And more reading

I finished "The Sterile Cuckoo" last night. More about that (contains spoilers) later on.

I also started a new book. This is one I saw reviewed somewhere (maybe on AV Club?) and decided I wanted to read it. It's called "Twee: the Gentle Revolution in Music, Books, Television, Fashion, and Film."

I'm not very far into it yet, and I'm not sure I agree with all of what the author is saying (he seems to imply times are better "now" - for whatever "now" was when the book was written and published - than it was in the early 2000s, and I'm not so sure about that economically. I suspect with strong certainty that if I were out on the job market now, I wouldn't be getting a tenure-track position, at least not right away.)

Anyway. "Twee" is sort of a catch-all term for some elements of geek culture, some elements of hipster culture, possibly some elements of craft culture - it's hard to pin down an exact definition. (The author refers to "Brooklyn" as the epicenter. I guess I'm a few decades behind the times in my understanding of New York boroughs, because I think of Brooklyn as a tougher place where recent immigrants live, but apparently now it's become largely an artist's colony). It's a yearning for "authenticity," which is actually a trait often ascribed to Gen-Xers. (one of the more favorable ones, or at least I think so). He describes it as being a trusting culture (or at least one that wants to trust) and one where gentleness is kind of at a premium.

(He quotes Morrissey, who said something like "It takes guts to be gentle." - that snark and nastiness are easy, but being kind can take some guts, because it means you are vulnerable. I tend to agree with that - I don't like snark and nastiness. But also, in my case, I think kindness and gentleness are kind of my default BECAUSE I'm such a huge conflict avoider. I'd rather smile and nod, or make whatever objections I have known as quietly and carefully as possible, than risk someone either blowing up at or snarking back at me.)

There's also a whole aesthetic - the whole "put a bird on it" movement is part of this. And owls. (A while back I opined that the current popularity of owls as a decorative element was a callback to the 1970s. Well, maybe not). And probably hedgehogs as well. The small and the cute. The popularity of Hello Kitty is part of this. (And probably the Ponies, too, to some extent).

As I said, there are elements of geek culture rolled into this: knowing vast details about all the films of a particular director. Caring a lot about comic-book history. That kind of thing. And there are elements of hipster culture (the whole mustache thing, the idea of artisinal donuts and such), but I would argue that some of hipster culture carries a harder edge than what twee culture does: I've seen some hipsters being VERY judgmental of peers or outsiders who do things differently, and it seems that twee culture is more content to let people do their own things. (In fact, "Free to Be, You and Me" - which I mainly remember for football player Rosie Greer doing needlepoint, because my mom did needlepoint - was an early touchstone of Twee, according to Spitz)

I have to say right here: I found myself nodding at some of the things he described. (And I really liked that Morrissey quotation, even if I've never even really listened to any of the Smiths' music). But it's really disconcerting to see a bunch of the things that you thought made you a little odd or distinctive all wrapped up into a "culture" that you never really knew existed:

- caring about how stuff is made and where stuff comes from
- a sort of odd nostalgia (odd in the sense that it's a revering of a past you didn't take part in: like my buying jewelry made out of old manual typewriter keys. I've seen and even briefly owned one of these behemoths, but I never had to use one on a regular basis)
- a fondness for the brightly colored, the cute, the sweet
- a sort of cultivation of one's own quirkiness
- a kind of scholarliness - as I said earlier, the person who knows all the details of the making of, say, all of Wes Anderson's movies (he's another big Twee icon), is someone who's seen as interesting and even in some sense "cool," though Twee seems to reject the idea of "coolness."
- possibly craft, though at least where I am in the book he hasn't brought up things like knitting or even some of the home-baking, home-curing, and home-brew stuff.

Of course, like any cultural phenomenon, this can be taken to extremes. (And Spitz does agonize a little bit: "Is this really just Stuff White People Like?" - and points out that really to partake in Twee culture, you have to be fairly well-off, to have the money for the material goods and also the free brain-space to think about those kinds of things, rather than worrying about where your next meal is coming from).

But taken to extremes, yeah. Like "artisinal" or "local." I like being able to buy honey that comes from an apiary near me (two of the nearest big ones, the ones that sell more or less commercially, are in Bonham and Denton). But I've also known people who went kind of judgey on others because they bought out-of-season strawberries that were trucked in from California or something. And there's a general mistrust of big corporations (though I suppose some of them have earned that mistrust....)

And, I don't know - I tend to feel one of the blessings of modern transport, infrastructure, and agriculture is that we CAN go through the winter without having to feed on the turnips and pumpkins that were put aside in the fall, and that in my neck of the woods, we are not restricted to what produce can be grown in our hot, dry summers. (And I do sometimes really crave raspberries in winter. Oh, I generally get frozen ones, because they're usually better than the Chilean or wherever ones that are available, and a lot cheaper, too - but I couldn't do that without modern infrastructure, food corporations, and all that.)

"Twee" does seem to be a "culture" mainly of affluent Euro-descended people, though maybe that's changing (and perhaps kawaii culture, which started out as an Asian - Japanese, primarily - phenomenon may be part of it, too). It also seems to skew fairly young, although Spitz does include Gen-Xers and even some Boomers heavily in the Twee group.

Twee is presented as a reaction against some of the hardness that has crept into culture, some of the unfriendliness and crassness. As Spitz says, it WANTS to be a trusting movement (but all the same: some aspects of it have been co-opted and cause a little bit of discombobulation or even mockery among people who actually care about it - for example, "artisinal" crackers made by one of the big firms (like Keebler) that does them on a production line with giant machines, instead of individual bakers rolling out the dough by hand)

Spitz also includes a "bibliography" of sorts of films, music, and books. Some of the icons are kind of "obvious" - Wes Anderson, as I mentioned. And JD Salinger. And Sofia Coppola and Zooey Deschanel. But others like Edward Gorey and Dr. Seuss are included - in fact, an appreciation for "kid's stuff" is something that marks some of the practitioners of Twee. (And once again I say: It's disconcerting to see stuff you thought made you distinctive written up and described as this mass movement that thousands of people are part of, even as you didn't really know of its existence). And Portlandia, the tv show.

And I admit, a lot of those "icons" make me cringe as much as I embrace them: I find Wes Anderson movies problematic because sometimes they just get too precious for me. And Portlandia makes me cringe as much as it makes me laugh. And I once referred to trying to re-read Catcher in the Rye and finding it just a little hard to take. ("Holden, you just have to learn: the world is FULL of phonies. You learn to deal with it.")

And that brings me to "The Sterile Cuckoo." In one of the reviews of the movie (which is somewhat different to the book) Pookie Adams (the female protagonist, and it's never revealed if Pookie is her actual given name or just a nickname) is compared (favorably) to Holden Caulfield.

Okay, yeah, I can kind of see that. But Pookie is Weird with a capital W and actually is kind of spooky at places - when she is on one of her tears, she refers to wanting to go into a crowded train station with a machine gun and shoot the place up. Now, maybe 2014 is a very different time than 1965 (when the book was written), but that's just kind of chilling. Even if she's saying it mainly to shock. (Then again, a big part of her childhood was spent slaughtering frogs.) She also suffered a huge tragedy: as a teen, a car she was traveling in (with several classmates) wrecked and she was the only one to survive - in fact, she watched the boy who was sort of her proto-boyfriend die in front of her, but she was temporarily paralyzed and could do nothing. (Perhaps that helped make her who she was)

Pookie is like a Manic Pixie Dream Girl gone bad. (Manic Pixie Nightmare Girl?) - she's free spirited and uninhibited and does and says unexpected things, but she's a handful. If I were friends with her I'd probably stay friends with her on the grounds that she needed a level-headed person around to look after her, but I'd find her incredibly tiring to spend time with. I'd probably wind up being more the rescue-friend: the person who comes and picks her up from a bar when she's got dangerously drunk, the one who talks her down off the ledge when she's about to go over....but yeah, she's nuts and that makes her exhausting (even to read about) (It's possible the author meant to imply she had bipolar depression; she seems to have manic periods and depressive periods)

And that's the problem Jerry Payne has with her. She becomes mildly obsessed with him after they meet on a bus trip (writing him lots of letters) and finally he takes up with her - and they fall into a love affair. (And yes, the book is fairly explicit that it is an affair. Pookie is Jerry's first, though it's not at all clear that she is his; there's....how do I put this delicately....none of the pain that women sometimes suffer mentioned the first time they "do it.")

Their affair is pretty wild. Jerry himself becomes obsessed, to the point of almost failing out of college (he goes to see her every weekend, sometimes leaving before classes end on Friday). But they can't stay together; Pookie is too crazy and she makes the both of them crazy.

And ultimately - here be the worst spoilers - they wind up in a New York City hotel after fleeing yet another debauched frat "house party." There, they first discuss marriage and babies. Then Pookie kind of snaps and writes a poem (from which the book's title comes). Then, for some reason (they are both slightly drunk at the time), they make a suicide pact and decide to go to their deaths by taking 50 aspirin apiece.

That ultimately doesn't happen; the scene ends by them tearing up the pact and throwing the bottles out the window, but....they also break off the affair. (Because they can't be together. In some sense they love each other but they can't manage together).

The end of the book is ambiguous. Pookie quits college and returns home to work at her father's real estate firm. (Back in those days, I suppose that was more common). Jerry receives a letter from her that fall which is essentially a suicide note. Of course, he receives it too late to do anything. He thinks of getting in touch with the local paper (I suppose calling her family is out of the question) and asking for all the back issues around the time the letter was mailed (to look for her obituary), but he ultimately does not, because what good would that do? And he remarked that he hoped she didn't go through with it, and that someday he'd find out she'd become a successful author or the wife of a famous person or something....and the book ends.

I don't know. I think if I were Jerry, I would have written for the papers. And if her obituary was there, I would have called her parents (even if they were as awful as she described them to be) and offer my condolences as a "friend" of their daughter. (They wouldn't need to know more.) But then, Jerry seems kind of chicken-livered in a number of ways.

Which actually, to come back 'round to Twee, is one of the fears I have about the Twee culture - that the people in it either actually will become, or will be painted by others as, chicken-livered: too soft, not willing to stand up to the wrong and tell it is wrong. Yes, Morrissey said that it's harder to be kind than to be mean, but sometimes you have to be even MORE kind by being tough in a situation.