We Have Entered the Era of Un-

In culture, literature, and theory, the 1960s marked the beginning of postmodernism.  And quickly the prefix post- became the operative way of understanding the world: post-war, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, post-industrialism; then, post-human, post-Boomer, and post-punk; more recently, post-millennial and post-apocalyptic; and for a least a little while in 2008, post-partisan and post-racial.   (Many a postdoc has been devoted to developing post-anything.)  Post- became more than a prefix—it became a worldview, an epistemological category.

But what, students in my class on postmodern literature reasonably asked, can possibly come after postmodernism, or post- anything? More post. Post-postmodernism. [Shudder]. Post- is the prefix that devours itself, since it is always after, belated, still waiting, and deferred. Nothing can come after post-.

Nothing except, with apologies to Existentialism, a new kind of nothing.

Enter: Un-.

Un-, like post-, is not a word. Unlike other prefixes, however, like pre- or post-, or re- or un-’s near-relative, under-, un- does not describe, affix in time, suggest repetition, or, like mis- or mal-, even suggest that something is wrong.  Unlike with-, dis-, de-, counter-, anti-, or even the powerful non-, un- does not suggest opposition, working against.  Un- suggests more than reversal or opposite: it is negation, disappearance, taking out of existence.  And if post- described the world after about 1945, Un- describes the world from 2000, or maybe 2001, to the present. We are living in the era of Un-.

Now, I realize that lots of words began with Un- before 2000.  I used “unlike” twice in the last paragraph alone. But I used it as a preposition, “dissimilar from.”  On Facebook, unlike is a verb: if you click Like, and then decide that you don’t like that thing anymore, you can click Unlike and it will erase your Like. Since Facebook does not have a Dislike button, Unlike is as close as people can get.

But Unlike is as different from Dislike as unable to disable, unaffected to disaffected, unarranged to disarrange, unfortunate to disfortunate (which is sort of a word).  Which is to say, very different.  Both suggest opposition, but dis- implies an active opposition, expending energy to reverse.  Un- feels passive, a kind of vanishing—or worse, the suggestion that the thing never was in the first place.  When we Unfriend on Facebook, we do something we cannot do in real life or face to face, which is presumably why the word had to be recently invented. We don’t Unfriend corporeal people.  We just—what, exactly?  Stop being friends? Spend less time together? Drift apart? Or something stronger—not a drift but a rift.  A fight, a falling out.  We’re not on speaking terms anymore.  But not Unfriend.  We can only Unfollow online, on Facebook or Twitter.  We can’t Unfollow in person.  Unfriend and Unfollow seem etymologically and epistemologically close to Untouchable, with the implications of prohibition, exclusion, disappearance. Unclean.

Like many people who spend time at their keyboard, I have become reliant on Delete, on Backspace, on Undo.  When I knock down a glass and wish it would float back in a startling cinematic backwind, or misplace my book and want it to reappear, or say something that I want to take back, I can picture Ctrl Z clearly in my mind’s eye.  But it does not Undo.   Glasses do not unbreak; books are not unlost but rather must actively be found (without Ctrl F, either). Words that are unspoken were never spoken, not spoken and stricken.  We say, I take it back.  But the words cannot be unsaid.  Judges instruct juries to ignore testimony, but lawyers know that jurors cannot unhear. Judges cannot unstruct.  Traumatized viewers cannot unsee.

Do not try this in real life

And so Un- fails at complete erasure.  Like a palimpsest, Un- can’t help but leave traces of its former self behind.  The close reader can see what used to be there, the residue of virtual Friendship, the electronically unsettled path left behind after one has Followed, or been Followed.  And perhaps this failure is for the best.  The only thing more powerful than Un-’s fever dream of retroactive disappearance is that the wish cannot come true.  If anything, the electronic world that birthed the fantasy of Undo is the same one that never lets us scrub our online prints away.

Time: 55 minutes

P.S. Please Like and Follow this blog.

Five Things I’ve Learned from Blogging

 

I published my first blog entry on December 4, 2011, or a little over six months ago. I felt like I needed a personal outlet for writing, since I spent the majority of my writing time typing comments to students on their writing and our class discussion boards. The only other writing I did was work email and slow-paced academic research and writing, at the rate of about one 25-page-ish essay per semester.  Facebook one-liners weren’t enough, and I felt like I had Things to Say.

But when and how could I do it? I decided to set the one hour rule to keep the blog from taking over my time.   I haven’t always stuck with it—in fact, more than half of these entries went at least a little over an hour, and that’s not counting some of the time (more on that next time).  But since then, I’ve written 32 entries, or about one per week, most of which were at least 1100 words, on a wider variety of subjects than I’d planned.  I even liked some of what I wrote.

As of now, I have about 20,000 page views: about 15,000 through my WordPress site, and another 5,000 or so that I’ve gotten from cross-posting everything in Open Salon.  I didn’t have any idea how many views I’d get when I began, but I dare say that 20,000 is way more than I imagined for six months. It’s no Charlie Bit My Finger or Harry Potter Puppet Pals or the singing Gummy Bear, with their hundreds of millions of views, but then again I made people read.

Ignore this picture. It’s just search engine bait.

For this entry, then, I want to share some of what I learned about blogging, the internet, and the numbers behind the scenes.

1)      Facebook works. I’ve had almost 2,000 views from Facebook. In truth, 2,000 is closer to the number I imagined I’d have by now—that is, from friends and friends of friends, not strangers.

2)      Yet I got most of my views from strangers, through search engines.  I had not been thinking about search engines, yet they provided over 9,000 referrals.

3)      Most of these views were from Google Image. The vast majority, at about 8,000. The funny thing is, I only originally included images because I could. It would be fun, like using a toy, to find and include images and, shortly after, captions, which turned out to be one of my favorite parts of blogging.   The images were what separated the blog posts from writing in a black marbled composition notebook, as I did during my teens and early twenties.

4)      But it’s not like a journal, because people can see you.  I was shocked that my piece about Metal Evolution was even noticed by—let alone linked to—Banger Film’s social media. That day gave me my highest number of single-day views, 511.

I was even more surprised when last month, the singer and bassist from The Arrows, the group who originally wrote I Love Rock n Roll and whom I compared unfavorably with Joan Jett, read the post and wrote me an email! Here it is exactly as it appeared, including the weird margins:

jk-

 I found your personal attack on me amusing,

(in your Jett – tongue in sphincter sycophant piece)

 especially after looking at your photo.

  

Since your attack on me was personal

I will respond accordingly.

 

It doesn’t matter what you think.

When you look in the mirror you

still have to see that face of yours.

 

Fact. I inspired Joan Jett in 1976 when she

saw me perform the song on TV and that’s

far more important to me than impressing

you, who will never be anything or do anything

of import except criticize people who have

accomplished far more than you ever will.

 

Good luck,

Alan M.

I was not going to respond, because I could not think of a reason to.  But then I asked myself, what would be more interesting, responding or not responding? And that became my reason:

Alan, if I may,

I’m just flattered that you read and responded to the piece. It was absolutely not meant personally. I never considered the possibility that anyone I wrote about would ever see it.  I have nothing but respect for someone who has written such a great and lasting rock & roll song.

Best,

Jesse  

I have not heard back, but then again I didn’t expect to become pen pals. I still stand by what I wrote and am still shocked to have gotten a message.  Elvis, also criticized in the same post, still has no comment.

5)      Yes, people can see me. But I can see people, too.  OK, not really. But in addition to seeing how people found the blog—again, usually via a specific search engine—I can also see people’s search engine terms.  The ones with the most views correspond directly to the likely image search—Where the wild things are (over 700 views) and a lot of permutations of Peter Pan (peter pan, piter pan, peter fan, peter pan disney, peter pan cartoon,  peter pen, peter pan characters, pan peter, and more). 

Hey, if it worked the first time…

 It’s nice to see that at least a few people probably found exactly what they were looking for in one of my posts: searchers for “conventions of time travel movies,” “death cartoon on regular show,” “protozombies,” “finn and link,” “symbolism in Mad Men,” “is don delillo alive or dead” and “hunger games hunger artist” were probably surprised that someone actually wrote about something like these topics.  And a dozen or so people were actually looking for this blog (hourman blog, the hourman blog, jesse kavadlo, jessekavadlo wordpress)!

But a few people probably did not find what they were looking for—even though ALL these searches registered more than one view, so they must have found or liked something. Here are a few other search terms that somehow led to views:

80’s metal chicks pin-ups  (must have been very disappointed), kava addiction (taken here because of my last name?), i’d rather enter the hunger games than go to school on Mondays (?), a normal person’s reaction to sparkly vampires/jack sparrow (??), you mad i do what i want loki t shirt (???), krampus sex (I don’t want to know), miss piggy in bondage (you thought krampus sex was bad).

And lots more.

 

Vixen. Too little, too late for that guy looking for 80s heavy metal chicks, but here is it.

Since WordPress added the feature late last February, I have also been overwhelmed by seeing the view’s country of origin.  Not only have Metal Evolution and the mean guy from The Arrows read my writing, but so have people in 128 countries, including Gibraltar, Mongolia, Korea, and 225 views from the Netherlands.  I’m huge in the Netherlands! 

Thanks!

I nether saw that coming six months ago. Thanks to everyone who’s been reading.  I hope the non-bloggers have learned something, and bloggers may recognize some of what makes blogging so interesting.

 Next post: what I’ve learned about writing and the creative process.

Time: one hour. I set out to write a Ten Things list but ran out of time at five. Typical.

The Meaning of Like

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One sure sign of adulthood is the urge to complain that the kids these days overuse the word “like.”  As in, “I was, like, working on my blog? And then I, like, got hungry? So, like, I, like, made, like, a, like, sandwich?”

[Stops clock, makes sandwich, eats, returns to blog]

But that’s not my problem.  The grownups who disrespect Like as an emptyheaded Valley Girl tic at best and the Decline of Western Civilization at worst tend to “Um” a lot themselves.  Same idea, and less endearing.  It helps the brain keep up with the mouth, which is not a generationally-specific problem. 

I even like “like” for “said.” As in:

“So then, she was like, I can’t believe it.  And I was like, Believe it.  And then she was like, No way.  And I was like, Fffyeah.” 

Here, “like” embodies the postmodern intersection where narrative collides with neurology.  Any attempt to recreate dialogue word for word becomes an artifice and fiction, limited by the teller’s cognitive constraints of language and memory.  “Like” provides healthy transparency; not “She said, ‘I can’t believe it,” but rather, “It was like—and I paraphrase, for I am only human and therefore limited by the margins of discourse and recall—she said, ‘I can’t believe it.’”

No.  It’s the Facebookization of Like—here, regarding something as enjoyable or pleasant—as an inadvertent philosophy of life, the way of viewing and assessing the world.  Online, Like turns from tepid tolerability—the way I think of the word—to the highest form of admiration.  In the absence of an actual comment—and many pages seem not to allow or encourage comments—Like is the only permissible form of praise at all.  It is not even a dichotomy—a twofold world of Like and Dislike.  There is no Dislike.  It’s not even Like or Ignore.  It is Like or nothing.   If you don’t have anything Like to say, you can’t say anything at all.  Some enterprising types can Like something and then click Unlike.  But Unlike [grumble not a real verb grumble] is no Dislike, and it reverts the former Like into ether, faint protest indeed. 

Unlike legions of Facebookers, though, I do prefer the absence of a Dislike button on Facebook.  That Manichean universe of Like and Dislike belongs to YouTube, whose green Likes and red Dislikes on any given clip represent a never-ending battle comparable to that of the Egyptian god Ra—symbolizing order—to prevent the dragon Apep—representing chaos—from devouring the sun every evening.     

Ra vs. Apep, for some reason

YouTube’s introduction of the serpent of Dislike into Facebook’s conflict-free Garden of Like has also had the effect of turning YouTube’s comment section into an Apep-like writhing snakepit of slurs, smears, and disparagement, not to mention aggressively ignorant racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and lunatic conspiracies theories, as documented here and on this video, where the poster was pretty much doing the Youtube equivalent of saying Voldemort’s name in his title—invoking the name and thereby  summoning attention and wrath:

It’s not like I want Facebook to go down this road.  But rather, I worry that, imperceptibly, a generation is being trained to think that the highest—and maybe the only—form of acclaim is Like.  Even Dislike—or the New York Times’ new Meh List—is still part of the limited Like spectrum.  But is Like all there is?  Aren’t there many other worthwhile reactions beyond and separate from the question of Like?

• Should everyone take a trip to the Holocaust Museum?  Yes.  Is it fun?  Do you Like it?  These are simply the wrong questions to ask. 
• I read—and just taught a class on—novels representing or responding to September 11, 2001. Do I like them?  Um, I guess.  But I’m interested in, and fascinated by, recent fiction’s attempt to create a narrative around fresh trauma, and in doing so, deliberately and dangerously making the day into something literary, even poetic.  It’s not about Like. 
• I just watched 127 Hours.  Did I Like it?  It depends on what you mean by Like.  Did I enjoy watching James Franco cut off his own arm?  Drink his pee?  Sweat and hallucinate? Not so much.  The early scenes are filled with anticipation, anxiety, and dread, since the viewer experiences the dramatic irony of seeing Aaron (Franco’s character) forget his knife and not answer his mother’s phone call.  And the money shot of losing the arm—plus the post-op ending—are excruciating.  But it was brilliantly done, it made me feel things that a movie has never made me feel, and I’m glad I saw it. Like doesn’t even enter into it.
• Do I Like Tabasco sauce?  Grilled asparagus?  Like John Zorn’s dissonance? Like William Faulkner’s or Gertrude Stein’s frequent impenetrability?  Like exercise, even though I always feel as though I’d rather be doing anything else?  Like repeating the same riff on the guitar a thousand times until I get it right?  Like writing? Sort of.  I guess.  If that’s my only choice.  But I relish all those experiences.

For that matter, would I click a Like button on Eating or Sleeping, as Facebook has often, to me absurdly, recommended, despite that both have millions of Likes?  As Nietzsche did not write, what lies beyond Good and Evil and Like?  Where is my Ambivalent button, with a thumb simultaneously up and down?  (I would use it on Henry James.)  Is it better to be feared than Liked, or Liked than loved, or Liked than feared? 

I fear that no matter how good it feels to Like, or be Liked, Like as sole criterion makes the world a little smaller and lot safer.   One measure of adulthood, then, is not whether you’re annoyed when kids say “like,” but rather that you can accept, even embrace, those complex, dangerous pleasures outside the very latitude of Like itself. 

P.S. Don’t forget to Like this post.

Time: 60 minutes, not counting the time wasted reading horrible YouTube comments.

And: I lied. I didn’t make the sandwich until after I finished.

And also: My thirteen year-old son Jonah designed the image at the top of this post. I think it took him more than one hour.  Thanks, Jonah.