"Women wanted to remove their support from men, the ‘enemy’ in a movement for reform, power and self-determination."

"Once I understood the feminist doctrines, a lesbian separatist position seemed the commonsensical position, especially since, conveniently, I was an L-person.”

Jill Johnston, the staunchly radical feminist, has died. She was 81. In the 1970s, she was the radical feminist, and we read her every week in The Village Voice.

The sexual power of Carrie Prejean.

I've been checking my Site Meter quite a few times in the last day. I've been pleased and then a little ashamed of myself as I see the phenomenal power of one particular post title to attract search engine traffic. This post was originally titled "Things the Site Meter dragged in." I've tweaked it a little to make my point. I'm not traffic-greedy — not too much. Just trying to make my point.

While I was hanging out on Site Meter, a couple other things got my attention. It's my general policy not to respond to bloggers who attack me — otherwise it would be a traffic-building strategy to attack me — but I do make exceptions as the whim strikes me. So, let's look at what Roy Edroso — of Alicublog and the Village Voice is saying about me.

He takes my Carrie Prejean post and intersperses it with comments in fisking fashion, and I'm going to fisk it back at him. Ready?

THE OLD DARK HOUSE. Hadn't been over to see the Ann Althouse site for a long, long while, but I retain a soft spot for her, so when tipped today by the Perfesser (with the irresistible tease, "Teenager? Is TMZ threatening to post child pornography?") I took a chance. Professor Althouse was talking about the Carrie Prejean sex tape:

But TMZ — I don't read it much, but, again, I'll guess — does not itself parade as Christian. Prejean does, and so she will be held to the high standards of Christianity, while TMZ can say and do whatever it wants. ("When we are cursed, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure it; when we are slandered, we answer kindly. ")

TMZ is following Rule 4 of Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals":

Scripture and Saul Alinsky? This explains so much: Althouse is The Anchoress!

Despite his inclusion of that St. Paul quote, Edroso cuts my quote of Alinsky's Rule 4, which happens to use Christianity as the example of the effectiveness of demanding that your enemies live up to their own rules. Alinsky wrote: "You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian Church can live up to Christianity." It's hardly some odd quirk of mine to combine scripture and Alinsky. Edroso, in his usual fashion, looks for ways to make me look flaky — along with the other bloggers he's made it his business to mock. (The link to The Anchoress hints at Edroso's approach. Check out his latest Village Voice column for a more comprehensive example of how he works.)

Back to Edroso:

This argument that hypocrisy doesn't exist for the Elect...

What argument? Where did I argue that Christians aren't responsible for hypocrisy? I simply don't.

.... is by now an old rightwing favorite....

So just pull it out of you frumpy bag of liberal complaints about right-wingers. I thought you were trying to fisk my post, Roy. But, no, I'm either this distinct writer that you love to make fun of or I'm indistinguishable in the blurry mass of rightish bloggers that you've looked at before and have grown weary of squinting at.

... and the quality of Althouse's reasoning hasn't changed much from the old days.

Well, you haven't come close to nailing anything I've said in this post, so why bother to be specific about anything I've said in the past? You can't even read the post currently in front of your face, yet you think everyone already knows what it is I've said in "the old days." Maybe Roy is tired and on autopilot. But maybe, as he worked his way through what I'd written, confident in his ability to spew snark, he saw that my post actually cohered and that it was pretty damned sharp and funny, and he consciously decided to blur his observations so he could still get his post up. The poor wilted man. The option of actually liking what I'd written is inconceivable within the little framework he's built for himself. What would happen to that Village Voice gig?

But the Jesus stuff was a shock. I went down into her comments...

He couldn't figure out anything to say about what I wrote — "the Jesus stuff" — and, desperate, he dove into the comments looking for something repulsive. What he came up was from Florida, a specific, familiar commenter here:

... a quick scan suggests that the old let's-pretend liberals (what were their names, again? Rainbow? Sunshine?) seem to have fled or outed themselves, and the remnant are leaving stuff like this:

What's difficult as hell to do is to live up to the standards that would be set up for Christians by the butt-buggering sodomites. The rapists of 13-year-old children.

Christians could never live up to the sodomites' expectations.

Thankfully, though, Jesus doesn't require that. And we know they'll spend eternity burning in hell.

So at least there's that comfort.

"Jesus stuff"... "stuff like this"... Roy is not editing and dealing with sloppy word repetitions, and, worse, he's not bothering to figure anything out. It's just stuff. He found the most unsightly quote and then — without reason — counted on his readers to believe that it exemplifies what is generally in the comments at my blog. How utterly flabby and lame.

Now, as for the comment he cherry-picked, Edroso has no idea what it means and makes no attempt to figure it out. He has not, like the regular comment readers here, been exposed to the way Florida writes and the things he writes about. He doesn't know about Florida's longstanding Roman Polanski theme — which began here and which involves a fair amount of antagonism toward me. It's likely that Edroso thinks he's come across some rabid homophobia, but, in context, I know that "butt-buggering sodomites... rapists of 13-year-old children" refers to Polanski and the Hollywood-type liberals who've defended him. Florida's comment is not part of a mass of "stuff like this" in the comments. It's something particular, incisive, and satirical, and, if you are going to focus on it, you'd better take some time to figure out what it means. But Edroso is happy to see something that looked like shit and to splatter it onto his post and then, childishly, to demand that onlookers see how ugly things are over at Althouse.

Amazingly, Althouse is still removing comments...

Huh? Where did that come from? What comments does he think I've removed? He's trying to pin that one comment on me by asserting that I moderate the comments, so that anything that is left, I've approved of. That is either a lazy mistake or a nasty lie. My approach to the comments is well known: I have a strong free speech policy, and I leave vile things in. To imply that whatever is left has my stamp of approval is cheap and unethical.

... perhaps because they don't come up to the standards of this gem, or because they're actually messages from her employers trying to reach her because her phone has gone dead and her windows are boarded up.

He ends with a comic image, intended as a play on my name, the "old house" that he's used in his post title. Unfortunately, he hasn't built the foundation for what could have been a well-written joke. The material he thought he had just wasn't there.

Den Beste isn't still blogging, is he?

Roy makes a second attempt at humor, and, while I'm familiar with Den Beste, I have no idea why this is supposed to be funny. Althouse is The Anchoress... Althouse is Den Beste? Everything is melting in the mind of Roy Edroso.

"Something weird and cultish in the sycophantish cathexis onto Hillary of the many nerds, geeks and vengeful viragos who run her campaign..."

It's Camille Paglia (who admits she's "leaning" toward Obama). She's got her sights set on Hillary Clinton, and it's going to get ugly, with the hurling of dangerous words like viragos and cathexis and — my personal favorite — "sycophantish":

Aside from the stylish Huma [Abedin], there's definitely something weird and cultish in the sycophantish cathexis onto Hillary of the many nerds, geeks and vengeful viragos who run her campaign -- sometimes to her detriment, as with the recent ham-handed playing of the clichéd gender card. I suspect the latter dumb move, which has backfired badly, came from Ann Lewis (Barney Frank's sister), a fanatical Hillary true believer who has been spouting beatific feminist bromides about her for the past 15 years.... Hillary seems to have acolytes rather than friends...

Paglia goes on to lavish compliments on Dianne Feinstein — she's "shrewd" and "steady" — why can't she be the first woman President? Feinstein speaks with "silky ease" and has "true gravitas." Paglia also strokes Nancy Pelosi, who has a "relaxed, resonant realism" and speaks in a "low purr." Pelosi purrs but Hillary's got that "tight-wound, self-righteous attack voice" and that "flat, practical, real-life voice."

But there are no big conclusions here about Hillary. Just an expression of that vague irritation we all feel. (Don't we?) But I wonder if this is the reaction we would have to any woman who got realistically close to the presidency. And I'll bet that's the sort of thing Ann Lewis says behind the scenes, but that doesn't make it wrong.

Paglia lights into Ellen DeGeneres for her "cringe-making on-air meltdown over a dog":

Following Rosie O'Donnell's professional collapse amid lunatic rants and operatic kvetching, this has been a terrible year for Hollywood lesbians' public image. It's as if when the butch mask drops, there's nothing inside but a boiling candy kettle of infantile rage and self-pity.

Butch up, girls, says Camille. But don't forget to keep that voice at a low purr.

She's got this on global warming:

This facile attribution of climate change to human agency is an act of hubris. Good stewardship of the environment is an ethical imperative for every nation. But breast-beating hysteria merely betrays impious tunnel vision. Thousands of factors, minute and grand, are at work in cyclic climate change, whose long-term outcomes we cannot possibly predict. Nature should inspire us with awe, not pity.

That's a nice twist. Our arrogance lies not in thinking we can indulge ourselves in our carbon-spewing ways — as we're commonly told — but in thinking we move Nature. It's impious to think of ourselves that way.

On Norman Mailer:

I didn't care about his novels -- I don't care about any novels published after World War II (Tennessee Williams is my main man) -- but I was impressed by Mailer's visionary and sometimes hallucinatory first-person journalism. And I was directly inspired by his eclectic "Advertisements for Myself" (1959), which I took as a blueprint after my first books were attacked by the feminist establishment in the 1990s.

I will immediately go read "Advertisements for Myself"!

Mailer's "The Prisoner of Sex" (the original 1971 Harper's essay, not the book) was an important statement about men's sexual fears and desires. His jousting with Germaine Greer at the notorious Town Hall debate in New York that same year was a pivotal moment in the sex wars. I loved Greer and still do. And I also thought Jill Johnston (who disrupted the debate with lesbo stunts) was a cutting-edge thinker: I was devouring her Village Voice columns, which had evolved from dance reportage into provocative cultural commentary.

Ah, yes, I remember. How we hated Norman Mailer in those days. From this distance, I rather admire him for making himself as a vortex for feminist hate. He got into the center of things the only way he could.

[O]ne of the lousiest things Mailer ever wrote was his flimsy cover-story screed on her for Esquire in 1994. It was obvious Mailer knew absolutely nothing about Madonna and was just blowing smoke.

Because he neglected to read Paglia's musings on the subject, no doubt.

Guess what -- Esquire's original proposal was for me to interview Madonna. Mailer was the sub!

Ha ha. What a transcendent brag! I especially like the use of the word "sub," with its insinuation of phallic gigantism. Paglia has the bigger... writing talent.

Next, Paglia has a reference to my favorite movie:

Penthouse magazine had similarly tried to bring Madonna and me together, as had HBO, which proposed filming a "My Dinner with André" scenario of the two of us chatting in a restaurant.

Camille is the André, of course. Madonna would have to be the Wally.

But Madonna, no conversationalist, always refused.

Damn! Madonna just needed instruction on how to play the listener, like Wallace Shawn. "My Dinner with André" begins Wally's voiced-over anxiety about he is about sitting through a whole dinner with André Gregory. He resolves to get through the experience by, essentially, interviewing him. But Madonna's problem was not — I suspect — that she wasn't good enough at talking, but that she didn't fancy herself enduring a long outpouring of Paglia's thoughts about everything. To be a good Wally in a "My Dinner With André"-format movie, you have to wait while the other person has most of the lines, then finally, when the audience can't take it anymore, say "You want to know what I think of all this." And then charm us to the core with a few lines that we will remember for decades.

Hey, remember the time Camille Paglia refused to have dinner with me? I wrote a post about it called — of all things! — "My Dinner With Camille."

Find the ladder in the back of Jammyland to go to Hospital Productions.

Ah, here it is. At 60 East 3rd Street.





It's run by our old friend Dominick Fernow. You remember this Village Voice article about him.

You saw pictures of him here, remember? (With the tongue?) I told him that the pictures made some of you readers angry... for reasons we couldn't understand. And he's the guy painted fuchsia in this blogged-about performance.

And he painted this, remember, from the old "Mysteries of the Althouse house" post?



Anyway, Hospital Productions is about noise music, but the music Dom was playing in the shop when we were there wasn't very noisy. It was actually the sort of atmospheric music that I like. It was Muslimgauze, and I bought the CD "Syrinjia." Here's the Muslimgauze website.

Dom's mother is Jean Feraca, who does that radio show — "Here on Earth" — on Wisconsin Public Radio. (I was on the show that time.) She's a writer with a new book, a memoir, called "I Hear Voices."

ADDED: Here's the NYT obituary for Muslimgauze — Bryn Jones, who died of "pneumonia derived from a rare fungal infection in his bloodstream" when he was 38.

Muslimgauze occupied a strange place in the musical world. He was a powerful, prolific innovator, releasing albums that were alternately beautiful and visceral, full of ambient electronics, polyrhythmic drumming and all kinds of voices and sound effects. The recordings earned him a devoted following in underground, experimental and industrial music circles worldwide.

But the albums' liner notes and titles were dogmatically pro-Palestinian, a rarity among Western musicians in general but especially unusual in one from Manchester who was not Muslim and had never visited the Middle East. Some said Mr. Jones was aiming for shock value, but those who knew him described him as a shy, mysterious man who was serious in his political beliefs and never wavered from his commitment to music....

Mr. Jones recorded 92 albums with titles like ''Hamas Arc'' and ''Vote Hezbollah,'' references to militant Islamic groups....

Note that I'm not buying the politics, nor did I inquire into his politics before buying the music. Do you think I should have? With all musicians or just ones with "Muslim" in their names? I heard the music and bought the music.

"Noise is the real punk."

Oh, I see that Dominick Fernow got written up in the Village Voice:

[Y]ou'll find a stuffy basement hotbox packed to the ceiling with the most elusive items in the noise underground: cassettes affixed to shards of vinyl or slipped into fuzzy pouches, CD-Rs packaged in seven-inch sleeves, seven-inches packaged in tin foil, a record where the grooves are lathe-cut onto a coke mirror . . . everything from mutant monoliths like Merzbow and John Wiese to obscurants like Cream Corn Barf Extravaganza. There's plenty of black metal too, but no death metal, hardcore, or punk. "In many ways I would say it's a real punk store in that it's more about celebrating the individual instead of the genre," Fernow says. "Noise is the real punk. It's not about the haircut, it's not about politics, it's not about an agenda. It's personal. That's the key for me. And that's an intimacy."...

Back in Madison, Wisconsin, when Fernow was in the eighth grade, some new friends invited him to hang out while their death/grind band practiced. The emotional intensity he witnessed was unlike anything he got from Aerosmith or the Chili Peppers. There were no gateway bands, no Metallica, no Slayer, not even Cannibal Corpse—Fernow just dove straight into tape-trading bands like Fleshgrind and Anal Blast. Around 1997, an appropriate distance from the time when computers and CD-Rs would become ubiquitous, 16-year-old Fernow started Hospital Records to release his home-recorded, organically made noise cassettes.

Dom is the person who painted this...



... which -- you may remember -- is something I couldn't get out of the garage, back when I cleared out the whole garage. It's an artifact of one of the concerts that were played in that garage. Embalm was a death metal band, and there were at least two other bands, Toy Gun and Four O'Clock Tragedy, that played here back then.

Anyway, John visited Dom in NYC this summer -- in that "stuffy basement hotbox" -- and got some great photos, like this one:

"Academic work ... is so bloodless most of the time."

That's from a nice piece in the Village Voice about academic blogs.

Now you know why we academics blog: we blog for blood.