Today, April 24, is Armenian Martyrs Day, also known as Genocide Remembrance Day.  As a half-Armenian who does not speak the Armenian language and does not have an Armenian last name, today is a strange day.  I am not ambivalent about the need to recognize the Genocide, which the Turkish government continues to deny.  But I do wonder how much my Armenian-ness is defined by the legacy of the Genocide.  What am I responsible for doing to the young Turks in my midst?  Is it better to let go of the suffering after 3 generations?  Or would today’s handshake further obscure the atrocities put upon my ancestors?  This is what I call the Armenian Question.  It is a tugging, agitated feeling that comes with trying to set the record straight.

As a boxing fan, for some years I have looked to the boxing ring as a suitable place for taking on the Question: it is an ancient place, a place of upsets and secrets.  George Plimpton once wrote that tears would stream down his face whenever he boxed–it happened even when he sparred with Archie Moore.  He called this ‘The Sympathetic Reaction,’  and it is this type of observation that has led me to believe boxing itself might sympathize with The Armenian Question.  It is a sport that requires you to know your own pain.

The thing about boxing is that you will get punched in the face.  If you’re unsure what to expect, you can at least expect to be punched in the face.  You will come to know the vinegary taste of being struck, and the pinks and greens that linger in your vision afterwards, and you will learn to proceed through dizziness.  It is a sad, scary thing, and it does not teach you to be fearless.  But in my own experience boxing, I have instead learned how to bite down on the things that hurt.  As a young writer following the example of George Plimpton, I have found boxing to be a sport in which the thing that makes you cry is also the thing that makes you tough.

And so we turn to Vanes Martirosyan, the undefeated Armenian light-middleweight contender.  With so few popular Armenian role models to choose from, I have chosen Martirosyan.  If this young boxer has not motivated himself on the strength of the Armenian Question, then everything I know about boxing is wrong.  I should say now that there are other Armenian boxers, but I watch Martirosyan in particular because he is less than a year older than I am, and because I have taken the strength of his record, 29-0-0, to be a direct measurement of the weight of the Question.

To be clear: I am not calling for Vanes Martirosyan to fight a Turkish boxer, nor am I suggesting that such an occasion would be equal to what happened between the Armenians and the Turks one hundred years ago.  Let me be the first to acknowledge the potential for race-baiting that lurks in the subtext of today’s Armenian Question.

Even so, one prepares for certain outside possibilities: what if an Armenian and a Turk did get in the ring, but they were both Mixed Martial Arts fighters?  This would be a disappointment.  For reasons that are part historical and part mystical, MMA is the wrong arena for this.  It is too close to actual combat.  It is not at all symbolic, and it does not have the formal constraints that make boxing special.  If MMA is a free-verse poem, then boxing is a 14 line sonnet.  It has more rules and is more old-fashioned.  It forces the fighters to choose from a smaller array of moves, and therefore it confers a precious advantage on the boxer that can deceive his opponent.  The surprises in boxing are more spectacular, because they are designed from fewer maneuvers.  To put it another way, MMA is not the sort of thing that Joyce Carol Oates would choose to mythologize.  Only boxing has the history of surprises, and paradoxes, necessary for addressing The Armenian Question.

For instance: consider Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion, who defeated Great White Hope after Great White Hope.  Johnson used to fight with a grin on his face, and he made a point to appear in public with his white lovers.  “No one understands him, this man who smiles,” wrote Jack London.  Twenty years later, Joe Louis beat the German Max Schmeling, in a victory that Americans took to mean the Nazis were destined to lose.  If nothing else, we can be grateful to the history of boxing, grisly and tainted as it is, for proving that one can draw strength from the power of one’s righteousness.  At the risk of making a dangerous observation, I remind the reader that the five men who beat Muhammad Ali were all black.  In a certain other contest, the contest against whitey, Muhammad Ali remains undefeated, which is of course to his credit.  But it is also to the credit of boxing.

So is Vanes Martirosyan really fighting for the Armenian Question?  I take it as an article of faith that he is.  But I also used to wonder if his name meant The Son of Martyrs, and then I learned that it doesn’t.  One thing remains certain to me: the sinking knowledge that the Armenian Question will always be there is another version of the decision every boxer makes: to participate in a sport in which he is certain to receive blows.  In the fights that he wins and loses alike, there will always be blows.  He has chosen to prevail against an endless tide of blows.  And therefore, Vanes Martirosyan is on the verge of doing something impossible.  He is proving, at last, that the Armenian Question is a sad advantage in the heart of a boxer.  It gives him stores of vengeance from which to draw, and it makes him unknowable to his opponent.  He is fighting for something that no one understands, not even his own oppressors.  More than that, he understands how to struggle with something that may never release him.  He holds within himself unfinished business, and a strength born from carrying a paradox: that the Armenian Question is meant to be unanswerable.

The release of the Insane Clown Posse’s sixth joker card album, The Wraith: Shangri La, did not mark the end of the world, but for many Juggalos, it may as well have. On the album’s final track, “Thy Unveiling,” the duo revealed that their mission as musicians had always been to serve a higher power: “When we speak of Shangri-La, what you think we mean? Truth is we follow God! We’ve always been behind Him! The Carnival is God. And may all Juggalos find Him!”

Much hay was made of this revelation, particularly by the journalist Jon Ronson, who published an article last October in The Guardian entitled “And God Created Controversy.” He writes that ICP have always been evangelical Christians, “pretending to be brutal and sadistic to trick their fans into believing in God.” This is damning stuff. Or at least, it would be, if it were true. But, while ICP sometimes eggs on this kind of condemnation from the media, when you look a little closer you find that their piety is also a charade. “Man, I never been to a church in my life. I wouldn’t even know how to go into a church.” Shaggy 2 Dope said on G4’s Attack of the Show. Violent J elaborated on this point: “We were taught there’s a heaven and a hell. But that’s all we were taught. We weren’t taught about the commandments, and what chapter 3:16 slash… o-Atheists… means. We don’t have that type of education about what’s in the Bible or all of that.”

In his interview with ICP, Ronson and the group watched a YouTube clip—by what the article describes as a college professor, but is actually Zinnia Jones, a transboy blogger who dresses like a catholic schoolgirl and speaks with an offputtingly sonorous voice of a television news anchorman—which describes “Miracles” as “not merely dumb, but enthusiastically dumb, endorsing a ferocious breed of ignorance that can only be described as militant. The entire song is practically a tribute to not knowing things.” Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J took great offense to this critique, but it’s dead on. Violent J himself has confessed to a pro-ignorance stance in the past.  “It’s a lot funner being the dumb guy,” he said to Machinima TV. “Because then you get to appreciate all of the beautiful things.”

Juggaloism—the inchoate religion hidden in the lyrics of ICP—is evangelicalism for dummies. Its radically anti-hierarchical ethos appeals to people who despise authoritarian truth, as well as its arbiters—teachers, parents, bosses, and politicians. It provides a basic moral system and a divine presence without the burdens of complicated metaphysics or history. It is the stuff of dreams and nightmares, stoned reveries and horror flicks. It is (as ICP sings in “Miracles”) “everything you believed in as kids.”

******

If you want to get at the heart of Juggaloism, you need only watch an infamous exchange from the Upchuck the Clown web radio show, in which a woman named Jules describes the death of her infant daughter due to her drug and alcohol use during the pregnancy. The video includes pictures of the funeral, in which Jules—pink-haired, extremely overweight, and wearing a red ICP hoody—and her fiancé bury their daughter in a casket emblazoned with ICP lyrics and insignia. They could not afford a headstone, in part because their house had burned down a few years back. Her only solace, she said, came from her family. Not her real family, but the family of Insane Clown Posse fans who pitched in to cover $350 of her funeral expenses. “If Shangri-La is really what it seems, my daughter Annabelle Lotus can hear me now and I just want to say mommy and daddy love you,” she told Upchuck. “And I want to give a shout-out to all of the Juggalos and Juggalettes who are beyond in Shangri-La right now.”

Not unlike ICP itself, the combination of rank sentimentality, melancholia, and absurdity in this video are tough to stomach: at one point we see the scrunch-faced baby in an open casket, swaddled in an ICP sweatshirt and, over that, a fake gold necklace bearing the “hatchet man” logo of Psychopathic Records. Our natural impulse is to laugh uncomfortably and to turn away.

The dismissive label I hear most often attached to Juggalos is “trashy.” But what repulses us about this new white trash is not their bigotry—indeed, their tolerance of black culture borders on outright mimicry—or even their fixation with mock violence, but their gleeful ignorance. The Juggalo’s rejection of intellectualism, education, and positivist orders of knowledge at once angers and delights us—scratches that delicious itch—because it prompts an argument we feel we can win.  (The more pertinent question of whether these people failed school, or whether the school system failed them, is one with which we appear less willing to engage.)

There is nothing funny about the lives of Juggalo Jules and her ilk. Not to downplay the extant reality of racial inequality, but let’s go ahead and state the obvious: white privilege doesn’t amount to much when you’re on welfare, or digging ditches, or slaughtering cows, or working a fryolator. It sucks to be white and uneducated and underemployed in America. And, despite what Violent J may have told you, it isn’t funner being the dumb guy, especially in a country in which intelligence is the primary requisite for any job other than the menial.

Not all ICP fans are unintelligent, of course, just like not all of their fans are white, or poor. But these are the fans that ICP, in its lyrics and its branding, actively courts. Juggaloism offers these people an escape from the late capitalist American rat maze, with its blinking, neon-advertised dead ends in money, and organized religion, and fame. ICP’s promise to its fans—that togetherness and transgressive humor and a faceless God will set you free—may be another one of those dead ends. Yet it has probably done more to alleviate their collective suffering than any other American institution, religious, pharmaceutical or otherwise.

So stop hating the Insane Clown Posse. In their funhouse reflections we can see ourselves on those days when we felt trapped in our own shitty existences; when we cackled in the face of authority; when we raged; when we cussed; when we goofed off; when we too yearned to wear a different face.

This is the second installment of a three-part essay. Part 1 can be found here; Part 3 is here.

In recent years I’ve watched the reemergence of Weird Al Yankovic with a bewilderment bordering on irritation. As a child, I always responded to his music with something like a feral baring of teeth; he was the kind of goof I spent my childhood trying to maim with dodgeballs. (It saddens me to admit that I was that kid whose popularity, looks, athleticism and cruelty peaked in the sixth grade; every day since has been a slow slide into mediocrity and tolerance.) I was secretly glad to see Weird Al’s career wane. And for most of the 21st century, he stayed out of sight, excluding the occasional appearance on VH1’s I Love The 90s.

Then, one night at a party in Brooklyn, I made a joke about a friend having been the president of his local Weird Al fan club, and easily half of the room turned on me with daggers in their bespectacled eyes. Some time in the interim, it seems, almost every person I knew had become hugely and unironically nostalgic for the genius of Bad Hair Day. Many, many of my friends know every word t0 “Amish Paradise” but can’t even remember Coolio’s name. I have since heard Weird Al praised for his lyrical deftness on all of my favorite comedy podcasts (Comedy Death Ray, WTF w/Marc Maron, The Pop Culture Happy Hour) by people who are much too old to have ever listened to him as pre-teens. However, by and large the praise I hear for Weird Al seems to be markedly past tense and un-theoretical, spoken through the fog of childhood memory.

Alongside this Clinton-era revivification has been another, much more public one: that of Eminem, who has returned to prominence by burrowing deeper into the depths of his blue collar, dry-drunk rage. Gone is the TRL-baiting jester of old; his hair is dark now, his cheeks sunken. His new flow seems stuck in a low gear of perpetual, monotone shouting, and his lyrical wordplay is about as playful as a pet vulture. When he collected his Grammy this month, Mathers—the man who once jokingly dropped a handful of Vicodins on stage while digging around for his acceptance speech at the VMAs—didn’t crack a joke, or even a smile.

Even if I no longer enjoy his music, something about Eminem’s comeback is historically satisfying; it’s as if B-Rabbit, Mathers’ semi-autobiographical character from 8 Mile, had walked off down that darkened alley and, rather than getting a peroxide dye-job and starting beefs with a succession of ex-Mouseketeers, instead chose to spend the next decade making music that his co-workers at the auto plant would enjoy. Weird Al has gone in the opposite direction, pulling in gigs and guest-spots by remaining anachronistically stuck in the comedic sensibility of his heyday—in other words, by stubbornly remaining the person his fans so fondly remember.

I don’t begrudge people the masturbatory pleasures of snuggling up in the flannelly warmth of former musical crushes. Early adolescence is that magical time when we have a burning passion for music, but almost no critical faculties with which to judge it. Of course we would form our most searing—and most embarrassing—artistic attachments then. What doesn’t make sense to me, though, is why the Insane Clown Posse, who lie somewhere dead smack between the twin poles of Weird Al and Slim Shady on the artistic/comedic spectrum of adolescent nostalgia, at the very moment that these two re-ascend, has fallen so hard.

******

It was a lovely day, the first time I heard ICP. The sun was bright, and the suburbs were shining. Grasshoppers and lawn mowers thrummed against my bedroom windows. It was the summer of 1996, and I had just returned from the local record store, where I had impulsively picked up ICP’s third LP, Riddle Box, because I thought the cover art looked cool. (It depicted a kind of deranged, forked-tongued Grateful Dead Bear jumping out of a music box. (I was 11.)) I remember slipping the CD into my stereo, hitting play, and then quickly ejecting the disc, because what issued forth from my speakers—an introductory skit in which a man dies in a car accident and then is asked, by a demonically cheerful voice, to turn the crank of the riddle box to find out his fate—was the single scariest thing I’d ever heard on a record. I didn’t even make it to the skit’s ear-splitting conclusion (a form of artistic cruelty I now put on par only with the dumpster-monster scene in Mulholland Drive). I shuddered, tossed the CD case under my bed and went outside to play.

On a second listen through, weeks later, lying in bed with my Discman, I skipped the intro track, and what I found was the sonic equivalent of a good low-budget horror movie: a mixture of scares and laughs that bear an inverse relationship to one another over time. To my young ears, the duo’s raspy, constricted delivery—racially indeterminate but distinctly urban—sounded like Cypress Hill’s, only without all the esoteric drug references. In their place were explosively violent screeds against rich kids, Southerners, sluts, and any and all forms of authority.

“We represent the people that were born without a silver spoon in their mouth, but instead with a rusty fork,” the group told Fox News in 1995. That kind of populist invective was catnip for a kid like me—guiltily privileged and possessed of a loose mental equivalence between scariness, danger, and cool. One of the album’s tracks, called “Ol’ Evil Eye,” quoted Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” at length. Another, titled “The Killing Fields,” depicted a nightmarish, Lovecraft-esque wasteland of bloody rainclouds and walking dead. The beats made my head nod, the lyrics were easy to memorize, and best of all, my mom fucking despised it.

But just as importantly, it was funny, in that intentionally stupid way that the Jerky Boys and Beavis and Butthead were funny. And as in a horror movie, the humor was weirdly intensified by the creepiness. One of the magical things about rhyming—whether it be in a rap song, a limerick, or a nursery rhyme—is the way that it creates its own intra-linear tensions, hidden little mousetraps that the artist can release in surprising and comical ways. As we grow older, our understanding of rhyme sharpens, and we find ourselves groaning at predictable couplings, but when we’re young, we can still find the internal echoes of a lyric like “Abracadabra boom shacka day/ I’m Violent J, and I’m back like a vertebrae” or an off-rhyme like “I met Milenko, he gave me three wishes/that night, I fucked three fat bitches,” unfathomably clever.

This was, keep in mind, still three years before the release of The Slim Shady LP. In fact, my first impression of Eminem was that he sounded like a sped-up version of ICP. (One day someone should put together a game wherein you try to blindly differentiate between ICP lyrics and early Eminem lines. For example, who once rapped, “It’s almost dark and I’m still tryna nail a trailer park bitch/ I met a slut and said ‘What up, its nice to meet ya’/ I’d like to treat ya to a Faygo and a slice of pizza’”? (Hint: Not ICP.)) No doubt in part due to this uncomfortable resemblance, Eminem spent much of his early career trying to differentiate himself from ICP, sparking a kind of nuclear arms race of homo-erotic/-phobic diss tracks that lasted throughout the early aughts. In the end, for me, as for most, Eminem emerged the clear victor. Not only was he funnier, and his fans less ridiculous looking, but also—I came to realize as my testicles descended and my brain sprouted critical faculties—he was infinitely more talented. In comparison to his densely rendered, hallucinogenic, multi-syllabic rhymes, ICP’s lyrics sounded like what they were: hastily drawn cartoons. The Insane Clown Posse once hinted that when their sixth “joker card” album dropped, it would mark the end of the world. In 1996, there was still a small part of me that naively believed it could be true; at 11, I may have stopped believing in Santa Claus, but the eschatology of the dark carnival did not yet seem too farfetched. By the time the fifth joker card album was released in 1999, just five months after The Slim Shady LP, I no longer even cared enough to buy a copy.

In Part 3: The Insane Clown Posse finds God (sort of), loses fans, and uncovers the meaning of life.

If Internet memes are in fact like viruses, a certain unhealthy fascination with the Insane Clown Posse seems to be one bug that our collective body has at last overcome. Rewind eight months, when most of us contracted (or re-contracted) Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J on YouTube, that great incubator of digital contagion. There we discovered, with mingled joy and revulsion, that around these two scary clowns had sprung up not just a school of rap, but an entire subculture of angry-looking men and women, or “Juggalos” and “Juggalettes.” It felt wrong to mock these people, but, like the delicious scratching of rashy flesh, we delighted ourselves in it nonetheless. And then we spread it on to our friends. Seemingly overnight, the outbreak was nation-wide; ICP was being discussed on blogs, parodied on SNL, and interviewed, exhaustively, on everything from their taste in women (fat) to their understanding of basic physics (slim).

Ultimately, to sate the itch, we sent spies to report back from ICP’s annual concert festival, a raunchy, scabby bacchanal known as The Gathering of the Juggalos. While performing there one night, the human-sized Bratz doll known as Tila Tequila was pelted with beer bottles by an inhospitable crowd. In an attempt to appease her attackers, Tequila reportedly pulled down her top and jiggled her boobs at the audience. At this point, according to some reports, the crowd hurled a watermelon full of human feces at her. Cartoonish and grotesque, the assault could have been plucked directly from an ICP lyric. (Got TT to show me hella tit, then I Gallaghered that bitch with a ‘melon fulla shit. [Splat!]) Art and life had collided; exhausted, disgusted, we finally looked away.

In the postmortem, the consensus has been that ICP will now sink back into the obscurity that they deserve. But this feels obtuse; if all we ever remember about the Insane Clown Posse is their lack of artistic talent, then we will have misremembered the Insane Clown Posse. The most common attacks against them as musicians (when people even stoop to address their music anymore) are that 1. it’s not good, and 2. it’s not funny. I will concede the first point, but not the second. Because the Insane Clown Posse are funny; it’s just that most of us are too old to get the joke.

The duo’s misogyny, their homophobia, even their depictions of violence were never really hateful so much as naughty. Martin Bashir once compared their songs to “nursery rhymes laced with murder,” but in actuality they are more like Itchy and Scratchy cartoons laced with whatever hormone cocktail makes us grow hair in new places. Theirs is the familiar rage of being horny but unfulfilled; it’s that desperate fear of dying a virgin.  “We don’t get chicks. We don’t get chicks. We never get any damn chicks!” Violent J complained to Adam Carolla on an episode of Loveline back in 1997, when the group was experiencing its first flush of success. (He also admitted, somewhat sheepishly, that he and Shaggy 2 Dope also didn’t smoke pot or drink alcohol. Faygo-brand root beer was their drug of choice.)

Six years earlier they’d changed their name from the Inner City Posse to the Insane Clown Posse, adopted the themes of the burgeoning horrorcore rap scene, and, fortunately, shed their third member, a one John Kickjazz (whom I always imagine as an SNL character played by Andy Samberg). The group steadily cultivated a surprisingly huge fan base; when they appeared on Loveline in 1997, their fourth album, The Great Milenko, had just gone platinum without the help of any advertising, radio airplay, or exposure on MTV.  They were unexpected millionaires, but strangely, they didn’t seem much interested in the money. Violent J told Carolla he drove a purple Ford Explorer and lived in a $250,000 house. “I have a seven-digit bank account, and I’m an idiot!” he exclaimed, as bewildered as anyone else at his success.

Most of that money ICP ended up reinvesting in their first feature film, Big Money Hustlas, a lovingly rendered neo-Blaxploitation comedy featuring, among other things, Harland Williams as a character named Officer Harry Cox. The fact that they reinvested the money (in a high concept re-appropriation of black culture, no less) is key: ICP, and by extension their diehard fans, never seemed to yearn for the usual things— fame, fortune, or artistic recognition—but rather for a new and concrete identity, built largely around a disavowal of cultural norms. Hence: makeup; dyed hair; foggy espousals of religion and anti-religion; a co-opting of the term ‘underground’; cartoon violence; black slang; fat girls slam-dancing in the mud; and shock comedy.

Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J started wearing scary clown makeup in 1992, the same year Todd McFarlane created Spawn. It was a time when that kind of dark-but-childish aesthetic seemed edgy, rather than trashy and puerile. For many years, the duo also practiced “extreme wrestling”—another thing that seemed edgy back in the early 90s—bouncing around in rings wrapped with barbed wire and hitting their opponents with flaming baseball bats studded with thumb tacks. Their lyrics threatened violence, often of a sexual nature, but these too were always weirdly cartoonish and stunted; in one song, Violent J says he will dip his nuts in your soup and “bust a nut in your macaroni”; in another, he threatens to assault his date’s mother, but then imagines it in the most pubescent conceivable way: “After your mom does the dishes and the silverware, I dry fuck her ‘til I nut in my underwear.” Wrestling, crude language, intra-underwear-ejaculation—these transgressions are ones that only teenage boys (and people with the minds of teenage boys) exalt.

Despite their occasional efforts at musical legitimacy, we never learned to take the Insane Clown Posse seriously. Even when they attempted to make deep music—about, say, their child-like wonder at the mysteries of the universe—we still laughed. (Or rather, we LOLed, which is to say, we sat in silence and smirked; in the mute reaches of the digisphere, the one has long been mistaken for the other.) In the end, we failed to take ICP’s “Miracles” to heart not because their sudden shift into antiscience signified a regression from adolescence to childhood—“Niagara Falls and the pyramids, everything you believed in as kids”— or because it evinced a shocking lack of education. (It did, but since when do we fault high school dropouts for not understanding the workings of electromagnetism?) No, these were just the excuses one social class used to vent its frustrations with another, lower one: namely, their stubborn refusal to accept the dictates of the American educational system—their wish to remain stupid. (More about that later.)

In the end, the real reason we didn’t regard ICP as serious and introspective artists is because they didn’t even seem to see themselves that way. Take “Miracles.” Sandwiched between couplets earnestly marveling at the appearance of rainbows and the invisibility of music, ICP manages to slip in a line that could well have been penned by Shel Silverstein:

Violent J: “I fed a fish to a pelican at Frisco bay. It tried to eat my cell phone.” Shaggy [in an aside]: “He ran away.”

“Jokes. Jokes, man. Jokes. Jokes. Jokes,” Violent J told The Guardian, when an interviewer tried to parse the moral messages embedded in a song entitled “I Stuck Her With My Wang.” “It’s just a ridiculous scenario. Silly stories, man. Silly stories.” This pronouncement and countless others like it should have been clue enough that ICP are fundamentally unserious artists (i.e. comedians). But for me, this realization didn’t gel until I heard their response to an interviewer’s question about the SNL parodies of their videos. “That, on the real, was awesome,” Violent J said, suddenly growing sincere. “To be honored on Saturday Night Live like that, is close to as great as being honored by Weird Al.”

In Part 2: Weird Al, Eminem, and the strange power of comedic rap on the eleven-year-old brain.

“How’d they do that, in a year when 19 state legislatures flipped from blue to red? Some of it was old-fashioned machine politics, but a lot of it was done by strategically deferring any potentially unpopular vote on anything that really mattered until after the election. … One controversial vote that isn’t likely to make it through is on SB 1716, the bill that would allow gay couples the same rights as straight ones.”

It is with pleasure that I dig into a steaming plate of crow on this one: in January, Governor Quinn signed a law legalizing civil unions in Illinois, which passed both houses during that very lame-duck period. I read the tea leaves pretty wrong on that one — although given my confident proclamation that Harriet Miers would be confirmed to the Supreme Court, I’m starting to think I should get out of the business of political predictions altogether.

In fact, it was another red-letter date in the struggle for marriage equality last week, when the Justice Department announced it would no longer stand up for the Defense of Marriage Act in federal courts. After two years of gay-rights groups wondering where the president’s leadership on their cause was, the decision was widely hailed among equality advocates; Marriage Equality USA called it a “watershed moment,” Freedom to Marry thanked Obama for the “excellent news.”

These victories, coming in a relatively short span of time, were of course exciting. But they also reminded me of a nagging qualm I’ve had with the way the marriage equality battle has been fought, the danger of which I’m not sure is monumental but I think at least bears remark.

The success of the movement for wider acceptance of homosexual relationships has been thanks to a gradual, at times painfully slow process of reassuring the general public that gay people are no different from you or me. Gay characters and couples appeared more and more frequently on TV and in movies. More and more cultural icons came out of the closet and didn’t suddenly turn into hyper-promiscuous sex-dungeon-keepers. And the institutions that fought for gay rights, and the court cases that lobbied for them, foregrounded ordinary American families, working hard, raising kids — families that happened to have a same-sex couple at either end of the table. Here’s the gay couple at the PTA meeting, there’s the lesbians at the grocery store, and slowly the needle of public opinion starts to move.

This strategy is neither misleading nor, it seems to me, lacking in effectiveness. I think my generation’s perspective on homosexual couples is as completely shifted from my parents’ as theirs was from their own parents about interracial ones — we’ve moved from at best an uneasy, halting acceptance to, by and large, an everyday unthinking acceptance.

But the voices of academia that still bounce around in my head, though fainter with every passing day since graduation, still cry foul when they witness this kind of normalizing process. By insisting that gay couples are also “normal,” doesn’t that rely on a category of “abnormal” against which to define itself?

In some ways, gay-rights groups can sound almost as conservative as the religious right when they talk about marriage: the argument that gay couples are as capable as straight ones of upholding the venerable traditions of the institution of marriage continues to venerate that exclusive institution. These groups are explicitly not trying to radically transform marriage — but without doing that, won’t it continue to be an exclusive club, allowing some entry and denying it to others? Leaning on an idea of the “normal” married couple or family is precisely a process of exclusion, and herein lies the danger.

What might seem like sort of abstract intellectualizing is made very real by an essay called “Sexual Reorientation” by Liz Glazer, a Hofstra Law professor and a dear if distant friend. (Liz, if you read this, I miss you, babe. Are you in town? Let’s talk.)

Glazer talks about the phenomenon, identified by scholar Kenji Yoshino, called “bisexual erasure.” Bisexuals are a precise example of one of the groups left in the cold of the non-normal by the fight for same-sex marriage, a group strategically overlooked and, intentionally or otherwise, excluded from the discussion.

To illustrate this point, Glazer looks at the testimony of Sandy Stier, the partner of Kris Perry, in the Perry v. Schwarzenegger case challenging California’s Proposition 8. Stier had been married to a man who died. As a widow, she met Kris Perry, a woman, and fell in love. She testified that she had loved her husband when she married him, so Ted Olson, an attorney for the plaintiff, asked her how she could be so sure she was actually gay. “Well, I’m convinced, because at 47 years old I have fallen in love one time and it’s with Kris,” she replied.

Both Olson’s question and Stier’s response are emblematic of the problem of bisexual erasure, and the problem with the strategy of the pro-equality movement. Olson is insisting, and Stier is confirming, that she has picked a side, that her relationship with a woman is the product of a fundamental fact of her identity — homosexuality — and not just a passing fancy, a love truer than the one she was capable of sharing with her husband. This completely precludes the possibility of bisexuality, the possibility that she might be attracted to both sexes and simply have found a second partner she’d be willing to spend the rest of her life with.

That’s not to insist (Glazer points out) that Stier is actually bi and just doesn’t know it; it’s only to say that such a possibility is completely ignored in the discussions around gay marriage. Lifelong attraction to the same sex is as acceptable as attraction to the opposite sex — homosexual couples and heterosexual couples should be equal — but anything in the middle, anything that threatens to erode those two pillars of conformity, is off-limits. Bisexuality is seen in this debate as at worst a myth, and at best a passing phase that ultimately leads to one pole or the other. Those identifying as bisexual (to say nothing of transgendered or intersex people) are left with no ground to stand on.

So, now’s the point in the essay where I bring it home with an emotional connection to my personal life. There’s the rub: I’m not gay, or bisexual. In fact, I’m not a member of any group that’s historically been denied its civil rights in this country (except for non-land-owners). So it’s easy for me to armchair-philosophize on pushing for more inclusiveness, or a more radical re-imagining of traditions like marriage. I don’t have much skin in the game. Meanwhile, with shades of Martin-versus-Malcolm, pro-equality groups point to the successes of the go-slow, pragmatic approach, and they’re very tangible and real and meaningful: my friends, my brother, my neighbors, my boss, all can now partake in the same privileges as I can here in Illinois when we find a partner we want to spend our lives with. These are achievements I would be a callous bastard to scoff at.

But, grains of salt taken, I think it’s important to be sure that as we fight to alter an institution like marriage, that we’re actually tearing the walls down, and not building them again just farther out, encompassing more territory but still equally as high.

I am at Tsukiji, the largest fish market in the world, right in the heart of Tokyo. The average worker at the Tsukiji fish market regards me as a nuisance: a blond visitor impeding the speed of their work as they dart through skinny hallways. Yes, this is the real Japan, and they aren’t afraid to admit that I am not a part of it.

******

Plenty of tourists go abroad looking for nothing more than relaxation and natural beauty. These people are going to visit Saipan because the water is diamond-clear and the sand is white and fine.

But for a lot of us, I think, we go abroad in search of some kind of authentic experience, hoping to truly be a part of a foreign culture. We want to feel not what it is like to be a tourist there, but to live there and to breathe the air of the locals.

When I was in Krakow, Poland, I was convinced to go on the “Crazy Communist” tour of Nowa Huta, a city built on the outskirts of Krakow during the Soviet reign over the Eastern Bloc. It was meant to be the “perfect proletariat community,” a utopia for the workers. It is also where many of the uprisings against soviet rule in Poland began.

The “Crazy Communist” tour promised a ride in a Trabant, a visit to a real milk kitchen (a sort of cheap cafeteria prevalent in Poland), and a drink of vodka in a Communist apartment. This ended up just being a tour of a relatively poor area of Krakow. The apartment was one in which real people currently lived, and the milk kitchen was just a cheap café where people were eating. In fact, I had eaten at a milk kitchen the day before when I was hungry and needed a quick bite.

Never in my life have I felt more like a privileged, ugly American than when an old man eating lunch in his local diner moved over so there would be enough room for our tour group. I made eye contact with him as he moved; the look on his face was one not of disgust or anger, but surrender.

The clawing guilt I felt in that milk kitchen is a common experience among culture-seeking American tourists. How do you experience something authentic without jeopardizing that very authenticity? David Foster Wallace puts it well in a footnote in “Consider the Lobster,” describing what it means to be a late-date American tourist:

“(To be) alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you.”

This dilemma highlights the impossibility of pure objective observation or experience. It is, essentially, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle writ large. It is impossible to observe or experience a phenomenon, a culture, or a place without affecting it, without changing it in some way.

But the problem with Foster Wallace’s point (and granted it was just a footnote to an article about an entirely different subject, so I’ll cut him some slack) is that it presupposes some form of the real that existed before the tourist showed up. It ignores the fact that most places were in a constant state of change before the tourist was a presence (Can you define one era in the U.S. that was authentically “American” over any other time?). It’s true that a place may have been different before it was overrun with tourists, but in many places, for better or worse, the tourist is now part of the authentic landscape; the tourist is just one more change in a world that is always changing.

When in downtown Prague, the drunken American exchange students you are bound to run into are as real as anybody else. And when in Nowa Huta, the western tourists shelling out 40 dollars to revel in a the absurdities of Soviet idealism and take pictures of an old man in a milk kitchen says a hell of a lot about the geopolitical and socioeconomic state of modern Poland. To be clear, I do not necessarily believe the changes these tourists bring with them are positive, but they are, without a doubt, real.

******

A hub of the rich American ex-pat community in Tokyo is a place aptly named the Tokyo American Club. Here is a place where Americans can forget they are in Japan and have the comfort of being somewhere thoroughly American. It features a bowling alley, a diner where you can get milkshakes and cheeseburgers, and an English language video rental store. Plus, it’s full of Americans. As a child, I only got to go on the rare occasion I visited a friend whose parents had a membership. But, for me, it was Mecca.

I lived most of my life in Tokyo, yet for myriad reasons I will always be a tourist. This is largely my own fault. I spent a lot of my time there actively defining myself as an American. I would tell my parents I wanted to move back to California and be a “normal American boy,” which in my mind consisted of playing little league baseball, chasing ice-cream trucks, and running around in open fields hitting my friends with sticks. I took Spanish instead of Japanese as my language in school because speaking Spanish was a very American skill.

My failure to embrace Japan when I lived there is one of my biggest regrets, and every time I go back I try to make up for it. I try to have the most authentically Japanese experience I can have. I try not to go to my friends’ high-school hangout of Hub, a faux-British pub with Guinness on tap and fish and chips in the fryer, and instead frequent more authentically Japanese bars; I duck into random ramen shops that have four seats; I go to Tsukiji.

The interesting thing about Tsukiji as a tourist destination is the fish market itself is a place of commerce not meant to serve the visitor. Yes, it is a tremendous spectacle that is outrageous to experience, but it does not exist to be experienced or observed. It serves as a functioning market for people to sell and buy everything that we humans can pull out of the sea. And many of the men and women who work there aren’t ashamed to let you know that you’re presence isn’t entirely welcome. This isn’t necessarily because you are spoiling some Japanese aesthetic they hold dear, but more likely because you are taking pictures, not actually buying the fish they are selling, and getting in their way. This, of course, makes the novelty of it even more enjoyable. What feels more authentic than that which openly challenges an intruder on that authenticity?

But the intruder anxiety is still there for me. I know that my very presence here is destroying what I deem so wonderful about this place. To assuage my guilt I stop at a stall to buy a small cut of tuna. As I am assuring the man selling the tuna that I will in fact be eating it within the next four hours and I know how to cut it, I realize that just as much as he is part of my authentic experience of the market, tall blond Americans buying cuts of tuna he rightly assumes they have no idea how to prepare is part of his.

A man pushing Sea Urchins on a cart through the tiny alleyway yells at me and breaks me from my reverie. I look around the market spotted with blond heads, breathe in the air of recently slaughtered fish, and build up my appetite for the best sushi I’ll ever eat.

As twenty-somethings, my friends were also part of the first generation to leave behind expansive digital footprints after death. If I want to, I can read all of our archived chats and emails. I can Google their names and find almost everything they authored or were featured in on the Internet. And, of course, I can visit their Facebook profiles.

Though all remainders of my friends are somewhat haunting, there’s something particularly unsettling about the digital ghosts that Facebook profiles become. After death, lists of activities and interests remain unchanged, along with any notes the users posted, hundreds of their photographs, and basic information like their hometown, their alma mater, and their birthday. Their profiles even list where they currently live (they do not list date or cause of death). In fact, if it weren’t for their walls, which become filled with posts of mourning and eulogy, it would seem as if nothing had happened to these people at all. Strangers who stumble upon the deceased’s profiles—blocked from seeing wall posts—would have no reason to believe they were not still alive and well. The Facebook system may even send automated reminders encouraging friends of the deceased to get in touch with them if they haven’t interacted in a while.

Again, sometimes I visit the profiles of my late friends looking for comfort—an old picture of the two of us, perhaps—but sometimes I can’t bring myself to look. I see their names pop up in my friends list and I click away. I have a dark, somewhat ridiculous suspicion that the crime I’ve always accused Facebook of perpetrating—reducing real, living, complex individuals into stark sets of easily-digestible data—is finally complete. Because the individual is dead, and the data remains indefinitely. Because, despite the individual’s absence, so many people continue to address this simulacrum in the second person, as if the person behind the screen is still checking their profile, or—more menacingly—as if the profile has finally replaced the person entirely.

There is no doubt: the Facebook wall has become a new, complex, and extremely relevant site of mourning; but many people feel off-put and perplexed by it. Zadie Smith writes in her critique of Facebook:

I’ve noticed—and been ashamed of noticing—that when a teenager is murdered, at least in Britain, her Facebook wall will often fill with messages that seem to not quite comprehend the gravity of what has occurred. You know the type of thing: Sorry babes! Missin’ you!!! Hopin’ u iz with the Angles. I remember the jokes we used to have LOL! PEACE XXXXX

When I read something like that, I have a little argument with myself: “It’s only poor education. They feel the same way as anyone would, they just don’t have the language to express it.” But another part of me has a darker, more frightening thought. Do they genuinely believe, because the girl’s wall is still up, that she is still, in some sense, alive? What’s the difference, after all, if all your contact was virtual?

Smith brings up an important question: How does the quality of death change in a world of rapidly expanding virtual interaction?

As humans, we haven’t evolved very far past our chimp ancestors in terms of our neurological capacity to form strong interpersonal ties. Chimps usually travel in groups of six to ten, and identify with larger communities of about 40 to 60. If you’re a young person who lives in a city, chances are your social life reflects these numbers pretty well—a core group of six to ten roommates and close friends with whom you interact on an almost daily basis, and a larger community of 40 to 60 friends whom you can count on running into at larger social gatherings.

But, with social networking, cell phones, and email, the group of individuals with whom we maintain at least some very marginal amount of contact can easily number in the hundreds. And there’s something a little unsettling about this. There is a limit to the number of relationships in which we can truly invest ourselves. Virtual relationships, for obvious reasons, tend to be weaker than those based on frequent physical contact. Friends who we used to see on a regular basis in college have been reduced to intermittent online pals, and new friends have entered our core group. But these new friends, too, may be marginalized in the near future. We are constantly moving and meeting new people, taking summer jobs, spending time abroad, bouncing from city to city, returning to school, etc. We’d like to use virtual media to keep up with everyone we’ve met and loved, and we’d like to bring even more people into the fold with social networking, but at some point this is simply impossible. Managing the flux of one’s social circle can be frustrating, confusing, even heartbreaking.

This confusion is felt especially after a death. When someone in our core group passes away, their absence is physical, immediate, extremely real. When, at the open casket, I laid my hands on the almost unrecognizable body of a man whom I had seen alive and well not even a week prior—and with whom I had spent the last many months living and dreaming and laughing almost every single day—that loss was real. But when someone outside of our core group dies, we often realize, perhaps ashamedly, that there is something a little less real about it. And when someone dies who we’ve only known predominantly, or perhaps exclusively, in the virtual sphere, there may even be something—as Smith says—a little unreal about it. As we accumulate and maintain more and more weak relationships via virtual media, the character of death itself may become, on average, more virtual. It’s a disquieting thought.

And certainly, on average, Facebook is a space for the shallow and the superfluous. An abundance of shitty writing and obnoxious abbreviations—the kind Smith highlights—reinforces the belief many of us have that Facebook is a place for unintelligent interaction. Facebook walls are most often littered with posts linking to asinine Youtube videos, or hawking a show or a party (or a blog post). So when we see that this same space has been commandeered for mourning and eulogy—for something of the utmost severity—we feel uneasy.

But the kinds of posts I tend to see on my late friends’ walls don’t leave me with the impression that the reality of their deaths has somehow been misunderstood, that the gravity of the situation is lost to the people who eulogize them. Consider the impassioned posts from the grieving mother; the post from the younger brother, who, two years out, is now older than his brother ever was or will be; the posts of pictures from an annual vacation among friends that is now and forever will be one friend short; links to charities set up to honor the deceased; photos of prayer flags hung over his grave; the constant affirmations that he is still loved, still missed.

The Facebook wall may be open to an expansive set of virtual (and perhaps weakly connected) friends, and yes, once in a while an off-putting post will crop up. But the deceased’s wall is most often used, as far as I can tell, by close friends and family—and most often for sincere, heartfelt grieving and remembrance. Indeed, the mere fact that I am invested in the walls of the deceased being devoid of unappealing posts (as I think Smith implicitly is) seems to betray that I really do revere the wall as a legitimate space for mourning.

Ultimately, I don’t think it’s just the virtual aspect of mourning on Facebook that makes the practice so unsettling. Rather, it’s the fact that posting on the deceased’s wall is a very public display of grief—and that it most often takes the form of apostrophe: a direct, second-person appeal to someone or something that is absent (e.g. the deceased).

Apostrophe is a notoriously “embarrassing” (in the words of theorist Jonathan Culler) literary trope. It’s embarrassing, in part, because it seems to reveal to the reader that the text was composed for his benefit. Dialogue between two characters may easily reside within the world of the text, but when there is the “turning away” of apostrophe—an address to the absent—the fourth wall may begin to deteriorate, and the text may begin to reveal itself as a kind of performance for its audience. It’s not quite meta-fiction—a direct address to the reader—but it’s something like a first cousin to meta-fiction.

Something very similar is taking place on the Facebook walls of the deceased. Though there has always been some guise that the wall is a place for dialogue, it has also always been a place for public performance. When you post a message on your friend’s wall, you may (ostensibly) be directly addressing your friend—but you know full well that the post is available for wide public consumption. When the recipient is dead, however, whatever guise of dialogue there may have been is now gone; posting becomes an act of apostrophe, and something may seem awkward or gross about this act. It begs to be read as a performance for the public, and as such, at its worst, it may seem selfish and embarrassing. Something like: “Look at me, I’m grieving! I want to take ownership of this tragedy, to bear it publicly as something empowering and profound.”

We tend to consider our direct, second-person addresses to deceased loved ones—which most often take place at a graveside or during prayer—to be a private matter. But I seriously doubt when my friends died, many people sent them private messages on Facebook, or emailed them, or called their phones to leave messages. Posting on the wall of a late friend is a conscious decision to put what reads like a private message into a public space, to create a kind of permanent public annals of supposedly personal grieving. Of course, there’s nothing new about public grieving, and sometimes even a eulogy can seem selfish and embarrassing. But a eulogy is usually directed to the bereaved, and the deceased is most often referred to in the third person. “Let us remember our friend” is an invitation to grieve communally, to support one another; whereas “I remember you, friend” may seem like an attempt to own the grief in front of the community. Something about the second-person address, when it takes place in a public space, makes us feel embarrassed both to attempt it and to hear or read it.

I have never posted on either of my late friends’ walls—largely, I think, because of this sense of embarrassment. But it may also be because, in the face of their deaths, I’m simply at a loss for words.

There may be something embarrassing about apostrophe, but there can also be something heartbreaking and beautiful about it. Several months ago, David Brent wrote a post about Facebook for this blog. He remarked, “online social networking isn’t replacing human interaction; it’s attempting rather earnestly to fill a deep void in personal connections with a cruelly inadequate substitute.” I would qualify that the medium itself—or those behind producing it—aren’t necessarily attempting to do this; but many of the people using it are. Many users, with the utmost earnestness, go so far as to post public messages to deceased loved ones. And what void is more absolute than death? Under what circumstances are attempts at connection more cruelly inadequate?

This is the character of grief: confronting the impossibility of ever filling the void. Facebook is not the embrace of a friend, not a family with which to share your sorrow. But it is something.

Green’s piece describes a hot new trend in home design: filling vast interior spaces with “decorative book solutions.” Apparently, the rich and famous are now paying top dollar to have ritzy designers like Thatcher Wine – whose very name brings to mind some despicable Dickens villain – create custom-made “textual accents” for their Hampton villas and South Beach condominiums. Unlike traditional home libraries, most of these collections are not intended to be read. For one recent project, Mr. Wine wrapped 1,500 mass-market hardcovers – “titles by John Grisham and Danielle Steele” – in blank white paper, to be displayed in a condo’s spa room. His selections had nothing to do with literary taste: the books are simply “cheap, clean and a nice, generous size.”

To help us understand printed literature’s transformation into architectural accoutrement, Green refers us to marketing exec Ann Mack, who notes that “objectifying objects” is “a trend to watch.’” Explains Mack, “The more that objects become replaced by digital virtual counterparts — from records and books to photo albums and even cash — watch for people to fetishize the physical object.”

This, of course, is the great fear of Kindle-haters like me: that eBooks will turn printed books into the new vinyl records – curious relics of a bygone era, never used but only displayed with a hip retro irony. It seems obvious that once books become objects appreciated for their aesthetic rather than practical qualities – once form has been fully separated from function – once we all, like Ann Mack, “stack [our] books and turn them into legs for a coffee table” so we can “put [our] Kindle on top” – then the battle is over and book lovers have lost.

And yet, reading about Thatcher Wine’s wealthy, book-fetishizing clientele, I felt forced to confront an uncomfortable reality: my relationship with books isn’t really so different from theirs. My bedroom is lined floor to ceiling with volumes of fiction and history and philosophy and art. And sure, I plan to read all of them – but I haven’t yet.

Though I’d like to believe my passion for the printed word is the product of a deep-seated love of literature, the truth is I love my books as commodities; I objectify them as bedroom decor; I project myself onto them and hope that when people see them, what they will see is an intelligent young man.

Since at least as far back as Martin Luther, reading has been a great equalizing force in Western society. With the invention of the printing press and the spread of books, literacy increased exponentially among the masses. And as the knowledge gap between aristocracy and peasantry narrowed, the potential for social mobility grew.

By a biased reckoning – namely, mine – the e-reader spits in the face of reading’s egalitarian tradition. The Kindle, a new and sleek-looking doodad, seems at first glance to be yet another commodity eagerly gobbled up by that loathsome late-capitalist creature: the soulless yuppie. One cannot help but picture handsome, clean, middle-aged white people pushing strollers around recently gentrified neighborhoods, Kindles poking out of their brightly colored tote bags as they saunter past local bookstores – which sit poised on the verge of financial ruin – and toward the nearest yoga studio slash organic tea emporium.

Yet this conception is misguided. E-readers have an undeniable populist appeal: Amazon sold over eight million Kindles last year (which is greater than the populations of Brentwood, Wicker Park, and Park Slope combined). In fact, Kindles and Nooks are relatively cheap and easy to use. Unlike physical books, they don’t take up valuable living space, or impede a transient lifestyle. And in an era where reading must compete with the distracting ubiquity of television, video games, and the Internet, there is evidence that e-readers are keeping books relevant for young people. Like the printing press, new e-reader technology has the potential to spur reading and increase knowledge for a whole new section of the population. Viewed in this context, an analog book obsession feels like stuffy, conservative snobbishness: anti-technology, anti-populist, anti-progress.

Physical books, meanwhile, have their own history of elitist trappings. Fetishizing printed volumes, which Ann Mack sees as a recent trend, has been going on since long before the arrival of the Kindle. For hundreds of years, books have been collected and catalogued obsessively by the pretentious, often pseudo-intellectual elite. This collecting has little to do with actual reading: books serve as an important marker of social status. Like the clothes you wear, the books you own can indicate varying levels of education, sophistication, and affluence. In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald describes a party scene in which one of Gatsby’s guests mocks the host’s impressive personal library:

“[The books are] absolutely real – have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard.”

After pulling a volume down from one of the shelves, he continues:

“See!… It’s a bona fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me… It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop too – didn’t cut the pages.”

This dig gets at the heart of Gatsby’s pretensions: he doesn’t care about being erudite but only about appearing erudite. Like Thatcher Wine’s clients, Gatsby’s books are not in fact meant to be read at all. They serve the same function as his beautiful suits and handsome car and monstrous mansion; they are commodities which show Gatsby to be a man of wealth and taste – a man of class.

To the Gatsbys of our age, the e-reader poses a threat. Unlike real books, e-Books are difficult to show off. Unless someone asks to see what’s on your Kindle, nobody is going to know what books you own. It becomes far more challenging to prove your erudition – unless of course you actually are well read.

If old-fashioned books are status symbols, does that mean we should cheer their obsolescence? What, if anything, does the printed word still have left to offer us?

In 1936, the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin observed: “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.” He noted that the uniqueness of a painting or sculpture – its specific history and tradition – gave it a power which was stripped from it by repeated reproduction.

But there’s a different kind of aura that mechanically reproduced books carry with them: not the aura of the words on their pages, but the aura of their reader. Although many copies exist of every printed book, each copy becomes unique once it’s really been read by someone – it has their markings and sweat and coffee stains all over it.

In a 2009 essay on the Kindle for the New Yorker, novelist Nicholson Baker notes that one of his biggest problems with digital books is their ephemeral nature:

“Kindle books aren’t transferrable. You can’t give them away or lend them or sell them. You can’t print them. They are closed clumps of digital code that only one purchaser can own. A copy of a Kindle book dies with its possessor.”

I can’t deny that part of my obsession with printed books is simply a materialist desire to own things. And I can’t fully escape my ingrained capitalist need to be defined by the things I own. At the same time, I do believe that physical books have value. Every good book – analog or digital – tells a story. But the former tells an additional story that the latter does not: it is a story of that book’s particular history; which is also a history of the person or people who have read it.

This quality of printed books – that their copies do not “die with their possessor” – has become especially important to me in the past few weeks. A very close friend of mine passed away. His name was Jim and he was a voracious reader. He first developed a love of literature during a particularly low period in his life. He was in prison, confined to solitary for a full month, and the only thing he managed to take with him was a copy of East of Eden. He read the whole thing cover to cover – and then he read it again. And again. And again. He would finish the last page and immediately turn back to the first. Reading that book, Jim said, he discovered beauty and truth such as he had not know before. Some people find these qualities in religion – my friend found them in literature. So he read East of Eden six consecutive times.

East of Eden – Jim’s Eden, his copy (which he actually ended up stealing from the prison library) – sits on my bookshelf today. It’s a complete disaster: binding taped; back cover ripped; edges smudged, stained, and frayed. The thing looks like trash. It’s unreadable. Yet the book is beautiful to me, because it contains evidence of all the truth and beauty that my friend found in its pages. Jim physically affected those pages just as they affected him; the interaction that took place between person and book still lives on in the latter.

Jim is gone. But the Eden on my shelf contains a narrative – one that’s related to but separate from the narrative Steinbeck wrote. It’s not “Jim’s story” – at the end of the day, people are not so easily defined by their possessions. But it is a story about Jim; and I am grateful to have it.

I’m not outraged for the same reasons that girl-power blog Jezebel was when they wrote about Munn’s having been hired last July. The blog alleged that Munn—former Attack of the Show host and inspirer of ejaculate the internet around—was obviously only hired as eye candy, because The Daily Show thinks that’s all that women are. Their argument that the program has a gender “double standard” was supported by mostly off-the-record comments from female ex-employees who blamed their terminations on their lack of Y-chromosomes. Go-get-’em-girl comments abounded.

Jezebel’s conclusion ignored the fact that the show’s current alpha female correspondent—Samantha Bee—has worked there longer than any other correspondent in the show’s history (except Steven Colbert). It also ignored the 40% of the show’s current staff who are women, who soon after released a statement saying, “Go f@#k yourself.”

A Slate response to the whole debacle put it this way: tirades like Jezebel’s hurt feminism more than they bolster it: “The vibe is less sisterhood-is-powerful than middle-school clique in-fight, with anyone who dares to step outside of chalk-drawn lines delimiting what’s ‘empowering’ and ‘anti-feminist’ inevitably getting flamed and shamed to bits.” The article then pointed to what it dubbed a paradox: that amidst all this fingernail scratching, few had seen the positive perspective that Munn, who embodies the neo-feminist ethos that women should be allowed to look and feel as sexy as they like, did get the job. Slate, like many online commenters, dug in its heels, ultimately applauding the hiring of Munn because she  “dares to seem to want to sexually attract men.”

Nobody, though, has gotten at why I’m outraged. As I see it, this shouldn’t be a debate about whether comedians can be good looking (that’s a tired conversation) or about gender inequality in comedy (an actual phenomenon and yet an even more tired conversation).

Now, there are plenty of things you could say about Ms. Munn. You could say she’s Megan Fox hot. You could say that she likes circus animals and deep throating mustard soaked hot dogs. You could say you’d give your left nut to eat that mustard soaked hot dog back out of her mouth because she’s Megan Fox hot and likes circus animals. Alternatively, you could say you wouldn’t anymore because you just read that she banged Dane Cook. Because my suspicions that she’s a tranny are still unconfirmed, even after hours of exhaustive searches (and lots of the other people in this café noticing the tranny porn on my screen), there’s only one thing I’ll say about her for sure: Olivia Munn is not fucking funny.

Watch her on the show to see what I mean. You can feel the writing and the other actors struggling to keep the sketch going despite Munn’s lack of instincts and charm, like a teacher clad in all black holding the hand of the special-ed kid playing the Wall in Midsummer.

I know something about being in “boy’s clubs”, as Jezebel said The Daily Show is. I’m writing this post for a blog called “Bachelors of the Arts,” whose small cache of posts have never before featured a female writer (largely because it’s taken me a few weeks to get around to writing this rant). Two of this blog’s creators and I were founding members of an improv comedy troupe as undergrads at Brown; I was the one female to the group’s four or five men. During those years of performing alongside them I did not learn that comedy comes more naturally to one gender and not the other. Such an argument ignores the unromantic fact that good comedy takes hard work. Like any comedians, where my cohorts and I were blind to our own faults we were unlikely to grow; where we gave ourselves entirely to one another and our craft, we maybe succeeded. Watching clips of the ex-Daily Show correspondents who whined to Jezebel, I for one am not convinced that the show has a pattern of firing women; I am convinced that the show has a pattern of firing people who aren’t very good. Perhaps I was predisposed to thinking so because the tenor of their remarks to Jezebel—their certainty that it was their genitalia and not their lack of collaborative mojo that did them in—struck me as being antithetical to the try-and-try-again attitude necessary to the production of good comedy.

It’s reasonable to infer that thousands of men and women alike have auditioned unsuccessfully for The Daily Show in its fifteen years, and that many have been hired only to be slyly fired a moment later. It’s also reasonable to infer that far more men have undergone this hardship than women. And it’s the show’s prerogative, if not its burden, to only keep around the best. This is especially true these days, as the program has more or less replaced that derelict institution SNL as our culture’s great comedy mine: Mo Rocca, Steve Carrell, Dave Attell, and of course Stephen Colbert got their breaks there. The Daily Show has to keep its standards up not only for its own ratings, but for the greater culture of comedy (a culture whose pantheon is arguably reigned by Mr. Stewart and Ms. Tina Fey).

The truth, is, we don’t know why Olivia Munn was hired. And we, like the sensationalists who wrote the original Jezebel piece can’t know, as we can never know the myriad reasons that anything happens in show business (unlike them, I won’t speculate, but not because this blog has journalistic ethics).

The real problem, now, is that the Daily Show can’t de-Munn. Because Jezebel took it upon itself to write this tirade and therefore politicize the issue of her employment, they’ve guaranteed that the Daily Show will keep her on, at least until this blows over, or else face a lot of flak. This in my opinion is the biggest setback of the whole scenario, from a woman’s standpoint. Where there may or may not have been a gender “double standard” to begin with, there’s certainly one now: Munn won’t be fired out of appeasement and meanwhile unfunny male correspondents can be hired and fired without a hitch. Olivia Munn will continue to appear on air with her whiny voice and blank gaze, all the while perpetuating the stereotype that women aren’t funny.

In an interview with the Daily Beast in the wake of the scandal, Ms. Munn intoned that she’s not a feminist because she believes that men and women should be treated equally. Equal treatment of the genders, of course, is feminism. I guess I forgive her for not knowing this—women’s blogs, after all, like women’s magazines before them, subsist off and therefore promote a contorted pro-woman, anti-man definition of feminism. (Also, she strikes me as being an idiot.) The actual feminist move here is to fire Ms. Munn precisely because women and men should be held to the same standards. Fire her, and replace her with someone better for the job, like me.

Four years after The Smoking Gun revealed that Frey had exaggerated parts of his memoir A Million Little Pieces, about triumphing over addiction, he’s back in the news with his own fiction company Full Fathom Five. Frey’s been doling out miserable contracts to young MFA students for practically no pay to write commercial works they won’t own the rights to in order to create high-profit, low-overhead literary franchises. Right: asshole.

Beyond questions of character, this also confirms what I had always thought about Frey’s memoir and all his subsequent babbling about “truth” – he doesn’t really care as long as the money comes in. Frey has said repeatedly that he would have published Pieces as fiction, but there’s no way it would have sold as well, because frankly, it’s just not very good. So instead, he slapped a nonfiction label on it, did his song and dance on Oprah, and cashed his check. And when he got caught, he backed off for a bit, apologized, and then later said he regretted apologizing because he believes, like a freshman after one semester of philosophy, that really, there’s no such thing as objective truth.

I’m tempted to end the essay here having said nothing other than that Frey’s an asshole, but the problem is it’s not just Frey. He’s part of a whole class of opportunists to whom “nonfiction” is for literature what “inspired by true events” is for movies – a marketing device. Take Hostel, the Eli Roth scare-flick about backpackers being tortured in dimly lit rooms, which was inspired by the “true event” of Eli Roth receiving a link to a website that said “you could go to Thailand, pay ten thousand dollars to go into a room and shoot someone in the head.” OK, sure – but I still don’t think the film’s novelization should be listed as “nonfiction.”

On the other hand, the backlash after nonfiction literary scandals is equally crazy. Academics and writers alike insist “nonfiction” is about factual truth: that’s what distinguishes it from fiction. Under this definition, any exaggeration is practically heresy. After the Frey affair, Alex Heard published a ridiculous eight-page New Republic piece entitled “This American Lie,” in which he took humorist David Sedaris to task for exaggerating and fabricating. “There’s a simple rule” in nonfiction, Heard wrote, “don’t make things up.”

This is the kind of sentiment I hear from time to time in my own MFA nonfiction program. If Frey represents those for whom truth means nothing and therefore everything is permissible in nonfiction, then the other logical extreme is those for whom truth means everything and is precisely what legitimizes nonfiction.

The problem is that neither of those positions is tenable. Heard et al’s concept of nonfiction isn’t even antiquated – it’s flat-out wrong. David Shields, who recently published his “manifesto” Reality Hunger, comes much closer: “Fiction gives us a rhetorical question: ‘What if this happened?’ (The best) nonfiction gives us a statement, something more complex: ‘This may have happened.’” It’s a nuanced distinction, but an important one.

The question isn’t really whether you’re allowed to exaggerate in nonfiction, but more importantly what that exaggeration amounts to – does it make a story more or less true? “In any war story, but especially a true one…when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed,” Tim O’Brien writes. Authorial changes to make a story more true to the messy, subjective human experience may simultaneously reduce a memoir’s verifiable accuracy, but that doesn’t necessarily threaten its status as nonfiction. Nonfiction can work with metaphor as deftly as fiction can to convey something uniquely true about its author. Take Lauren Slater’s “metaphorical memoir” Lying, about her struggle with epilepsy: “I’m not saying I’m making the whole thing up – but if I were, I would be doing it not to create a character as a novelist does, but, instead, to create a metaphor that conveys the real person I am…even those things that are not literally true about me are metaphorically true about me, and that’s an important point.”

People who insist on nonfiction’s objective truth are dismissing its power as literature to convey deeper truths precisely through manipulation and allegory. But people like Frey are doing something much more sinister. They’re not making changes to make their memoirs more true, but rather to make them fit more comfortably into the molds we already understand.

The false memoirs that generate the most outrage – including Frey’s – tend to all fall into the category of “redemptive memoir.” That is, they’re about the author’s fall and subsequent triumph over an extraordinary obstacle, internal or external. They’re the kind of stories we want to believe are true, because we secretly hope they’re about our own lives. That’s why there’s such an uproar when they turn out to be false, because we worry that if these stories aren’t true, well then shit, maybe we can’t change our lives; maybe we don’t have it in us; maybe it’s not possible. But most of these stories offer reductive concepts of the challenges we face anyway. Addiction, in the case of Frey, is a lifelong struggle; it isn’t triumphed over in the conventional sense. Feeding people what they want to hear may sell books – but that doesn’t make it true.

I’ll admit that I don’t know exactly where nonfiction lies. It’s hard to pin down its boundaries. It’s not journalism or fiction, though it occasionally wades into the territory of both. But I can tell you for certain what nonfiction definitely isn’t: a bullshit way to sell bad fiction.