Hugging the wall

Do you know what the antonym of the word 'megalomania' is? This source http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/megalomania, suggests it is 'altruism' or 'selflessness'. Are those really antonyms? (The antonym of of the word 'antonym' is 'synonym', by the way.) The same source says 'antonym' is a 'negation', 'contradiction' or 'opposite'.

Well, the opposite of the prefix 'mega', is 'mini', and author Tom Wolfe, in his essay titled "Afterward: High in the Saddle", which describes the aftermath of the literary scandal caused by his articles in the New York Herald Tribune in 1965, titled "Tiny Mummies" and "Lost in the Whichy Thicket" about The New Yorker magazine and its editor William Shawn, contains the following paragraph on pages 262-3 of the book Hooking Up, which collects these and other Wolfe articles.

By now The New Yorker had decided to take a page from a master, namely, Aristotle, who had advised that if the argument was giving you problems, -- in this case, the argument that the New Yorker was a dull magazine edited by a minimomaniac (emphasis mine - A.) -- then go after the facts and try to invalidate the argument that way

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Earlier in the same book, in a Foreword to this entire story (page 252), Wolfe cites his source:

Malcolm Muggeridge once wrote that the world was full of megalomaniacs but that William Shawn was the only minimomaniac he had ever met

And so, it is 'minomomania', and 'minomomaniac', two words not found in my dictionaries and found only in one place on the World Wide Web by Google (at least until this is published and indexed.)Tom Wolfe describes William Shawn as follows:

Shawn is a very quiet man. He has a soft, somewhat high voice.He seems to whisper all the time. [...] The Shawn whisper, the whisper zone radiates our from Shawn himself. Shawn in the hallways slips along as soundlessly as humanly possible and--chooooo--he meets somebody right there in the hall. The nodding! The whispering. Shawn is fifty seven years old but still has a boyish face. He is a small plump man, round in the cheeks.

[...] He is self-effacing, kind, quiet, dilligent, an efficient man, courtly, refined, considerate, humble, and -- Shawn uses this quiet business like a maestro. He has the quiet moxie to walk through the snow at 3 a.m. to the apartment of somebody who owes him a story--the magazine is at absolute deadline, and this writer is revising and revising and won't turn loose of the story...

(To read the rest of the story, get the book.)

I've known some minomomaniacs, and I can tell you that the affliction buys one much less friendship and affection than being an antonymic opposite of that. A co-worker of mine some years ago was probably a minimomaniac. His physique and manners were similar to those of William Shawn, except that he wasn't as accomplished or well positioned as Shawn, and he wasn't married. In fact, he didn't have much luck with women at all.

I remember in the place where we worked, he walked the long hallways of the building so close to the wall he rubbed it with his shoulder, as if he wanted to merge into it, hug it, become invisible. Shy, self-effacing, a conscientious worker, and a terrific friend to those (men) who knew him, he was lonely and depressed, though he never showed it.

What's most interesting however, is that when he tried to come out, so to speak, and assert himself just a little, whether in a mixed group or with individual females, he was always being pushed back, put down and stomped upon, for being too aggressive, impertinent and rude. And he wasn't by any measure. The man was simply expected to forever remain a wallflower, as the saying goes, to be invisible, to remain that minimomaniac. He wouldn't be accepted as anything else but that. Who knows what happened to him after I moved away.

13 women (and only one man in town)

Last night I was dreamin'
Dreamed about the H-Bomb
Well the bomb-a went off and I was caught
I was the only man on the ground

There was-a 13 women and only one man in town
Thirteen women and only one man in town
And as funny as it may be
The one and only man in town was me
With 13 women and me the only man around


This is the thirteenth post on this blog. Above excerpt is from a song by Dickie Thompson, recorded in 1954 by Bill Haley and His Comets. You'll find more information about it here.

Tonight: The Fabulous Intruders!

When I was younger, much younger, I had the idea of naming the white boy rhythm and blues band I was starting The Intruders. The name was perfect for the type of band we were to be: dangerous, rude, aggressive, impertinent. Alas, I discovered that there was already a sweet soul vocal group of this name, and I had to give up the whole idea of competing with the Rolling Stones and the Stranglers, and the...

You can believe this story or not, (the alternate name considered was The Tormentors), but believe me when I say that the idea of the intruder has haunted me for a long while. It is a common theme of course. What would the Western literature be without the Intruder? Odysseus was an intruder, as were Don Quixote, and Count of Monte Cristo.

Closer to our modern, visual imaginations, John Wayne was an intruder into those corrupt towns of his early Western films, the towns he would save from themselves. Gary Cooper, playing the luckless, if brave, sheriff Will Kane in High Noon, turned out to be an intruder in his own town. (John Wayne, by the way, was said to have hated High Noon, and the happy John Ford Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was supposed to be his answer to the bleakness of High Noon.) So was J.J.Gittes, played by Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, who ended up contributing to the drama's tragedy, as he had done sometime in the past, we learned. Intruder John Wayne might have won in all those fairy tales, but Will Kane and J.J.Gittes clearly lost in their own dark, arguably, more realistic, dramas. One of the most interesting and disturbing films about an intruder was Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema with Terrence Stamp playing a mysterious stranger who intrudes on the lives of a wealthy Milanese family. Here's a link to a 1969 interview with the director.

The thought of the intruder came back to me recently, as I reviewed some past intrusions, as it were, into my life, and my own intrusions into others' lives. There were times when I was, was seen, or was treated as a nuisance, a disruptor, an intruder. Just in case you were wondering, by some miracle, everyone survived all those intrusions.

I spoke about it to a friend one recent evening after six, and this is what he said: "The problem is that the people we meet at our age, that is people no longer in their teens or twenties, the people that we find interesting, worth knowing, all have complicated present lives and life histories, and however delicately, carefully we approach them, get involved with them, we cannot help but become intruders into those lives, if we ever hope to establish deeper relationships with them, whether friends or lovers. However complicated or simple their lives are, we are intruding into them."

"Intrusion is the word to remember", he added, emphatically, "This is especially true of women. You and I, men in general, can wipe our slates clean and start all over again, the past being little more than a prologue. For one reason or another, women can't do that."

"In kindergarten", I said, "everyone is your friend. Every kid, there or out on the street or playground, is your friend. Once out of the kindergarten, or perhaps grade school, things become complicated. Once you've reached the middle age, it's no easier to make friends out here than it is in prison. People start making rules for themselves: can't (or can) make friends at work, can (or can't) make friends in neighbourhood, at a cafe, and so on."

"Exactly," he agreed, "and then, anyone who's overly friendly outside of those arbitrary rules you've established for yourself, becomes an unwelcome intruder. It takes an extraordinary skill to steer those waters, and I am unable to advise you. The baggage, the obligations, the habits, the past experiences, the delusions that people carry, all make you want to go back to the kindergarten and start all over again. I know you haven't given up, but your heartbreaks and disappointments only help to prove my words."

"I hope you won't give up, but you'd better hope you'll catch that young Monica Vitti on the train home again", he added, finishing his strong drink.

"Increasingly disturbed writing"

Ready? Set? Go! ... Analyze, Report!

In the wake of the tragedy at Virginia Tech, let's all start looking for "early warning signs" of a "tortured soul", in these and all writings. YIKES! He's got a gun in one of his 'drawers'! (You should see my other blog; no there are no guns in it, but existential despair, yes, overflowing with blood and guts. But then, you shouldn't see my other blog. No one should, except the persons who won't ever report me, or my insane Mr Hyde double, or will they?)

It's no joking matter, and no one will need encouragement. We will now be looking at each other with suspicion, reading each other's writings with suspicion, distrusting each other even more than before, in the happy paradise of only the lonely. My writings, here or there, may turn out to be disturbing, or "increasingly disturbing" to someone somewhere.

We received a year or so ago mandatory sexual harassment training at the corporate headquarters. It wasn't a yawner, as expected. It left me increasingly disturbed, so to speak. Say "You look nice today", to a female co-worker (and it's always a female, even as the official masquerade requires the policy to state that the rules apply to both genders; but let's not kid ourselves), she complains of sexual harassment, you're out of a job, pal! It's that crazy. It has happened, and veiled or unveiled threats happen daily. You can't touch, and you can't look, buster! It's called "an unwanted advance", or something of the sort. Enough to make you grab your guns! Oh wait, can I take back what I just said?! Too late? I need to start packing for a trip to a re-education camp, comrade?

Well, I understand, we're at war in America, extraordinary measures must be taken. The latest reports from the front say that the Female side is still winning, though the long winning streak doesn't seem to make it too happy.

Universal deafness

"When the going gets tough, the tough get blogging"
-- Christopher Buckley

I was talking to a friend about graphomania. He had never heard the word, and in the din of the fine restaurant where we were dining, he strained his ears, already damaged by years of rocking and rolling, to understand its components. I had to spell it out for him. G-R-A-P-H-O-M-A-N-I-A. (Графомания in Russian.) The Online Medical Dictionary defines the affliction thus:

Morbid and excessive impulse to write.

(In the age of universal blogging, the Big Pharma could cash in on this mania by developing Prozac-like drugs to cure it. There are 100 million bloggers/potential patients out there to be overmedicated. Again.)

In any event, I wasn't surprised by my esteemed friend's ignorance of the concept, as obsession with graphomania is a European thing. Call it graphomania mania. It is a concern of the literati there, the writers, the critics, the elites of the written word. My friend and I agreed that the concept originates from centuries old traditions in Europe of limiting access to professions and crafts to pre-screened, experienced and worthy individuals. One has to apprentice for years and years before becoming a craftsman himself. Writers, poets, composers, artists, are born, not made, and they are inspired by the gods on Mount Olympus, or the Muses, is an all too common belief across the Big Pond.

This is of course good and bad, as it serves to produce high quality art, but on the other hand it arbitrarily limits access to the tools of the trades and the audiences. In a democratic, egalitarian America, anyone can call himself a writer, artist or composer, and let the market decide, we say, as everything here is treated as a marketable product, including your own pitiful self. The barriers to entry exist here as well, let's not kid ourselves, but they don't usually involve years of apprenticeship.

A security guard where I hang my hat has just published a novel with a publishing house that is regarded in the publishing industry as a 'vanity press' (though they didn't charge him for it as is customary, except for the copies he ordered himself. It is a new kind of vanity press called POD, or Print On Demand publisher.) The father of my dinner companion had published his memoirs as a vanity press project, distributed them to his family members, and provoked a mini storm with his self-serving distortions. Outside the restaurant where we were dining that evening, on power utility poles hung advertising flyers from writing coaches, teachers, and editors. American psychoanalysts recommend writing as therapy.

The question of blogging as graphomania has been raised by others, and you can find discussions of it elsewhere. Before I sign off to work on the next posts for my two blogs, and then the next ones after those, I will only cite a quote on graphomania by the Czech writer Milan Kundera from his 1978 book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

Graphomania is not a mania to write letters, personal diaries, or family chronicles (to write for oneself or one’s close relations) but a mania to write books (to have a public of unknown readers). … Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society devlops to the point of creating three basic conditions:

1. an elevated level of general well-being, which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities;
2. a high degree of social atomization and, as a consequence, a general isoalation of individuals;
3. the absense of dramatic social changes in the nation’s internal life. (From this point of view, it seems to me symptomatic that in France, where practically nothing happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel.

.. The mainspring that drives her to write is just that absence of vital content, that void. But by a backlash, the effort affects the cause. General isolation breeds graphomania, and generalized graphomania in turn intensifies and worsens isolation. The invention of printing formerly enabled people to understand one another. In the era of universal graphomania, the writing of books has an opposite meaning: everyone surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to filter through from outside. … One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.

I ain't superstitious

Don't want a four leaf clover
Don't want an old horse shoe
Want your kiss 'cause I just can't miss
With a good luck charm like you

(Elvis Presley - Good Luck Charm)

We've waited so long for this unlucky day, Friday the 13th, to record for posterity, as they say, some of our private superstitions.

I have heard that some skyscrapers and hotels in this country don't include a 13th floor. I've never been inside one, but I have often wondered what is between the 12th and 14th floors of such buildings. As for an old horse shoe, you can buy one at your local flea market. Luck for sale.

I live in a house located on the 13th hundred block of the street, and I can't complain of long strings of bad luck. But then I can't brag of good luck either.

I won't walk under ladders. I am careful about not breaking mirrors. I do step on the cracks in the sidewalk. I knock on unpainted wood (which is harder and harder to come by these days.) I won't open an umbrella in the house. Clover has been invading my once beautiful lawn for years, but I have yet to find a four leaf clover. I have experienced beginner's luck when playing games. I don't wash my car, as doing so will surely bring rain. I do not think that a bird pooping on my car will bring me good luck, but I do believe that stepping into dog poop will.

I beware of black cats crossing the road, and when walking I will occasionally wait for someone else (a sucker!) to pass me when faced with being the first person whose path the cat crossed. (You ought to try doing this in America, when often enough you are the only man on foot for miles around, arousing suspicions of normal citizens inside their moving vehicles, and inviting friendly chats from police cruisers stopping by just for you.) When driving, I try to run over the damn black pest. About the time my current string of bad luck started, a black cat crossed the road in front of my car, I wasn't close enough to run it over, and the only bright spot I saw at the time was that the cat's feet were white. The paws gave me a pause. Alas, the legs didn't lift my luck a lick!

The black cat with white feet happened on a Saturday morning when I do my shopping errands with eight or nine stops to complete. Eight in China signifies prosperity, and nine long life, so at least on Saturdays things ought to look copacetic. During the same recent time period, I was finding what are called lucky pennies -- I found three, giving two of them to the woman I was thinking of while spotting them, and I still have the third one, right here in the breast pocket of my shirt. You are supposed to blow on coins found on the street for good luck. I do. The three lucky pennies have brought no kind of luck.

If I found a lucky penny
I'd toss it across the bay
Your love is worth all the gold on earth
No wonder that I say

Come on and be my little good luck charm
Uh-huh huh, you sweet delight
I want a good luck charm
a-hanging on my arm
Uh to have, (to have), uh to hold, (to hold), uh tonight

The late great Willie Dixon wrote I Ain't Superstitious

Well I ain't superstitious, but a black cat crossed my trail
Ain't superstitious, but a black cat crossed my trail
Don't dust me with no broom babe, just might land in jail

Well the dogs be howling all round my neighbourhood
Dogs be howling all round my the neighbourhood
Sure is a bad sign babe, don't mean no earthly good

When my right hand itches, I gets money for sure
When my right hand itches, I gets money for sure
But when my left eye jumps babe, somebody got to go

Telephone Plans for the Family

"Like you", he said, "I don't own a mobile phone". He insists on using his foreign name for what we call 'cellphone' here.

"I know. But you own an iPod, and I don't", I answered.
"Well, you have a flat screen TV, and I don't", he came back.
"True, but I don't subscribe to cable, like you!", I hit him with my best shot.

Two grown men playing children's games. In reverse.

"Now, if you allow me to finish", he said with a hint of resignation.

My head nodded.

"She wants me to get a mobile phone, to help us communicate, she says", he told me.

"Who, Mona?" , Mona is the name of his latest flame.

"Who else!", he said, "And why do their names all have to start with an 'M' ?"

"Don't complain, we're in the middle of the alphabet now, just right for our ages. We have a long way to go before we reach the 'Z's. Zelda, Zora, Zena, await us in the distant future!", I told him, adding, "So what's the problem, get a damn cellphone, they're as cheap as dirt."

"Not really", he answered, "you have to sign a two year contract."

"Ah, I see", I said, "And you don't think Mona will last that long. Do you want her to last that long? Longer?"

"Mona's wonderful. I'd keep her for the rest of my life in a New York minute. But you know women these days."

At least, he's picked up some of our clichés, like the "New York minute", even if he hasn't learned to use them properly.

"Well, can you tell her about the two year contract?", I was giving impractical advice, as usual, "ask her what she thinks about it vis a vis her commitment? Delicately? Grinning? While she's chewing on a madeleine?"

He gave me That Look, his eyes above the eyeglasses on his nose.

"Commitment, huh?! Shall I remind you of your 'friend for life' ?", he hit back with his best shot this time, inflicting a life threatening wound.

"Well, you did, didn't you!", bleeding now and dying, I attempted one last desperate volley, "Ask her to marry you, and you'll both get a family plan on your cellphones. Problem solved!"

"I ought to..."



In the end, we agreed there are no plans for life, and no friends for life, in this land rich in material goods and poor in human values like genuine affection, friendship and love. We finished our drinks, said 'goodbye' , didn't hug each other like Hollywood celebrities and encounter group participants do, and we returned to our respective homes as friends. For at least a fortnight. For now.