Where are all the lesbians?

I'm writing this at Snack Bar, a SoCo restaurant for the vehicularly starved: you watch automobiles, a great many of them, trundle past in their lazily Texan way, fake hubcaps determinedly revolving around an axis on which ego, brawn, and parental disaffection are distributed in equal measure.  You could come here at 8:45 pm, oblivious to the lateness of the time or the appropriateness of your sartorial state, seeking only to get "some work done".  Does that hostess make eyes at you, or is it just part of her job description?  "Did you want to get one more before we close?" "Sure, why not?" But the true achievement of this bar-restaurant hybrid is its rather liberal sensibility, in which sprays of red- and blue-ly lit water replace ceiling fans, in which the twenty-eight year-olds still get carded, if obsequiously so.  "Are you over 21," the waitress states, knowing full well that you are, knowing full well that you are obliged, required, to respond: "Wow! No one has carded me in two years," to which she replies with an incoherent sentence that includes the word "doll" in it.  "Love" would be more British, less personal. She knows this.

Included in this sensibility is a tolerance towards the gaily gay, the cheerfully left-behind.  Here we find a couple making out, only on closer examination one of them has pigtails, the other breasts. Is this the purgatory of the homosexually alienated?  They are in fact both of the same, indeterminate sex.  The man or woman with breasts has a set of biceps that would put a certain Ripudaman Manchanda to shame, and yet the girl/boy with pigtails is only, or at most, eighteen. Did he/she get carded? More importantly, does he/she go to UT?  Surely he/she's part of the liberal arts Plan 2, if at all.

My question, rather inconsequential: Where are these people when you're ready to observe them? When  your PhD is not, as it is now, nearly, but perilously, complete?  When your nights do not involve breathless exchanges with your advisor? If the University of Texas at Austin starves you of anything, it is the full view of lesbians, or gay people, unashamedly necking, in full view of the buff inhabitants of Gregory Gym, insensible, alarmed, at one, about to miss their Bikram Yoga Informal Class.

Hell, I'd pay to see them hold hands. In a city---town? university town?---that paper-cuts the boundary between conservative and self-consciously liberal, it may often seem as though there is no middle ground.  The gay straddle this ground without needing to; without desiring to. They are in fact the last bastion of sincerity that remains in this riven not-yet city-but-not-quite-town, not just because they want to be: because they are compelled, by the Rominees, to be. 

Well done, Sean Carroll

Note the subtle change in prose rhythm between the  exclamatory captions and the often declaratory sentences that follow. For instance: "You are  a gluon! In one of eight colorful hues."  Since GR, I've had a sneaky feeling that Sean Carroll was all kinds of awesome; this confirms it.

Ninety thousand eight hundred and eight reasons to universalize healthcare

Date of Visit	Provider	Total Charges
2/9/12	ST DAVIDS HLTHCARE PARTNERSHIP	$76.00
2/9/12	HARRIS S ROSE MD PLLC	$199.00
2/9/12	CLINICAL PATHOLOGY LABORATORIES	$134.50
11/17/11	SELECT PHYSICAL THERAPY HOLDINGS	$235.00
11/11/11	SELECT PHYSICAL THERAPY HOLDINGS	$285.00
11/7/11	SELECT PHYSICAL THERAPY HOLDINGS	$230.00
11/4/11	SELECT PHYSICAL THERAPY HOLDINGS	$254.00
10/31/11	SELECT PHYSICAL THERAPY HOLDINGS	$180.00
10/26/11	SELECT PHYSICAL THERAPY HOLDINGS	$180.00
10/21/11	SELECT PHYSICAL THERAPY HOLDINGS	$235.00
10/17/11	SELECT PHYSICAL THERAPY HOLDINGS	$189.00
10/14/11	UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN	$35.00
10/11/11	UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN	$10.00
10/10/11	SELECT PHYSICAL THERAPY HOLDINGS	$235.00
10/7/11	SELECT PHYSICAL THERAPY HOLDINGS	$275.00
9/28/11	ST DAVIDS HLTHCARE PARTNERSHIP	$76.00
9/28/11	AUSTIN RADIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION	$32.00
8/24/11	ST DAVIDS HLTHCARE PARTNERSHIP	$76.00
8/24/11	AUSTIN RADIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION	$32.00
8/15/11	A M HOME DIAGNOSTICS INC	$45.00
8/15/11	CTMF INC	$199.00
8/14/11	AUSTIN RADIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION	$32.00
8/14/11	CAPITOL ANESTHESIOLOGY ASSN	$1,343.30
8/14/11	CTMF INC	$200.00
8/13/11	AUSTIN RADIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION	$137.50
8/13/11	AUSTIN RADIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION	$37.00
8/13/11	AUSTIN RADIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION	$137.50
8/13/11	AUSTIN RADIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION	$32.00
8/13/11	AUSTIN RADIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION	$32.00
8/13/11	AUSTIN RADIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION	$32.00
8/13/11	AUSTIN RADIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION	$137.50
8/13/11	SETON HEALTHCARE	$74,678.00
8/13/11	HARRIS S ROSE MD PLLC	$4,277.00
8/13/11	SETON HEALTHCARE	$897.00
8/13/11	AUSTIN PATHOLOGY ASSOCIATES	$182.35
8/13/11	AUSTIN RADIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION	$41.00
8/13/11	AUSTIN RADIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION	$357.50
8/13/11	AUSTIN RADIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION	$130.00
8/13/11	CTMF INC	$539.00
8/13/11	B & M AMBULANCE SERVICE INC	$4,373.33
	Total	$90,808.48

An email excerpt (but one I didn't want to lose)

To my brother, or more generally, to anyone who has not yet met his first Darin:

My point in the previous email was to ask you for specificities.  Could you give me an example of a specific sentence, paragraph, passage, or piece of dialogue that suffers from a lack of nuance, i.e., that does not "mirror the inherent contradictions and ambivalence in [our thoughts]"?   This may be harder than you think.

"Darin got on the bus."

By most measures, this is is an innocuous, workmanlike sentence, with a single subject and object, and nothing else.  But it conceals a great deal.  For instance, the proper noun "Darin" brings up different images in different readers. To you, who are possibly yet to meet your first Darin, fictional (Darin isn't a very common a name in novels) or real, it is a placeholder for a person with no attributes. I hazard that the image in your head is one of a vaguely Caucasian man, perhaps long-nosed, a briefcase in his right hand, and wearing a tie.  For me, on the other hand, who knows two real people and one author named "Darin", a Darin-image is necessarily more amalgamated.  I see a man long of hair, flat of face, his stay-at-home t-shirt still stained with the cat droppings he tried to clean up in the afternoon.   We have already diverged in our interpretations of this sentence, and we haven't even gotten to the word "bus" (to which a similar hermeneutic treatment can be applied) yet.
All this may seem obvious to you.  In fact, you may claim that this is exactly the opposite of what you had in mind.  You may say: the shortest passages are the most ambiguous, and the longer a passage, and its accompanying description, the easier, and thus less rewarding, it is to imagine the object of the description.  But this is a specious argument.  A long passage is not inherently easier to place than a shorter one.  

"He wore ill-fitting clothes.  He had on a fake gold watch.  His lips wore a brownish hue, as though recently parted by a cigarette.  His face was mottled, it was obvious, by a recent accident.  He was missing his front teeth. Out of his pocket stuck a damp-deformed carton of Colgate Total.  His maroon gumboots were soaked through."

This, by any standards, is a bit of an itemization.  You may claim it belongs to the category of descriptions that leave little to the imagination.  But surely there is enough here to imagine!  As in the Darin example, each noun introduces shades of meaning, introduces images, that depend on the reader that apprehends them.  More importantly, the person being described here, unlike Darin, can be placed in a certain stratum of society---the man of few means---and this fact is itself enough to propel it beyond any accusations of dutiful thoroughness.   

Given, then, that there is always a great deal to imagine, that a passage always introduces more possibilities than it closes off, the question is not: Does a passage leave much or little to the imagination? but rather: What does this passage leave to the imagination? Different schools of fiction (I assume here that we're talking about fiction;  non-fiction is a whole other ballgame) answer this question in different ways.   The minimalists would stick to the Darin-like  sentences, which they seem to admire a great deal.  

"He looked very dead.  It was raining. I liked him as well as anyone I ever knew." (A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway)

The point of this kind of writing, apart from "the mere ratification of male taciturnity" it embodies, is to hint at a world just beneath the fictional surface, one pierced only at critical junctures by the fiction itself.   In theory, they leave a lot to the imagination. In practice, the amount to be imagined, if not managed properly, can overshadow the fiction, until everything comes to seem distended rather than pregnant with portent.  For this reason (and others, of course), minimalism is difficult to master, and only certain kinds of writers (not to mention readers) are suited for it.  

I myself prefer the opposite of minimalism:  

"They looked out, frowning into the sun, at what was left of a High Victorian garden, a wide round pond with a disused fountain of crumbling tritons, like angry, pock-marked babies, at its centre; the water had dropped to show the weed-covered pipe that fed it. The surrounding parterres had all been put to grass ten years before, when help had become a hopeless problem; though here and there a curved seat or a sundial or an unkillable old rose made a puzzled allusion to the plan it had once been part of." (The Spell, Alan Hollinghurst) 

In such writing, the writer is interested in parading the depth of his own imagination; in proving that he is better at imagining things than you are.   He too, leaves things to your imagination; but what he leaves is rather ordinary and can be deferred endlessly, until the end of the novel is met.  It is not an oversimplification to say that most novels can be located in a spectrum between minimalism and abundance.

Being not a review of Fortress of Solitude

I'm being blown apart by Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude.  I haven't finished it yet, so I can't say it's best novel I've read in the past few years, but so far, a fifth of the way through, it's already taught me more about technique than possibly any other novel, The Line of Beauty excluded.  I have a strange, almost paternal reaction to critiques of it: the review by William Skidelsky in the London Review of Books, for instance, may be interesting enough in its structural observations, but it makes very little of the endless mastery of ventriloquism on display in every single sentence in that book.   On the flip side, we have the useless reviews by any number of newspapers; either (on this side of the Atlantic) mindlessly congratulatory or (on the other side) vague but mostly positive. No one seems to have done justice to the purely belletristic pleasures of the novel, and, once I'm done reading it---PhD be damned---I intend to do exactly that.