How often does an opportunity come along to blame a) the kids, b) the Internet, and c) the self-esteem movement for every ill that besets 21st century society? If you answered "every five minutes" you'd be approximately correct. This state of affairs has unfortunately not dampened media enthusiasm for these linked themes. The press has had a field day with the recent publication of Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled -- and More Miserable Than Ever Before by Jean M. Twenge, a professor at San Diego State University.

Check out the lurid cover. Good Lord, that's it! Slutty MySpace girls are taking over the world! Just look at that tattoo (tsk), and that belly-button bauble (tsk-tsk), and... wait... is that an iPod in her pocket?!?!

Never mind that no self-esteeming narcissist would ever be caught dead in a tat that ugly.

But let's back up a second. In my personal view: a) the kids are alright, b) the worst danger of the Internet is that it so perfectly reflects the values of global capitalism, and c) the self-esteem movement was indeed one of the biggest boondoggles ever visited upon a terminally gullible America.

Note, however, that with the possible exception of the kids being alright, these are complex concepts that require more than hysterical sound-bites to unpack. Most germane to the book in question, the relationship between "self-esteem" and what the DSM-IV calls Narcissistic Personality Disorder calls for an intelligent examination of both pop buzzwords and psychoanalytic diagnostic criteria to differentiate between cultural inclination and genuine pathology. For instance, being told from birth that you are "Special," that "You Go, Girl!" and suchlike ego-affirmative formulations will probably not make you mentally ill. It may, however, in later life, make you indistinguishable from the village idiot.

The Publishers Weekly review of Generation Me observes:

Twenge argues that those born after 1970 are more self-centered, more disrespectful of authority and more depressed than ever before. When the United States started the war in Iraq, she points out, military enlistments went down, not up.

May I be permitted a resounding "Duh!" here? Hell, I was born in 1947, and since 1970 I've been a lot more depressed myself -- starting with the whole disco thing. As to a lack of authority-respecting gung-ho for the recolonization of Iraq, that seems hardly confined to some ill-delimited cadre of navel-gazing "young people."

Wrapping up its contribution to the feeding frenzy, The Chicago Trib quotes Nancy Baym, associate professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas, as follows...

"We should start thinking of ourselves as brands and control our message," Baym says. "That's what we're doing when we put ourselves out there. People don't have a sense of their identity as something they have property rights to."

From: Narcissism on the Internet isn't risk-free.
Source: Chicago Tribune (Chicago, IL), March 14, 2007.
Via: HighBeam™ Research
COPYRIGHT 2007 Chicago Tribune

To close this brief rant, let me suggest that with brains like Nancy Baym and Jean M. Twenge holding university posts and using them as bully pulpits to impart such "wisdom" to our young, we need look no further for the source of our civilizational discontent. Enlist in the Army and Brand Yourself. Why, the argument is so inherently powerful, so intrinsically persuasive, I can already see kids bailing out of YouTube in droves, heading for a brave new dawn of cultural concern and social commitment.

Sure, that'll happen. Hold your breath.

I can't believe it's taken me all this time to discover LibraryThing. It's simply an amazing... well, thing. PC Magazine says...

LibraryThing is a social network of bibliophiles. That's right. Bibliophiles. Despite its reputation as a frivolous fad among teenagers and twentysomethings, online social networking has the power to serve almost anyone -- including people with a passion for books.

I wasn't aware that social networking was widely thought to be reserved to da youts, but let us pass over that in silence. Continuing...

Created by Chicagoan Tim Spaulding, this grass-roots site follows in the footsteps of Flickr and del.icio.us. Just as Flickr built an online community around digital photos and del.icio.us fashioned a similar social network around browser "favorites," LibraryThing connects people through their book collections.

And oh boy, does it ever. I just uploaded 700 ISBNs for books I've been raving about (in one sense or another) over on Mystic Bourgeoisie. Take a look at the "author cloud" that produced! And each of those author links connects to other people who own the same books by said author, and/or reviews of said books, and so on. The "so on" part is extremely extensive. Here, trip around in this eclectic headspace for a while!

Highbeam finds 21 hits on LibraryThing, including this...

LibraryThing lets you create an online database of your book collection, automatically entering details about the books (from Amazon.com and the Library of Congress) when you enter a title. You also can "tag" books on your list to make them searchable by whatever categories you like, rate and review them and share your handiwork with other book lovers.

OK, so that doesn't tell you much more than you already knew. However, the writer mentions another site I'd never heard of.

Ms. Dewey is not your father's librarian. Unless your father's librarian was a super model, and even then your father's librarian wasn't computer generated. I'm not sure this attempt to make search sexy is worth the overhead, but it's interesting to try and the results seem to be good, if a little slow to arrive. For fun, type in "Janina Gavankar."

from: Links Column
source: The News-Gazette, 13 November 2006
via: HighBeam™ Research

I tried the "Janina Gavankar" search, and the results were astounding -- until I realized (duh!) that it's a canned example. For even more fun, type in "Chief Blogging Officer" -- talk about your strange loops and twisty little passages!

One word of warning. Ms. Dewey gets to be a pain real quick. If you tab away to do something else, she knocks, sighs breathily and hassles you to come back. Funny the first time. Annoying thereafter.

This is the Vedanta Temple in San Francisco as pictured in The Visionary State: A Journey Through California's Spiritual Landscape by Erik Davis and photographer Michael Rauner. It was my birthday last week and Tom Matrullo kindly gave me this amazing book as a present. It includes many forms of high weirdness as practiced on the left coast, and will be an invaluable aid to my ongoing research. While Davis is far more reverential than myself -- at least toward certain spectra of the rainbow of mystical mythemes and cultural aberrations he covers -- some of his chapter headings do sound especially intriguing: Theosophy and its Discontents, The Rosy Cross Parade, OC Superstar, Space Brothers, Sci-Fi Gnosis, and so on. But the whole is much more than the sum of the parts. Visionary State is the ultimate coffee-table book of hyper-syncretistic spiritual seekery.

We get a good look at the conventional stuff, such as the California missions, the Hare Krishnas, Theosophists and their forebears, and the beat/Zen/hippie/nature devotees who have helped give California its much-deserved reputation as a place well-suited for and hospitable to spiritual experimentation of all kinds.

Davis also presents the darker side of spiritualism ... including Charles Manson, Jim Jones and the Heaven's Gate suicide cult. And he gives ample attention to the psychedelic movement, ranging from the early mescaline experiments of Aldous Huxley in the 1940s to the invention of recreational drugs such as STP and Ecstasy that he attributes to research pharmacologist Alexander Shulgin, who, he says, still experiments in a cluttered lab in the hills above Lafayette.

from: Exploring California's spiritual scenery
source: Contra Costa Times, 27 August 2006
via: HighBeam™ Research

• PreScript: Oh yeah, I meant to say (but first wanted to make sure I could get this working again), the old archives will be linked into the sidebar soon. They're all still "there" in some wonderfully virtual way. Here: see for yourself.

Meanwhile, The New York Times has a story on Allen Ginsberg that will be coming out in next Sunday's Book Review section (I get their Wednesday previews as a "TimesSelect" subscriber). I haven't read the piece yet, as I was stopped by the photo that precedes it. Now, is it just me, or is there more than a passing resemblance here?

Ginsberg	Goldblum

Of course, we all know that Jeff howled a lot in Jurassic Park, and Allen was great in altered states. As HOWL just turned 50, there's lots of news about the Beats floating around these days. And there was much leading up to this signal anniversary in American letters.

Yada yada... Actually, I'm using this post as a practice run to get my Chief Blogging Officer chops back. Let's see if I can remember how this quoting business works.

Fifty years after co-founding City Lights as the first paperback bookstore in the country, only to revolutionize poetry in 1956 by publishing Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," Ferlinghetti remains a leading light in San Francisco's cultural community. He is still organizing and giving readings, still painting and holding art exhibits, still publishing his work and still putting in time in the cramped offices of the City Lights press, on the bookstore's second floor.

from: Ferlinghetti's City Lights, Still A Beacon at 50 source: The Washington Post, 9 June 2003 via: HighBeam™ Research

Oh yeah, it's all coming back to me now.

Reading this uneven new biography by Bill Morgan, you come to realize what hard work it was being "beat." For one thing, you had to have an absolute aversion to the 'straight' world of basic workaday life. Morgan, for example, quotes from a 1952 journal entry by the 26-year-old and still not famous Ginsberg: "I never ride the subway toward an interview for a new job without dreaming of suicide." Not surprisingly, Ginsberg's employment record was a bit spotty in those early years.

from: Bio marks 'Howl' 50th source: Rocky Mountain News, 3 November 2006 via: HighBeam™ Research

What I want to know, though, is precisely why Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac were all reading Oswald Spengler in the late '40s. And precisely how they were influenced by Der Untergang des Abendlandes (click for instant translation). After I finish reading the 40 or so books I've collected on the beat scene, I should have a pretty good handle on these questions. Wish me luck.

Through a series of misunderstandings and bad calls on my part, this blog went moribund in mid-2005. Through a much longer series of head-scratchings and technical hiccups, I think the Highbeam folks and I have figured out how to get it back up and working again. All the old stuff is still "here" -- though the archive files (what archive files?) are no longer linking to those posts. For instance, if you search Google for Chief Blogging Officer, you'll find the old material. I'll be manually relinking the archives soon, and reposting the items that were on this front page at the onset of moribundity -- my gratis contribution to the English language.

Anyway, this is just a test. Stay tuned.