Baggage, pt. 2

The waitress. John Roberts Dicksee.

Finally, after months of struggle, I managed to overcome my congenital forgetfulness and bring a bag to the grocery store to appease the whims of the Bay Area eco police – only to encounter a new social terror awaiting me.

When it comes to the interpersonal aspect of exchanging goods and services, I’m basically the Matthew Crowley of bumbling, bewildered class confusion. As a child, I was terrified of stores, restaurants, hair salons, and any other place where I was expected to interact in a scripted manner with unfamiliar people whose time or products I was purchasing. I would chalk it up to an upbringing in the former U.S.S.R. and its emphasis on equality and proletarian solidarity and all that…. But unfortunately most of my fellow ex-Soviet countrymen appear to have adopted the opposite strategy: an exaggerated lordly disdain, bordering on naked wrath, for any server-type person. The appropriate and only way to address a waitress in Russian or Ukrainian, for example, appears to be a sneering “girl!”, no matter how pale and puckered your mortified American-raised dining compatriot becomes in the process.

So, with breeding definitively scratched out as an excuse, I can only blame garden-variety, Woody-Allen-style neurosis. But honestly, I don’t know how everyone else just goes about their normal capitalist lives without batting an eyelash, when every moment is filled with so much danger and uncertainty!

Case in point, the bagging of groceries, something I’ve never felt entirely comfortable about. There was always that instant when the canned soups and loose yellow onions and shrink-wrapped soap packs first lurched into motion on the grocery store conveyor belt, and a part of me desperately wanted to intercept them as they went jittering toward the bagger – not because I cared whether my eggs would get smashed by a brick of frozen pork shoulder, but because I sincerely felt weird letting another person do something that I was very clearly capable of doing myself. Instead, as a polite citizen, it was required of me to busy myself with the opening of the wallet, the finding of the right credit card, the holding of the plastic rectangle, poised like a throwing star, ready to strike the card reader as soon as the last item’s bar code was scanned. Then my groceries were remanded back to my custody, and I could hurriedly flee the scene before anyone asked if I needed help out of the store today.

This system was disdainful but ultimately made sense to me. After all,  technically the groceries and the bags belonged to the store until I paid for them. It was only natural for a third party to conduct the very important ceremony of bagging them. Only then, christened by a 17-year-old with acne and bad floppy emo hair, was the ritual of buying complete.

But now, oh now! Now I walk into the store with a bag already in hand. I’m not even sure why I still pick up the plastic basket with the uncomfortable metal handles and go about putting things in it until I’m ready for checkout. Is this wrong? No one explicitly states that it is wrong, but the chubby Teva-wearing mother buying organic eco-friendly muscles is putting her shrimpy bundle directly into her enormous burlap bag, and I have a feeling the baskets will soon be phased out. Also, that everyone is looking at me and tsking.

But the ultimate horror is still to come. Arriving at the checkout line, I am now confronted with a situation of utter absurdity. I must now hand my bag to the grocery bagger, wait for my groceries to fill it, and then take it back from him with profuse benedictions and adulation. It appears that all of this focus on eco-friendly grocery shopping has not yet managed to shake the rigid class pyramid of “customer” and “servers”; no, it has simply muddled the distinction beyond all reason. Waiting for the two old ladies in front of me to pass through this gauntlet, I consider my odds of keeping the bag in my hands and bypassing the bagger altogether, in a desperate stand against the ills of social inequality. But as I watch first Old Lady Number One fumble with the tiny-screened card reader, and next Old Lady Number Two issue icy dictates as to which of her items belongs in which bag (“cold here! warm here!”), I am crushed by the hopeless realization that I will just be causing trouble. Like Matthew Crowley refusing to allow his valet to dress him, with my defiant exhibition of self-reliance, I’ll simply be insulting a grown man’s profession.

Old Lady Number Two is finally finished, and I am next on the chopping block. For an instant I am wavering on the precipice; the grocery scanner has chosen the bottle of wine first and skeptically asks for some ID. The grocery bag still on my shoulder, I rummage through my wallet and pull out a driver’s license, thrusting it at him with a practiced impatience honed by nearly ten years of looking too young to drink. I can feel the bagger’s nervous attention, his body tensing up, his mouth ready to form the shrill request – and before he does, I hand him the bag. It’s all over then. I have surrendered to the ritual, and all is calm and right in the world. I have lived to be socially awkward another day.

Crit lit

“Manifesto” by Critical Mass Roma

Of all the great benefits of living the rich, lengthy lives that we first-world denizens are blessed with, the greatest must surely be having the ability to cycle through multiple iterations of the self. It appears that, collectively, our reptilian brain still hasn’t quite caught up with this concept – research shows that people of all ages systematically underestimate the extent to which their future selves will change, despite ample evidence that their past selves underwent radical evolution throughout their lives. But personally, I’m a big fan of the idea. I take perverse pleasure in knowing how different my current self is from the self of my teens or early 20s, and I gleefully await the strange new person who will be looking back at my life ten years from now and smiling ruefully.

So, it’s no skin off my back to admit that a decade ago, I held a particular opinion about the world, and that opinion was that Cormack McCarthy was an annoying, conceited, terrible no good writer. It was a popular opinion at the time – in some circles, anyway. B.R. Myers had just released an entire manifesto dedicated to taking down a generation of mainstream literary darlings, from Annie Proulx to Don DeLillo, and he reserved special ire for McCarthy’s brand of “muscular,” “edgy” prose. I was in college then, taking an advanced creative writing course with a professor who hated McCarthy and assigned “A Reader’s Manifesto” as a de facto writing bible, and this was the kind of literary criticism I could get behind. In addition to its sneering acid tone, the essay advanced a tidy us-against-The-Literary-Establishment-Man argument  – all the hallmarks of a college student’s view of the universe.

Of course, I had never read anything by McCarthy at the time. But that didn’t stop me from singling him out for special abuse in my assigned response to “A Reader’s Manifesto.” While vigorously applauding Myers for his absolute ideological correctness on the subject of contemporary fiction, I believe I may have compared one of the snippets from All The Pretty Horses that Myers chose to eviscerate (“He said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war… Lastly he said that he had seen the souls of horses and that it was a terrible thing to see.”) to the “horse is like a man” Borat sketch. (Okay, I have to admit that was a pretty good zinger. Nice work, past Maryana.)

As I said, though, I’d never actually read any McCarthy, other than the quotes that Myers had plucked out for ridicule in his essay, nor did I stop to think how my beloved Faulkner would fare if cherry-picked and held under microscopic scrutiny by some priggish grammarian.

A few years later, I finally did pick up a copy of The Road from the desk of a fellow grad student who shared an office with me at Harvard and happened to be T.A.ing for James Wood’s Contemporary American Fiction course. I breezed through it in a few hours to stave off grading midterm exams and found it a moderately better use of grad school procrastination time than my usual forays into the depths of Google Reader. Later still, I saw the movie starring a disheveled Vigo Mortensen (clearly laying the ground work for Andrew Lincoln’s portrayal of Rick Grimes in The Walking Dead), and it’s hard now for me to separate the movie from the novel; both were equally engrossing and forgettable, sort of like Fight Club in the appearance of holding immeasurable weight for a brief glimmering instant, before disappearing into the ether.

However, to say that I was put off by the pompous prose or convoluted syntax would be a lie. It did hold a certain charm, an appropriately scrabbling, relentless cadence for end-of-the-world genre fiction, the kind B.R. Myers was okay with as long as it wasn’t endorsed by the Oprah Book Club.

It’s been a few years since I left the frosty academic bubble of Cambridge behind, but my inner grad student bubbled back up this morning when I followed a link to a blog post titled “Is Cormac McCarthy a Terrible Writer?” I read through the appraisals of McCarthy’s writing by vaunted literary scholars like the aforementioned James Wood, as well as those of ordinary readers, and I cringed – first at the literary scholars and their sad attempt to imitate the prose style of the subjects of their reviews (“When critics laud him for being biblical, they are hearing sounds that are more often than not merely antiquarian, a kind of vatic histrionic groping, in which the prose plumes itself up and flourishes an ostentatiously obsolete lexicon.” Ugh.) But I cringed even more at the ordinary readers’ comments:

Language structure is there to aid communication, it should not be modified willy nilly by some hack author as a literary device in a way to inject what he is unable to convey through language. In this case all you have is a clumsy, choppy, piece of sub-par writing.

McCarthy’s writing is full of incomplete sentences and anastrophe, completely lacks quotation marks, and frequently embeds dialogue in the middle of paragraphs… Each of these conventions is a barrier to straightforward reading…

It’s as if a century of literary innovation – generations of writers deciding to take wild, imaginative departures from established conventions – had simply never existed. I imagined a horrifyingly hilarious scenario: what if James Joyce or Virginia Woolf, or even Ernest Hemingway, had lived in the world of blogs and Amazon book reviews? What kinds of reader criticism would be lobbed at them? Terrible grammar? Archaic lexicon? Run-on sentences?

Sadness and indignation welled up in me reading those comments and feeling like those generations of writers clearly lost the game: all their brilliance and innovation sank like a stone, with barely a ripple across the smooth surface of reader expectation. Or to put it in the terms of one commenter who, like me, must have felt the ripple in various graduate-level courses and seminars, but can now only wail Cassandra-like at the uncaring masses: “Stick to John Grisham. THAT guy knows where to put an apostrophe.”

But the parting words of the post felt like vindication:

This is the reason I think debating “literary merit,” or ranking or rating books, quickly becomes an exercise in either folly, futility, or bullying. If you’re going to ask “but is it any good?” you need to flesh out the question: good at what? for what? for whom? There are myriad ways a novel can be. A much more interesting discussion will come from asking “what does McCarthy’s prose do?” or “what are the connections between McCarthy’s literary strategies and the central ideas of The Road?” then from asking if he is a good or a bad writer. Why would you even ask those questions, though, if you didn’t think the work was worth spending that kind of time and thought on? By assigning The Road to my class, I’ve implicitly endorsed it as good writing, haven’t I? And, to return to where I began, I think it is good writing. Good at what? Good for what? Well, one of the things it is unequivocally good at, or good for, is provoking discussions about good (or bad) writing.

Literary criticism has undoubtedly changed in the decade since “A Reader’s Manifesto.” Even in my brief tenure living among their tribe, I saw fewer academics issuing proscriptions like Harold Bloom or James Wood (or, for that matter, B.R. Myers) and more behaving with self-conscious restraint in their assessment of the literary canon. Instead of spilling ink to pontificate about what is Good and Right, they’d started asking questions like, “Good at what? Good for what?” Given how much people change in the brief course of their lives, it’s amazing how static the world of the arts has remained despite the centuries of shakeups and rebellions. It’s nice to see that even that entity is not immutable, and I suppose it shouldn’t be so surprising that its acolytes, standing on the cusp, are often too myopic to see it.

Baggage

A specter is haunting the Bay Area – it is the specter of the 10 cent grocery bag. All over cloudy NoCal, grocery stores, mini-marts, and corner bodegas are now required by law to make customers pay for their bags instead of giving them out like candy.

The most beautiful thing in the world.

I still haven’t ascertained whether the law also requires the snooty tone of the checkout people at the local hoity-toity foody grocery store when they surmise that you are bagless and ask “would you like to purchase a bag?” in a way that sounds suspiciously like “did you really vote Republican?”

It’s a funny turn of events. When my family moved to the States from then-Soviet Ukraine, my mother went on her first American grocery-buying expedition (Ralphs in Alhambra, stay classy) armed with my father’s briefcase. It had never occurred to her that American grocery stores would be so plentifully stocked with gossamer-thin plastic satchels.

Even years later, when we visited my family in now-independent Ukraine, plastic grocery bags were a hot commodity: people dressed in immaculate business attire walking down the streets of Kiev would be toting a briefcase or purse in one hand and a lumpen piece of polyethylene emblazoned with a Marlboro logo in the other. You had to be prepared in case you needed to pick something up on the way home, I guess, and even though bags were available (for purchase), they cost much more than 10 cents, adjusted for terrible post-Soviet economy.

I’m hoping someone, somewhere has already made the Godwin’s Law type analogy between this and socialism, but in case they haven’t, I’d like to declare my firstness openly and publicly. It’s totally socialism. First!1

There was a sendup of this in a recent episode of Portlandia – the show that I imagine was actually secretly cowritten by a bunch of cultural studies grad students in an effort to legitimize their PhD thesis on post-humor comedy. However, as a former resident of PDX pointed out, Portland has never actually managed to enact such a law. I guess it’s only fitting that the Bay Area would take something that’s in the realm of liberal absurdism and dutifully legislate it.

I do hope this policy will have the intended effect, curbing our over-reliance on wasteful convenience, much like taxing cigarettes has contributed significantly to the decline in smoking. But no small part of me resists this latest incursion of the nanny state in my ability to be unapologetically wasteful. It’s things like this that make me respect (okay, maybe respect is a strong word…) the ranting of the other half of red-blooded Americans, who hate any obviously engineered attempt to make them into better people. Capitalism creates waste, as we all know, but even Marx admitted that this process leads to creative destruction. We run out of wood, so we use coal; we exhaust coal (pun intended), so we turn to gas. Who’s to say that there isn’t some tipping point at which landfills choked with plastic won’t inspire some visionary to finally step up the game and invent that mythical biodegradable packaging material? I would personally like to see Sergei Brin turn his attention away from bionic eyewear and toward some cool ethereal shopping bag matrix – great opportunity for targeted advertising!

If I’m honest with myself, though, I guess what upsets me most about this new law is that I’m still constantly forgetting to bring bags, even when I remind myself to do so five times before leaving home to do the shopping. It’s just not a habit I’ve gotten into, and not one I imagine is going to be easy to instill in my busy, chaotic, unstructured Bay Area life. In the end, my excuse should be a familiar one to all those namby-pamby nanny state liberals: society made me do it!

Women in software

Cover of the American Phrenological Journal, 1848.

Confession: I am a woman. And I work in the San Francisco tech scene.

There have been a flurry of publications on the gender gap in technology, most recently the book Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook. There are equally numerous theories as to why so few women populate the ranks of top Internet enterprises at the engineering, management, or executive levels. Allow me to add to the cacophony by positing my own humble two-pronged theory.

Basically, for me, it breaks down into one of two paths in the gender discrimination choose-your-own-adventure:

Scenario one: The Calvin J. Candie/Larry Summers hypothesis

I am a woman who is interested in working in the hot software scene, or perhaps has just begun an entry-level job at a startup or established web enterprise. I look around and see very few women in the industry. All around me are men – some of whom are jerks, granted, but many of whom are sympathetic, progressive, iconoclastic men who certainly don’t seem like sexist stone-age dinosaurs. I admire these men; they are brilliant and powerful, and they exhibit the kind of pro-active leadership and self-confidence that I lack as a junior person in my organization.

I begin to suspect that women must simply lack those skills; otherwise, why aren’t there more of them in those positions to guide and inspire me? I know there is a severe shortage of talent in Silicon Valley, so much so that kids barely out of school are being snapped up by the Fortune 500 tech giants, so it’s hard to imagine that there are no female applicants.

I also know that in all other respects I am no different from my male colleagues: we share the same geeky cultural background, have the same humor and hobbies, believe in the same causes, and I know dozens of women like me out there in the world. The only logical conclusion is, of course, inherent differences in intelligence and talent in the sexes.

In the 1800s, it would have been phrenological literature that reassured me of my inability to be the next Thomas Edison. Today, there are various and sundry theories of inherent difference, from evolutionary biology to pop psychology. All of them tell me two things: I am fighting an uphill battle, and my gender is not predisposed to fighting or battles. And as crazy at it sounds, as mad and sad as it makes me, I kind of want to believe it. Because at least it’s not the alternative…

Scenario two: The status quo bias hypothesis

Same scenario. I am a woman who is interested in working in the hot software scene, or perhaps has just begun an entry-level job at a startup or established web enterprise. I look around and see very few women in the industry.

It stands to reason, then, that if women’s skills and talents are equal to men’s, the only thing explaining women’s absence in the industry is underlying systemic bias. It may not be the kind of overt sexism we all gasp at in Mad Men, now equally un-P.C. and verboten in law alike, but a more prosaic status quo bias upheld by both parties: women decide not to apply for jobs in technology because they don’t feel like they’re supposed to, and men don’t have to feel so bad about not hiring them if they’re not out there.

By bucking this trend, I am disrupting the status quo, whether I want to or not. If I want to be a part of that illustrious status quo, I’ll just have to pretend my difference doesn’t exist, while constantly being worried about making men uncomfortable.

(And, of course, Scenario one tells me that my gender hates making people uncomfortable.)

I can’t speak to the experience of every woman who has ever worked in technology, but I can say that I’ve oscillated between these two positions over the years I’ve worked in San Francisco. My organization happens to be a stand-out in the field – our executive director is a woman! we have, gasp, three women engineers out of fifty, a whopping 6%! But it’s hard not to suffer a certain amount of anxiety when you are an obvious minority, despite comprising 50% of the world’s population, no matter what your HR hiring practices statement says.

I don’t have horror stories of being openly harassed or insulted like some in the biz, but I can attest to a nagging feeling of inequality that’s made worse by internalized and difficult-to-eradicate paranoia. Is analyzing this data inherently difficult, or am I failing because I’m just not as good at writing code as my male colleagues? Does everybody secretly hate it when I mention gender issues? Is it better for my career to dress like a 12-year-old boy or a Sex and the City character?

No matter the situation, in my reptilian brain, it usually boils down to incompetence on my end or bad faith on someone else’s. It’s a terribly unproductive and demoralizing way to feel at the end of the workday, made more so by the fact that I know that the overwhelming majority of my colleagues don’t have this additional burden cluttering their psyche.

But the worst – the absolute worst – part of this is feeling like I’m not supposed to be admitting it; not to myself, and certainly not to other people. It feels patently absurd to indulge such paranoiac fantasies, even if they contain kernels of truth. The solution to self-doubt is self-confidence, the solution to being held back is fighting harder, fear is the mind-killer… end of story.

These, at least, appear to be the recommendations of Sheryl Sandberg. Lean in, sister! Forget about those nagging whispers of self-doubt and just work harder! I can’t blame her for this very practical, no-nonsense bit of advice; I also can’t stop blaming myself for not being able to live up to it.

Of course, it’s probably my fault that my mind is so heavy with all this negativity. If I just lighten up, I’m sure I’ll be much more likely to get that hot executive-level position one day.

Moral exhibitionism versus political action

Václav Havel by Zbigniew Kresowaty.

Of all the novels I read in college and grad school as a precocious bibliophile, The Unbearable Lightness of Being was the one that probably stuck the hardest to my ribs. It wasn’t my favorite novel or even one I necessarily think of when I’m rattling off a list of Great Works That Have Moved Me ™ when I want to sound smart and interesting to a stranger at a party. I think it’s because Kundera’s voice seems to have wormed its way into my ear, assimilating his ideas so seamlessly with my brain that I don’t even realize they’re his until moments like today, when I stop to think about why I am not a moral exhibitionist.

Unbearable Lightness is a War and Peace style blend of politics (it’s set around the time of the Prague Spring), love (but the tanks play second fiddle to Czech girls’ mini skirts), and philosophical rumination (Nietzsche’s theory of eternal return features prominently). There is a moment where Tomas is asked by a dissident to sign a petition to free some political prisoners – an act he rejects on a variety of grounds, primary among them the fact that dissidents seem to care more about being viewed as heroes by history than performing any pragmatic, altruistic action. 

The roots of this view, that protest and dissidence is primarily a self-aggrandizing, egotistical endeavor, trace back to an essayistic argument between Kundera and Vaclav Havel, basically the chief dissident of Czechoslovakia in the 1960s (and, later, friend of Frank Zappa and president of democratic Czechoslovakia). Havel insisted that after the Soviet takeover, political action on the part of those opposed to the Soviet regime was necessary, despite the seemingly hopeless situation the Czechs found themselves in. Kundera fired back that the political action Havel referred to had two aims: (1) to unmask the world in all its irreparable amorality, and (2) to display its author in all his pure morality. 

I have thought a lot about this debate over the years. Even before reading Kundera, I sympathized with his position; student protest, particularly around the start of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan during my first year of college, struck me as paltry and vain, in both senses. I couldn’t stomach the idea of one man or woman standing up in a crowd and declaring him or herself the arbiter of truth in a world of lies, not to mention myself in that role. Those who truly wanted the world to change, I reasoned, would do it within the system – cynically, deviously, hiding their true intentions and secretly chipping away at the foundations until one day the great granite face of the world suddenly resembled their personal vision of it. Expecting that great granite face to turn on its pedestal, stare at one lonely individual standing up with a placard in the middle of the freshman quad, and tremble and shatter from the power of the almighty truth seemed… well, downright silly.

At that age, like many of my peers, I had a blog (ages 16-21, Livejournal, no judgment), in which I recorded daily ruminations and impressionistic accounts culled from my rather conventionally lonely and troubled adolescence. My greatest enemies were the truism on one side and pretentiousness on the other, and stalwart effort went into maintaining a persona of ironic, aesthetic detachment. I was certainly no Kundera, but the gist was the same – I was Tomas, fallible and quixotic creature, and I wanted no part in putting my name on something permanent and declamatory.

Like all maxims, though, moral exhibitionism is easy to turn on its head. It’s hard to read Kundera’s essay on moral exhibitionism now without smiling sardonically at his own obsession not to sully his hands in the mundane dealings of politics and remain ideologically pure. After all, there is no better author on the subject of unmasking the immorality of the world than Kundera himself, who ruthlessly deconstructs the petty delusions of his characters with scene after scene of humiliation and hamartia. And few authors are better at maintaining their ironic distance from their subject matter, always twelve steps ahead of worldly ambition in a realm of pure aestheticism. It’s trite, but Kundera’s inaction was always just another kind of action, more rarefied and gnomic, but still speaking against some great granite monolith, still gleefully intended to cause certain fault-lines to tremble in the world.

These days, the pressure to maintain some kind of distinction between the one kind of moral speech and the other seems less important to me. Exhibitionism is only a matter of degree, and to aim for the opposite extremely, terrified secrecy, feels equally selfish and vain. I’d like to navigate the distinction in this blog, with full awareness that I may at times slip into embarrassing hubris. The risk seems worth it, both to flex the authority I often feel I lack, and to avoid the much greater peril than, as Tomas feared, being immortalized, misquoted, and hopelessly misunderstood in history books – to say nothing at all.