fancy sideburns or mustaches, and wear outlandish clothes. While the older guys were very private and even up-tight about the whole thing, the younger guys were somewhat more relaxed and open.

The older guys, as far as I'm aware, didn't turn out well. I remember one, Jim Dell, very clean-cut and taciturn, whose ambition while he was at college and in the drug scene turned to dealing drugs as a career. The protective coloration in such a case was very wise, but four years at Dartmouth isn't the kind of thing that prepares you for that kind of work. After he graduated, he went back to New York, and Larry heard from him and about him now and then, but the news wasn't good. Indeed he become a dealer; he began to carry a gun, but he became more and more paranoid, and soon he was hearing voices. Within a short time, he'd blown his brains out.

Another in Jim's class went back to New York as well, but with his student deferment gone, he seemed to lose all ambition while he waited for the draft to catch up with him. He discovered he could go on general relief in New York just by signing up for it, which is what he did, and he then spent his days on welfare, stoned, waiting for his induction notice. We lost track of him after a while.

More Digression

"Some later time" in my earlier post has turned into "today". I had actually wanted to take care of everything that was on my mind about how the web functions for writing in yesterday's post, but it just kept growing. As soon as I started writing yesterday's post, I realized I was unrealistic in thinking I could take care of this in one post, and I will probably be posting more about some of these issues in the future.

Poking around over the weekend looking for literary stuff, I ran into TheScreamOnline, which can best be described as an online "little magazine". In its first issue, the editor said that when he first dreamed up the magazine, he thought of including ". . . a call for submissions inspired by Edvard Munch’s 'The Scream,' a painting that rather sums-up the horrors of seeking legitimate representation, not to mention getting published as an artist or writer." I can certainly relate to that. However, the fellow's good intentions go only so far. On the bottom of the same page is this warning: "TheScreamOnline regretfully [sic] cannot accept unsolicited submissions of any kind. Publication in this magazine is by invitation only."

So if you're looking for a way to break into print based only on the merit of your work, TheScreamOnline sympathizes, but it's equipped for the moment only to accommodate members of its own clique, it would appear. Even so, I started looking at some of the fiction it publishes, trying to get a feel for what's in vogue these days, at least at online little magazines. TheScreamLonline comes out high on search results, and a check of technorati.com shows it has many links, so we can assume it's a site that's often visited. The lead story in the current issue is "Styrofoam", by Laura Albritton.

In the story, Jorge Valdez, a young Cuban, has dropped out of medical school in order to improve his chances for emigrating to the United States. He's applied for a US visa, and he's determined not to do anything to make him "indispensable" to the Cuban state so that he will be allowed to leave when his number comes up.

My initial reaction is what Henry St. George, the successful older novelist in Henry James's "The Lesson of the Master" tells the promising young writer Roger Overt: "Hang `abroad!` Stay at home and do things here -- do subjects we can measure." Cuba, though, has a particular appeal to some people, so I justified spending the time to read further.

He makes his living selling bad watercolors to tourists in Havana's Cathederal Plaza. He meets Ana, a pregnant half-Cuban woman who is the daughter of a Cuban exile, but who has come to Cuba herself for reasons that aren't clear. She also, without a valid visa, ekes out an income in the plaza reading tarot cards and, in Jorge's opinion, can tell the future.

One night, Ana reads his cards and tells him he has an obstacle to getting to the US, which she says is "a form of insanity": he still believes in a paradise. Somehow as a result of this encounter, Jorge immediately decides to swim the 90 miles to Florida; the story makes it seem as though this is a suicide attempt, and the final image suggests Jorge will float like a styrofoam cup.

It's hard to know what to make of this. The events in the narrative make it plain that Jorge would have a future in Cuba if he would drop his determination to emigrate: his stepmother could get him a job as a teacher. A female soldier guarding him as he cuts sugar cane finds him attractive. Jorge, though, is determined to find a better life in the US, which, however, the narrative suggests is mostly unrealistic fantasies of wealth and sex with blonde ladies. As far as I can see, the story is putting forth a view that Jorge should stay in Cuba and seek his calling there; ideas of escape or emigration are selfish fantasies based on false consciousness.

Laura Albritton, judging from what I can find via Google, is a Lecturer in the Composition program at the University of Miami. She has published a number of very short pieces on the web. I found another story that may be a continuation of this one: Cachita, a nurse, works in a hospital, where a young man has been pulled out of the water after trying to swim to the US; subsequently the young man has overdosed on Valium. Later, she visits a male friend who has a pregnant woman who's outstayed her visa writhing in pain on his bed. The woman is apparently infected. Humberto, a doctor, treats the woman with antibiotics that have been stolen from a French relief agency. To thank Humberto, Cachita has sex with him. When Humberto asks her why, she says it's either have sex or swim to the US. They both agree sex is better than swimming to the US, and they have sex again.

The thumbail bio at the end of this story says Albritton is working on a novel set in Havana and Miami. Well, at least with my blog, you get the episodes one after another. The thing that interests me about Albritton's writing is that it's almost a mirror of Tom Clancy. All of Clancy's doctors, nurses, FBI and CIA agents, Army enlisted men, Navy officers, White House staff, Green Berets, mid-level bureaucrats, federal contractors, and so forth seem to share an ant-like motivation: they see their tasks in life as fitting into the grand anthill purpose that is the American enterprise (almost entirely governmental) as Clancy envisions it. These Cubans in Albritton's stories seem very similar. The conditions of Cuban life are bleak, but it's better to struggle on with your little ant-purpose than to dream unrealistic dreams of sex with blondes and enough to eat and new clothes in the US. The moral choices of Albritton's Cubans are as two-dimensional as those of Clancy's Americans: be a good ant, or be some kind of crazy.

(In Clancy's defense, I should point out that he doesn't pretend to be more than he is: from everything I've read, he's happy he can make gazillions using his hobby of war-gaming, which he much prefers to his previous career in insurance. He doesn't put on literary airs or write for little magazines; he doesn't need to. Albritton, on the other hand, does both.)

This is a non-political blog, so I don't want to delve too far into why a US author might choose to set stories in Cuba, one of the last bastions of Stalinism, and make life there seem at least morally preferable to life elsewhere, such that those who wish to escape are seen as somehow pathological. Nevertheless, it puzzles me that an author who lives in Miami, who presumably can buy new clothes whenever she wants, while her problems over food likely revolve around how to avoid eating too much of it, would choose to create an imaginative universe where Cubans who stick it out are morally superior to those who want to leave. Is our little novelistic train here fully coupled to something we can recognize as the real world? I don't know, but I'm puzzled.

The other advantage Albritton has to living in Miami is what happens to writers in Cuba. A quick google search on "dissident writers prison castro cuba" turned up "about 32,200" results, and the first several pages cover only releases of imprisoned writers in response to international pressure, statements from Amnesty International, appeals from relatives for prisoners' release, and the like, for only the past several weeks. So far, nothing in Albritton's stories that I've seen covers this side of Cuban life.

To what extent is Albritton writing propaganda for one of the bitter-end Stalinist regimes? Why would someone want to do this? Why would someone want to publish it? Into what kind of a strange intellectual universe is this a window? We are in Ezra Pound territory here, as far as I can see; that is, the St. Elizabeth's Hospital part of the map. It confirms my theory in yesterday's post, that what we see of contemporary writing on the web isn't especially good, but it's also kinda loopy. TheScreamOnline regretfully cannot accept unsolicited submissions of any kind.

Holiday Digression

I saw a report of an exchange between Lewis Friedland and Jeff Jarvis in a conference on blogging last week that's stayed in my mind ever since. Friedland has by far the best of it. "[T]o say that because anybody can be a publisher that that opens up a broad range of voices is a delusion really," he says. He goes on,

Yes, new voices will enter the mainstream consistently but they will not be trafficked to simply because they are smart and clever. Some will, but . . . much of the traffic on the net when you start investigating the structure of the Blogosphere and the structure of the net very much represented the horserace political commentary of much of the mainstream media. It’s clever, it’s more up to date, it has more voice, there's more opinion, its sharper; but if you look at the Blogosphere as a whole with some important exceptions much of what it consists of is a lot of he-said, she-said political commentary that is not any different what you would find on the cable news networks.

You can find Jarvis's reply on the link; I don't want to elaborate it at much length, because I think he's wrong. He says everyone else has a "niche". In other words, of the million-plus blogs people estimate are out there, Friedland says correctly most aren't read, at least by anyone other than the blogger's Aunt Molly.

Jarvis simply replies that's fine, that's the blogger's niche. This is tautological and assumes every blogger's intent is to do exactly what he or she has actually done, which I don't think we can assume. Every parent dotes on his or her own child's crayon drawings; at some point we have to decide that an artist is trying to do something beyond that, and we're entitled draw conclusions that go beyond saying every work of art "serves its own niche". Figuring out where the niche stops and eligibility for critical discussion starts is at the beginning of intelligent discourse; Jarvis abandons discussion here.

Friedland's point, which I like more every time I read it, is that it's way too early for blog triumphalism. The most celebrated blogs are in fact a lot of he-said, she-said, with much self-congratulation and high-fiving among the bloggers' in-groups thrown in. "Act like you've been there before," is one football coach's advice to players tempted to spike the ball in the end zone; the blogsphere hasn't reached this stage. And I suspect that in a fairly short time, the archives of most blogs will be tedious, trivial, and unreadable -- I can stand only so much of Glenn Reynolds on digital cameras (and the rest of his conspicuous-consumption, don't-I-have-it-good posts) even now. The best thing any commentators have said of most current blogs is that they sometimes have been a means for embarrassing the mainstream media, which is a different and far more entrenched in-group.

I've referred here more than once to C.S. Lewis's essay The Inner Ring, simply because I haven't seen any other clear discussion of the in-group phenomenon and how it operates. In his essay, Lewis refers to "those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner Ring [the corporate or professional in-group] produces." One of Lewis's major points is that in-groups exist to allow the members to bypass professional standards. The recent mainstream media crises, such as Jayson Blair and Rathergate, are thus symptomatic more of the inherent dangers of in-groupery than of blog efficacy. If blogs don't catch lapses in professional standards, something else will; that's an issue of professional standards, not of blogs.

Blogs, for instance, had very little to do with another recent media scandal, the Los Angeles Times's late-hit allegations of groping against Arnold Schwarzenegger during the 2003 California gubernatorial recall. It was the Schwarzenegger campaign and local media that publicized the complainer's lengthy criminal record for prostitution. And to my knowledge, the LA Times hasn't made any type of investigation or adjustment for this lapse, which must journalistically be not far removed from the seriousness of Rathergate.

The blogs' somewhat limited success in Rathergate, though, has caused a number of commentators to write obituaries for mainstream media. I think these are off-base. While monopoly media has been losing viewership and circulation for many years, I doubt if credibility per se has much influence on the trend, and the media themselves, like all monopolies, are pretty much ignoring those circumstances -- the managers (and workers as well) inevitably say we'll keep losing market, but it won't be a factor until after I retire.

While some commentators have reacted to the CBS investigation by asking why Rather himself wasn't fired, it's worth pointing out that the penalties meted out against CBS's usual suspects weren't all that severe. Mary Mapes was terminated outright, while three managers were "asked to resign". There's no way to know for sure, but this wording strongly suggests that the three who weren't terminated outright were given severance packages to sweeten the deal -- and I suspect that, as often happens when in-group members are caught red-handed in one or another such crisis, some or all were quickly offered jobs elsewhere. The in-group in this case is likely behaving predictably.

So I think the impact of blogs on mainstream media is much less than bloggers like to imagine. On top of that, while Friedland doesn't say so, most blogs and other self-publishing efforts, in addition to being unread, simply aren't very good. Friedland's point is that whether or not blogs are read is not reflective of their merit, but I would even say that the farther we get from the widely-read blogs (and other self-publishing efforts) that comment on current events, the more the quality deteriorates -- or maybe more accurately, the more potential opportunity goes to waste. (But don't worry, I'm not planning to go after anything on Blogger or equivalent; I've got bigger game in mind.) I'll pick this up again at some later time.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XLII

So one evening in the summer of 1966, the campers were singing "Dixie" again in the dining hall after dinner. As I mentioned a while ago, they always followed it with Irving Berlin's "God Bless America". They stood for that, too. Mostly to make my point, I stood when they finished "Dixie" and started "God Bless America", though that wasn't really consistent. You don't stand for "God Bless America", you stand for "The Star Spangled Banner", but that's not what they sang. "God Bless America" was as close as we ever came.

I'd been not standing for "Dixie" ever since 1960. I'd not stood for "Dixie" some number of times already in 1966. I'd wondered every time I hadn't stood if I was maybe being a little too priggish, but it never got to the point where I ever changed my mind and stood. And my cabin's table wasn't all that far from the head table, which was elevated on a dais, so Wyatt must certainly have seen me, and those few others, not standing for "Dixie" many times before.

This night, though, after the singing stopped for "God Bless America", Wyatt picked up his microphone and addressed the dining hall. "If someone plays the Marines' Hymn," Wyatt said, "I stand when everyone else stands, even if I was never a Marine. I think everyone should stand for 'Dixie' out of respect for the rest of us. It's no different from playing the Marines' Hymn." Obviouslty he was talking about me. It was hard for me to think this was the first time he'd ever seen it. Maybe Lloyd and Bobby had been on my case with him, and this was the result. At that point, of course, I realized that for the rest of the summer I'd better stand for "Dixie" or suffer consequences. So, given the implied threat, I stood for "Dixie" thereafter. But I already knew it was going to be my last summer at Camp Sea Gull.

I was in no position to argue with Wyatt, and even if he'd called me into his office and chewed me out privately, there wasn't much I could really say to him in reply, at least that he'd listen to. It's not usual to stand for the Marines' Hymn, for starters, and "Dixie" isn't the same thing. If I go to Canada and attend a baseball game, I'm courteous and stand for "Oh Canada". If I am in the UK and see a film, I stand for "God Save the Queen" at the start of the show. Those are legitimate national anthems of real countries.

The Russians, when the Soviet Union became defunct, changed their national anthem back to what it had been before the 1917 coup. So, should a Moscow orchestra choose now to play the former Soviet national anthem, nobody, Russian or visitor, would be obliged to stand for it, out of either patriotism or politeness. It is the national anthem of a nation that no longer exists, and in fact to stand for it would be to send a political message of an unpleasant sort, whether one intended it or not.

"Dixie" is not the legitimate national anthem of a real country. Luckily, it's just a song, a good song, for many of us, and it isn't objectionable the way "Deutschland Ueber Alles" is. But "Dixie" is no more a legitimate national anthem than "Deutschland Ueber Alles". If Wyatt thought the whole dining hall should stand and sing something, "The Star Spangled Banner" was always available, but he didn't seem to want to use it. Had I had the chance, that's what I would have said to Wyatt about the Marines' Hymn, but I never had the chance.

I never talked about Camp Sea Gull with Albert Dickerson. I suspect that if I had, he would have chided me gently for giving myself too little credit, because looking back, I can see that I did quite a bit of growing up in the two years that I worked there. There were little slips that I could partly see, and those insights partly shaped my attitudes. The camp's church services on Sunday mornings, for instance, were run by Floyd Suddith and Bobby Humbird, who were divinity students (whose sincerity was open to question due to their draft deferments), not ordained clergy. Nevertheless, Bobby and Floyd had both begun to adopt the distressingly obsequious homiletic device, common in the South, of comparing whomever was the local high muckety-muck to Jesus Christ (favorably, I should add, just so nobody gets the wrong idea here).

In short, I was 18 years old, and I was beginning to develop an independent nose for humbuggery. Camp Sea Gull was a private club, or at least thought it was, for the specific purpose of excluding people who weren't white. We stood to sing the national anthem of a non-existent country, and to make up for it, we remained standing for a song that wasn't the national anthem of a real country. We had church services that weren't conducted by clergy, but by mealy-mouthed poltroons who gave sermans and pastoral prayers that said the Camp Direcor was just like Jesus. Every day, it seemed, I was learning about more and more things we couldn't talk about: either some guy's wife was really coming on to me, or some other guy was worried his wife might once she'd seen me in my underwear.

Now and then over the years I've pestered myself, asking if there's some way I might have saved the situation, gone back there for another summer, and gotten a start on things that might have been done: some dedicated work might have added a lot of material to the nature hut on local history, the logging trails, the abandoned rail lines, the old fisheries. But that's the habit of thinking, I've read, of people who've been through abuse: they're always trying to figure out what they did wrong, how they could have fixed an unfixable situation.

Camp Sea Gull was a rigged game. I was never going to come out of it at even odds. Not at a place where everyone sang the national anthem of a non-existent country, where Jesus was the same as Wyatt Taylor, where the best social skill amounted to keeping quiet. If they thought they were building character there -- and all their literature says they did -- they deceived themselves. You could have fun as a camper, by all means, but character had very little to do with it. I pretty much recognized that I'd outgrown the place, and I would need to go back to college in the fall and pick up the very messy tasks I'd left behind there. At the end of the session that summer, Wyatt made some not entirely favorable noises to me about the nature lore program for the following year, and I told him I would likely have to be in summer camp with the ROTC anyhow. I never got another petulant letter from him asking me to come back, in any case.

I raised a question earlier that was a little like writing a gun into the first act of a play -- once you've put it in, you've got to use it. Once I asked if Wyatt was gay, I've got to give some kind of an answer. The question, it seems to me, is interesting in the same way as the biographical information on other prominent closeted gays of his time, such as J. Edgar Hoover, Roy Cohn, or Walter Jenkins. The exact truth is one of Camp Sea Gull's secrets, as far as I can see. On the other hand, Wyatt was Director of the Raleigh, North Carolina YMCA in addition to his job as Director of Camp Sea Gull, and a number of the senior people at the camp also worked for the YMCA. The web is a remarkable resource, and a google search on "YMCA gay" will bring up links for hours of fascinating reading.

It appears that almost since its founding in the mid-19th century, the YMCA became a haven for gay men, although this wasn't common knowledge until the Village People outed the organization with a popular song in the 1970s. After highly publicized gay cruising scandals before World War I, it was felt that more senior YMCA officers should be married, at least for the sake of appearances, though desk clerks and other lower-level staff were often assumed to be gay. While on one hand, the YMCA was recognized among gays as a gay-friendly organization, on the other, the YMCA became a popular society charity, so that YMCA officers moved in higher social echelons.

According to information on the web, Wyatt Taylor began his career with the Raleigh YMCA as its Physical Program Director in the 1930s. The Physical Program covers the gym and the pool, which had the same social function for gays then as gyms have now. I can't draw conclusions on whether Wyatt was gay beyond this generally available information. It might explain what I observed as a very frosty relationship between him and his wife. His position with the YMCA would explain why Wyatt was able to develop many contacts at high levels in the state and region whether or not he was gay. If he was in fact gay, it would simply be another of the many things over which people at Camp Sea Gull kept quiet. And perhaps people like Floyd and Bobby recognized that I was the sort of person who'd be likely to figure a few too many things out if I stuck around there.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XLI

My most heinous sin at Camp Sea Gull, though, was refusing to stand for "Dixie". As in nearly all summer camps, there was singing before and after meals in the dining hall, led by a noisy piano. Camps have favorite songs, and a camp alma mater, and Camp Sea Gull was no different. In fact, Camp Sea Gull had the words to its standard songs painted on sheets of plywood suspended from the roof trusses in the dining hall. One of the camp's great favorites was "Dixie". Since the camp was located in North Carolina, part of the Old Confederacy, that shouldn't be surprising.

I don't have any objection to "Dixie" per se. It's a stirring Stephen Foster song that has both historical interest and current appeal. There's nothing in the lyrics themselves (in the standard version, anyhow) that alludes to or suggests racism, nullification, or slavery. In fact, I've spent time now and then in the Old Confederacy, and it has a most appealing lifestyle, extremely good food, and friendly, interesting people. The problem some folks have with "Dixie", when they have it, stems from the fact that it was the national anthem of the Old Confederacy.

So I never had a problem with "Dixie" being sung in Camp Sea Gull's dining hall. I did have a problem with the fact that they always stood for "Dixie". By and large, the only music people normally stand for is the national anthem, in the case of the United States, "The Star Spangled Banner". Everything else is a special case: you stand for your alma mater at college, you often stand for the Hallelujah Chorus in Handel's Messiah. You don't stand if you hear Fred Astaire singing "Puttin' On The Ritz". You don't even stand for "Maryland My Maryland".

So to my way of thinking, standing for "Dixie" was a little like pretending Confederate money was still legal tender. I didn't agree with the premise. There was briefly a separate country whose national anthem was "Dixie". We fought a war over the issue, and it was well and truly resolved. We revere honorable and even heroic figures on the losing side of the conflict, like Robert E. Lee, but we forget that the Arlington National Cemetery was Lee's estate before the war, and the Union confiscated that estate and converted it to a cemetery intentionally to make it plain to Lee and his sympathizers what the outcome had been of their choices. The Civil War was not a joke. It never struck me as right to play footsie with "Dixie" and pretend there is still a country out there that has it as its national anthem. You can sing "Dixie" all you please, and I'll enjoy hearing it, I may even sing along, just don't make me stand up when you sing it.

I was born near Philadelphia and grew up in New Jersey and Maryland, so that naturally colored my viewpoint. Whatever someone thought of "Dixie" in North Carolina or Georgia, I simply wasn't going to feel the same way. I started going to Camp Sea Gull as a camper when I was about 12. My ideas hadn't been fully formed at the time, but I still thought standing for "Dixie" went against my own grain. So from the first time I heard "Dixie" in the dining hall, I remained seated. I was at Camp Sea Gull most summers between 1960 and 1966 and never stood for "Dixie". Nobody gave me any trouble about it. The other outlier campers from places like Pittsburgh and Omaha mostly didn't stand for "Dixie", either.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XL

Another evening that same year, I was taking a shower after dinner, getting ready to go out on my night off. Each cabin had its own shower room, but there was no direct access to it from the cabin itself -- you had to leave the cabin through one door and go into the shower room through another. The clotheslines were outside the shower room. Naturally, while nobody went from cabin to shower room stark naked, the standards of dress people usually followed while going to take a shower were minimal. It was a boys' camp, after all; except on the days at the start and end of sessions when parents came to pick up or drop off their boys, you had a reasonable expectation that no women were in the residential areas.

And that guided my standards of dress that night. I'd left the cabin headed for the shower room clad only in a pair of briefs, which was the usual dress under the circumstances. When I finished my shower and dried myself off, I put my briefs back on and ducked quickly out of the shower room to grab some clean clothes off the clothesline. All of a sudden, at the clothesline, I ran smack into a party of bosses and other high muckety-mucks making a tour of the cabins. Among them were Bobby Humbird and his wife. Bobby, you will recall, was a deputy director, at the same level with Floyd Suddith, and the two were so close as to be interchangeable.

Why this group of higher-ups was on this particular excursion was beyond me; the only thing I can compare it to in inappropriate futility would be the visit, a century or so earlier, of prominent Washington, DC citizens to view the First Battle of Bull Run, when they found to their discomfiture that the Union side was in retreat, and their return to their comfortable homes would need to be much more hurried than their venture out. In my case, the visit of the Camp Sea Gull privileged to the area of our shower room resulted only in a glimpse of me wearing a pair of briefs, no more revealing than if I'd been wearing a bathing suit, but it caused as much consternation as if they'd watched the defeat of an army and would now need to get out of the way of the rout.

I kept on with my plans and went out for my night off. But at midnight, when I came back, Bobby Humbird was waiting for me in the shadows by the cabin door. "Why did y'all expose y'all self to my wife this evening?" was his question.

"I didn't mean to do it," I said. "And I was wearing a pair of briefs. It wasn't exposing myself."

Bobby began to back down -- he didn't have much choice -- but he was still very unhappy. "I understand my wife shouldn't have been back there, but you shouldn't have done that," he said.

"For goodness sakes, Bobby," I replied, "if I'd known she was out there, I wouldn't have gone outside then. But I couldn't see what was outside the door." Bobby went off again, grumbling.

My Junior Counselor had already reported that, although I didn't work for either Bobby or Floyd that year, both of them were on my case. Floyd in particular, it seemed, was unhappy that Wyatt had hired me back after his unfavorable appraisal. My Junior Counselor reported again that Floyd and Bobby were trying to cook something up.

I should make it clear that my Junior Counselor was not acting out of altruism in telling me about the potential problem -- instead, he was apparently trying to impress me with how well-positioned he was among the Suddith-Humbird group. Many years later, I discovered that my Junior Counselor was the hero of a true crime book, in which he secured the conviction of a woman for murdering the daughter of one of his friends. Something drew me to the name on the cover in the bookstore that day; leafing through it, I saw enough details to confirm that the guy was the same person I'd known at Camp Sea Gull, and I bought the book and took it home to read. But a more detailed reading showed that a great many of the details the guy had given me of his life at the time -- where he lived, where he went to school, what his daddy did, and the like -- had been the purest moonshine -- something you don't expect from a close co-worker. There was a lot I didn't even know I didn't know at Camp Sea Gull.

I went to my own boss about the situation. I told him about the VIP party at the clothesline and my unwitting dash outside, wearing only briefs, into their presence. I relayed to him what my Junior Counselor had conveyed to me about Floyd's and Bobby's apparent attempt to cause a stir. "I'll take care of it," said my boss. "You're one of my best guys. I make the decisions on personnel in my area." He was the one, after all, who had me rewriting the other counselors' weekly reports. I never heard anything more from Floyd or Bobby.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XXXIX

Wyatt had a hard time finding someone else to run the nature lore program because it was just a one-person operation, a small nature hut with the usual collection of curios and specimens bottled in formaldehyde. Each year whoever ran the program gradually filled the cages with whatever live exhibits came in, an assortment of snakes, frogs, toads, lizards, turtles, salamanders, wounded birds, muskrats, possums, and so forth. The area teemed with small wildlife, much of it docile enough to let campers pick it up and bring it over to the nature hut. One medium-size type of non-poisonous snake called a rat snake was so tame it was almost a pet. Sometimes the campers caught mice, which were fed to the snakes. I tried to supplement the passive exhibit with hikes, canoe trips, and the occasional event like a jeep trip to the Texas Gulf Sulfur strip mine I mentioned earlier.

However, Camp Sea Gull stressed its sailing program, so the nature lore business was just an afterthought. I could never develop much enthusiasm for sailing as practiced there -- as a camper, I had a lot in common with Pat, the unmotivated 13-year-old who got crosswise with Lloyd Griffith. The nature hut was a place where I didn't feel as much pressure to be like all the other campers, who of course where a very provincial bunch. There really wasn't a good reason why I should want to be much like them. In fact, it amazes me that I was able to survive over the course of seven years at the place without exciting the kind of attention that accrued to Pat.

There was only so much you could do, on the other hand, with kids and sailboats. It speaks greatly for the hands-on staff in the sailing program that their safety record has been, as far as I'm aware, spotless. Nevertheless, running the program safely means that nobody gets out of sight, and that in turn means there's not a whole lot to do. Racing was the biggest focus, while other skills like navigation weren't covered at all, and that's logical -- you don't need to navigate if you're never out of sight from the camp's pier. In effect, with rare exceptions for trips across the river and so forth, all you ever did was sail around in circles, singly or in competition. That's probably why I never found the sailing much of a challenge.

In fact, Camp Sea Gull was a boring place, maybe because the Southeastern US has always struck me as a place where there's not much to do -- not much, that is, other than get drunk and commit adultery. Since the Camp Sea Gull employment contract forbade alcohol, that left only the other source of entertainment. I got the impression, in fact, that having your wife at camp with you was not a completely unmixed blessing.

One evening I was taking care of some sort of business in the nature hut during the half hour or so of free time after dinner. The nature hut was in a fairly out of the way place -- unless you were going to someplace like the jeep garage, you had to want to go to the nature hut to be anywhere in the area. That evening, I saw Emma Charleston making the trek from the married staff quarters toward me in the nature hut. Emma was married to Steve Charleston, whose exact function I could never quite figure out, but he was important enough to live in married staff quarters and have his wife in camp.

"Do you have a cigarette?" she asked when she got to the door of the nature hut. "I'm all out of cigarettes. I'm dying for a cigarette." Right. She's out of cigarettes, and she figures she'll get one in the nature hut. Emma was not what I would call a prize catch; she was matronly, didn't wear makeup, and had kinky red hair that she didn't spend much effort on. On top of that, she had to have been over 30 to my 18. But I had the impression that she'd come out to the nature hut to see what nature had to offer, so to speak.

"All I have is Camels," I said. "That's probably not what you had in mind." She stood in the doorway for a long moment. I could see the wheels turning. In fact, I could sense some of the thoughts going through her head. She was evaluating many of the same things that Floyd Suddith had evaluated me for, though not from the same perspective. I could almost hear her going through the list: Willingness to Cooperate, Overall Inoffensiveness, General Malleability, Oversensitivity to Appearances, and Fear of Authority, and I could feel her conclusion.

"I guess you're right," she said. "I probably don't want a Camel." Emma, I would guess, banged like a bunny. I was just starting to find out what really went on in the place, and it was going to be my last summer there. I saw Steve Charleston around camp a lot. I began to realize he always had a sad expression, and I was beginning to understand why. But then, there were other questions like why Wyatt and Lillian didn't seem to get along, and what Steve actually did around the place, and I knew I would never get much of it figured out. Camp Sea Gull was boring in part because it was so quiet, and it was quiet because it had many secrets.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XXXVIII

I've read that some home appliances, like kitchen blenders, come with a large number of speed settings, not because such minute gradations are actually necessary, but because people want to feel in control, and the many possible alternatives give them that sense. It is of little consequence to a pina colada if the blender is set on mulch or puree.

It occurs to me that there's a similarity here to the typical performance appraisal form that's promulgated by our human resources departments. They have the same sorts of over-persnickety options that you see on a kitchen blender or a clothes dryer. They give people a sense of control, a feeling that something is being measured. Let's give Joe a three on thinking outside the box, a seven on seeing opportunities instead of problems.

In fact, the whole idea of fussy gradations on either home appliances or personnel forms brings to mind the famous Stanley Milgram experiment on obedience to authority, in which experimental subjects were ordered to turn twirly dials (actually, it seems, levers) connected to nothing, whereupon a graduate student enlisted as an actor would feign painful reactions to a supposed electric shock:

If the [subject] stopped giving [the actor] electric shocks at this point, the experimenter ordered the [subject] to continue, and to administer stronger and stronger shocks for each failure to respond—all the way to the end of the graded series of levers, whose final labels were "Intense Shock," "Extreme Intensity Shock," "Danger: Severe Shock," and "XXX," along with voltage levels up to 450 volts.

The twirly dials with carefully graded intensity must certainly have been a convincing factor in the sham, reinforcing the sense of institutional importance that allowed the experimental subjects to acquiesce in what they had every reason to believe was torture. Milgram focused on the influence the authority-figure of the "experimenter" had on the subjects, but the seeming precision of the graded-intensity levers must have had an impact as well. They looked VERY IMPORTANT.

One evening while I was working as Moe Findley's Junior Counselor, Floyd Suddith, who was our boss, came to our cabin and beckoned me outside. He took me back behind the shower room, a little like the way you would take someone back behind the bar for an ass-kicking. He had a piece of paper with him. "This is an appraisal, John," he said, a little like you might introduce a mildly complex technological artifact to a child who'd never seen one. This is a waffle iron, Freddie. "Have you ever had one of these before?"

"No," I said. Floyd seemed almost to be rubbing his hands together in gleeful anticipation. Floyd, I can see in retrospect, was an ardent believer in the self-reinforcing puissance of twirly-dials connected to nothing. It should be pointed out that as a Junior Counselor at Camp Sea Gull, I made $22.50 a week, not a whole lot even in 1965. Here was Floyd completing a highly detailed personnel appraisal form on a glorified baby sitter making a lot less than the minimum wage. A reasonable appraisal form for someone like that should probably say something more like "OK with kids? [ ]Yes [ ]No Comments:_______".

I don't remember exactly what was on the form Floyd had, but I think it must have read something like this:

Positive Attitude 

Willingness to Cooperate

Overall Inoffensiveness

General Malleability

Oversensitivity to Appearances

Fear of Authority

And so forth. There was a one-to-ten scale for each category. Floyd patiently explained to me, in the same tone you'd use with a child, what each of the categories meant, and why I was being rated so low in each of them. I think the overall rating I got was somewhere between C-minus and D. Actually, I thought I'd been doing at least a competent job, and it was pretty surprising to me that Floyd's opinion of my work seemed to be so bad, and so different from my own self-assessment. For a first job evaluation, it stung pretty badly.

Looking back, my sense is that I wasn't in Floyd's clique, he didn't feel like he owed me anything, and he didn't trust me. I wasn't on his team, I wasn't likely to be anytime soon, and there was nothing I could do for him otherwise. I think he was hoping to end my career that summer and keep me from being re-hired for the following year. The combination of the vague categories for evaluation and the bogus precision of the twirly-dials gave him full scope to evaluate anyone exactly as he pleased. In my case, he pulled the lever for full ass-kicking.

If Camp Sea Gull didn't want to rehire me for the following year, whether this was Floyd's intent or not, I didn't much care. In fact, though, I was rehired -- I got a very petulant letter from Wyatt Taylor the following spring, around the time I was being introduced to the Army ROTC, demanding to know why I hadn't reapplied to work that year -- Wyatt needed me. I could tell this was Wyatt's patent manipulative technique at work. The fact was that I'd run the nature lore program the previous year, and they hadn't been able to find anyone else to take it over for the coming summer. Whatever Floyd had tried to do via the appraisal form hadn't been successful: Wyatt wanted me back, though I had no illusions about why. That was the reason I was at Camp Sea Gull in the summer of 1966.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XXXVII

The first time I met Moe Findley, he told me the most important thing I needed to know about him: "I'm high strung," he said. "I'm like my mama that way. She's high strung, too." In fact, Moe lived in Goldsboro, which wasn't all that far away from camp, and on his days off he went back home to see his mama. I don't mean to imply any type of pathology here; as far as I can see from the details I recall, Moe was what we would have called then normal, if a mama's boy.

In fact, I would classify Moe mainly as a complete pain in the neck, but nowhere near a case for the head-docs. He was just a mama's-boy pain in the neck. Because he was high strung, as he put it, he was always demanding that I do little extra things in running the cabin with him. The boys weren't just to sweep the floor in the mornings, they were to sweep it extra-clean. Since there was no official inspection and no evaluation of either campers or counselors based on such an inspection, I was inclined just to make sure the place was clean enough, but not a prizewinner. It was hard just to get the kids to shake the sand out of their sheets every morning.

Moe wanted everything much closer to perfect, and he always thought my attitude was lackadaisical. I've always been a lot closer to Solzhenitsyn's philosophy: it's the extra ration they give to the shock workers that kills you. You're likely to wear yourself out on extra effort, and any additinal reward from the bosses won't make up for it. Not Moe. He was always trying to dream up something extra to take credit for.

One day, in fact, Moe pulled me aside and began mumbling some important information, sotto voce. He'd caught one of the boys doing -- I don't remember exactly how he put it, he was high strung and a mana's boy, and it was a hard thing for him to express -- he'd caught one of the boys doing you know what. This still puzzles me. In all my years at summer camp, including two as a counselor, I never saw a boy doing you know what. The typical boy, all I can figure, knew enough not to get caught. And anyhow, these kids were maybe nine years old, a little young for that kind of thing, I thought. But somehow, Moe had caught some poor kid polishing his knob. He didn't tell me which one it was, or even exactly how it had happened.

Moe had, of course, lectured the kid sternly about it, as he told me. In fact, he brought me up to date on what he'd said during evening devotions when I was gone on my day off. He'd told all the boys in the cabin what a bad thing this was, though I'm sure that he identified this bad practice simply as you know what. I would imagine most of them didn't have a clue about what Moe meant. Whatever, as Pat the prodigal is deemed to have said. But now Moe realized this was a whole area that we hadn't been paying enough attention to. I was to redouble my vigilance and seek out any boy who might be doing you know what. The proper disposition of such cases was still vague in Moe's mind, but he was sure we should be doing something about it.

Actually, Moe had already shown me a copy of Playboy that he kept someplace -- I would never keep something like that in a cabin, figuring kids' instincts at finding it would likely be unerring, but Moe had a copy stashed away someplace. Moe seemed to have nothing in principle against you know what -- he was just trying to find extra things to do, new ways to make things more complicated than they had to be.

He drove an Edsel. It had been his mama's Edsel, but she'd bought a new car and had passed the Edsel on to him. This was a disconcerting piece of information for me to get my mind around: one day I saw Moe getting out of a light blue Edsel in the counselors' parking lot. "Is that your car?" I asked him. He assured me it was, and told me of its provenance as well. He was very proud of it, since it had been his high-strung mama's car. I went off trying not to shake my head. On top of everything else, Moe drove an Edsel, and he was proud of it. I somehow didn't think things worked that way in real life. The guy was not only a jerk, but he drove an Edsel. Nobody would believe me if I ever chose to write about it, I thought.

Moe had the Camp Sea Gull attitude, which was in effect the attitude of the shock workers who died from the extra ration in Solzhenitsyn's gulag: Moe was always trying to do something else. It was never enough just to do your own job competently. You always had to be looking for a way to add complexity, to create a problem where nobody had seen one before, and in doing that, make it harder or even impossible just to do your own job. Of course, if you made things more complicated and found new problems where there previously hadn't been any, you didn't need to do your own job -- you could specialize in telling everyone else how to do theirs instead. But that was what Camp Sea Gull wanted: guys like Floyd wanted cheerleaders, they wanted enthusiasm, they wanted guys with the right attitude. That was Moe.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XXXVI

I detoured into the story of Pat the Camp Sea Gull prodigal because I found it just recently, and I thought it gave an interesting insight into the overall adjustability of Camp Sea Gull values. Now we're going to take a look at Floyd and the performance appraisal he gave me in 1965.

It shouldn't take too much explanation to establish what an appraisal is supposed to do, at least in theory. An employee performance appraisal measures an employee, as I see it, against two things: the employee's position description and the employee's specific performance objectives. Does the employee have job knowledge, people skills, and initiative to perform in the position? Did the employee process 100 widgets per week in the prior year? These are the main questions. If the employee met those expectations or did better, fine -- a token raise and the tenuous prospect of keeping her job for a while longer lie ahead. If not, it's shape up or ship out.

Theoretically. One February when I worked at DDT, it was announced that annual appraisal time had arrived; employees were to work on their portion of the appraisal form, the "self-appraisal", which would be submitted to the managers, and then there would be meetings in which the employees would "negotiate" their final appraisals with those managers. "That's not how it happens," a co-worker told me. "You think that form you fill out has anything to do with it? Of course not. All the managers know right now who's going to get what appraisal. The lists of who's going to get the 'far exceeds' and who's going to be on accelerated termination are already made up."

The system, in other words, is broken nearly everywhere, despite the pious utterances of the human resources department. The ways for the good boys and good ol' boys to game the system are numerous and infinitely supple, as are the ways for the bosses to make their proteges look good at the expense of those who are merely capable and hard-working, and the situation is by no means new.

Let's look at the position description of a camp counselor. "Counselor" is probably not a good word for the position -- in California, for instance, you need some kind of a license to call yourself a "counselor", which in that context is a kind of head-doctor. Camp counselors are really just glorified baby sitters, and that's not surprising, since they're mostly college kids -- if I were a parent, I wouldn't want a sophomore at NC State messing with my child's head, and I wouldn't want the sophomore or his superiors thinking it was OK if he did -- that's another problem I have with the Rev. Griffith's treatise just previous here; it suggests a college sophomore is there to help patch up Pat's attitude. Nonsense.

A counselor's duties are much more straightforward. You're primarily there to provide adult-surrogate supervision for a group of children or early-teens at all times other than when they're on camp activities, when they're presumably under the supervision of other counselors. In the back of your mind, you're always keeping a count, and you're specifically counting heads at designated times -- meals, rest hour, bedtime, morning wake-up, and so forth. You stop fights, attend to minor bumps and scrapes, take them to the infirmary for anything else, make sure they take showers and change their clothes, and cajole them into making their beds and sweeping up the cabin. Bed-wetting among the younger boys was probably the biggest issue any of us had to handle.

The simplicity of the job's actual requirements was also reflected in what it took to get fired: I never heard of Wyatt firing anyone for reasons other than being absent at times not on your scheduled time-off periods, or for drinking any alcoholic beverage at any time during the period of your employment contract. Our contracts were short and sweet that way: don't drink, and be back at midnight. Multi-page, human resources-style appraisals were superfluous, given the basic nature of the job.

At Camp Sea Gull, the counselors also had to send the parents written reports each week on their child's activities. "Tyndall passed his swimming test on Tuesday, and since then he has been participating in the intermediate level swim class." That sort of thing. Allowing for the fact that most of the counselors were sophomores at places like NC State, the quality of written reports was not high, and the lot fell to me, as it often has throughout my life once my superiors discovered I could write better than most sophomores, to rewrite other counselors' reports so they would look like acceptable Camp Sea Gull communications to parents. But of course, there's no place in the standard appraisal form to say "I get John Bruce to redo his peers' work so my department will look better." You don't get points for things like that in the real world; instead, it's something they cover up.

The first year I worked as a counselor, I was Moe Findley's Junior Counselor in Cabin Eight.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XXXV

Now I want to get to the personnel appraisal Floyd gave me the first summer I worked at Camp Sea Gull. To help illuminate this, I will cite an article written for the camping trade press by Camp Sea Gull's current Director, the Rev. Lloyd Griffith, who, as Bobby Humbird and Floyd Suddith are interchangeable with each other, is himself, in my view, interchangeable with either one of them. Griffith sketches here a picture of an Unhappy Camper:

Let me introduce Pat, a thirteen-year-old returning for his second summer at camp. Little distinguished his first year at camp, but this season he has a definite attitude problem. It showed up immediately in the ragged look of his clothes. As introductions were made on opening day and plans began to form for the summer, Pat was distinctly indifferent to all the hype given to the opportunities ahead. As the first week progressed, his lackadaisical attitude became more obvious in half-hearted efforts at completing morning cabin chores, passive interests in establishing activity goals, and an emerging antagonism toward his cabin mates who were excited to be at camp. When confronted by his counselor, Pat’s response was a version of “whatever,” “ you are clueless,” or “I don’t care.”

Pat's "attitude problem" showed up in "the ragged look of his clothes"? Let me get this straight. Pat is a 13-year-old boy. Most 13 year olds' mothers still buy their wardrobes. Not only that, but at Camp Sea Gull, the universal outfit is flip-flops, shorts, and T-shirt. About the worst that could happen to Pat's clothes is that his mama thought she could get another season out of a couple of T-shirts that had some tears and holes. Somehow the Camp Director has decided this means Pat has an attitude problem.

Next, in the Camp Director's words, Pat is indifferent to hype. A good sign, as I would see it -- but let's move on. Poor Pat's efforts at making his bed, sweeping, and dusting were "half hearted". Speaking as a former Camp Sea Gull counselor, I would describe the efforts of every camper I ever supervised in this direction as half-hearted. Next, his interests in "establishing activity goals" were "passive". I'm not sure what this means. Do they make the campers fill out forms now?

And next we get into the thick of things. Pat had emerging antagonism (whatever that means) toward his mates, who (knowing campers as I do) were far better socialized than he was and knew what was good for them: they were "excited to be at camp" (I would say, based on having been there, they were better able than Pat to feign excitement), unlike Pat, whose response was "a version of 'whatever,' 'you are clueless,' or 'I don't care.'" From the Rev. Griffith's account, it appears that Pat didn't necessarily say any of those awful things: he said a version of those awful things, which, to the Rev. Griffith's mind, might simply have been, "sure is sunny this morning," or anything else, depending on how the Rev. Griffith chose to characterize it.

The Rev. Griffith began cooking something up for our friend Pat:

His poor attitude persisted throughout two-and-a-half weeks of camp despite interventions by cabin counselors, a unit leader, and the camp director. As strategies were almost exhausted, the increasingly apparent next step was removal from the community.

Interventions -- my goodness, what did they do, bundle him up and haul him off to Target for a couple of new T-shirts? The poor guy is being flogged up the chain of command for being, as far as I can see, pretty much of a normal 13-year-old whose mama might not have understood the need to keep up appearances, T-shirt wise, even at summer camp. The Rev. Griffith, meanwhile, is mooting removal from the community, which, in the context of the Christian thought with which the Rev. Griffith is presumably familiar, may otherwise be expressed as "excommunication".

The last time I heard a pastor speak of excommunication, it was while he was remembering his early career, integrating a church in the Deep South. Some white parishioners displayed an emerging antagonism, as the Rev. Griffith might put it, toward this project, and their efforts to integrate the church were, as the Rev. Griffith might have expressed it, half-hearted. The pastor who told me this story said he finally had no choice: he told the parishioners who had an attitude problem that they faced removal from the community. A different situation, of course, different stakes.

I knew another pastor who, in the same situation, was beaten by the local Klan and left for dead under someone's pickup truck. The Rev. Griffith has been able to sidestep such issues, presiding as he does over a private club that can maintain quaint local institutions without exciting the attention of the Klan or subtler contemporary enforcement apparatus, and is thus free to interpret the motives of 13-year-olds as he chooses. You didn't quite say "whatever," "you are clueless," or "I don't care", but I still don't like your attitude, I deem you to have said these terrible things, and you're hereby removed from the community. More than likely, Pat's biggest sin was that his mama didn't have the good sense to send him off to camp with brand-new clothes like all the other mamas did.

But Pat's story has a happy ending:. The Rev. Griffith describes Pat's transformation:

Then one afternoon Pat found himself as one of the crew in a sailing regatta. A captain needed an extra crew member, and Pat happened to be hanging out on the pier at just that moment. He was put on board — but certainly not by choice. The wind was a crisp 15 knots, the competition was challenging, and the outcome required the best of everyone on board.

During that regatta, something significant happened to Pat. He returned to the pier a different boy. He had a new enthusiasm to learn to sail. He told the dock master he wanted to move from crew to captain, to hold the tiller in his hand. This new energy spilled over to his cabin with a greater interest in completing chores and an eagerness to join his cabin mates in activities.

Not, of course, that his mates were now his friends in anything like the real world. Pat here, I have the feeling, is a bit like the prodigal in the parable with which the Rev. Griffith is presumably familiar: he's the one who's genuinely thought things through, changed, and come back home, while the good brother, in the form of the cabin mates here, sees his own unexamined adherence to the outward forms as unrewarded and is not pleased at the prodigal's return at all. The Rev. Griffith's story is in some ways a recasting of that very parable, and a recasting of it to fit Camp Sea Gull's ethos. Pat's been a bad boy; you can tell from his torn T-shirt that he's been metaphorically squandering his inheritance and sleeping with the pigs.

Pat's return to the community is marked by his more enthusiastic adherence to the outward forms: he's learned to look like he's working harder at the dusting and sweeping and making of beds; he's learned not to look like he's unimpressed by hype.

When he returned to the dock at the conclusion of the regatta, he felt different. It would take some reflection on his part and some guidance on the part of his cabin counselor to help him get a better handle on what he had learned.

Indeed. You've made progress, Pat, but you've got to get rid of that facial expression that still seems to say "whatever". The world wants joiners, son. The world wants cheerleaders. You've got to act like you agree with everyone. If you want to screw people, you've got to learn how to do it behind their backs so nobody can catch you at it. But welcome back home, son! Just watch out for that brother of yours, you'd best slip it to him before he can slip it to you.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XXXIV

Two of Wyatt's good boys are vivid in my memory even now, Bobby Humbird and Floyd Suddith. Bobby and Floyd were two of Wyatt's deputy directors. They supervised the counselors who worked with the campers in their residential cabins. One year I worked for Floyd, and in fact he gave me my first-ever personnel appraisal, of which I will speak presently.

Bobby and Floyd sat together, their wives across from them, at the head table in the dining hall. They were very much alike, in their mid-twenties, fit and trim, clean-cut, not so much well-spoken as slick and unctuous, even mealy-mouthed when it suited them, but they were studying human relations with Wyatt Taylor, which meant that throwing the occasional tantrum was well within bounds.

Bobby and Floyd were able-bodied males, who'd already graduated from college, in the mid-1960s -- and they weren't in the Army. Those of us who were able-bodied males at the time knew the options pretty thoroughly: there were no more draft deferments for graduate school. You got four years, and four years only, to finish an undergraduate degree, at which time your student deferment ended, ready or not. If you left school earlier, your deferment ended earlier.

Once your deferment ended, the demand for cannon fodder to be expended in Viet Nam was such that you were quite likely to be called for a physical, which would inevitably result in a I-A classification, at which point you could simply count on getting an induction notice. Unless you were somehow able to discover, feign, or create a physical problem that would cause the doctors to reject you at the physical, your next step was the Army. I eventually got as far as the physical, and the doctors were of the big-tent school -- they wanted to see everyone included, few excluded. I had a trick knee; the doctor noticed it without my mentioning it -- and I got a I-A.

At that point, your options were few. They included hightailing it for Canada, trying one more time to convince the draft board that you were a conscientious objector, or one other option. Interestingly, it was often clergy who led opposition to the war and counseled students on their options in avoiding the draft, but the one option they almost never mentioned was this: ordinary graduate school deferments were no longer available, but there was still a deferment -- in fact, an exemption -- for clergy and seminarians. If you were a man of the cloth, or studying to be one, you weren't subject to the draft.

Out of what must have been both a sense of integrity and a sense of self-protection, clergy seldom stressed divinity school as a way to avoid the draft. You didn't want legions of draft dodgers suddenly crowding the seminaries, after all -- you wanted, many of the clergy must have thought, people who were there from some sincere motive, imperfect as any human motive must nevertheless be. So, among my peers, while there were various debates on the merits of going to Canada or finding some potion that would convince the doctors of their physical debility, almost none thought of applying to divinity school and waiting out the war for a few more years that way.

Bobby and Floyd, as it happened, weren't in the Army because they were both seminarians. It took me a little while to add things up, for the reasons I've cited: the clergy, the media, the scuttlebutt all tended not to emphasize the seminary option for avoiding the draft. People who opposed the war wanted to think of themselves as somehow possessing greater sincerity, greater basic honesty, than those who supported it (who, we should recall, were minions of the fascist/capitalist establishment).

But Bobby and Floyd were different: they had no particular opinion on the war (though, if pressed, they would certainly utter patriotic words in their mealy-mouthed way); they simply wanted to avoid the draft, and I think they always wondered what all the fuss was about. If you could get out of the draft by going to seminary, fine; not only that, but men of the cloth did pretty well for themselves in the South. Not as well as doctors, but well enough. Where was the problem? In fact, once the whole draft business blew over, Bobby dropped out of seminary, switched to medical school, and became a doctor anyhow, but that was several years after this story takes place. Floyd eventually abandoned his clerical ambitions as well and went to work for Wyatt full time -- that is, after the whole draft thing blew over.

So Bobby, Floyd, and their wives had summer jobs that, for people in their position, were sweet indeed. As high-ranking people on the staff, they had private cabins with venetian blinds and air conditioning. Unlike the ordinary staff grunts, they had their wives with them (some of the counselors and lower-level staff were in fact married, but couldn't bring their wives to camp). Likely the pay wasn't all that great, but on the other hand, they had room and board thrown in. And the wives had jobs, too -- they were basically secretaries, but they did it with an air of noblesse that you could cut with a knife. In their view, they didn't really do typing, they were actually sort of princesses who hung out near Wyatt's office so that part of the world would be a better place.

One or another of the wives sat next to Wyatt at the head table and supervised a loose-leaf binder that scripted all of the many announcements Wyatt made at the end of each meal. Wyatt would stand up at his seat, put on his reading glasses, pick up the microphone, and one of the wives would POINT, very directly, at Wyatt's first announcement. When Wyatt finished that, she'd POINT at the next announcement, and on down the list, page after page, so that Wyatt never missed anything, never repeated anything. It was a very, very important job, and you could tell it from their faces. They were the most important people in the whole place, judging from their expressions. If they weren't on the job, Wyatt might miss an announcement, after all.

In fact, Bobby's and Floyd's wives sat between Wyatt and his wife, Lillian, the first year or two I was there. Later Wyatt gave Lillian her own summer camp a short way away, and she no longer ate at the Camp Sea Gull head table. It didn't matter much to Lillian, I have a feeling, that Floyd's and Bobby's cute little wives got to sit next to Wyatt and she didn't. The relationship between Wyatt and Lillian Taylor was simply the most glacial I have ever seen between a husband and wife. Lillian sat through all the meals gazing straight ahead, eyelids hooded, giving no reaction as Wyatt went through his announcements, in fact giving no reaction to anything. Wyatt might make a little joke -- Lillian wouldn't even notice.

Bobby's and Floyd's wives might as well have been twins. They were, as far as I could see, interchangeable (but then, Bobby and Floyd were interchangeable, too), a little too short, a little too doll-like, a little too skinny all around, and in particular a little too small in both the breast and the head to suit my tastes -- but of course, they were married anyhow, and I assume they'd married Bobby and Floyd because there was some attraction there, whether I saw the point of it or not. Or maybe they'd married Bobby and Floyd because, whatever they were going to wind up as, pastor, doctor, Indian chief, they'd likely be VERY IMPORTANT, and that was what girls from good Southern families deserved.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XXXIII

Some of the best times I had at Camp Sea Gull involved listening to the rhythms and words of North Carolina speech. What I heard was all, it's worth pointing out, educated speech, coming from students at places like UNC, NC State, and Wake Forest College, or from the children of college graduates. I have a feeling, though, that I wouldn't have heard this kind of talk at Duke; that would have been more like the bland, standard, TV anchor speech I heard at Dartmouth.

In the vignette just previous, for instance, you will note that Wyatt called me "son". It's been observed that in North Carolina, men, regardless of paternity, call each other "son"; some women also call men "son". This is also common in the military; a general may well call a private or lieutenant "son", and this must stem from the speech patterns of the southeastern US, where there are many military bases.

A man superior in age and station is justified in calling any other male "son" under the informal rules that apply here. On the other hand, a male who has obviously screwed something up is eligible to be called "son" by nearly anyone: "Son, your fly is open," or "Son, you don't know how to park a car -- look how far away from the curb you are."

The next interesting linguistic quirk I found at Camp Sea Gull was the use of "right" as an intensive, synonymous with "very", as in "Dubya-T found out about that right quick. . ." Another was the use of "about" to mean "almost" or "veritably", as in ". . . and he 'bout shat a brick when he heard it, too."

Then there were the references to gender-related conduct. They didn't say a woman was easy; they said, "Mary Rachel? She bangs like a bunny." But the all-time favorite locution I took away from that time was the term "pussywhipped", which is roughly, but only roughly, equivalent to "henpecked". With "henpecked" there's a certain connotation of involuntary servitude -- there's always the sense that a henpecked husband will one day go out for a quart of milk and never come back. Maybe the great majority will remain obediently in place, but certainly nobody is surprised at the occasional escape, and everyone recognizes its justice.

But if you're pussywhipped, you'll always stay home. In fact, you'll stay home and like it. The idea of going out for the quart of milk and never coming back is thoughtcrime. Pussywhipped, it seems to me, is actually the normative condition of feminized men now, not henpecked. I have no problem with revised gender roles; I do the grocery shopping, meal planning, and half the cooking in our marriage. Still, something disturbs me as I see a husband trailing his athletic and unencumbered wife and a brood of children down the aisle as they board a plane; the guy is carrying an infant in a papoose and huffing along with the diaper bag over one shoulder and the tote with the formula over the other.

This man, it seems to me, is pussywhipped. He will spend the rest of his life watching the network news each evening, and he will believe all of it, and he will wonder if he should be seeing his doctor over every nostrum for allergies or asthma that's pitched at him in every commercial message. I know a pair of suburban daddies; if one spends too long in the garage of the other talking about off-topic subjects like model trains, the wife of the absent one, half a block away, will send a couple of the kids to hie daddy back to where he can be watched.

One of the wives, in fact, discovered the endgueltige Loesung to the problem of a daddy distracted in a buddy's garage down the street: she enrolled their pubescent daughters in a girls' basketball program. Girls' basketball, in their upscale suburb, has several games a week, nights and weekends, and no season: you do the daddy thing for girls' basketball all year round. I didn't see Jim for several years after that; likely well able to put his daughters through college on his own nickel, he'd become obsessed with getting both the daughters basketball scholarships. Between work and the program, he hadn't come up for air at all. Would he have remotely encompassed the example of a Judge Crater? Of course not. The man wasn't henpecked, he was pussywhipped.

I heard the term "good ol' boy" frequently, and I believe it entered standard speech during the Jimmy Carter administration, in which it was used, correctly, to refer to Carter's more shady associations, such as Bert Lance. But one more senior staff member at Camp Sea Gull explained to me that Wyatt had a different term. Anyone could be a good ol' boy. Wyatt wanted people who were good boys. "Bobby is a good boy," Wyatt would say. It was his highest praise.

A good ol' boy, of course, is not necessarily a model of rectitude, public or private, nor necessarily clean-cut, nor necessarily capable. The late Billy Carter, Jimmy's sodden older brother, was in many ways the model of a good ol' boy, as for that matter is Roger Clinton, the sometime cokehead half-brother to Bill. A good ol' boy needs only to be a relative or crony of someone important enough to ensure his continued standing in the community, however shaky. If a good ol' boy is not a model of rectitude, nor clean-cut, nor capable, that's the point. His value, whatever it may be, fraternal ties, childhood friendship, whatever, to a powerful person or clique, keeps him afloat, though he may be a frequent source of embarrassment.

A good boy, as Wyatt saw it, was different. A good boy was of use for more than decoration. A good boy was clean-cut and presentable, a model of public (though not necessarily private) rectitude, and at least ostensibly capable. A good boy would, by definition, lose his status should he ever be the source of embarrassment; a good ol' boy will just keep on keepin' on until he brings his patron down with him.

Nevertheless, the job of a good boy was in many ways similar to that of a good ol' boy: his purpose was to hold a place, to absorb expense that might otherwise go unspent, to prevent anyone who might be truly capable or truly righteous or even truly presentable from approaching too closely the center of patronage. Anyone could surround himself with good ol' boys. The disadvantage of good ol' boys was the embarrassment they eventually caused to the likes of Carter and Clinton. It took a real schemer to cordon himself with good boys. This was a feature of Wyatt's genius, which I think in many ways paralleled the genius of Lyndon B. Johnson, who also, by and large, knew the value of good boys as opposed to good ol' boys, knew the difference, and kept good boys like Bill Moyers around while shedding good ol' boys like Walter Jenkins as soon as they caused him trouble.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XXXII

Camp Sea Gull was founded in 1948 by Wyatt Taylor, whose day job was Director of the Raleigh YMCA. Taylor was a character unique to the South, a powerfully demanding, eccentric, bombastic, manipulative, domineering, occasionally charming personality who insisted that everyone -- everyone -- call him Wyatt. When camp was in session, you didn't shake hands or say "hi, Wyatt", or "good morning, Wyatt" -- in keeping with Camp Sea Gull's nautical theme, you flexed your bicep in a Popeye-like gesture and said, "Ahoy there, Wyatt!" Not just campers, you understand, everyone. Just as the elder Rockefeller was known for distributing shiny new dimes to those he met on the street, Wyatt was known for handing out caramel candies-on-a-stick called Sugar Daddies. The term was apt.

In a perfectly natural distrust of this ostentatiously phony bonhomie, nobody on the staff -- at least, none of the lower-level staff, the counselors and other worker-bees -- called him Wyatt in their private colloquies. They always called him "Dubya-T" behind his back. I don't know what he would have done if anyone had referred to him as "Dubya-T" in his hearing. The staff manual contained a dire section enjoining all who worked there to abjure just the sorts of colloquies in which the name "Dubya-T" was bandied about. They were, according to the manual, bad for morale.

It goes without saying that Wyatt was not Robert Lechner. For one thing, fond as Lechner was of all his campers, he was always "Mr. Lechner" to them. Wyatt, on the other hand, didn't spend a whole lot of fuss on campers; he had deputies and assistants to take care of names and faces, bumps and scrapes. Wyatt was the big-picture guy, the visionary. To his credit, Camp Sea Gull was a phenomenally well-built and well-equipped institution.

"The only place that has more equipment than this summer camp is the US Army," was a typical staff remark, and it was true. There was a fleet of jeeps and International Harvester Scouts that could be variously dedicated to grounds maintenance or hitched up to open trailers equipped with benches that took campers on excursions around the many back roads and logging trails in the area. These were called "jeep trips"; Wyatt himself usually drove the lead jeep, and they often pulled up outside one or another waterside honky-tonk where Wyatt or his designee would order Nehi sodas and ice cream bars all around.

My biggest interaction with Wyatt as a staff member was when I'd learned somehow outside of camp that a company called Texas Gulf Sulfur had opened a giant strip mine maybe 25 miles away. You didn't just drive up to the security gate of a strip mine with half a dozen jeeps pulling trailers loaded with kids, but I told Wyatt about it and said it might be a good destination for a jeep trip. "That's a great idea, son," said Wyatt. "I'll get right on it." A couple of weeks later, Wyatt had pulled some strings, and it was all worked out. There was a jeep trip to the strip mine. We drove right down inside. That was Wyatt; it seemed as though if the guy didn't run the whole state himself, he knew everyone who did. In fact, I often wonder if he took care of the whole whites-only private club issue with a single phone call to Lyndon B. Johnson himself. But then, I also sometimes wonder if Wyatt was gay.