It is the week after Christmas. My mother and I have driven to my place in Brooklyn for a little extra family togetherness. Against my better judgment, I have agreed to put my mother up in my apartment, rather that stashing her in a hotel, the usual program when she comes to town for a visit. This is her first glimpse of my new Brooklyn digs: a bigger, shabbier apartment than the one I rented in Manhattan for a couple of years. My outer borough bachelor pad. My grungy castle. My down-at-the-heels domain.
She’s not exactly pleased with what I’ve done with the place. She has — surprise! — her own ideas about how her adult son’s apartment should look. She has sinister plans for my wall-to-wall collection of back issues of Sports Illustrated.
I’m not a guy who completely lacks a design sense. I know the difference between McCobb and Wakefield. For me, the word “Shaker” does not automatically imply that it’s time to break out the vodka and vermouth. I purchased my first piece of antique furniture (a desk) when I was 20. I own a set of Michael Graves coasters.
But my tastes are not mom tastes. And to make matters worse, my mother — a gentle woman on the verge of turning 60 — is a decorator. She runs a small custom drapery business in West Virginia. She has yet to spot a swag, a tie-back, a bolt of flowery chintz or yardage of ornate damask that did not cry out to the inner Dixie Carter that rules her aesthetic soul.
My ideas about decor, by contrast, tend to treat golf clubs as furniture. A prospective diversity of indoor flora — geraniums and ferns and aloe vera plants — has by and large been reduced to a collection of forbidding cactuses. There are half a dozen remote controls hiding in the sofa’s cracks, two-week-old copies of the New York Post heaped in tottering piles, partially read novels left open on every available surface, and credit-card receipts scattered about like pale yellow leaves.
Over my fireplace mantel hangs a pair of mounted deer antlers. My 2-foot-high fake Christmas tree, perked up by three lonely Christmas cards, carries no ornaments and is losing lights at a rate of about six per year. The objects in my apartment that aren’t brown or black are orange.
I am a member of a entire subclass of not-so-young-anymore men, living in large cities, who are precariously close to being worrisome bachelors, problem sons, borderline lost causes. Our mothers lie awake at night wondering if good women are ever going to come along to reform us. They struggle to tolerate the hopeless tactics we employ to cozy up our dwellings. They’d prefer nuptials, but until that fateful day, an endless series of decorating tips will have to suffice.
“Those certainly are nice orange chairs,” my mother says, meaning: “Why aren’t you married yet?”
“Where did you find that?” my mother asks, gazing balefully at the General Electric wall clock that I spent three weeks hunting down in the junk shops of the Upper East Side. The subtext: “You’d better get rid of it if you ever want to get hitched.”
Bachelor sons in their early 30s pose a maternal dilemma of unexamined proportions. We’re too young to be completely written off, but too old to be parentally cajoled. Our mothers are compelled to resort to a kind of transparent code to improve and edify us. More often than not — especially if mom cares about the arrangement of her surroundings, as mine does — this code involves flooring, furniture, wallpaper, shelving, and most troubling of all, doodads, bibelots and tchotchkes: every mother’s quick fix for a lamentable decor.
“Why don’t you get some baskets for up there,” my mother says optimistically one morning while sipping coffee from one of my numerous gimme mugs at my supercool chrome and warped-formica Salvation Army kitchen table, her consternation focused on the bare tops of my cabinets.
“I really never finished cleaning up there,” I say, knowing full well that my cabinet tops could, two years after I signed the lease, still harbor rat skeletons or the corpses of cockroaches.
Baskets. Suggesting the purchase of decorative wicker is never a good move where the 30-something bachelor son is concerned. Pier 1 is for chicks. I prefer to shop for my housewares in Bay Ridge garages.
My mother pushes down on a wounded corner of my kitchen table. “You could fix this, you know.”
I keep my mouth shut.
“Why don’t I send you your great-grandmother’s tea set?”
Suddenly, it’s time for Mom to go home.
In my mind’s eye, I sustain my own image of the perfect surroundings. Leather club chairs; a Stickley desk; a Frank sofa; wood blinds; vintage golf photographs; a stuffed fish or two; an enormous television accessorized with a powerful Playstation; a Francis!Francis! X1 espresso machine; a kitchen entirely outfitted in gleaming Sub-Zero and Viking and All-Clad; bookcases crammed with first editions; a custom-designed closet for my fly rod, golf clubs, tennis racket, basketball and skis; a temperature-controlled wine-rack; a shower with many, many directional jets. Threadbare Oriental and Turkish carpets. A huge bed swaddled in white. A display case for my extensive collection of French and Italian ashtrays. A wet bar. A speed bag.
In the restlessly nurturing mind’s eye of my mother, there resides a vastly better lighted and less deliberately butch apartment that is organized to be shared with a member of the opposite sex. All emblems of masculinity are tidily concealed. The vacuum and the dustrag and the mop come out of hiding more often that once every three months. Living things grow and flourish, bud and flower. Wallpaper borders ring the rooms. There are pillows and fluffy miniature blankets. The feminizing touch is subtle but unmistakable.
Part of the curse of the meddling mom can be attributed to the rental apartments of the Northeast, which, regardless of widespread barely masked dilapidation, often retain enough of their fled former glory to give people ideas. Beneath those 11 layers of paint — wainscotting! Under that encrustation of filth — tilework! Visible through the accretions of crud — great potential!
Since they can no longer effectively tinker with our personalities or psyches, the mothers of us soon to be middle-aged bachelors sublimate the urge into our apartments. They fantasize about blowing into town with swatches and paint chips and, through the whirlwind expenditure of maternal effort, transforming our sad surroundings into cheerful fiancee beacons. “Some mini blinds would look nice in here,” they suggest, while in their hearts they know that if we don’t gussy the joint up, no woman will ever have us.
“This place has great potential” — the mom mantra, the semaphore of optimism. Potential, of course, means nothing to us. Scares us, in fact. It’s just another word for commitment.
I’m not half as bad as some guys, with their duct-taped recliners and phones shaped like footballs, their seductive leather sectionals, their framed posters of Porsches and end tables constructed from beer-stained issues of Maxim. Their fragrant black bedding. The undying allegiance to the microwave oven and dinners that come in trays. Their mildew farms in the bathroom.
But I can’t fully avoid being included in the woeful species. Most theoretically “masculine” decor — the God-awful girlified arrangements that appear in decor magazines — strikes me as hopeless. Where are the musty plaid sofas? I wonder when walking through Pottery Barn. Where are taxidermied squirrels? I ask myself on jaunts to Crate & Barrel. Couldn’t House & Garden find a guy who owns bowling trophies? What of the cardboard shipping boxes innovatively employed as nightstands? The pride-of-place accorded to stereo equipment? The fridge stocked not with foie gras and Krug but Bud Lite and week-old pizza?
The truth is that the contemporary bachelor pad, in all its repulsive glory, is the final remaining challenge for the shelter industry, a holdout of willful tastelessness that professional decorators — Mark Hampton wannabes and the editorial staff of Metropolitan Home — would dearly love to stamp out.
Mothers are the advance men of this campaign. If they can’t get grandchildren out of us, the least they can do is force us into accepting window treatments. In their advice, they mingle pity with undying sense that they can bring us around, that they can save us from ourselves.
We, of course, don’t want to be saved. We just want to continue to eat dinner without napkins and sleep on the couch and wallow in vigorous bachelor ineligibility. Unfortunately, following the old adage that mothers raise their sons in the image of the men they wish they had married, our moms refuse to give up on us. We have become projects, discussed ruefully among other family members, tutted over in mutually concerned company. “If only he would throw away that Dallas Cowboys beanbag chair …”
But there is an esthetic bravery in our refusal to be tamed, to become IKEA momma’s boys. Proudly, we switch on ESPN beneath paintings of dogs playing poker and ease down into our swayback thrift-shop futons. We make the bed only when there’s sex on the evening’s menu. We might dwell alone forever in our scuzzy sacrosanct environs, but we’ll never be conquered. In the end, we’ll break our mothers’ hearts, but a precious independence will stubbornly endure. Like cockroaches on the cabinet tops, we won’t go away.
Compared with their European counterparts and their colleagues in literary studies, American historians are grinders, and they’re not usually showoffs. They tend to focus on the slow accumulation of documentary evidence rather than on madcap flights of speculation. So it’s surprising that Walter Johnson, an assistant professor of history at New York University, has written “Soul by Soul,” an account of life in the New Orleans slave market in the years before the Civil War that leaps from disengaged historical judgment to social and psychological conjecture about the lives of slaves and slaveholders alike.
At the center of Johnson’s book is the slave pen, a sort of jail modified for the peculiar needs of the trade and located in downtown New Orleans, surrounded by walls as high as 20 feet. Outside the pen, slaves were publicly displayed, dressed in blue suits and calico dresses in the hopes of attracting buyers. Within its confines, slavery was privately negotiated — and, according to Johnson, not merely in financial terms. Johnson’s central argument is that slavery was as much a socially and psychologically constructed institution as one that relied on overt physical bondage. “In the slave pens,” writes Johnson, “the yet-unmade history of antebellum slavery could be daily viewed in the freeze-frame view of a single transaction on its leading edge — a trader, a buyer, and slave making a bargain that would change the life of each.” Chains, in a manner of speaking, were always in the process of being imagined and reimagined, manacles broken and reattached in a three-way chattel dance among seller, master and slave.
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What’s more, Johnson says, for Southern man circa 1840, slavery was much more than a way to get cotton harvested; it was a ticket to a better life, the antebellum South’s version of the NASDAQ. “Jefferson McKinney,” Johnson writes of one buyer, “had bought a slave in the hope of effecting the capitalist transformation of himself. McKinney’s was a fantasy of economic independence and bourgeois self-control.” From the slave pen flowed all those latter-day contradictions of Southern manhood — domestic virtue alternating with trips to the slave quarters to rape “fancy” black females; families bonded over homemade hooch; white boys playing Negro music — that we know well from William Faulkner, not to mention “The Dukes of Hazzard” and Lynyrd Skynyrd.
For the most part, this is an interesting and compelling argument, though it rests on the essentially unprovable notion that a social-climbing soap opera was being staged in the minds of white Southerners and their slaves. Of course, all Johnson has as evidence are documents — personal narratives, legal dockets, letters and posters advertising slaves — all of which are forced into the service of a pre-Freudian mass psychoanalysis.
Occasionally, Johnson goes over the top in turning slavery into an abstraction. In buying slaves who needed to be broken, he writes, “slaveholders boasted that their own mastery would inhabit their slaves’ every action. Their slaves would be extensions of themselves, the actions of the enslaved indistinguishable from the will of the enslavers. Slave breaking was a technology of the soul.” Slave breaking may have been a technology, but as much as it became one of the soul, it remained one of broken bodies, of an empirical difference between slaver and slave. Johnson avoids confronting the very concrete reality of slave suffering in favor of some rather fevered analogies. (“If necromancy was the slave market’s magic, race was its technology.”)
Where Johnson succeeds, ironically, is not in his desire to detail the daily dramas of the slave business but in the grander project of using the New Orleans slave market, its contents and its customers as a way to understand a culture that no longer exists. That culture produced a durable mythology of Southernness — admirably genteel but intolerantly patriarchal — and its racist heritage continues to tyrannize the post-Civil War South. For proof, one need only gaze at the Confederate battle flag fluttering atop the Capitol in Columbia, S.C.
It’s unlikely that Simon Schama will ever produce a book anyone
accuses of being too short. The Columbia University history professor and
author of the widely praised “Landscape and Memory” and “Citizens:
A Chronicle of the French Revolution” is among the reigning champions
of the lush and massive tome. Schama doesn’t so much write books as
deliver immense objects to his readers.
His latest undertaking, an investigation of Rembrandt van Rijn’s intricate
connection to another 17th century master, Peter Paul Rubens, is close to
the heftiest volume I have ever read. This is a 728-page
book, sized to fit 359 illustrations. The pages, when not simply walls of
print, are walls of print broken only by densely painted Baroque
masterpieces, reproduced in full color. Visual overload is always just a
licked fingertip away.
Which is just the way Schama wants it; overload is his accomplice. This
is the kind of monumental undertaking most historians would gladly trade
their rustbucket Volvos for a shot at. But would their ambition be the equal
of their envy? Schama, after all, is the jet set, the Mac Daddy of historians. He gets to write gargantuan books because he delivers the goods.
He made his mainstream reputation in 1987 with “An Embarrassment of
Riches,” a you-are-there channeling of life in the Netherlands in
the 1600s. It’s another gigantic book — 698 pages — but, really, the
Netherlands? Who cares? We should, argued Schama, because in the burgher
republic of the Dutch Golden Age, we can find the seeds of our own current
lifestyle, our embrace of plenty and our neurotic misgivings about whether
all that plenty is somehow robbing us of our souls.
Rembrandt — the most important artist to emerge from this milieu — was
certainly sensitive to the tension between the desire for excess and the
penalties that excess invites. As talented as he was extravagant, Rembrandt was the perfect painter for Calvinist Amsterdam of the 1630s
and ’40s: Apparently predestined for greatness, he became, by the end of his life, an
anachronism laid low by his foibles.
This is far from the whole story Schama has to tell in “Rembrandt’s Eyes,” however. He makes the case that Rembrandt’s career was shaped by an anxiety-of-influence relationship to the then-greatest painter in the world, Peter Paul Rubens. True to form, Schama is anything but direct in the way he details this connection.
They were night and day, Rubens and Rembrandt. While the older painter
was the soul of taste, a stoic and a devout Catholic, Rembrandt was a
Calvinist vulgarian. “Rubens’s most ardent admirers … [celebrated] the
Flemish painter’s commitment to discrimination,” writes Schama.
“Rembrandt, on the other hand … had no idea when to avert his gaze.”
Fittingly, Rubens died a painter-aristocrat who dabbled in
diplomacy and was universally mourned. Rembrandt went bankrupt and
expired penniless in a hovel just seven years after he had disinterred
his wife’s bones so that he could sell the grave to stave off his
creditors.
Rubens painted only four self-portraits, Rembrandt more than 40. “Unlike
Rembrandt’s restless makeovers,” Schama writes, “Rubens’s sense of himself
was constant.” The irony here is that Rubens was the more overtly flamboyant painter.
Rubens’ “Christ on the Cross” (c. 1613) gives us the Savior as a martyred Catholic muscleman. Rembrandt’s 1631 painting of the crucifixion, by contrast, depicts a scrawny hippie: “A Calvinist image of the body,” in Schama’s estimation, “pathetically slight, broken, and bleeding.” Rubens, the more practical man, had his head in the Platonic clouds. Rembrandt, the captive of his own appetites, had his eyes focused on the Aristotelian everyday, “the piebald, the scrofulous, the stained.” His most famous painting, “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp,” depicts an autopsy.
Of course, where Simon Schama is concerned, one takes comfort in simple
dualities at one’s peril. Partly this is a function of his style, which
is both elliptical and intense. No one can match him at translating
visual detail into scholarly porn, but neither can anyone veer more
maddeningly from the straight path of historical narrative. I used to think
“Citizens” was the most willfully disorganized book ever written. I now
realize that Schama just can’t help himself. The man thinks entirely in
codas and arabesques.
But fighting to keep up with Schama is worth the struggle. Rembrandt was
among the most complex, compelling — and flabbergasting — artists who
ever lived. He is well served by an equally daring biographer, one who isn’t
afraid to take some chances in the service of his craft.
Theresa Duncan’s widely praised CD-ROM games for girls have sported whimsical, fulsomely cute titles — Chop Suey, Smarty, Zero Zero — and have struggled to offset the splatterfest tit-show that governs much of the current gaming scene. But Duncan is no soft-focus cornflower scourge to the platoons of polygon-wielding code boys. Nor is she the pigtailed digital minx — Silicon Alley’s dream girl — who coolly winks from the dozens of photos that have graced reviews heralding her narrative-intensive projects as the kinderfeminist’s answer to Maximum Barbie.
She is instead a thoroughly savvy and, by her own admission, predatory businesswoman who just happens to possess a spunky narrative sense and an affection for old-school children’s books, as well as chutzpah by the gallon. Spending an hour with her in the Manhattan offices of her stakehorse, Nicholson NY, you can almost hear the pitter-pat of the business-magazine profile writers in the distance. With her streaky blond hair, braided in signature twin tails across her strap-halter-encased collarbones, thick stripes of black eye shadow and Paper magazine wardrobe, she could be a Condi Nast scout or a stylist for Marc Jacobs. Duncan’s image is just that, however; beneath lurks the spirit of a true player.
I’m immediately taken aback. I’m wearing a suit — a cotton summerweight Brooks Brothers suit that isn’t doing its job on a muggy and overcast August afternoon — so as to better confront the diva-ish Duncan. But I’ve completely overdressed for the meeting at Nicholson’s Puck Building suite — the kind of place where molded plastic chairs in very retro burnt avocado await the arrival of the first iMac. Plus, I’m in no mood to come off as a prototypical Alley scrivener, swaddled in St|ssy, Gap khaki and treads by somebody with point guards on the payroll.
Duncan’s latest undertaking is an hour-long, digitally animated mockumentary film called “The History of Glamour.” It’s a merciless satire of New York’s incestuous ’90s cultural moment: fashion, art, celebrity and various downtown style tribes converge and are shredded for our delectation. Clearly, Duncan is growing up, and I want her to think she’s being interviewed by an adult.
That didn’t work. Duncan, at 29, is engaged in a sort of preemptive maturation driven at least partially by market forces, and all my delusions of simpatico — not to mention the theory that I might snag a few pointers about exiting my current Peter Pan mode — quickly vanish. Duncan is making it up as she goes along, counterbalancing her Liz Phairish tomkitten chic with fabulous press and a slightly ballsy manner that at times can be patronizing.
I cringe a little, for instance, when an e-mail response from her describes Manhattan’s mopey gallery circuit as “the rarefied world of the New York art scene,” from which was drawn a “Glamour” collaborator, artist Karen Kilimnik. Duncan says that if she used live actors in her work, rather than just voices, she’d want to follow the ensemble model of Woody Allen, Hal Hartley and … Werner Herzog! She is not a woman who levels her cross hairs on the middlebrow, but the naked aspiration strikes me as more than a little overwrought.
Nothing to get all that ruffled over, of course, since her bootstrapping enthusiasm and indefatigable confidence in her ability to get noticed have resulted in a crucial whammy to the core assumptions of the interactive gaming cabal. “I’ve been thinking of us in terms of something like the Warhol factory,” she says when asked about the composition of her creative team, which includes illustrator/boyfriend/partner Jeremy Blake and Washington, D.C., punk stalwart Brendan Canty of Fugazi, plus former Bikini Kill bassist Karhi Wilcox and a pair of Mac-jockey animators. It’s a telling comparison: Like Warhol, Duncan’s business is her art, and even if she hasn’t completely abandoned her childish ways, she knows exactly what she wants.
“I was initially attracted to CD-ROMs because they’re driven by the reader’s curiosity,” Duncan says, “and for kids they offer multiple points of entry. But I really wanted to make something for adults, because with kids’ stuff you have to go through the parents to get to your intended audience.”
Of course, this turn has been prompted at least in part by the consolidation of the CD-ROM business, which now resembles the assembly line universe of so much other children’s publishing and entertainment, controlled almost entirely by licensers and a few central distribution outlets. For Duncan, the Web doesn’t necessarily represent an escape from this kind of constraining uniformity. But she doesn’t buy into the notion that the digital future is all secure transactions and Dow Jones downloads, either.
“Every time anyone talks about content on the Web anymore, it’s with a sneer. There a kind of Schadenfreude, like, ‘OK, now the artists have to move over and make way for the advertisers.’ But the idea that it’s all about e-commerce now is ludicrous, because everyone knows that’s not making any money either.”
In this sense, Duncan’s switch to film signals a savvy betrayal of the secret of her success. If anyone would know when to get out of a failing medium — or decline to take a stab at the one that’s now garnering all the frosty press — she’s the one.
“With the new project, I was interested in examining glamour as a semiotic system,” she claims, revealing her slightly wonkish academic background (her senior thesis at the University of Michigan was on technology and narrative). “In the film, the main character is looking for an identity, and glamour becomes for her a potent form of self-expression. She finds it very liberating, because she’s from a small town. But by the end of the story, glamour becomes limiting, then imprisoning, so she becomes a writer, chooses grammar over glamour.”
Duncan could be summarizing her own biography with these comments. There’s more than a vague resemblance between her and her antiheroine, Charles Valentine — who hails from the fictional backwater of Antler, Ohio, and who storms Manhattan with no coherent ambition beyond plying scams to get noticed (one of which involves smashing a window at the “Googenheim” museum with a fashionable baseball bat, dressed only in skimpy, iridescent underwear). Duncan herself was raised near Detroit and tumbled into CD-ROMs after first working as a rare-book cataloger in Washington, D.C. While her male colleagues at Magnet Interactive were enthusing over slaughter, she was putting $80,000 to a rather different use, spinning out the tale of two sisters who overgorge on Chinese food. Illustrated by Monica Geuse and narrated by David Sedaris, Chop Suey was praised by the Washington Post as “one of the finest stories-on-CD ever produced.”
Soon after, Duncan moved to New York, but by the time her second project, Smarty, came to fruition, the CD-ROM market had tanked and distributors were running scared. So Duncan took matters into her own hands, cold-calling stores and badgering magazine editors based solely on her avid perusal of mastheads. Gradually, a Duncan cult evolved, but it was short-lived. There was one more CD-ROM in the pipeline, Zero Zero, but after 1996′s Barbie Götterdammerüng, it was clear to Duncan that the good fight to empowering adolescent girls might be a field she’d want to surrender to the heavy hitters.
Her next frontier is indie-animation of the MTV variety, into which “The History of Glamour” could be tidily slotted. Charles Valentine, like Duncan’s preteen heroines, is an endearing individualist: pert lips, blond tresses and circumflex eyebrows mask a pilgrim soul with a built-in bullshit monitor. Fashion, with its host of pompous eccentrics (a crusty, limousine-dwelling agent, circa “Broadway Danny Rose”; a fashion editor whose mannerisms and diction are a mélange of Allure’s Polly Mellen, Vogue’s Anna Wintour and vintage Diana Vreeland; and a duo of pretentiously named designers), is an ideal medium through which to channel satire. Duncan’s own deep-dish clothes sense — desperately uncommon on the digital frontier — helps, of course.
“There’s a book that influenced ‘The History of Glamour’ called ‘Love, Loss, and What I Wore,’” she says. “It’s a series of strange little watercolor paintings of the author, Ilene Beckerman’s, outfits from childhood to the present. She describes all the things that happened to her in the outfits — being dumped, feeling beautiful, going to the prom, her mother dying, her marriage and divorce, her pregnancies. It’s a very spare but moving book. I, like Beckerman, remember incidents according to what I was wearing.”
Duncan’s shmatte devotion, which lent a hipster edge to her children’s projects, has now become the spur to her own developing sense of her glamorous horizons. Fox Searchlight is keeping tabs on her, and she has a literary agent at William Morris, with the possibility for a synergistic book deal hovering in the wings at HarperCollins. All the attention hasn’t slackened her verve for shepherding her projects through the media jungle, even though hustling up all her own press and advertising can be a drain. “I have such a passion for the product,” she says, “that I can do it better than almost anyone I could hire. Still, I’d love to be able to concentrate on the writing. But being in entertainment requires a lot of schmoozing.”
Her skeptical tone, however, disguises a genuine delight with the game she’s entered — a competition that goes beyond desktop animation and multimedia pioneering. Duncan seems to grasp concretely what dozens of other aspiring millionerds only understand in the abstract: that fluidity is pointless without products that can stand on their own. All the dazzling brainstorms in the world won’t amount to much more than a drizzle if consumers aren’t touched by what they buy — hooked, in a sense, on the personality pushing the fantasy.
Even though Duncan’s turn away from digital messianism, coupled with her gimlet attitudes toward multimedia’s artistic future, suggests that “The History of Glamour” is a retreat, in truth it’s a logical step toward the fulfillment of its creator’s master plan. A hard-working minor celebrity with an evidently carefree but actually quite deliberate business strategy, Duncan is exactly the sort of solo artist/entrepreneur one imagines surviving every market vicissitude — confirming that there’s no such thing as fleeting fame if it’s got talent backing it up.
Popular science writers are an excitable breed. They have to be: If they fail to infect readers with their giddiness over complex theories and frequently radical ideas about the world as we know it, then science might as well be left to the encastled brain lords who do it for a living.
Unfortunately, in their rush to craft a compelling story, science writers often do as much damage as good, slipstreaming for quick consumption issues that science still doubts. The danger is that this meta-narrative will then supplant wisdom — prompting, say, rotten blockbuster movies about asteroids decimating the Earth, or bogus legends about life on Mars based on observations of structures that only look like canals.
Tor Norretranders is the Danish James Gleick — a writer who knows a Big Idea when he sees it and possesses the skill to neuter that idea’s thorny patches without babying his readers. His “The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size” — a bestseller in Denmark following its original publication in 1991 — is the result of just such a science writer’s “eureka!”
Norretranders could scarcely have done better than to stumble across the “user illusion,” a notion he copped from Alan Kay, the interface-design guru. According to Kay: “The ‘user illusion’ … is the simplified myth everyone builds to explain … the system’s actions and what should be done next.” Blending information theory, neuroscience, cosmology, physics, theology and a grab bag of thumbnail philosophy, Norretranders sets out to demonstrate that human consciousness is an overbuffed example of just such a user illusion.
“Consciousness,” he argues, “is a fraud,” a liar that deceives us into believing that it runs the show when in fact it lags significantly behind unconscious decision making (as a groundbreaking and controversial series of experiments by Benjamin Libet revealed). Only a half-second behind, but that’s enough to play havoc with the continuum of human assumptions about how our heads work. If, for instance, consciousness is the mental equivalent of a con man, convincing us — in Norretranders-speak — that our narcissistic “I,” not our intuitive “Me,” is the boss, what happens to free will?
This concerns Norretranders — but what really has him worried is the fundamental irony that the user illusion foists on the Information Age. Joining a discussion of Maxwell’s demon (a thermodynamic problem that has vexed scientists since the mid-19th century) with some trendier current lingo, Norretranders warns that man has “moved down to a lower bandwidth, and he is getting bored.” Consciousness, naturally, is at fault, implying that it’s tapped into a vast river of data when in truth our subliminal experiences are considerably richer. “The ability of consciousness to assimilate the world,” Norretranders writes, “has been seriously overestimated by our scientific culture.”
This salvo has grave implications for practically everything that people do, even the goofy stuff. Remember listening to those old Led Zeppelin or Beatles albums when you were a sullen teen, anxiously struggling to discern the backward-masked, supposedly satanic messages? It turns out that the usually futile effort was, once again, consciousness getting in the way. It’s not that you need to try hard to catch subliminal information; subliminal information is everywhere, all the time. Consciousness simply dupes you into believing that it isn’t. The real world is backward-masked.
Norretranders differs from the standard American science scribe in his willingness to surrender the pretense of objectivity to an agenda. As his subtitle indicates, he’s no friend of haughty consciousness, with its embrace of strict, low-bandwidth reason, straight lines and keyboard drudgery. Instead, he craves sexy fractals, shills for nonlinear thinking and wallows in the freestyle cognition of pro soccer players — all because be feels that they represent more accurately the truth of human experience. “There is a terrain between order and chaos,” he writes, “a vast undiscovered continent — the continent of complexity. The precondition for discovering it is that we learn to steer between the two poles of our worldview — order and randomness, supervision and surprise, map and terrain, science and our everyday lives.”
But he also indulges in a whole series of annoying sci-writer clichés during his crusade to prove that the “epoch of the I is drawing to a close.” One is an obsession with paradox. Given that much of contemporary science traffics in little else, a certain procedural devotion to these noisome little bastards should be expected. But Norretranders — whose style is already scattershot and aphoristic — is a paradox monger. My personal favorite: “As only the conscious is conscious, and consciousness has to be the result of cerebral mechanisms so boring that we are unconscious of them, consciousness can ever be in charge.” Or: “What we experience is a lie, for we experience it as if we experienced it before we experienced it.”
Worse by far, however, is his tendency to rely on the language of formalism — a rather tight-assed confederate of mighty consciousness — to describe as “beautiful,” “elegant” or “sublime” almost every momentous scientific discovery or vital equation. He also thinks Manhattan is an example of a linear civilization — which means he probably hasn’t ever abandoned himself to the subliminal subversion of the West Village, where you can find 4th Street intersecting with 13th Street.
Norretranders, of course, would dismiss such skepticism as further evidence that “consciousness is depth experienced as surface,” and he would have some extremely provocative science on his side. At the very least, he has produced a lively story about the extreme frontiers of research in many different fields. He may have locked himself in a potentially disastrous bind — asserting that consciousness is no big deal while producing a hefty tome that showcases his supreme control over his own knowledge. He extricates himself skillfully from this awkward position, however, so of one aspect of Norretrander’s personal “I” we can be sure: this is a science writer whose enthusiasm for his work is happy to displace his meager consciousness.
