masturbation contests

As a teen Peruvian (future) novelist Mario Vargas Llosa went to a military-style boarding school. Academically it was considered a cut above. It sounds like young Mario did okay there, but it instilled no love in him for the military’s “mechanical hierarchies, [its] authorized violence [or] the at times … cruel and monstrous uses” to which these were put. But what sticks out to me (so to speak) are the literally homosexual acts these (almost certainly mainly heterosexual) boys promulgated. 

On the very first day, after getting into their school uniforms and hearing welcoming (?) speeches from the adults, the new boys are turned over to the older boys for the usual hazing rituals. 

A group of cadets took me and a[nother] boy … to a fourth-year dormitory. They made us go through a ‘right angle’ contest. We had to kick each other in the backside as we doubled over alternately; the one who kicked more slowly than the other was in turn kicked, hard, by the hazers. Afterward, they made us open our trousers fly and take out our penis and masturbate: the one who came first would be let go and the other would stay behind to make our torturers’ beds. But, however hard we tried, fear kept us from getting an erection, and finally, bored by our incompetence, they took us out to the soccer field. They asked me what sport I went in for: ‘Swimming, sir.’ ‘Swim on your back from one end of the athletic field to the other, then, perro.’

As Mario figured out the place, he recognized that, “in order not to have one’s will broken [by the relentless bullying], it was necessary to do daring things, so as to earn the good feeling and respect of the others. I began doing them from the start: from the masturbation contests — the one who ejaculated first or who shot his sperm the farthest — to the famous escapades at night, after lights out.” The biggest “escapade,” Vargas Llosa says, was the escape, “going over the wall,” as being caught leaving the compound without authorization meant you’d be expelled “without appeal.” Mario was a regular escapee, it seems. 

Of course you had to boast about your sexual prowess with women — even if (especially if?) you were a virgin, which most of the boys were, I’m sure. The highest prestige went to (as it comes to us in English) the “mad jock with a big cock,” a title Mario proudly claimed.

In his memoir Mario Vargas Llosa at times expresses sympathy for gay men, and disappointment in others’ homophobia, though he presents himself as very het — besides the “masturbation contests,”  that is, although isn't that somehow hetter than het? It’s not like there’s any love or affection in it.

source:

A Fish in the Water

by Mario Vargas Llosa

translated by Helen Lane

1994. Farrar Straus Giroux, New York

Reading a Man

Judy Melinek is a medical examiner for New York City. She autopsies dead bodies. 

On this day off she’s just seen a movie with her husband, T. J. They are enthusing about the movie while waiting in line at a taqueria. Judy casually looks at the back of the man in front of them in line. I love the way what she observes begins to come together for her into a portrait not just of the man’s lifestyle but in particular something that happened to him. Any of us could have picked up on the man’s sex, age, clothes, but it’s the thing at the back of the man’s head that Judy recognizes from her job. 

He was a huge man — six two easily — in his midtwenties, with a shaved head and nickel-sized black lacquer plugs piercing both earlobes. His forearms were covered with the sort of tattoos I had seen on drug users as a way of camouflaging needle tracks. Some of them I recognized as prison badges. The thing that really startled me, though, was the back of the man’s neck. He had a perfectly circular scar at the base of his skull just to the left of midline, and a vertical, linear, well-healed surgical cicatrice extending down his cervical spine. …

This man had done something awhile ago that had induced somebody to shoot him carefully in the back of the head. Based on the rough diameter of the scar, the shooter probably used a .22 or other small-caliber weapon at close range. The blow had knocked the tattooed man down and probably out, but the bullet lodged in the thick bulb of bone at the butt of the skull and didn’t penetrate. A skilled surgeon had extracted the slug, stemmed the bleeding and saved [the man’s] life. I could even see the textbook pinprick scars of the suture staples on either side of the old incision going down his neck.

As they are eating, Judy and her husband notice the man is sitting nearby. Is he casing them? T. J. begins talking loudly about Judy’s police colleagues, naming them, wondering who is on duty in this precinct. The man with the scar abruptly gets up, leaving his drink unfinished on his table.

Based on her expertise Judy Melinek could read a lot more here than the average person. She is humble enough to say that she could have been misreading the situation, that the man may not have been looking to rob them. 

I love the way people with a particular expertise can see through things that to the untrained eye would be opaque. This doesn’t mean they always get it right. But their education gives them access to information that they just might be able to use. 

source: Working Stiff: two years, 262 bodies, and the making of medical examiner

by Judy Melinek, M.D., and T. J. Mitchell

Bill Moyer’s World of Ideas: interview with Vartan Gregorian, librarian of NYPL

from the book log (1/6/89):

Bill Moyer’s World of Ideas. Interview with Vartan Gregorian, chief librarian of the New York Public library. Program on PBS, aired on KQED channel 9, San Francisco.

Excellent interview, one of the best half hours I’ve seen on television — recently, at least! Gregorian is an educator. One idea he advances — class (year-long) with five instructors, like Intro to Cosmos with Astronomer, Biology instructor, Geologist, Historian, etc., exploring the origins of & implications of the Universe. [Gregorian] stressed that with information doubling every five years, a four-year university education can only introduce the world to a student. We need the mental traffic cops to keep there from being informational gridlock in our brains. With ideology & creed falling apart around us we need a clear introduction to how different cultures, peoples, creeds, ideologies have solved problems, have approached the world, have ordered the Universe.

The Vartan Gregorian interview is available online at pbs.org.

Gregorian (from the PBS transcript): “Suppose we taught the history of World War II. Not how American diplomatic historians see it, but European diplomatic, Soviet diplomatic and Asian diplomatic. Suppose they argue about their methodology, archival sources, and this and so forth. Students will not be brainwashed or influenced. Students have to be exposed to varieties, possibilities, but also not to say everything is relativistic, but rather there is common endeavor to honestly seek the truth in order to learn from history.”

I wonder if he ever put the multiple teacher class idea into practice.

Gregorian also asks, if we find humans on Mars, “has Christ risen for them?”

Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, part II

from the booklog (January 1989):

Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

I wonder how autobiographical this is. [Pirsig’s book] is a page turner and well-written. I came away not altogether sure what “Phaedrus” had gotten so uptight about & what all that deconstruction of Socrates meant. Sophists had something to do with the Quality that comes before everything. I rather liked some of Phaedrus’ original teaching methods. He threw out the essay-writing textbooks and told his classes, “You know what quality is. Just work on that.” And he didn’t give grades (until the end). The good students, he found, didn’t like grades. I coulda told him that!

*

Some of the above repeats what I wrote in my diary (and which I quoted in the earlier Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance post).

Writing teachers in grade school taught me to loathe essays and the mechanistic crafting of them. In my reading life I’ve come to love the weird things essays often are. In college my professors were usually ready to engage with the weird things I made of my papers.

What if everything you’ve been told is wrong?

Being gay is very different from a heterosexual’s experience, in which everything they see, hear, and have been told confirms their own experience. Whereas for gay men and lesbians, their experience is at odds with what they’re told.

That’s Robert H. Hopcke in an interview conducted by Mark Thompson.

source:Gay Soul: finding the heart of gay spirit and nature with sixteen writers, healers, teachers, and visionaries interviews and photographs by Mark Thompson

Handwriting Rebels

A couple years back Kent & I were doing a tour of Northeastern California. We stopped in at a museum that featured gold mining equipment and Indian baskets and so on. I bought some postcards, as I am wont to do, and chatted a little with the lady behind the front counter. When I said we were from Berkeley, she said she was born in Berkeley!

Somehow we got onto the topic of education - maybe it was the ignorance of kids today, or some such evergreen - and she said she couldn’t believe schools no longer required handwriting, that is, cursive. How could you consider yourself educated if you didn’t know how to do that?

Probably nobody (older) has ever but agreed with this sentiment (not long ago my younger sister posted similarly on Facebook), so I must have surprised the museum lady when I rolled my eyes and said, “I always hated cursive. As soon as it was no longer required I stopped using it. The only time I write with cursive these days is when I apply a signature.”

Sadly, we suddenly lost our common ground!

In his book about the FBI and the Free Speech Movement Subversives, Seth Rosenfeld spends several pages on a biographical sketch of former University of California president Clark Kerr. Kerr remembered his grade school days and one of those confident predictions made by his teacher at the old one-room school:

[T]hough she insisted he learn the prevailing Palmer Method of cursive writing - unless he mastered it, she warned, he would “never amount to anything” - he clung to his block letters.

I doubt Rosenfeld interviewed Miss Elba himself so I’m guessing Mr Kerr provides the quote from memory. It stuck in his memory! He did amount to something, the little rebel.

source: Subversives: the FBI’s war on student radicals and Reagan’s rise to Power by Seth Rosenfeld

They

Since English already has an example of a pronoun that is used both as a singular and a plural and used that way in grammar so proper even the snootiest grammargendarme prescribes it (I’m talking about you, of course), I don’t see why we can’t allow that sort of use for another pronoun. Everybody knows that using he or she in order to make sure there is agreement in a sentence feels tiresome and awkward, especially when speaking. Yet it is conventionally considered the best alternative when looking to de-gender the generic. “Everybody loves to kiss his or her lover!” Please. “Everybody loves to kiss their lovers!” Everybody is supposed to be a singular, according to the grammar logic crowd. But everybody knows that in real life, outside the textbooks, it’s a plural. “Everybody get out your textbook.” That’s grammatically acceptable, isn’t it? “I want everybody to get out their textbook.” Not correct! No? Pooh on that. “I asked for a wheat-back penny. Suddenly everybody was looking through their change.” I’m grammar-sensitive enough to wonder if sentences where a “their” sounds natural in speech could or should be rephrased when written. “Suddenly you could hear the jingle of change as every hand dug through their stash.” Oops. Did it again. “Suddenly everyone was looking through his or her coins.” “Suddenly all the kids were digging through their change.” Functionally, “all the kids” and “everybody” are equivalents. We treat them that way in speech. I think we ought to treat them that way in writing. English has a very formal neuter - one. “One ought to know one’s mind.” It sounds a bit off, a bit British, even. And using one that way has its problems, too. “One was standing on the platform when the train arrived.” One was? One what?

In Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue John McWhorter looks to see if there’s any their there:

Take the idea that it is wrong to say If a student comes before I get there, they can slip their test under my office door, because student is singular and they ‘is plural.’ Linguists traditionally observe that esteemed writers have been using they as a gender-neutral pronoun for almost a thousand years. As far back as the 1400s, in the Sir Amadace story, one finds the likes of Iche mon in thayre degree (‘Each man in their degree’). … Shakespeare is not assumed to have been in his cups when he wrote in The Comedy of Errors, ‘There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me / As I were their well-acquainted friend’ … Later, Thackeray in Vanity Fair tosses off ‘A person can’t help their birth.”

McWhorter has been asked, if this use of they/their/them is so appropriate why don’t linguists use it themselves? It’s the copy editors, he says. “[E]ven linguists have to submit to their publishers’ copy editors’ insistence on expunging it … At best I can wangle an exception and get in a singular they or their once or twice a book.”

It may still be that books are copyedited by human beings, but most of the writing on the internet clearly isn’t. No copy editor touched this post, for instance. Other than me, and I don’t claim the title.

source: Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: the untold history of English by John McWhorter

Notes toward an autobiography by others, part 13

As a grade schooler, I always found read aloud exercises excruciating to sit through. Breezing through a paragraph or two and dropping back into my seat was never a problem for me. Then as now, however, I found the public struggles of other kids forming words such as "education" and "exceedingly" both heartbreaking and a waste of time.

Like Chuck Thompson I found reading aloud in class no sweat. When other kids struggled, sweating out one word after another, halting, hesitating, stumbling, I just wanted to take over. I enjoyed reading aloud. It was an opportunity to perform - with an audience! Besides, I thought surely the kids who were struggling would get more out of the text if it were voiced with life and passion. I know I enjoyed being read aloud to. I was happy that my sixth grade teacher read us books chapter by chapter, and by sixth grade I had no problem reading novels without my lips moving. I thought it great stuff that my mother read aloud the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy to me and my brother even after we both could read it for ourselves (my brother already had).

Listening in class to that struggle to push out words was a torture. If it was a torture to me, I thought it must be painful for them. For whose good was it?

source: Better Off Without 'Em: a Northern manifesto for Southern secession by Chuck Thompson