Rules Of The Game #17: Punks and Cats

[koganbot]

This week's column is something of a repeat of last week's, elaborating on both the functionality and dysfunctionality of sticking with our own (with our own people and their ideas). So, any thoughts about how to overcome the dysfunctionality, given that social clustering is necessary and inevitable?

The Rules Of The Game #17: Punks and Cats

I make no effort to justify the last three words of the piece. I just toss them in.

(Still don't know if I should ask the Web guy to insert the italics. Also, they added a strange paragraph break in the middle of a quote, and made "Net" lower case, which turns it into a mere piece of netting, whereas I was trying to have a double meaning, a normal net and an Internet. Last week I snapped at the fellow for dropping the final three paragraphs, and he objected to the snapping, which he should have, since he's always been friendly and cooperative and treated me with respect. It's not his fault they're understaffed. I don't know how far I should press him. But the editor-in-chief tells me I really should ask to get the italics included.)(EDIT: But they made "Web" lower case too, so lower case is probably just their style. Maybe I could have them put an apostrophe in front of "net.")

EDIT: Here are links to all but three of my other Rules Of The Game columns (LVW's search results for "Rules of the Game"). Links for the other three (which for some reason didn't get "Rules Of The Game" in their titles), are here: #4, #5, and #8.

UPDATE: I've got all the links here now:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/179531.html

Comments

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I'd like to consider myself adventurous compared to most music-consumers: try anything once, try a fair number of things again to see if they've grown on me any, try the odd thing because I heard someone talking about it. However I'm lucky in that my particular social group (ie poptimists, LJ, swapping CDs down the pub) contains certain people who are dedicated to searching out new music online, paying attention to the charts and going to gigs and clubs, and some who even have this music thrust upon them (I'm picturing the Lex being bombarded with jewel cases by desperate PRs!). Therefore there is a constant trickle of New entering the group - from there it bounces off the walls several times (at Poptimism, discussion on LJ) and either dissipates or becomes canonized (usually signified by someone attempting it at karaoke).

Are the groups you're talking about less receptive to this trickle? Are they missing the key players that ensure the trickle becomes a flood? Are the walls made of very non-bouncy material?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I liked the bit on normality and punk and terror (even though it was 20 years old!) - what would it mean to accept terror as normal? What music would result?

Is it desirable (even possible?) to feel and live subcultural difference in ways that don't end up comfortable?

Earlier this week I posted this on FT, about my gaming experiences in the 90s - http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/09/i-was-a-goblin-herd-mentalities/ - seemed vaguely relevant.

[koganbot]

Another reason I abandoned the book was that I had some very unresolved issues with my parents that the book was acting out and trying - not successfully - to deal with. Also, I was realizing I was maybe too immature (at the not-so-young age of 32!) to pull off a book. Rereading some of that first chapter was an ordeal.

The book opened with a couple of incidents that I simply wasn't ready to write about. A kindergarten teacher - a genuinely bad-tempered woman - had criticized me to my mother, which mortified me, my mother told my pediatrician, and both the pediatrician and my mother agreed that the teacher was at fault and had it in for me, and the result was that I was put on tranquilizers. The second incident was my terrorizing some kid in kindergarten. But of course the two incidents were actually the same one seen from two different perspectives. (The terrorization incident did have an interesting outgrowth, which is that several months later I actually taught the kid how to be less vulnerable to terror, how not to panic when kids were calling him names.)

[koganbot]

Is it desirable (even possible?) to feel and live subcultural difference in ways that don't end up comfortable?

In last week's column I was saying that adventurousness in one aspect of my life (say music listening and writing) was dependent on conventionality in others, and here I'm saying that there are patterns of conventionality even in the adventurousness.

(Stream-of-consciousness thought: by denying people welfare and guaranteed health care and a social safety net in general, you may goad some people into taking the risks and learning new skills that will get them a livable income, so they don't hang around in manageable poverty; but by providing welfare and a social safety net you may give some people the security to take innovative and creative risks that might get them fired.)

[koganbot]

"conventionality in others" = conventionality in other aspects of my life (not conventionality in other people)

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

The point about the value on non-conformity sounds very like evolution of an organism - you need some variation to try out new fits, improved fits, fits with changing environment and so on: people as the stable or mutating genes of society.

I think you're right that too many of 'our kind of people' are too easily satisfied with talking to ourselves only. This can obviously relate to politics and so on as much as aesthetics. I fall into this myself - I'd rather talk about these things with you and Mark and Tom than people less likely to say things that would interest me or things that would make me angry. I think it's a wholly understandable trait, but it does feel like an avoidance of responsibility too.

Cat books appraised (Braun vs. Brown)

[koganbot]

My brother, Richard, writes:

Stepping up to the challenge...

As you know, Nan and I read science fiction, murder mysteries, and other relatively light fiction and popular scientific non-fiction to each other for relaxation and entertainment, and have for decades. So eventually, when we got through all the Asimov and Heinlein and Kuttner and Wyndham and Christie and Sayers and Allingham and ..., we turned to other authors. My distaste for brutality and meanness as a form of relaxation and entertainment kept me away from most of the American noir classics (Nan is more fascinated with brutality than I). I really prefer a Joan Hess mystery, which features irony and a touch of romance mixed in with multiple corpses.

Anyway, in our travels we read through a number of "The Cat Who..." mysteries by Lillian Jackson Braun (there are other authors who play off this theme as well, but she seems preeminent in the field, or perhaps I should say the litter box).

What's my take? A) These are probably no better and no worse than many of the hundreds of unboiled mysteries written by American women. B) In the three or four books of hers we read, the cat is relatively incidental - perhaps it sniffs out a corpse or is found sleeping on a clue, but it is otherwise not featured. Rather, the books feature a supposedly normal person with a normal job, who just happens to be around when corpses turn up and through coincidence, ingenuity, or whatever ends up solving the mystery - in short, the standard fare.

I conclude that in these books, the cat really plays the role of Bella Abzug's hats or Sen. Paul Simon's bow tie or Sherlock Holmes' cocaine habit or Miss Marple's knitting. The cats are there as some sort of symbolic reference [I'm not exactly sure what they are symbolic of], but play very little role in the plot or theme. In short, the cat does little or nothing to enhance from or detract from the books. As for the books themselves: merely average, as is evidenced by the fact that even though we are always looking for something new to read, we dropped this author after reading a few. Don't waste your time.

In a literal sense, these books are not exactly appropriate for the use to which they are being put in your column. But if you assume that none of your readers has read any of them (a reasonable assumption, I would think - on the surface they are the pure antithesis of a punk sensibility), then they serve the rhetorical purpose of your columns admirably.

The fact that Nan and I both prefer the Ramones to the cat mysteries BUT SAMPLED BOTH suggests that one can never be exactly sure which dances anyone will investigate.

(Rita Mae Brown also writes mysteries that feature cats, though she writes other stuff too and has a tonier rep than Lilian Jackson Braun, or anyway sometimes she's considered literature. I've never read any of her books, though I've watched her former gf play tennis.)