Ron writes:

I enjoy your blog, but I’m a bit surprised that comments are disabled. This surprise is multiplied when the post consists of a series of questions, whether rhetorical or not (as does your most recent post concerning gamers). Have you been getting spammed? Any other reason why comments are closed?

Laura writes:

  B. is a boy I know who is approaching adulthood. He has spent most of his free time for the past eight years playing electronic games. He is a good person, well-behaved, decent and intelligent. But, he is easily bored. He does not engage in lengthy conversation and seems impatient with the inefficiency of social interaction. He does not like gray areas. Reading bores him and it even makes him angry. He is an addict and wants to get back to his games. Here is my question: How will he ever find a wife? And, even if he finds a wife, how will he sustain her interest in him? Few girls share his addiction. Electronic games generally bore them to death. Most women like conversation and they like to discuss gray areas. Can the outward passivity that is so characteristic of the addicted gamer ever fulfill female romantic longings? Can the addicted gamer acquire the patience and temperament required by marriage and family without a painful and permanent rejection of his habit?

In a follow-up to my post The Parental Serf, I wrote:

“The enormous sums spent on higher education don’t represent adoration of youth so much as adoration of institutions and a superstitious belief in their magical properties. I don’t mind selling out to the future. I do mind selling out to colleges which offer little of value that cannot be obtained for much less.

James M. writes:

Surely, the “magic spell” can only be sustained within a healthy job market? Recent college graduates know or will come to know what little they received for their parents money, and many are having trouble finding employment. Tens of thousands of dollars were spent on each so that they could be taught by unintelligible immigrant TAs while playing in a richly populated hook-up hunting ground. If the economy continues its downward slide, how will a matured reflection upon these memories affect decisions made regarding the schooling of these graduates’ own children?

As a supplement to this issue, we have the mass-dismantling of vocational technology programs in high schools across America. Tradesmen are retiring much faster than they are being replaced. Everyone is getting funneled into college, and the attitude is that kids who don’t go to college are failures; they got “left behind”. Working with your hands is for lower class people who “weren’t suited” for higher education. There are hordes of College Engineering students who can’t actually make anything. White-collar husbands can’t fix a leaky faucet, change their wife’s brake pads, or make a birdhouse.

So, if there is a depression in our future, I hope that positive side-effect will be a disenchantment with unnecessary higher education and a re-invigoration of the trades.

Laura writes:

I also hope for a re-invigoration of genuine learning. I did fairly well in college but I barely learned a thing. Virtually every scrap of higher learning I possess was obtained on my own.

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  Is the atmosphere of fear and anxiety that pervades high schools throughout America, fear that without admission to the right college an individual's life is doomed, one of the most effective crowd control devices ever invented? Such is the claim of John Taylor Gatto in his new book Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling. I entirely agree with him on this point. The belief that learning depends on a college education, and that worldly success depends on it is, a myth. Many jobs today depend on the credentials acquired at colleges and universities, but the learning, especially in an age of advanced commuications, can be acquired for less. Less money, less time, less hassle and less damage to the ability to think. Gatto was once an award-winning teacher in Manhattan. He now believes schools deliberately inculcate stupidity and passivity. They do bring one good to society: they are a successful jobs program.  He tried to discover the reasons for our profound over-schooling and concluded, "Only a darkness at work, reachable not by common experience but through historical, sociological, psychological, theological, political and philosophical research, could reveal the causes, it seemed to me."

  Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, was the favorite beach town of America's intellectuals in the 50s ad 60s. Writers, artists, scientists, law professors, historians, psychoanalysts - many of the most prominent names took up residence in summer cottages on the dunes and held their evening cocktail parties overlooking the magnificent Atlantic. Devastating wit and incomparable learning were concentrated in one of the coast's most pristine settings. But, the ship of American culture was showing serious cracks. If you looked closely, it was already listing to one side. Alfred Kazin, the New York literary critic, spent his summers in Wellfleet. He wrote a moving essay about both the beauty and decadence of the place. He said of his wife of the time, who was consumed with her work as a novelist and with her love of highbrow parties, "I came to think of R. not as a wife but as a brilliant, wayward daughter, so dogged that I would never be able to help." Kazin's essay "Wellfleet and the Beach of the Intellectuals" is not available online, but here is its melancholy closing: End of summer. End of a marriage. How strange it was at the "violet" hour of the day, when the light was fading and the couples in odd corners were getting cozier by the minute - how strange it was to look out on the outermost Cape with nothing else in sight but a last fishing vessel. Somewere in that thrilling, frightening emptiness was Portugal, even Galicia in northwest Spain. How strange…

In a previous entry, Jeffrey W. laments the end of courtship and describes romance today as a form of “egalitarian play.” In response, I said:

The Victorians created what Linda Lichter called a “religion of love,” with its own sacred practices and totems, down to the ribbon-wrapped bundles of letters from a suitor that a young woman would keep in her drawer. This is not to say they worshipped love, but they knew that it was largely built from human artifice and that without this it was unsatisfying. With all our sexual libertinism, we are far more prudish than the Victorians. They truly knew how to be in love and to woo each other. Their famous “cult of domesticity” was not a cult, it was civilization in its highest form.

Ellie Hunter writes:

I tried to teach my children about this, and my daughter decided she did not want to date. One day a young man came to see my husband about some business and my husband literally snatched him. “You would be a good man for my daughter,” he told him.  The young man thought it was unusual but he was enchanted. He had been in the dating scene and could never figure out what the next step was. Here, in a family courtship, he would be guided to the final results and get where he was going.  We played parlour games, went on outings, trips, and all sorts of activities as we shared the courtship. Mostly, my husband and I did the work and set things up so that they could enjoy time together.
 
Ten years later, our younger son had a bad experience with a girl who acted like she liked him. She was plastered all over him at a Christmas party we had, and needless to say he was happy about it. But, when he proposed, she said she just wanted to be friends.  Later, he went to see her and she gave him the cold shoulder. If  she had known about courtship, and if her parents had been involved, perhaps she would not have played this game.  When people did that, they were “marked” and they learned a lesson.  Today we allow it to go on.  When someone saw my son with this girl they warned me that she was that “type” and that there was no way she was serious about marriage.  At least there are a few people who speak out and who have some sense of propriety in the matter.
 
This is an example of two ways of doing things. One is through the parents, which is mocked and ridiculed today, but it is lasting and happy. You know, the moderns spread the lie that parents and family were oppressive and that girls needed their freedom to choose. But in a courtship, a parent is more likely to get an end result. In dating, the choices are just so confusing and it rarely ends in marriage.

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  Jeffrey W. writes: I couldn’t help but react with some bemusement (and perplexity) to the response from the single-man in his mid-twenties you received to your letter. I am the same age as your correspondent and my experience searching for a spouse has been made difficult by the fact that very few of my peers seem to be interested in seriously pairing off at all and my efforts to get to know women with the sought after purpose of marriage is frequently met with derision (I am frequently told not to desire a wife so much). From my perspective courtship and flirtation are not so much hurried as non-existent. Egalitarian play is the essence that composes most social interactions among young adults with the result of there being a marked lack of wooing and encouragement to seek out marriage. Those among my peerage who are married usually describe themselves as having stumbled into it by accident or were overtaken by it like an impersonal force of nature. Laura writes: The amount of group activity that takes place among single people in their twenties amazes me. "Egalitarian play" is a great term for it. Conversation is the greatest of aphrodisiacs. It seems hard to engage in this art at its highest when one is always traveling in a herd. This is the ultimate triumph of the Marxist project: the destruction of the foundations of love.  When people feel awkward and constantly uncertain in the civilized…

Alexander writes:

This week, you’ve featured a letter from a women in her mid-twenties struggling to find a husband. It is also interesting to read from the perspective of a single man in his mid-twenties. I find it’s very difficult to know what a girl is really interested in, and whether she is interesting to me. I fear that given the standards of the society we’re in, those of us who are interested in more than the normal contemporary relationship come off to most people as not interested in a relationship at all.

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  When summer's heat reaches its climax, there is a renewed awareness of the benevolence of shade. The outstretched limbs tower above, waving their green fans with indolence and occasional vigor. The motion of a million scraps of parchment creates white noise. A 120-foot oak can send several tons of moisture into the atmosphere in a single year and produce 100,000 leaves. It may lower the temperature in its vicinity by as much as 20 degrees. The sheer busyness that lies behind this diminution of light is remarkable. We find more than physical relief in these recesses. The moist leaf, the wizened bark, and the statuary of limb contribute to a sense of longevity and inspiring paralysis, as if life were halted and summarized in these enclaves of composure and meditation. It is no surprise Buddha found his path in the shade of a large tree: "Therefore, with resolution as his only support and companion, he set his mind on Enlightenment and proceeded to the root of a Pipal Tree, where the ground was carpeted with green grass."  Cemeteries seem incomplete without living monuments that provide at least a modicum of the "thousand years of gloom" of the yew in Tennyson's In Memoriam, "who changes not in any gale,/Nor branding summer suns avail."  Shade shelters the dead and fosters memory. Trees possess personality and their beckoning shade draws us closer to their idiosyncrasies. The Japanese maple is feminine, almost erotic in a restrained way while an aged oak is paternal, commanding, and indifferent. Lying under shallow-rooted maples, you feel uneasy, as if someone is about to pull the carpet up from under you. No one would even think of…

Katy writes:

Thanks for your site — I read it daily through my Google RSS feed with much enjoyment. Like you, I think the correlation between the decline of domesticity and the decline of thought is no coincidence. Both children and ideas need time and nurture to grow to maturity. One of the side-effects of modernity seems to be that we push both out the door and into the world a bit too fast, or perhaps just in the wrong ways, before they are ready.

To get to our topic, though — without having read Bellatin, I must point out that there is a long and fine tradition of “literature of the wound,” better known as the grotesque, in the West. One of its exemplars would of course be Flannery O’Connor, in stories such as “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” and “Good Country People.” The fault in contemporary authors in general seems to be not that they fixate on the deformed, disfigured, or diseased. All reflection on human nature must, to be complete, explore our inescapable flaws, either directly or through some metaphor. Rather, the fault is that contemporary writers of woundedness increasingly seem to indulge a tendency to exploit the macabre and prurient for its own sake — seeing it as attractive in itself rather than in what it can reveal about us. They show increasingly less of the gentleness and good humor O’Connor showed even as she left Hulga abandoned in the hayloft, and their characters show increasingly less of the peaceful yet profoundly disturbing self-acceptance of the sideshow hermaphrodite in “Temple” as it lifted its dress and said: “God made me this away, I don’t dispute hit.”

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