Reader Stereotypes

A blogger named Lauren Leto has assembled a fine list of reader stereotypes. How does she describe people who call Ayn Rand their favorite author? "Workaholics seeking validation."

Shakespeare? "People who like bondage."

Bull's-eye.

Allow me to propose some additions. (If you're easily offended, go away.)

Phillip K. Dick
Bifocaled employees of independent bookshops in the Bay Area.

Nora Roberts
College-educated mothers whose kids mock her for watching The American President every third Friday.

John Milton
Agnostic college professors with beards. Not the facial kind of beards.

Barbara Kingsolver
English teachers who spend the first two weeks of every summer beginning and abandoning novels about plucky, brainy, insecure young women attempting to escape stultifying domestic situations.

Anton Chekhov
Unremarkable MFA students.

William Faulkner
Posers.

Marcel Proust
Girls I hit on. Guys who hit on me.

Errata

Ben Franklin doesn't dwell on regret. (Most of the time.)

... were it offered to my Choice, I should have no Objection to a Repetition of the same Life from its Beginning, only asking the Advantage Authors have in a second Edition to correct some faults of the first...

The rub: We don't get to relive our lives. But we do, time willing, get to write autobiographies.

... the Thing most like living one's Life over again, seems to be a Recollection of that Life; and to make that Recollection as durable as possible, the putting it down in Writing...

Autobiography can be a do-over, a fair copy.

How heavily does Ben Franklin "edit" his life? Well, he doesn't seem to lie. (Often.) He admits to a few mistakes. (Surely not all. How about that mistress in France, Ben?) He calls these "Errata," a term for printing errors.

Printing errors are correctable.

Labeling his mistakes "Errata" has the effect of bracketing them. These don't go with the rest.

It's a public confession in which the sinner is pre-forgiven, because we know, as eighteenth-century readers knew, that Ben Franklin is speaking. Honest Ben. Industrious Ben.

The Ben we know only as the protagonist of the Autobiography.

Approaching Anew

Lyrics from "The House That Guilt Built," a mini-song by The Wrens:

It's been so long
Since you've heard from me
Got a wife and kids
That I never see
I'm nowhere near
Where I dreamed I'd be
I can't believe
What life's done to me

Some parts of the above apply to my recent life. Others don't.

Here's the deal: new material on Sunday and Thursday mornings, fewer conventional music reviews, more randomness. The posts will be shorter and probably more oblique.

To quote Ronald Jenkees, "It might be cool, I don't know. And if it's not, I don't care."

Listen Closely: Micachu and the Shapes

Things sure have changed here on Morrison's Mountain.

My girlfriend and I moved out of our San Francisco apartment on Saturday. UHaul is great, by the way. Great if you like half-broken graffiti-spattered trucks, surly employees, and loose interpretations of "guaranteed reservation."

Now I'm lazing about in my girlfriend's parents' backyard in Santa Rosa. Four days from now I finish my career as a tutor and begin my stint as an unemployed grad-student-to-be.

I just wrote a sarcastic letter to UHaul and now I'm embarking on a new project, a reflection on fifteen albums that shaped me as a listener. I do this kind of thing in the interstices of my life. Thinking about the past comforts me, secures my position in time.

That post will be up by the end of the week.

In the meantime, enjoy a silly little video for a silly little song called "Golden Phone" by Micachu and the Shapes, whose recent album Jewellery contains some of the weirdest, catchiest indie pop of the year:



How perfect is that Game Boy hook at 0:37? And the breakdown at 1:36?

Like all of the best songs on Jewellery ("Lips," "Calculator"), "Golden Phone" sounds like it was put together with scraps from the kiddie music junk heap. And somehow everything fits.

Listen Closely: Grizzly Bear

Grizzly Bear already gets too much hype, but the Brooklyn band's new album Veckatimest is too good, and the following video for the single "Two Weeks" too creepy, to ignore:



Kinda yucky, right?

Other potential singles on Veckatimest include "Southern Point," "Cheerleader," "Ready, Able," and "While You Wait for the Others." Even filler tracks like "About Face" and "Hold Still" sound exquisite through (non-iPod) headphones.

If you listen to one indie rock album in 2009, this should be it.

Enlightened Paranoia

I have here in my hand a list of two-hundred and five... a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.

~ Senator Joseph McCarthy, 1950

I have, my brethren, an official, authenticated list of the names, ages, places of nativity, professions, etc., of the officers and members of a Society of Illuminati (or as they are now more generally and properly styled Illuminees) consisting of one hundred members, instituted in Virginia, by the Grand Orient of France.

~ Reverend Jedediah Morse, 1799

In History class, high schoolers learn that Joseph McCarthy was a bad man and that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln were great men. They are encouraged to pluck McCarthy out of the river of history and say, "This one doesn't belong."

But the truth is he does belong. McCarthy's style of thinking, writing, and speaking has ample precedent in American history. The first historian to show this was Richard Hofstadter, whose essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" was a multidisciplinary blockbuster in 1964.

Hofstadter puts a name to McCarthy's rhetorical mode - "the paranoid style" - and traces its history from anti-Illuminists like Jedediah Morse to anti-Communists like McCarthy. The "central preconception of the paranoid style," says Hofstadter, is "the existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character."

In a paragraph not unsuited to an essay about eighteenth-century novels of seduction, Hofstadter describes the "enemy":

... he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman: sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He is a free, active, demonic agent. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history himself, or deflects the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced.

The implication is that such a man does not exist. Paranoiacs and novelists, perhaps in cahoots, invent different versions of him every couple of decades. He was an Illuminist in the 1790s. In the mid-1800s, a Freemason. And a Muslim now.

Hofstadter's essay typifies a kind of historical discourse that surfaced in the post-war academy, one that engages in present-day issues without a pretense of neutrality. Hofstadter makes no bones about his liberal sympathies. Early in the essay he cites the contemporary "Goldwater movement" as an example of "how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority."

The very term "paranoid style" reflects a bias. The so-called paranoiacs, who at certain times in history made up entire political parties, wouldn't call their discourse paranoid. They'd call it reason.

So would we, if they had been right. But Hofstadter's paranoiacs flamed out one by one, exposed as delusionals, exaggerators, or outright liars. Jedediah Morse's list of Virginian Illuminati was never authenticated, and McCarthy's fear of a Communist takeover never had a chance at coming true.

What Hofstadter misses is how often the paranoid style appears in "legitimate" political discourse, especially during the all-important second half of the 1700s. Take, for instance, this juicy passage from George Washington's Farewell Address:

... as it is easy to foresee that, from different causes and from different quarters, much pains will be taken, many artifices employed to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth [that the unity of government is of the utmost importance]; as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed, it is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness...

Here we have the hallmarks of the paranoid style: an evocation of a widespread, masterfully executed conspiracy; an enemy who operates "constantly and actively," "covertly and insidiously." And yet Washington's Farewell Address rarely comes up in discussions of the paranoid style. Hofstadter doesn't even mention it.

Which is weird. The Farewell Address is one of the most ubiquitous American speeches. Every year on the observance of Washington's birthday a different senator reads the speech in legislative session; last year Mike Johanns, the Republican senator from Nebraska, did the honors.

Perhaps familiarity conceals the vehemence of the speech's rhetoric.

Or maybe since Washington declines to specify an enemy, his tone doesn't seem truly paranoid. Say he had singled out the Illuminati, or the Jacobins: he would have seemed like more of a conspiracy-monger.

But his formulation of the enemy is vague enough to apply to any "anti-American" group. Hence the durability of the Farewell Address. In 1954, Joseph McCarthy would have seen red in the passage about covert and insidious "external enemies." And imagine the effect of the same words on the congressional audience in February 2002, when suspicion of Islamic terrorists - and, shamefully, Muslims in general - had reached its height.

If Washington's Farewell Address annually revives the paranoid style in our government, Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence inscribed it on the birth of our nation.

U.S. history buffs might balk at this characterization of the Declaration. After all, the most vocal paranoiacs of late eighteenth century, from Jedediah Morse to Harvard theologian David Tappan, were Jefferson's political rivals. In a much-reprinted letter, Jefferson characterizes the writings of Augustin Barruel, an anti-Illuminist who influenced Morse, as "the ravings of a Bedlamite."

But the paranoid style was a common mode of expression at the time, and it slips into the flabby midsection of the Declaration. For eighteen paragraphs, which teachers often tell students to skip, Jefferson enumerates the wrongs perpetrated by King George III. "He" attempted to turn our military against us. "He" razed our towns and destroyed our lives. "He" incited the Indians to rebellion.

This singling out of one identifiable evildoer is a convention of the paranoid style. As Hofstadter puts it:

The paranoid's interpretation of history is... distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone's will.

The final draft of the Declaration is extreme enough in this respect, but Jefferson's first draft goes even further. He blames the king not only for the "piratical warfare" of the slave trade, but for the slave insurrections that rocked plantations in the late 1700s. Perhaps sensing the extravagance of these claims, Jefferson wraps up with a "strange-but-true!" appeal, standard in paranoid discourse:

Future ages will scarcely believe that the hardiness of one man adventured, within the short compass of twelve years only, to lay a foundation so broad and so undisguised for tyranny over a people fostered and fixed in principles of freedom.

All of this was edited out. It's possible that the editors, members of the Second Continental Congress, doubted the accuracy of Jefferson's accusations. More likely, however, they refused to sign a document that condemned the slave trade. They sort of dug the slave trade.

You might be surprised that Washington's Farewell Address and Jefferson's Declaration of Independence employ the paranoid style. The word "paranoia" connotes at best intellectual laziness, at worst psychological abnormality. In the eighteenth century, however, paranoid thinking was considered up-to-date, even enlightened.

The historian Gordon Wood gives the clearest explanation of this surprising idea. He locates the philosophical foundation of the paranoid style in the Enlightenment, a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cultural movement:

The work of John Locke and other philosophers opened reflective minds to the startling supposition that society, though no doubt ordained in principle by God, was man's own creation - formed and sustained, and thus alterable, by human beings acting autonomously and purposefully.

It follows that men could, with the proper use of reason, dissect and understand their world, their own handiwork. A new "science" of history thus emerged, with cause-and-effect as its central mechanism. In Wood's words:

Cause was something that produced an effect; every effect had a cause; the cause and its effect were integrally related. Such thinking created a new world of laws, measurements, predictions, and constancies or regularities of behavior...

In this type of historical analysis every event ("effect") can be traced to a human action ("cause"). This slips easily into what Wood calls "conspiratorial interpretation" and what Hofstadter terms "the paranoid style": a tendency to attribute events "to the concerted designs of willful individuals."

If something bad happens, someone must be responsible. And if something bad happens on a massive scale (the Reign of Terror in France, 9/11), the culprits must be numerous and well-organized.

As Wood sums it up:

Far from being symptomatic of irrationality, this conspiratorial mode of explanation represented an enlightened stage in Western man's long struggle to comprehend his social reality. It flowed from the scientific promise of the Enlightenment and represented an effort, perhaps in retrospect a last desperate effort, to hold men personally and morally responsible for their actions.

So when Jefferson blamed King George for every evil under the sun, when Washington imagined enemies in "from different causes and from different quarters," when McCarthy ranted about undercover communists in the State Department, when Hillary Clinton spoke of the "vast right-wing conspiracy" against her husband, they all relied on a rational, "enlightened" framework.

The same framework, used for a very different purpose, underlies these more recent words:

It's the answer that led those who've been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

The effect: Barack Obama's victory. The cause: freely acting individuals banding together and acting purposefully.

A conspiracy, one might say.

Listen Closely: Passion Pit

Passion Pit should annoy me. The squealing synths and kiddie choirs should annoy me. Lead singer Michael Angelakos's voice, well-described by Pitchfork as a "singing-in-your-hairbrush falsetto," should annoy me.

But none of it does. Passion Pit's new album Manners, released to big hype on Tuesday, is full of catchy, exquisitely produced, re-listenable electropop - better in every way than Pit's inconsistent debut EP Chunk of Change.

Check out the vid for the album's first single, "The Reeling":



Second single "Moth's Wings" is flowing through the tubes at the moment, but just wait till "Little Secrets" bum rushes the blogosphere. Explosion potential.

And trend-mongers beware: if these dudes hit top 40 radio, brace for a Vampire Weekend-style backlash.