The fields and gardens, the empty lots and woods, even the highway median strips – all  resound with insect music here at this time of year, as if thousands of soloists, chamber groups, quartets and jazz ensembles were hidden in the bush.  Whatever evolutionary purposes it serves, there is nothing utilitarian about our pleasure in this music. Even you, dear reader, are mortal and this sweet evanescent sound is for you.

The crickets and katydids produce their songs by rubbing their wings together, a method known as “stridulation.” A file on the bottom of one wing is rubbed against a scraper on top of the other wing. Thin membranes on the wings vibrate rapidly to produce the noise we hear. If not for the wings, the sounds would not resonate anymore than the sound of a finger scraped against a comb.

The cicadas have a pair of special sound-producing organs called “tymbals,” located at the base of the abdomen. Here is a wonderful website,  Songs of Insects, that describes the process. “Inside each tymbal are stiff but flexible ribs supporting a stout membrane. Muscles attached to the ribs pull the tymbal inward, causing it to pop. The tymbal pops again when the tension is released. Rapid contractions and relaxations of the tymbal muscles create the loud, buzzing songs of the cicadas, which are amplified further by a hollow area in the abdomen.”

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The institution of marriage is undergoing it’s most profound crisis today. But, it has been subjected to lesser controversies throughout history.

Robert Dale Owen issued the following statement on the occasion of his 1832 wedding to Mary Jane Robinson, to protest the state of law by which women lost property and other legal rights upon marriage.

Of the unjust rights which in virtue of this ceremony an iniquitous law gives me over the person and property of another, I cannot legally, but I can morally, divest myself. And I hereby distinctly and emphatically declare that I consider myself, and earnestly desire to be considered by others, as utterly divested, now and during the rest of my life, of any such rights, the barbarous relics of a feudal, despotic system.

 

 

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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American journalism moved further along on its own exciting trajectory toward truth and the all-encompassing love of reality today. Oprah, the Queen of Vanity and Fantastic Female Illusions, aired a show on How Other People Live. That’s no big deal. As our Maternal Monarch puts it, we need “to see how we’re all interconnected. ” But, this was no ordinary look into an American home. This time the lead guest was an “independent contractor.”

You know, an independent contractor, just like the guy who fixes your leaky pipes or replaces your roof or does your taxes. Brooke Taylor’s professional base of operations is the Moonlite Bunny Ranch in Carson City, Nevada. Brooke, wearing underwear and smiling affably, gave us an extensive tour of the facility on the show. “We’ve all been told that prostitution is wrong,” she said, but that’s because we all have “a lot of misconceptions.” Even her Dad had misconceptions and refused to speak to her for three weeks when he found out she was a working girl.  

“If the customer wants to have a drink at the bar, we’ll stop and I’ll let him get a drink,” she said, standing in the barroom. “Then we come back to my room and we discuss really what they want to do and for how long.” That’s fair. She pulled out a whip and leather straps from the drawer in her night table. “These are the ones where I can tie people up.” The soccer moms in the audience looked on with curiosity.

When Brooke, 24, defended herself to her Dad, she appealed to reason. “Hey,” she told him. “I’m a sexual being and this is what I’m doing with that side.” She’s also an economic being and this is what she is doing with that side. Before she entered this line of work, she was tragically “living from paycheck to paycheck.”

Fortunately, her mother was more enlightened. “She was very supportive right off the bat,” Brooke said. “She took it as an adventure.” And, it is an adventure. There’s even an ATM machine in the bar and a shower room with nozzles on all the walls. Not all of her clients are purely into sex. “Sometimes it’s more about the journey.”

Isn’t it cool how we’re each on our own personal journey? The point is what we learn along the way and how we grow closer to each other every moment of the day. We are all interconnected. I am a housewife. Brooke is a whore. Oprah is force of nature. The point is not our minor differences, but our MAJOR SIMILARITIES. We’re human and lovable. No matter where our life’s journeys take us.

On Oprah’s website, which includes a video of Brooke, a commenter defends Oprah’s professional degradation. “Oprah is a journalist. Like any good journalist, she is presenting the issue and all the facts. She simply showed her viewers a very controversial topic and the truth.” Truth is Oprah’s cause and the object of her journey.

                                                                                                  

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 it was then to think that career can be the greatest passion, capable of destroying a marriage. How little, really, the intellectuals on the beach made of summer. They – all of us – used Wellfleet, that last great wilderness, in a way that cut us off from the primitive, everlasting heart of the world beating in our ears as we gabbed on the beach. 

How sad it must have been to witness the vessel of America’s elite slipping over the horizon.

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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 pursuit of romance and attachment, family – and all that is naturally anti-statist – are cut off in their delicate, embryonic state.

I’m sorry if this sounds heavy. After all, we are talking about something very commonplace: the nearly universal desire for a mate. But, I cannot help but see the demise of courtship as an event of great consequence and as a threat to our way of life. It has been destroyed by ideas. Make no mistake about that. One of those ideas is that ‘mating’ happens naturally. We are liitle different from gorillas in the bush.

A good illustration of just how far we have come is the courtship, which I wrote about here, between Winston Churchill and his wife, Clementine. It is hard to imagine these two people having existed as a couple outside the form and structure of Victorian love, which was very ritualized and in its own way highly sexual. The Victorians created what Linda Lichter has 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. While the Victorians were “prudish” about sex, we are prudish about masculinity and femininity themselves. We are spiritual prudes, embarrassed by the loftier possibilities of love and by the need for others.

This leaves us with the question of what does a healthy, normal young person do about this?  He holds onto his ideals and never departs from them. There are others searching for him. Ideas have consequences. To see things as they are and as they should be is not a passive thing. It influences the world and changes your life.

I should also add that there is only one word that can accurately describe the women Jeffrey meets who are indifferent to marriage even though they are in their mid-twenties: Stupid. Most of them are no doubt good girls by today’s standards. They have been convinced marriage is beneath them until they have impressed the world with their accomplishments and are making good money. What fools. Their femininity has been all but surgically removed.

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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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 Kidist Paulos Asrat has interesting observations at her blog Camera Lucida on the latest cover of O Magazine, the scripture of all things Oprah. Could Oprah be depressed? Miss Asrat says Oprah looks “insecure, hesitant and certainly non-powerful” in this photo. So ubiquitous is Oprah’s face, I do not possess the ability to sharply discern one image from another. She seems uniformly plastic in all. Oprah’s handlers like to present her as both fragile and fantastically more attractive than she is, the better to draw the weak to her throne. The hair on her shoulder seems to represent the conceit of a woman who is far too old for this sort of “come hither” gesture. Increasingly, Oprah is a sop to the middle-aged and their search for perennial youth.

I wonder if Oprah has ever gazed into the mirror and said to herself, “I could be wrong. I could be hopelessly and irretrievably wrong.”

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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 lying under an ornamental pear. Why bother? It’s so stingy.

The leaves begin to yellow in August. We dimly perceive a lessening and, before we can experience its full return, shade falls to our feet. The leaves, as Robert Frost put it, “They must go down past things coming up/ They must go down into the dark decayed.”

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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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We are scolded in today’s New York Times for not caring enough about the work of Mexican novelist Mario Bellatin. Here’s a brief description of the plot of the Bellatin novella Beauty Salon:

In an unnamed city that is suffering from an unnamed epidemic a transvestite hairdresser has turned his shop into a hospice for men dying of the disease, caring for them as indifferently as he tends to the fish he houses in aquariums that are his sole diversion.

Much of Mr. Bellatin’s work focuses on “characters whose bodies are deformed, disfigured or diseased or whose sexual identity is uncertain or fluid.”  I can’t wait to crack this stuff open. Incidentally, Bellatin is missing part of his right arm due to a birth defect, a fact which apparently justifies a new literary genre, “literature of the wound.” Critic Francisco Goldman is quoted: “In Mario’s sense, the wound is literal and comes with all kinds of psychological nuance and pain, and seems related to sexuality and desire, the desire for a whole body. One of my favorite aspects of him is this sense that he is writing for all the freaks — either literally freaks or privately and metaphorically, that he really touches us.”

Contemporary literature is one unending freak show. Or maybe it’s not. It’s normal people who are the true freaks today. If you were missing an arm, would your desire for a new limb be sexual? 

What could be more tedious than viewing domesticity purely in terms of who does which chores? Oxford University researchers, in a failed effort to keep from twiddling their thumbs, have created an “egalitarian index” to measure domestic harmony around the world, according to Science Daily.  All is seen through the prism of efficiently-divided chores, as if families were business franchises. The more men and women reportedly share household chores, the higher a country ranks on the index. The United States comes in fourth in the world even though mysteriously there are few men in the supermarket aisles.

How many people honestly report they do nothing around the house? Yet, the study results have the imprimatur of certified data. Interestingly, the survey fails to look at how well men and women perform the chores or whether many chores important to comfort and daily sanity are even executed. It does not ponder one possible cause of the declining birth rate in top ranking countries, such as Norway, Sweden and Great Britian. Men look awful in aprons.

It is important that men share in household chores. Women are not drudges. But, it is not fair to divide chores evenly if it keeps a woman from being a woman and a man from being a man. 

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A reader writes: 

Dear Thinking Housewife,

I have been perusing your website and enjoy it, with some serious reservations.

If I’m not mistaken I am younger than you (despite your obvious zest and vitality.) I am a single woman in my mid-twenties. Things are not going too well with me. I haven’t found the right man and am beginning to give up. The truth is I haven’t any idea how to go about this. Can you offer advice?

Laura writes:

Thank you for reading. I appreciate your interest.

Only one woman in history never faced your predicament. In her legendary garden, Eve opened her eyes – eyes too clear and deep for deception – and there he was. Her self transcended.  A being familiar and yet strange. There he stood, delivered to specifications. 

Eve’s experience – both mythical and real –  has left its trace in us. It should  be easy. Love should just happen. Why does finding a mate seem the romantic equivalent of building the Suez Canal? 

My first recommendation is that you realize what you seek is not natural. You are not a frog in a pool. Human love is herbs and chemicals, a blend of the natural and the synthetic.

Let it sink in. You have a formidable task before you, something you probably face amid pressure to build a dazzling career. That’s a bum deal. The whole world may tell you to relax. Take your time and it will happen. Even your own mother may seem indifferent, unlike mothers of the past who gazed at unmarried daughters with undisclosed panic. This nonchalance is a lie. Don’t believe it for a second. I advise you to maintain a healthy state of panic until you have found a man worthy to be your husband.

Your mother may be oblivious in other ways too. She may be ignorant of the cultural disaster that awaits you. Men are in a state of potentially irreversible adolescence. Years in the great educational gulag, with its stultifying classrooms and cinder-block corridors, have killed the male spirit. In a serious world, they are surrounded by unseriousness. Men are bored to death. Men are in a trance. The constant non-reality of electronic games and TV and sexual images flickers on their internal screens. The screens grow larger. Their minds and souls correspondingly shrink.

They hang onto life by some invisible cord. How can something as subtle as love penetrate their psyches? You have a gift that is noble and rare. How can it compete with the glitter that sustains them?

This is bad news. Very bad news. There would be only one thing worse. And, that is if you did not possess the desire to love. Scrupulously maintain this capacity. What did Eve see when she opened her eyes and glimpsed Adam? She saw that all of nature was a master stroke of invention, the result of a love too profound for human comprehension. You cannot put yourself in Eve’s lucky shoes, except in one sense. You can possess her capacity for wonder and reverence. You can possess her soul.

Once you have this, you are halfway there.  Spend as much time as possible out in the world. Any place but bars. Seek not and ye shall find not. All the conventional advice applies. Eve didn’t need nice clothes, but every woman after the Fall has needed conscious attempts at prettiness. Eve didn’t need to reserve herself until after the wedding, but you do. Through simple, age-old feminine inducements and the nobility of your love, you might awaken someone who barely lives. Together, you can create a new world. The Suez Canal wasn’t built in a day.

If this seems vague, it is because the object of your search is as yet unknown. Good luck!

Boudicca Haranguing the Britons by John Opie

History has known a few great women warriors, such as Boudicca, who led the Iceni tribe of Briton in battle against the Romans. But, the normalization of women in combat is a sign of the weakening of a nation’s will to defend itself.

On the subject of women leaders and warriors, Rose writes:

Your other commenter has caused me to ponder the topic of warlike females. I know that many conservatives are displeased by popularity of women-warriors in modern culture, but I believe that they are wrong when they say that the phenomenon is driven only by political correctness.

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