Turns out your uncle Mort—you remember him; he’s the one who spends most of Thanksgiving in his recliner, looking and sounding like an elephant seal—is a trendsetter! In the U.S. and especially Britain, the incidence of gynecomastia, or enlarged male breasts, is on the rise. In the U.K., male breast reduction is the second-fastest-growing category of cosmetic surgery.
Your instinct might be to blame this on hormone-infused beef or other food additives, but the actual cause is less freaky: Most of what’s being reduced in these reductions is fat tissue, and our nations’ increasing adiposity is to blame. That, and it’s linked to marijuana consumption. (Not just because of the Dorito consumption that goes with the pot-smoking, apparently.)
Somewhere in this story is a Seth Rogen screenplay, fighting to get out. (“Okay, here’s the pitch. A guy who spends his whole life trying to get his hands on a big pair finally acquires one of his own.”) Or, alternatively, they could just buy the rights to make a movie about this guy.
Okay, so magazines get lots of letters, and all of them are crazy. Point conceded. I sometimes take a read through the letters at Harper’s, and those few that aren’t from geriatric Canadian socialists are definitely from nutjobs. And prisoners. Not to mention a few demonstrably dangerous people.
But at least they’re all real. That much cannot be said for the grandmaster of pornographic letter-publishing: the Penthouse Letters. Those are fake—not that there’s much debate about it. Everyone knows they are made up. I mean, how many times can the hottest maid this side of Timbuktu show up, clean your apartment, and shine various parts of your anatomy before a little doubt begins to creep in?
I was thinking about these letters, now grown nearly as obsolete as the book (or so they say; I’m still pretty deeply committed to eradicating as many trees as possible), when I came across this letter posted by Choire Sicha at the Awl. Here’s a taste:
Dear New York magazine,
My baby. My baby! Recently my baby had some tests. My baby is 2.5 months old. My baby! Sometimes my baby seems different than other babies. My baby should have be accepted to a very good college in the year 2025. My baby likes yams and dislikes all loud noises that are not the sound cows make. My baby has good arm strength but bad color-name recognition. My baby!
It’s signed, “A Parent, Brooklyn, New York.” Now, come on, people—bullshit alert! What kind of baby, raised in Brooklyn, doesn’t like yams and loud noises? Fake! And a “good college”? A true Brooklynite wacko-mom (and the tone here is clearly maternal) would definitely have said Harvard. Good colleges are for Queens, dear Choire. And let’s be honest, the middle-class babies born of middle-class graphic designers in Brooklyn, furiously scarfing their CSA organic sweet ‘taters—well, they just don’t have enough arm strength to write letters. Everyone knows that! Arm strength is very suburban.
Oh, some readers might claim that this letter was nothing but satire, yet another opportunity to have a laugh at the expense of over-thinking, pretentious urban parents (the sort who would wonder: “Do I want another baby as well? Would that be twice as much baby, or really more like thrice? Would I be betraying my baby? What if I had another baby and something was wrong with my baby?”). But I don’t think this letter is intended as a joke.
At the very beginning of Elena Gorokhova’s remarkable new memoir A Mountain of Crumbs (which, at the risk of repeating one of its blurbs, really is like an Angela’s Ashes for the Soviet era, all beautiful and evocative and worth your attention), Gorokhova swiftly sums up the provincial baseness of her mother’s people by saying that they were from the country, “the kind of people that lick their plates.”
I came to San Francisco alone with my kids this week in part to go to my grandfather’s 88th birthday. And he, like Gorokhova’s people, was the kind of person who licked his plate. No matter what context, what the dress code, where the plate was or what kind of food had been on it.
It was, of course, a source of horror and shame, particularly for my grandmother. And she’s not alone. A 2006 survey on UK manners (funded by the Great British Chicken trade group) was reported in the London Evening Standard with suitable scorn:
Today’s parents have not only forgotten their manners — but are too busy licking their plates and watching the telly to pass them on, a survey has revealed.
The report showed that 24% of Brits licked their plates and “more than half admit to eating chicken drumsticks with their hands”. One quarter of respondents burp at the table, 36% talk with their mouth full and 47% “leave the table while others are eating” (although, really, given all the gross things everyone is doing at the table, I’d want to leave too).
But here’s the thing: my grandfather can’t lick the plate anymore. He had a severe stroke last year, and although he’s a tough sonuvabitch and recovering apace, he’s lucky if he can lick his chin, much less pick up a plate.
I kind of miss his licking his plate. I mean, sure, it’s gross. But I feel like idiosyncrasies–even ill-mannered ones–tell us something about who people are and where they came from. Growing up in the eighties, it was hard to imagine what his life as a Southern California kid during the Great Depression was like, and he never talked much about it. So I began to imagine is that licking his plate was a legacy of privations long ago. It’s a kind of heirloom, or at least a genealogy.
My grandfather used to goad his six grandsons into licking our plates (probably just to piss off my grandma). I imagine that, if I ever were to try it as an adult, my wife would put a quick end to it. But maybe now, when I return to New York, I’ll give it plate-licking another shot. I know the kids would be down–the 2-year-old acts like Karen Finley every time I put him in the high chair anyway. Not everything that gets handed down through the generations has to be pleasant or upstanding, right?
When the Texas state Board of Education last week bannedBrown Bear, Brown Bear, the beloved (if slightly repetitive) children’s book written by Bill Martin Jr. and illustrated by Eric Carle, most of us said: WTF?
It soon became clear that a Board of Ed member had done a cursory Google search and discovered a 2008 book titled “Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation,” by Bill Martin. And soon after that, it became even clearer that that those Texans had their Martins mixed up: Bill Martin, the 53-year-old philosophy professor at DePaul University who wrote Ethical Marxism, is not in fact Martin Jr., who died in 2004. We corralled Dr. Martin on IM yesterday to get his take on censorship, children’s literature, and insects.
Bill Martin, Bill Martin, had you heard of “Brown Bear, Brown Bear” before the Texas Board of Education tried to ban it?
Yes, although I was more aware of Bill Martin, Jr., the writer, than his specific titles, other than one about bugs, which I think was his first book. It caught my eye because I like bugs.
Bill Martin, Bill Martin, what is your favorite bug?
I’d have to say the ant.
Bill Martin, Bill Martin, why?
There is just a great deal to learn from ants, as you can see in the books of E. O. Wilson; among other things, ants turn the topsoil and process it through their bodies, and, along with worms, this creates the nutritive basis of agriculture (or real agriculture, in any case).
Bill Martin, Bill Martin, it’s not because the ant is a symbol of the proletariat?
I wasn’t aware that the ant is a symbol of the proletariat, but it would be a good symbol!
Bill Martin, Bill Martin, what was the fallout of the story for you, personally?
Just fun, really, nothing bad, so I wouldn’t call it “fallout.” I’ve heard from various people around the country who I haven’t been in touch with in years, who saw the story in one or another newspaper, and that’s been neat. Of course what I would really love to have happen is a little more attention to the actual book I wrote, Ethical Marxism.
Bill Martin, Bill Martin, is accidental celebrity really different from, uh, “real” celebrity?
I like the way you put that, and, yes, right, I would say it isn’t different. Sure, this whole thing is a fluke, in some sense, but then when you look at the people who are merely “famous for being famous,” as they say, then, hey, at least I’ve written some books that have some good arguments in them about what we need to be doing in the world.
Bill Martin, Bill Martin, do you have kids?
No, my wife and I were agreed on that before we got married, it was never really a question for us. When I got my job at DePaul and had insurance to pay for it, I got a vasectomy, happily. However, we do have a superb cat named Theo, who is sitting nearby, or I should say he has us.
Bill Martin, Bill Martin, oh, good, you’re a cat person. I recently argued that cat people make better parents than dog people, so you should know that even though you decided not to have kids, you’d probably be a good parent. But anyway: Bill Martin, Bill Martin, what do you remember reading as a young child?
I think when I was first reading it was the usual “Dick and Jane” stuff, I don’t think I ever read Bill Martin, Jr., unfortunately. As I got further into elementary school, I liked reading about scuba divers and motorcycle riders, and also I really loved the “Alvin” books, especially Alvin and the Secret Code, and also the Danny Dunn books. In sixth grade I read my first Robert Heinlein book, Time Enough for the Stars, and that made a big impression on me. I guess before that I was also reading about the space program and also sea exploration, sea creatures, etc.
There is even a part of Ethical Marxism about cephalopods, especially squid, so that stuff is still very much with me.
I did also read the Bible a good bit, I should mention—I was a good Christian boy.
Bill Martin, Bill Martin, how much did that reading shape your eventual critical point of view?
I would say it shaped my views a great deal, I still think about questions like how we would explain to aliens from another planet why we have messed up this planet so much, as if “we destroyed that forest because we own it” is a good explanation.
Or, millions have to starve or die from bad water because otherwise they would have no “incentive” to work hard, as if that’s an explanation.
Bill Martin, Bill Martin, what is the role of children’s-book publishing in advanced capitalism?
Well, not to be reductive about it, but it is not hard to see children’s literature as being a part of encouraging one way or another of looking at and living in the world to people in their most formative years–either to establish certain “norms,” for example of gender and gender relations, or to question these norms.
In philosophy and literary theory some of us are very interested in the relationship between reading (and “learning to read”) and epistemology, the theory of knowledge–what we know and how we know it. For sure children’s literature would be fertile ground for this sort of inquiry, though I haven’t undertaken this myself.
Bill Martin, Bill Martin, do you know if there are any good Marxist kids’ books, or at least books about Marxism that would be interesting and readable for kids?
Amazing question, really. I do still like the Marx for Beginners book that has been out since sometime in the 1980s–it’s basically a comic book.
Bill Martin, Bill Martin, in Brown Bear, Brown Bear, every animal is asked “What do you see?” How does that relate to the “animal question” in Ethical Marxism?
Clearly Brown Bear is about the interconnectedness of the animal world, and also the idea of looking around. But “seeing” is not quite as transparent a question as one would think. One interesting thing that the book raises is that some animals, such as humans, are set up to see in a predatory way–our eyes, and the eyes of bears, are aimed straight ahead. But there isn’t any predation in Brown Bear, these animals are just looking around taking note of each other and appreciating each other. So maybe that is good “communist” literature for children.
One of the things I discuss in Ethical Marxism is the way that kids often rebel against eating animals at a certain point, when they realize what they are eating. Then a great deal of pressure is brought to bear on getting most kids “past this hurdle,” so to speak.
You probably know the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon about this, where Calvin asks his mom if hamburgers are made from people from Hamburg. Which idea he finds highly amusing, but then he’s grossed out when he learns that hamburgers are made from cows.
Bill Martin, Bill Martin, did you get “past the hurdle” and then turn around and get back behind it (i.e., become a vegetarian), or did you never get past it in the first place?
I first became a vegetarian when I went off to college, out of all sorts of motivations, including the not especially laudable one of just wanting to be different. That lasted for about five years (though I did graduate in four!), but I kept having problems with anemia, I wasn’t getting the right stuff–which should have just been a matter of looking more into things and also learning how to cook. Then, about twenty years ago, it was really my partner and fellow philosopher, Kathleen League, who got me back into that direction. She had become a vegetarian herself a couple of years before, and then one day I was at a gyro place in Chicago, looking at that hunk of lamb on the metal rod, and thinking of the line from William Blake, “little lamb, who made thee?” And I thought, “what could possibly justify this?”
Bill Martin, Bill Martin, that sounds like the children’s book you should write—Little Lamb, Little Lamb, with illustrations by Blake.
Sure, or someone better at that sort of thing should write it. Then they can ban it in Texas!
Bill Martin, Bill Martin, is there a Marxist reading of this whole incident?
Yes, I think on a number of levels, but probably first of all going to the question of the way that capitalism functions in a “postmodern” way these days, where the new media and the Internet, etc., are not some ancillary add-ons to the way things work, but are fully integrated, and so the genesis of this “incident” is not only a superficial Google search, but also the consciousness (or lack thereof) of people whose whole notion of knowledge or research is now fundamentally shaped by these media. This includes the politics of speed, in this case of not being able to take more than literally a few seconds to “research” something, which is also an integral part of what I call “postmodern capitalism.”
One last thing I would say on this is that it has simply become normative, and acceptable, to just say “that’s good enough for me,” in terms of anything that is critical of capitalism (though I am indeed harshly critical of it, in Ethical Marxism I call capitalism “evil” and give extended arguments for not only this judgment but also for why we need to use that word), as a supposed justification for dismissing such criticism.
Bill Martin, Bill Martin, that’s good enough, I think, for us. Thanks for chatting with me, and for playing along with this admittedly silly conceit.
Thanks very much, Matt. It was great chatting with you.
At the very beginning of Elena Gorokhova’s remarkable new memoir 