The Future's Too Bright Wednesday

What I’ve Finished Reading

Swap Clubs (1964) purports to be “A study in Contemporary Sexual Mores,” but since it cites zero sources, contains no verifiable information and no discussion of methods, and is littered with husband-and-wife authors Willam and Jerrye Breedlove’s rambling and inaccurate thoughts on psychology, sexuality, and world history (including that old favorite, Everything Was Fine Before Christianity Came Along), it’s pretty useless as a study of anything.

You can get a sample of the style of the whole book from my favorite paragraph (ambitiously headed “Attitudes Toward Society"):

There are many swap club members who feel that they entered the swapping relationship in a desire to “flaunt authority”, that this proclivity is a marked one throughout their existence. Yet even in these instances the evidence of their well-kept secret is de facto evidence that they are “flaunted” not at all. The introspection necessary to arrive at that conclusion is another piece of evidence of their attempts at reason, which again attests their level-headedness. The tendency to “flaunt authority” is a form of exhibitionism often related to a strong guilt complex. The couples who belong to swap groups are usually more honest in their relationships with each other and their friends. With the whole realm of sexual dishonesty discarded practically at a single sweep, the untruthful occurrences are greatly decreased. The few swap club adherents who are under psychiatric care also suggest that such is the case. People with a tendency to “flaunt authority” will flaunt that authority in many ways, not just once, and the minute number of “modern marrieds” who have ever had brushes with the law again puts the lie to the flaunt-authority charge.

The wonderful thing about this paragraph is that its entire unsourced non-argument is based on the Breedloves knowing what the word “flaunt” means while simultaneously confusing it with “flout.” Two words become one! It's also worth noting that whenever the Breedloves describe one of their couples, they make sure to give bust, waist, and hip measurements for the woman, a very Sixties practice I’m glad has gone out of style in recent decades.

Paris in the Twentieth Century continues to be a tragically bad place and time to be a delicate poet who can't face working in a bank. Michel eventually takes a job in a drama factory, writing "updates" of popular plays for the centralized entertainment union, but he can't hack that, either, so he wanders the streets and eventually dies of sadness among the snow-kissed tombstones of Pere-Lachaise. Also, the French language has collapsed under the weight of too many foreign loan words: at one point Michel's book-loving uncle laments that the dictionary has swollen to twice its size! Quelle horreur! On the plus side, electric light and clean, fast trains everywhere! But the light hurts our hero's eyes and there's nowhere he wants to go anyway. From the Introduction I learned that Father of Science Fiction Jules Verne, like Françoise in In Search of Lost Time, refused to learn to use the telephone, stubbornly holding the receiver upside down when circumstances forced him to take a call. I wouldn't have liked this book at all if it had been written today, about the illiterate and materialistic future of our own Kids These Days, but I enjoyed it from a distance.

What I’m Reading Now

I picked up Reality Matters: 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can’t Stop Watching at the free book shelf at the library some months ago. I was curious to read some essays about “reality TV” because it's one of those cultural touchstones but I've never been able to get up the patience to watch any, which made the refrain repeated in James Frey’s foreword (“You will never fucking escape it”) a little baffling at the outset. My experiences with reality TV: I watched about six episodes of Elimidate when I was in college, and once saw half an episode of Project Runway while staying in a hotel. They both made a strong impression on me, so maybe, in a sense, I will never fucking escape them. Both of the forewords are clumsy in their own way: Frey’s is overwrought and shouty, editor Anna David’s reads a little like a freshman essay – heavy on the self-description, light on everything else.

Of the eighteen shows written about in this book, I’ve heard of four: Project Runway, Survivor, American Idol, and The Bachelor. (Alas, there is no essay about Elimidate, a mean-spirited show in which four or five people go on the same date with one other person and are eliminated one by one). The rest are new to me, so I'm almost guaranteed to learn something.

And some other things! which I'll probably get to next time.

What I Might Read Next

I've got a bunch of stuff to catch up with, so maybe NOTHING until I catch up.