The New Rambler

STATISTICS

There are now 114 subscribers to The New Rambler. In age they span about seven decades, in geography, three countries.

RANDOM NOTES & ILLUMINATION ROUNDS

Over the past few months I have been using three different computers. I have tried to keep the mailing list consistent, but if, for some reason, you have missed an issue, or gotten an issue twice, or something, please accept my apologies. Back issues are available on the web (www.avalon.net/~rambler), or via e-mail, by request.

Remember back awhile ago when I sent out the notice asking for favorite poem submissions? Well, I haven’t forgotten about them completely. Submissions so far have been

• “Spring and Fall: To A Young Child” Gerard Manly Hopkins
• “Song on St. Cecilia’s Day” John Dryden
• “Yes Yes” Charles Bukowski
• “Each in His Own Tongue” William Herbert Carruth
• “fair ladies tall lovers” e. e. cummings
• “Atlantis” Mark Doty
• and a number of Shel Silverstein poems

Someday when I’m feeling more ambitious I’ll type a few of them up.

Several of you have heard tell of the Star Wars interviews that I did back in May. Ostensibly these interviews, conducted with various people waiting outside the Englert in downtown Iowa City in the three hours prior to the premiere of The Phantom Menace, were for a book I’m theoretically going to write someday about being a kid in the ’80s. (Actually, I think that might be kind of a dumb topic; mostly, it’s reactionary. I’m so sick of reading books about the ’60s. But I am fascinated by the 1980s, and by the idea that Star Wars was a term being bandied by both George Lucas and Ronald Reagan. . . .) Anyway, in the meantime, I shall be transcribing said interviews, and they’ll be available on the website, or via e-mail or hard copy, by request. Don’t hold your breath, though.

The last issue, No. 13, has sparked considerable confusion, my own perhaps more than anyone’s. When and if I’ve made it any clearer to myself, I’ll pass on what I can. The very first New Rambler I ever wrote started as an e-mail to a friend one evening, until, at some point half way through, I realized I was just telling her a lot of stuff she already knew. I thought about junking it, but, either because I hate throwing things away or because I was feeling angry at the world and cut off from communication as I had come to understand it, I didn’t. I added several dozen e-mail addresses, called it The New Rambler, No. 1, hit send, and waited for the recriminations to come in. Only they didn’t.

When people have told you your whole life that you are good at something, you tend to discredit it. Most writers say that writing is incredibly difficult. I have never found it so. Writing that others may read–read and possibly misunderstand, disagree, or dislike–that is hard. I claim that I write to make people think, but of course that is not the whole truth. I write to make people think like me, and to say that I want you to think like me, is, of course, tantamount to saying I really don’t want you to think at all. That I keep on writing despite that contradiction suggests to me that I either have weak morals or an arrogant will. Since neither of these is an admirable trait, I try to avoid thinking about it–but it makes it very, very difficult to write.

A VERY SHORT SURVEY

One word answers are sufficient, but anything more you’d care to tell me would be excellent. There is no precise purpose behind this survey (apologies to statisticians, psychologists, and others who may find such lack of direction an abomination)–I’m just testing out some hypotheses and satisfying my curiousity.

1. Have you ever fired a gun?
2. If you have read The Catcher in the Rye: How old were you when you first read it, and did you like it at the time?

Please e-mail your answers to me.

Thanks for reading.

–Laura

A short time ago I was watching a TV newscast in Chicago, which took a short break from politics, sports, and mayhem, to report on a breathtaking new phenomenon: there is actually a place in Chicago now where you can work out outdoors! My God! What a concept! The place in question is some outdoor gym by Lake Michigan, doubtless founded by a bunch of yuppies who wanted to flash their perfectly toned midriffs at a wider audience. But what I want to know is when did exercise become an activity that could only be pursued indoors? I’m so confused. Haven’t these people ever heard of going for a walk? It’s a surprisingly effective mode of transportation, I think they’d find. For all our talk about multi-tasking and parallel processing, the world is actually becoming more and more compartmental. Eat only at the Food Court. Exercise only at the gym. Next thing you know they’ll be telling me I can’t read while waiting for the bus.

“There have been parallels, individuals who’ve made great leaps foward in understanding–Galileo, Newton, Stephen Hawking–these men. . . .”
–Mulder, The X-Files, 5th season finale, emphasis mine

Several weeks ago I watched (yes, really) the dazzling made-for-TV docu-drama Pirates of Silicon Valley, about the rise and fall of Steve Jobs (Noah Wyle) and the rise and rise of Bill Gates (Anthony Michael Hall–remember him?), respective men behind Apple and Microsoft. Its primary initial effect was to make me want to stay the hell away from computers, which may explain the unnaturally long lapse between issues. Around this same time, I was reading a book of my mom’s called Young Men With Unlimited Capital, by John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, and some other guy, which is about how the first two, both venture capitalists, put up the money, and then did a lot of the dirty work, for Woodstock. Since then, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about rich white guys, who are generally a group I try to ignore. Consequently, I do not promise that this will be at all coherent. (But what am I apologizing for? This is my damn e-mail journal).

Near the beginning of Pirates, the Steves (Jobs and Wozniak) narrowly escape being teargassed at some Vietnam (?) demonstration at UC Berkeley, and Jobs says to Woz, “Those guys think they’re revolutionaries–they’re not–we’re revolutionaries.” And so the two of them go blundering on with their machines and their computers built inside wooden boxes, working out of Jobs’s parents’ garage and totally oblivious to how foolish they’re being. Bill Gates and his cronies are doing the same thing, only with software. It’s the kind of story America is supposed to love: guys bumbling about in the basement suddenly figure it out, and, after years of hard work, strike it rich.

One might say that Roberts and Rosenman are the opposite of this story, although they also thought of themselves as revolutionary, in a way. But they started out with a lot of dough and proceeded to sink almost all of it into that mudhole which has somehow become a defining generational event. (Sorry, I didn’t mean that as entirely insulting–just a knee-jerk reaction to all things Boomeresque–the book gives you the impression that it was actually quite a feat).

What struck me most about all these men–Jobs, Gates, Roberts, and Rosenman–however, was how damned sure of themselves they were, and what incredible jerks they were at times along the way (the latter two much less than the former two, but then, I was getting their side of the story). It is enough to make one think that the prevailing characteristic of genius, or of success, is not just tunnel vision, but also the inability to conceive of yourself as anything but right–and thus it is that several young men took over the world, or at least Max Yasgur’s farm.

There are flaws in this thinking, but I’m not going to point them out. I end with an anecdote:

A group of about a dozen is dining in a small Italian restaurant. A waitress, in her early or mid teens, leaves for the kitchen, and a man explains to some of the group that she is the daughter of the owners. “But she’s just gotten really shy in the past year for some reason,” he says, bemused. Three of the group are young women themselves, college-educated, in their early twenties. “Yeah,” they all say knowingly, simultaneously, and then look at each other and at the rest of the table, a look of almost shock on their faces–the shock of recognition, and the shock that none of the other people at the table quite seem to grasp it. “Does that happy, really?” the man asks. They nod. “We should get her a copy of Reviving Ophelia,” one says.