Porn Store Clerk Blog: a Review

I devoured a weblog recently, by way of GeekPress, that for some reason motivated me to draw up this arbitrary list of qualities a good author should have: 1) some writerly pretensions to a good prose style; 2) a will to observe stuff, especially people; and 3) benevolence. Yes, benevolence. Somehow I think that can be sensed, and it can make all the difference. (Just ask Oliver Stone and David Lynch, still smarting from my ongoing boycott). If an author has all three qualities she can almost always turn out something worth reading, on whatever subject.

And no, my usage of "she" in this case is not a random driveby salvo of enlightenment, as in "the average surgeon is seeing her malpractice insurance go up this year". No. I have a particular bisexual female porn store clerk in mind when I say that.

She's doing her small part to humanize the Discovery Channel world of Berserkeley ideology for me. Though her scruples are a bit politically correct for my taste, she's so darn thoughtful and self-searching about them that I'm disarmed. I formally surrender.

I also formally commend her on her craft. Take a look at her last three points here:

It took a long time for me to even admit to myself that porn can be degrading. I'm a sex-positive, first amendment feminist. I've been through the progressive arguments: lesbians enjoy it too, the woman giving the blow job is in control of the sex act, and what if they come for your porn first.

Regardless of their merit, has anyone ever summarized these arguments so compactly?

Writing doesn't get this good by accident; you need some of those writerly pretensions. But gee, right after I got done analyzing her and her pretensions, she goes and hits on that point directly herself, which is beyond disarming:

My intellectual vanity is, I think, the personality flaw that I've done the most work on and made the least progress with. I like him. I want him to know I'm smart and trust me to understand what his paper is about, and I like getting to talk to him a little longer in the quiet of the morning.

Shall I pick a single nit? The ironic one-liners ending many of her postings seem a little formulaic, though I admit they're snappy. Perhaps it's best to accept them as a convention of the genre, like (classical musical reference) the coda in sonata form. Or a standup comic reincorporating a previous detail into his final bit.

In any case her closing one-liners compare favorably with their more dubious cousin: David Sedaris's patented technique, the sedariprecation. He'll spend an entire story reveling delectably in the foibles of others--cataloguing, strip-searching, and building pyramids to them--and God help me I usually enjoy this--but he then caps it all with a final saving paragraph that contains a self-deprecating twist. Quick rinse with a minty mouthwash, and no questionable aftertaste! Dante might sentence him to an acid gargle all year, with an altoid on New Years Eve as point of comparision.

Thesis Idea: Calculate what percentage of the total piece is devoted to the closing ornament: the closing one-liner to the blog post, the sedariprecation to the story, or the coda to the entire sonata form movement. Beethoven's codas grew as he enlarged the movement as a whole beyond the Haydn/Mozart dimensions, and my armchair guess is that a certain proportionality reigns. The ratio in all these cases, musical and otherwise, might be pretty constant: call it the Golden Closing Section?

English Lit Hell

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

The good points of Finnish socialism, rampant censorship in America, and Bill Clinton cast as "one of our more serious intellectuals" (I think). In today's Academy, that's all par for the course in a discussion of William Blake (1757-1827).

If you've read C.S. Lewis's "Pilgrim's Regress" (1933), I think you'll notice a resemblance to the Clevers.