April 2010

Mad, Bad and Dangerous to —? No.

By in herbivory, samesecks No Comments

Is Your Veggie Burger Killing You?

Despite the alarmist headline, the answer seems to be no. And I’m crestfallen, really. See, I would honestly prefer not to live to a ripe old age. But if you don’t count the massive ingestion of elephant tranquilizers, the unprotected sex with prostitutes, and the part-time job as a crash-test dummy, I’m really very boring and not much of a risk-taker. So when I saw this, I thought, finally — a way to tempt fate, to skirt the cliff’s edge of destruction, to make onlookers gasp at my heedless, pell-mell descent into romantic ruin, to stare Death in the face and match him grin-for-rictus-grin, and all without having to make any changes in my lifestyle.

Another dream dashed.

Once upon a time, I was promised soy would make me gay. Nope. I was told I must already be gay for being vegetarian in the first place. Nuh-uh. I was told it would give me. I don’t even need a training bra after eating soy for almost two decades! I was so looking forward to being “The Confuser“, but I had to resign myself to simply being confused.

I just don’t know how I can recover from this latest disappointment.

Know Your Role and Shut Your Mouth

By in language, the statusphere, writing No Comments

It’s a word that can stop any concept, or insight, or book, in its tracks: “That’s pretentious.” The declaration is usually accompanied by a disdainful turning of the head or waving of the hand. Pretentious. It’s pretentious—and by extension, so are you.

…Let’s define our terms here. Pretension is about, well, pretense, pretending to like something we don’t to create some sort of affectation.

So if I pretended I didn’t like Kundera or Fassbinder, and instead raved about the Twilight books and Michael Bay, I’d actually be pretending something I don’t feel in order to reach consensus with my peers. But I don’t like Twilight and I don’t get my kicks out of watching the earth blow up. Or seeing Owen and Luke Wilson embarrass themselves. So acting as though I did would in fact be pretending, or displaying pretense…or pretentious.

— John Grabowski

It depends on the particular example, I suppose, as to whether a writer is being too baroque, or a reader is being too obstinate in refusing to accept something different. It’s true, as I was just saying a few days ago, that academic literature is full of pompous twits who do their best to obfuscate rather than clarify. However, the authenticity police need a sharp poke in the eye as well, for their Holden Caulfield-like obsession with accusing people of phoniness if their writing aspires to be more than colloquial. I was thinking about that recently, after seeing someone called a pretentious poser for writing a word like “oeuvre”. Right, because anyone whose vocabulary has grown since high school is a fauxhemian snob who THINKS THEY’RE BETTER THAN YOU. I’d expect to hear that sort of embarrassingly insecure, anti-intellectual resentment from your average provincial Palinite, but it really seems to be a universal complaint. The barstool, the office chair, the season ticket-holder’s stadium cushion, and the living room recliner — any word that isn’t commonly heard within these boundaries of the everyman is apparently evidence of unforgivable conceit.

Does that have a ring, boys? Does it sound for you?
It sounds, the boys thought, oh, oh, it sounds…!

I love words. I love the way they ring and sound for me, and the best passages have to be read aloud to be fully appreciated. I love reading dictionaries. That doesn’t make me smart, or even someone who thinks he’s smart — it makes me someone who loves hearing new words. But I also curse like a motherfucking sailor, in everyday conversation as well as here for your reading pleasure, and yet I’ve never been on a boat, either! OH NOES I’M A SLUMMING BOURGEOIS TOO!

I’m focusing on writing here, because that’s the area where my sensibilities regarding artfulness and playfulness clash the hardest with this grim, almost Puritan hatred of anything flowery or extravagant. I enjoy writers who look like they’re having fun, who attempt to at least mildly blur the lines between poetry and prose (I even enjoy the irony that people who do delight in playing with language will invariably be accused of taking themselves too “seriously” by those who seem to walk around with a chip on their shoulder, looking for something to take offense to). If I want utterly unadorned, no-nonsense language, I’ll go read the owner’s manual for a lawnmower

Dang Ol’ Tell Yew What, Man

By in language, ohferfucksake, old dixie No Comments


I’ve lived in the northernmost part of the South my whole life, and I can say with authority that I find it easier to understand broken English with an occasional Spanish word thrown in than the Boomhauerian patois preferred by the majority of our “Speak Anglish or G’wan Git!” nativists. The few times I’ve had to travel to the actual Deep South were even more jarring. Motherfuckers, you might just want your slogans to more accurately reflect what this is all about and say, “Quit speaking Spanish!”, because whatever the fuck it is you Real Myrrhkins use to communicate, it isn’t “English”.

Let’s Put the “Fat” Back in “Fatherland”

By in fresh hell, germans supported their troops too, waiting for the barbarians No Comments

Daniel Engber righteously stands up for the right of the husky, the portly, the pear-shaped to serve in our military. Well, thank the gods. I can’t tell you how much sleep I’ve lost, worrying that we don’t make it easy enough for the maximum number of young people to sacrifice their lives for the glory of the corporate imperium.

When it comes to body fat, the regs declare that too much flab connotes, first of all, “a lack of personal discipline.” Another document suggests that it “detracts from soldierly appearance.” So excess weight isn’t just a health problem—it’s a personality flaw. Oh, and it makes you ugly.

I don’t want to suggest that the military discriminates against the thick-bodied alone. The high standards of appearance apply to skinny people, too. And short people. And tall people. (Forget Prussia’s army of giants: If you’re a man who’s over 6-foot6 or a woman over 6-foot, you can’t join the Marine Corps.) Those with severe, untreatable acne may also be excluded from military service, along with anyone with an insufficient number of teeth, extra fingers, or severe ingrown toenails. Some of these requirements seem to have more to do with keeping neat and trim than fighting off baddies in the desert. It doesn’t matter if you can do as many pushups as the next guy. Without the “self-discipline to maintain proper weight distribution and high standards of appearance,” you’re not welcome.

Well, it probably does help pacify the wogs more easily when they can clearly see that they’ve been invaded by a race of perfectly sculpted superbeings to whom resistance would be futile, but still. In addition to “insane, bloated, resource-consuming, world-straddling, hellspawned colossus death monster”, you can now add “lookist” to your denunciations of the U.S. military. Of course, if you’ve been reading the brilliant and entertaining Jennifer Michael Hecht (and you should be), this wouldn’t be too surprising:

Through studying history, I came to believe that gyms are occupying precisely the role they did in Ancient Sparta and in Fascist Germany. Being obsessed with bodies is actually a pretty rare thing in human history and we’re in lousy company.

…So what is the real story with gyms and gym bodies? What does the cult of exercise really mean?

Whenever it pops up in history it means the same thing. It always means: We are strong even though the peons do all the real work for us. We have special arenas marked as leisure where we get muscled at play.

…When we see this behavior in Ancient Sparta (where the population of Helot slaves outnumbered the Spartans) and in Fascist Germany, and we see the art of those two cultures focusing on the beauty of the toned but clean and uncallused body, we know what we are looking at. It’s more than shallow, it is military, it is deluded, it is oppressive, and a bit grotesque.

Well, that’s unnerving to consider, but never fear. Other experts aver that the majority of Americans remain too fat for fascism.

The How and Why of Writing

By in calvin and hobbes, education, language, nietzsche, writing No Comments

HOW:

They were a lively group of students, and we chatted for an hour, discussing topics we were all interested in. They asked smart questions.

When we were wrapping up, I asked them a question: “What is your relationship to reading and writing?” At that moment, they morphed from T-shirt-clad physical specimens and became generic graduate students, indistinguishable from all-in-black, cigarette-smoking studiers of literary theory and bearded-and-geeky future scientists. It’s all we do, they wailed, and it’s hard.

What’s hard?

The journal articles he makes us read (they said, directing accusing fingers at my colleague) are dense and boring. We’re getting good information, but it can be painful. And, they said, we have to learn to write like that.

No, I said, you don’t.

I’ve heard that song from graduate students in every discipline, and from faculty members, junior and senior, at universities across the country. The message: You have to write the same way as others in your field. You must use multisyllabic words, complex phrasing, and sentences that go on for days, because that’s how you show you’re smart. If you’re too clear, if your sentences are too simple, your peers won’t take you seriously.

— Rachel Toor

Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water.

— Nietzsche

I’m not an academic. As I’ve said, I never even attended college for the purpose of serious study or career preparation. I’m an autodidact if you want to be gracious, a dilettante if you don’t. But the quest to expand the horizons of one’s knowledge is a demanding one nonetheless, so I have done my best to read what the real academics have written on subjects I’m interested in, as well as shoot the breeze conduct rigorous interviews with a few of of my friends with advanced degrees and/or former academic careers dozens and dozens of prominent intellectuals throughout academia, and what they’ve told me has dovetailed with my own experience: there’s a whole realm that consists of technically smart people who have turned away from trying to make any real difference in the world with their knowledge, and spend their time in a cerebral circle-jerk, talking to themselves and others like them in an inscrutable private language. I like to flatter myself that I’m smarter than the average bear, but I’ve read academic tracts that left me glassy-eyed, with a trickle of drool from the corner of my mouth and thin tendrils of smoke trailing from my ears.

It’s a shame, because while I do agree that one should strive to be understood, especially when the goal is to actually impart information, I’ve really come to appreciate most of all when someone can enlighten and entertain in equal measures. The problem isn’t just that too much intellectual writing is devoted to pointless meandering through labyrinthine thickets of signified signifiers signifying signification, it’s that it has no style, no grace, no sense of humor. Pace George Orwell and his rules that Toor quotes, writing can be clear and artful; there’s no need to have such a ruthless, stripped-down, utilitarian aesthetic that always aims for the lowest common denominator.

WHY:

I have heard it said that the defining characteristic of a writer is that writers absolutely must write. They can’t help it. It’s a compulsion. By that metric, I am not a writer. By that metric, I am pretty much the opposite of what a writer is. Most of the time, I have to be forced to write. This post, for instance, is prompted by my desperately needing to work on something else with a looming deadline. Yes, it’s still writing, but my only alternative is doing the dishes. There have been days this week where I chose a sinkful of dishes instead.

I like writing. I’m good at it. I’ve come to realize that my writing has made a few incremental changes for good in this world: swaying people’s opinions, helping people better appreciate some neglected things.

But do I need to write? No. I have been happy with my life without writing being a part of it.

— Chris Clarke

B: But why, then, do you write? – A: Well, my friend, to be quite frank: so far, I have not discovered any other way of getting rid of my thoughts. – B: And why do you want to get rid of them? – A: Why do I want to? Do I want to? I have to.

— Nietzsche

>I never was one for keeping diaries or journals, and in my school days, writing was just another task to be done for a grade, with as little effort or fuss as possible. Until my late twenties, in fact, the most writing I ever really did was in the form of short poems or song lyrics. But having spent a few years now making a more-or-less regular effort to set down my thoughts on whatever topic catches my fancy, I don’t know what I’d do without it. Writing is how I solidify my thoughts; it’s a tool to focus my awareness. Along with music, of course, it’s how I get right with myself and the world, a way to find harmony and beauty that I can’t find anywhere else.

I don’t have to write in the sense of a compulsion, and I’ve never bought into the oft-heard advice that says aspiring writers have to devote a certain amount of time each day to writing a certain number of words. The calendar has nothing to do with it. If I don’t have anything really pressing to say, or if I’m too busy or tired, writing can wait. I enjoy the act of writing, and it really does energize me and lift my spirits to grapple with thoughts before finally expressing them in words to my satisfaction, but when I’m just going through the motions to force myself to conform to some artificial timetable, it’s worse than if I just wait however long it takes until inspiration strikes. If I felt the need to mindlessly jabber just to distract myself from the unsettling sound of the wind whistling through my head, I’d have a Twitter account. But for me, thinking is just as much part of the process as the actual work at the keyboard. You need to allow time for new information to filter in, for new experiences to occur, for new perspectives to spontaneously emerge before you can write anything meaningful. I find the best way to do that is to stop worrying about what I want to say, and go listen to what other people have to say. The interconnectedness of the blogosphere serves the purpose of keeping my mind stimulated. And while I’ve never wanted to be the kind of blogger that has to have an immediate comment on every piece of breaking news, there is a certain drive to stay abreast of what others are talking about, to see if you can add your two cents to a conversation before it dissipates, and that, more than saying, “I have to write a hundred words a day, no exceptions,” is what helps with the discipline of it.

So while I have yet to feel like a slave to my keyboard or my blog, writing is the necessary third link in the chain, following observation and reflection, that makes me feel complete. That process never stops. In that sense, then, yes, I have to do it.

Look on My Works, Ye Whiteys, and Despair!

By in fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies, tribalism No Comments

I’ve said before how I’ve really felt weary of politics (and the same old political blogs) for a while now, and that hasn’t changed. But let me just say this now: I do appreciate the effort Michael “Humpty Hump” Steele has been putting in to make sure I stay entertained. From an endless supply of gaffes to blowing the RNC’s money on lesbian bondage nightclubs and lavish getaways for meetings, he’s really gone above and beyond, and I salute him.

It’s so funny to think that the party brain trusts apparently thought putting one of the three or four black Republicans in a position of power would somehow make voters forget about the last forty years or so; even funnier to see Steele turn around and admit what everyone already knew. Long may he reign!

Either a Beast or a God

By in environment, foolosophy, solitude No Comments

But the really reckless were fetched by an older, colder voice, the oceanic whisper: “I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing. That is how I shall set you free. There is no love; there are only the various envies, all of them sad.”

— W.H. Auden

But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

— Aristotle

From the NYT:

The compulsion to live in isolation can be attributed to any number of factors, said Elaine N. Aron, a psychologist and the author of “The Undervalued Self” and “The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You.”

Some people might “really need their downtime,” Dr. Aron said, and seek out “isolation that avoids all social intercourse.” Others may have developed an “avoidant attachment style” in childhood, resulting in “a need to prove to themselves that they don’t need anybody,” she said.

For many people, though, the desire for extreme solitude may have simpler roots, she noted: “It could be because they want a mystical experience. You can’t pathologize that.”

O RLLY? That’s funny; I would turn that completely around. I can understand and be sympathetic to someone who has had enough of the bitter dregs of intimate relationships and decided that the negatives outweigh the positives. While I think there are many degrees and shades of difference worth exploring between an active social life and utter solitude, I don’t think it’s completely strange to prefer your own company to an extreme degree.

But as for going off into the wilderness, miles from any other human, in order to find some mystical secret or meaning in life, man, you gotta be one non compos mentis motherfucker. “Meaning” is a human construction. Even the examples of the bitter and the brokenhearted stand as a reaction to social relationships, the photo negative of social engagement. They’re still defined by what they oppose. Caspar David Friedrich paintings notwithstanding, wild nature isn’t going to reveal anything profound to you about how you should spend your life. Fight, feast, fuck, and eventually die. That’s about it. If you want more nuance than that, you’re going to have to look to human society.

O Moments Big as Years!

By in foolosophy, psychology, technology No Comments

From misty memories of commuter happy hours to rotary dial apps: Why are we addicted to romanticizing the past?

— Mary Elizabeth Williams

Because of the certainty, something we rarely ever have in real time. Once an object or event is safely stored away in the past, it loses its ability to give us any nasty surprises. It’s much like how reading a book or watching a movie for the second time through allows you to take your time and savor the details — you know how it all turns out in the end, so there’s no anxiety. Our nostalgic mistake is projecting that certainty backwards, as if the people living at the time weren’t beset by the same insecurities and fear of the future as we have today. We’re forever in a hurry to get away from where we are, but afraid that we’re rushing headlong into something worse. That leaves the past as the obvious place to look for a contentedness that we always feel has to exist outside of ourselves.

And, of course, when you’ve lived long enough to see so many things you took for granted change, fade, and be replaced, it starts to weigh on you in a particularly heavy, existential way that one day, it’s going to happen to you too. Hence a tendency to start digging in our fingers, not wanting things to slip away quite so easily.

In every age “the good old days” were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.

— Brooks Atkinson

If you look back at various writers in ancient Greece — the cradle of Western civilization, ferfucksakes! — you can’t help notice a familiar theme: bitching about these damn kids today, how they don’t make things like they used to, we’re going to hell in a handbasket, and on and on. I love a lot of ancient Chinese poetry, and it’s the same story there. There was always some Golden Age in the past when everything was great, and somehow, we’ve fallen away from it and are now living in a debased time, one step away from barbarism. Second verse, same as the first. Clearly it’s just an fundamental feature of human psychology.

Pace Ms. Williams and an otherwise good essay, though, I have to say that I hate the way so many of these ruminations end up fixating on technology as one of the main culprits that have stolen our time, innocence, social grace, what have you, rather than seeing it as a mere symbol of the restless hyperactivity and anxious activity that give birth to it in the first place.

Shake Your Spear at Shakespeare

By in art, books, music, writing No Comments

Any scholar who dared to suggest that Bach’s work wasn’t by Bach or Rembrandt’s by Rembrandt would, I trust, be handled thereafter with the academic equivalent of padded tongs. Yet outside of the ambiguous evidence of their work, we know scarcely more about the inner lives of either man than we do about that of Shakespeare. Why, then, is he the only creative giant around whom an ever-growing edifice of pseudoscholarly fantasy has been erected?

The answer may be as simple as this: Most of us are far more at home with words than with sounds or images. Not being able to do much more than sketch a crude stick figure, I can’t even begin to imagine what it would have felt like to paint “The Night Watch.” But I, like you, express myself with words each day of my life, and though I know I’ll never write a play like “Cymbeline” or “The Winter’s Tale,” I also know how it feels to sit down at the keyboard and set down my thoughts about the world.

— Terry Teachout

That’s interesting, but I don’t know…it doesn’t really ring true to me. I am constantly, intensely envious of writers and bloggers who are not only smarter than me but more artful writers to boot, but I can’t say it’s ever occurred to me to doubt their authorship out of jealousy; it just makes me want to try harder. And while it takes more than a little sustained effort to understand and appreciate Shakespeare, I would think that music and visual art, being more immediate and visceral, would inspire more intense interest and speculative theorizing about the mere mortals responsible for creating them. His earlier remarks about democracy and genius seem closer to the mark:

To deny that Shakespeare’s plays could have been written by a man of relatively humble background is, after all, to deny the very possibility of genius itself—a sentiment increasingly attractive in a democratic culture where few harsh realities are so unpalatable as that of human inequality. The mere existence of a Shakespeare is a mortal blow to the pride of those who prefer to suppose that everybody is just as good as everybody else. But just as some people are prettier than others, so are some people smarter than others, and no matter who you are or how hard you try, I can absolutely guarantee that you’re not as smart as Shakespeare.

If anything, Shakespeare’s story reminds us of the existence of a different kind of democracy, the democracy of genius. Time and again, the world of art has been staggered by yet another “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere” (to borrow a phrase from “The Great Gatsby”) who, like Michelangelo or Turner or Verdi, strides onto the stage of history, devoid of pedigree and seemingly lacking in culture, and proceeds to start churning out masterpieces. For mere mortals, especially those hard-working artistic craftsmen who long in vain to be touched by fire, few things are so depressing as to be reminded by such creatures of the limits of mere diligence.

Still, as he says, there are other great artists of humble backgrounds and means who aren’t subject to speculation about the true author of their output. Alas, ’tis a mystery.

But however it got started and for whatever reason, I don’t think it’s much of a mystery as to how it should have accumulated enough mass to become a recurring issue — people just love digging into others’ potential secrets, and thrill to the idea that they might be distinguished by possession of some esoteric knowledge. Why did supposedly intelligent people invest so much time and energy into proving that Paul McCartney’s death was being covered up? (Speaking of the Beatles, and getting back to the aforementioned comments on democracy and genius, I seem to recall hearing how there was some initial skepticism about how four working-class boys with no official training could have possibly crafted those songs.)

Borrowers and Lenders Be

By in history, religion, spiritual-not-religious No Comments

Hinduism, as a faith tradition, stands at this pass a victim of overt intellectual property theft, absence of trademark protections and the facile complicity of generations of Hindu yogis, gurus, swamis and others that offered up a religion’s spiritual wealth at the altar of crass commercialism.

…Not surprisingly, the most popular yoga journals and magazines are also in the act. Once yoga was no longer intertwined with its Hindu roots, it became up for grabs and easy to sell. These journals abundantly refer to yoga as “ancient Indian,” “Eastern” or “Sanskritic,” but seem to assiduously avoid the term “Hindu” out of fear, we can only assume, that ascribing honestly the origins of their passion would spell disaster for what has become a lucrative commercial enterprise.

…Hindus can only sadly shake their heads, as by this measure, soon we will read as to how karma, dharma and reincarnation–the very foundations of Hindu philosophy–are only ancient precepts that early Hindus of some era made their own.

— Aseem Shukla

Oh yeah? Well, through the practice of jnana yoga, I came to the realization that notions of karma and reincarnation are nonsense and gibberish, so how ’bout that? And I’ve benefited from the practice of modern, secularized hatha yoga just fine, thank you, without suffering any “deficiencies” from the absence of another nonsensical term, “spirituality”. Seriously, I’m not sure what irritates me more — the way this starts out as an almost identity politics-style whinge about how yoga is a Hindu thing and you outsiders wouldn’t understand, or the way he eventually allows that okay, fine, maybe people from other traditions and backgrounds can sort of get it, but only as long as religion or spirituality is involved somehow. Sorry to break it to you, but physical activity does not have to be combined with magic words and sanctified thoughts to be meaningful.

But leaving the condescension of metaphysicians aside, getting to the real gist of his complaint — when has it ever not been thus? Traditions evolve and adapt or become static and die out. Different aspects appeal to different people in different cultures at different times. Go ahead, insist all you want on the need for everyone to take a moment and acknowledge the Hindu roots of yoga. It won’t change the fact that the vast bulk of a several thousand year-old tradition just doesn’t serve any need for modern Westerners. Once again, I’m just amused at the way people cling to ossified, limiting labels instead of celebrating the continued existence and the dynamic flow of the vibrancy they were originally meant to symbolize.

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