Jeannette Winterson’s review of Frederick Turner’s book on Henry Miller ends with a question that is seldom discussed in the bounds of polite society.  Why do men revel in the degradation of women? 

I can only speak for myself on this, because I don’t know what other men experience. I do know that women are abused by their spouses and many of them submit to it for years, and I know that, at times, I have gotten physical in fights with my own wife. Not that I have battered her or intentionally abused her, but have forcibly removed her from my presence at times so I can cool down in a locked room. 

My wife would seem to suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder. She believes herself to be perfect, and right in all things. She suffers me to listen to her point of view, especially on the topic of my faults, which she will enumerate ad nauseam whenever we sit down to a meal, but if I should even suggest that she might have a fault or two of her own I am staring down the barrels of a Gatling Gun. The torrent of abusive language is intolerable. Moreover, she does this in front of our child and the child addresses me the same way when angry, and my wife adds fuel to the child’s fire, instead of telling the child that’s wrong. I worry that the child will grow up thinking such behavior is normal and mouth off in such a way to those in with authority over her. It will absolutely ruin her life and her mother cannot see it. Her attitude is that I am wrong and the child is right to point it out. 

I suppose her main grudge against me is that I’ve taken to ignoring her, spending spare time alone reading and writing, rather than hear her complaints and abuse. She had a similar problem in an earlier marriage. Soon after their first anniversary her first husband informed her they would not have any more sex because they would not have any children. I can’t imagine a young man saying such a thing to his bride, unless he had similar problems with her and was wise enough to know what a disaster it would be for a child to have such a mother. He joined a cult that preached wifely obedience to husbands and insisted she join it too.

I would add that I am gainfully employed and the sole breadwinner in the family. I do not go out with the boys to drink and all my money goes to housekeeping and savings, so she has no complaint on that account. 

So, does that mean I revel in the degradation of women? No, I do not. But I can understand that some men do if their wives are anything like mine. 

I was at Pigfoot in Northeast Washington several years ago, with a friend, to hear the house band. They announced that a lady named Etta James, whom I had, sadly, never heard of, was in the audience and would join them to sing a few numbers. I don’t remember what she sang. I don’t remember how long she sang. What I do remember was the excitement she generated and the effect she had on me, who hadn’t listened to anything but classical music in several years, which was magical. Here she is on youtube singing my favorite blues tune.

When I was a scholarship student in prep school I remember seeing a lower form student emerge from his parent’s top line Benz wearing a luxurious fur coat that would probably fit him for a season or two. I wasn’t jealous or envious of him, but I did despise him because he had such an air of entitlement about him. It was my first exposure to such people and I thought, what had he done to deserve such a coat, and why does he seem so contemptuous of everyone around him who doesn’t have one? Since then, whenever I see such people, I want to put them in the stocks and invite some scamps to swing dead cats at them.

Thus, it is of momentous interest that Willard “Mittens” Romney is a plutomaniac, comes from a family of plutomaniacs, can’t help being a plutomaniac, and will clearly serve the interest of other plutomaniacs to the detriment of everyone else, as Republicans have done since the Reagan Era. 

There are millions of people who work with equal focus and persistence, to far less reward than Romney did making deals and issuing pink slips at Bain. Just watch carpenters, electricians, or plumbers at work; they all have focus and persistence and pride in their craftsmanship, and most chaff under contractors who demand they cut corners to save a few bucks. What he has that they lack is ruthlessness, and a sense that they are entitled to more than what they alone can produce. 

Yuck.

I write fiction and I am always appalled by how little vocabulary people know today, even people who call themselves writers, or are published as writers. The multi-syllabic word is almost beyond most people’s understanding. Shakespeare fused the high Norman French to the vulgar Anglo-Saxon, giving us the basis of modern English, yet it seems we’re expected to write today in Anglo-Saxon monosyllables. Why?

I love words. I love the sound of rhyme and alliteration and use it as a tool in my writing, particularly in passages of ridicule because they always make it sound so much more absurd. Nobody gets it. To do it, I often need to use a thesaurus, of course, or string searches, to find words with appropriate sound as well as the exact meaning. Often the words I find are obsolete. Fine by me. If they’re wonderful words, revive them. Another "writer" told me to put away the thesaurus. That’s pretty damned difficult when you don’t want to use keywords more than once or twice in a novel, and because you want a certain rhythm, plus sonority and precision. 

I love making long loopy sentences too, that have an expressive shape like a rolling circle for my road novel or an arc which rises to to the point it seeks to make. People tell me to break them up. Make them punchy for more impact. Sometimes punchy doesn’t have the same sort of impact.

All too many writers today seem content to tell the story in very common and inexact language. A few months back I looked at a book that was promoted on a popular literary agent’s blog. The first page used the word shitty five times. It seemed to be the only adjective the author knew. What did it describe? Everything from the weather to the architecture to the food. And it was published. How? I guess since that is the way people talk, that is what readers expect to read.

I see nothing wrong with standards of excellence. What does bother me sometimes is the people who want to set them. Too often, the objective is more about power than rightness.

via What the Heck Has Happened to Standards? – Letters to the Editor – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

It was always about him running away from himself, telling bawdy tales on the CB, towards his supposed future, but there wasn’t a strong motivation, or anything for him, or the reader, at stake. I believe it’s all there now.

I revisited a particular phrase last night, “the last bastion of Eddie’s boyhood” and for “boyhood” substituted “perpetual adolescence.” And suddenly it just felt finished. 

Then I googled perpetual adolescence and came up with some references to the Puer Aeternis archetype, and realized that not only was it Eddie, but the main subsidiary characters were the other aspects of it. And it all came out of me, somehow. I’ve spell and grammar checked it and and proofed it, and the copy could not be much cleaner. I added a few more tweaks today,  things that needed clarification in accordance with the insight, and it’s done. All 79,600 some words, a respectable length for any novel. 

Now it’s on the ABNA, again. If it doesn’t get past the quarterfinals, this time, I’ll be very disappointed. 

So why the question mark? Because I thought it was done so many times before and it kept getting rejected. But I never had the feeling that it was done. There were always things I felt were weak and I kept going back and back. Now I feel like everything I would want in it, as a reader, is there. Is it Literature? Hard to say. It aims to be. That’s all I know. 

In the darkest part of his heart he knew it would tell her nothing necessary and was, in short, the typical screed of a narcissistic VIP. It rationalized his own decisions prior to the crisis and concealed connivance in confidence schemes conceived by his grandfather years before. He portrayed himself as a neophyte, seduced by situation ethics and enthralled with the overall cultural drift towards caveat emptor, laissez-faire, and self-correcting markets. He maligned his lately lamented mentor as the mastermind of his mendicancy, waxed waspishly on his wayward father, who wasted the latter two thirds of his life wafting about with an opium pipe but was lucid enough to understand what lupine lunatics they’d be assuming excess leverage as their competitive edge, thus wedging themselves on that knife-edged ledge from which their plum portfolio would eventually plummet, and finally mocked his milksop board for alleging their hedges and friends in high places would guarantee they’d come up aces if they did a coemption off ledger.   

As a dogmatist for the Heritage Foundation, your solutions sound like talking points from the G.O.P. that your institution probably wrote.

What is this “double taxation of savings” for instance? The only tax on savings is that on dividends and earned interest income. How would ending that improve mobility for those with “a dearth of personal savings?”

Poor people don’t have savings because wages paid by “job creators” don’t permit them to save, not the fear of taxes on earned interest income. So that solution only helps the rich while depriving the government of resources that might help the poor.

You also speak about “family breakdown.” Most family breakdown occurs among the poor, who can’t earn a living wage due to union busting, jobs offshoring, right to work laws, opposition to the minimum wage; all of which the Heritage foundation supports.

Education and job training are critical to moving up the ladder, but for poor people that means public education and job training, inadequately supported by location-based property tax distribution that overfunds schools in the rich suburbs and underfunds schools in the inner cities and rural areas, where poverty is most persistent, again due to policies the Heritage Foundation and the GOP not only support, but would exacerbate with school vouchers that subsidize private schools for the rich, while depriving the public schools of much needed revenue.

If you can’t be intellectually honest, you should not be invited to debate.

You really tipped your hand, Mr. Rose, in that fight with the Congressman over the private sector doing it better. The private sector is no better at doing things than government is, and this has been proven time after time. Look at the way the private sector wasted billions in Iraq on shoddy and uncompleted construction contracts, look at what the private sector is doing to medical care and medical costs. The rent seeking and profiteering is killing us. The urge to privatize government functions began in the 1970s, at the end of a long bear market when returns on investment were terrible, and the Dow was priced at four time earnings. If a company could get cost plus by assuming government functions, that was a damn good deal. Has been ever since, even with the boom in the capital markets. But it hasn’t been a boon to the taxpayers. The size and cost of government has increased in spite of it. 

I truly believe there are only two things the G.O.P. has against government; the elevation of African Americans into middle class government jobs, and government demand that business assume its external costs. 

Otherwise, they love government because it’s a source of enormous profits.

I remember in the Reagan years, when the President’s closest campaign advisor bypassed a White House job to set up a firm called The Power House. I went for a job interview there, and the one thing they wanted to know was who my Pentagon contacts were, because the only mission was to open doors to rent seeking contractors for a cut of the Government’s largess.

As one who has followed the stock market for nearly twenty years, I’ve been unimpressed with the dogma of maximizing shareholder value. With returns as poor as they have been in virtually every sector for years, it seems to me that few shareholders have gotten maximum value out of their investments. But the idea has become a religious dogma of totalitarian proportions, especially among establishment conservatives. So it is good to see that it come under fire from the business press at large.

I believe that the key to happiness is subordinating the ego. In business this would translate into subordinating the profit motive. I have long believed, with Peter Drucker, that the first task of business is to create products that customers value and establish thriving markets for them. Get that right and the rest of it will take care of itself.

My novel, Banana Republican Blues, contains the core of this idea in a passage I wrote long before I encountered the link to this article on The Big Picture blog.

Eddie awoke with a start, alert and determined to remain so, he composed, in his head, the rudiments of his Doctrine of the One True Chili. The titular topic was a very small part of Eddie’s aggrieved philosophy. It repudiated everything he once held true, except for the value a truly good meal cooked with something more in mind than extracting the maximum profit from it. It extended to the value of the well made thing that built his family’s fortune, and from there to the value of labor.

Eddie has learned the hard lesson of putting customer value first by blowing up a hedge fund that put returns to investors first. He is attempting to start over again with the old fashioned ethic of value first, customer second, workers third, and profits last, assuming that returns to investors will, thereby take care of themselves. It becomes a sort of Quixotic crusade, as he keeps coming into conflict with those who see it the other way around.

I notice Milton Greenberg does not refer to the infamous letter of Lewis Powell, the former Supreme Court Justice regarding the threat to Capitalism represented by the counterculture, certain university departments and a number of tenured scholars. What a joke that prediction turned out to be, as high finance became a double entendre, and drug addled banks and brokerage firms became Kamikazes for capitalism. 

I also notice he mentions think tanks as being places truth is pursued. Most of them were founded, along with the business lobbies, pursuant to Lewis Powell’s admonition, to enhance and promote free market dogma, as an antidote to what? The socialist dogma of the druggies in the banking system? The queer theorists in academe? The identity poitics crowd on the “left” that forsook the class struggle here at home and signed off on union busting, for Franz Fanon’s post colonial claptrap. 

Is Milton Greenberg so naive as to think that think tanks actually think instead of promoting dogma? From what I can see, they earn the second half of the name by water boarding truth in the rush to subordinate free people to free markets. The free market has become more destructive to itself, as a result of Powell’s letter, than of any threat from the counterculture or the liberal arts.

What drivel.