Thursday Throwback

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[Originally published Jun. 14, 2016.]

Ben Sixsmith:

The immediacy and excitement of social media and online journalism have encouraged people to ignore this and hold forth on everything. Mouthing off with insufficient knowledge of one’s subject can entail devising and promoting arrant nonsense. What it also does, however, which is far less acknowledged, is make it more difficult to stop promoting nonsense as having publically endorsed a particular opinion one has made a personal investment in its success, integrating the idea into one’s identity and gambling one’s social status on it being impressive.

In the depths of an old-growth forest, a tree falls. In a study, a blogger glances over the headlines and trending topics in his feed reader and rolls his eyes in disdain before closing the laptop and picking up a book. Do either of them make a sound? It depends, of course, on how you define the term. Are the soundwaves that ripple out from the tree’s crash into the undergrowth significant if they’re only registered by the ears of forest creatures incapable of recursively reflecting on them? Is the blogger’s weariness with the fatuity of social media meaningful if it isn’t publicly performed in that same venue in return for validation by clicks, likes and retweets?

It’s no fun ignoring people if they don’t know they’re being ignored, is it? How are people to know that the weeklong lapse between posts is due to my principled rejection of the popular topics and viral essays on offer, rather than my being occupied with work or other hobbies, if I don’t say so? However, conspicuous disdain, the kind that wants to make sure the audience knows just how unworthy of your attention you find the current object of your attention, should be beneath us. It’s akin to the fraudulent spectacle of a football player peeking through his fingers to see if the referee has taken note of his simulation of mortal injury. In the social media marketplace, sense and nonsense are not polar opposites, however invested consumers might be in believing otherwise; they’re competing products, like Coke and Pepsi. Performance, signaling, and seeking validation — these are the currency, the bills and coins which dirty the hands of the enlightened and benighted alike.

Words You Say Never Seem to Live Up to the Ones Inside Your Head

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Joe Moran:

This book makes a good case for seeing linguistics as “the universal social science”, one that teaches us not just about language but about how we live and make sense of the world. When we learn how the world is made through words, we also learn to be sceptical of our current iteration of reality and more tolerant of other perspectives. If life can be differently worded, it can be differently lived.

One is tempted to say, well, it’s the Guardian, what else do you expect? The house style pretty much calls for some vestigial gestures in the direction of power to the people! revolution! and the progressive arc of history, even in a linguistics book review. When efforts to remold stubborn reality through politics, cultural diktats and technology have all fallen short, I suppose the incantatory power of language is an obvious alternative, one which just so happens to promise a starring role for bookish intellectuals, imagine that.

We Take For Granted We Know the Whole Story. We Judge a Book By Its Cover and Read What We Want Between Selected Lines

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Himadri Chatterjee:

So why is he so dissatisfied? Holden himself cannot explain this, for, firstly, he does not analyse himself, and is possibly incapable of doing so; and secondly, neither is he very articulate. His general sense of dissatisfaction is something he feels, but which he cannot understand, or express in words even if he could. So it is up to us, as readers, to try to look beyond his natural inarticulacy. One word he uses frequently is “phoney”. He doesn’t explain what he mans by this, but we can see that he tends to apply this word to describe what he regards (although he would possibly be unable to articulate it thus) as emotional shallowness, or insincerity. And this he sees all around him. People say things, do things, not because they feel it, but simply because that is the form, as it were, simply because this is what everyone does. What appears to dissatisfy him is a lack of feeling, a lack of emotional depth in peoples’ day-to-day lives. But why seems it so particular with him? However, as with Prince Hamlet (in this if little else), he knows not “seems”: for Holden, it is. It is the seeming in others that he deplores.

And the reason for this, though not immediately apparent, emerges slowly over the course of the novel, and takes centre stage in the climactic passage towards the end, where he meets with his sister Phoebe: Holden is still in grieving for the death of his brother Allie, and he cannot understand why the rest of the world isn’t also in grieving with him. How can people – even his own parents – carry on with their lives as before after something so momentous as this? How can they all go inside to take shelter from the rain immediately after his funeral?

This, I think, is at the heart of the matter. The novel is not about teenage angst, or rebellion, or about the difficulties of coming to age: it’s about a sensitive young lad who cannot articulate his grief, nor understand how the rest of the world, his own parents included, could fail to grieve as he does, could carry on living when his own life seems to have come to a halt. And considered as such, it strikes me as a very poignant novel, and not deserving the opprobrium so frequently heaped upon it these days.

I read The Catcher in the Rye in eleventh-grade English class. It didn’t make a deep impression on me, and I’ve rarely thought about it since. In fact, I don’t even remember Holden having a dead brother named Allie, but my faith in Himradi’s honesty is such that I’m willing to accept that he did, and that this isn’t just some prank to see how many people have actually read the book before offering opinions on it.

For as long as I can remember, though, conversation about the book has resided on some meta-level of significance, in which people pronounce on its cultural importance rather than its merits as a story. I have an isolated memory of the actress Christina Ricci in a magazine interview back in the mid-to-late ’90s expressing the “contrary” opinion that despite her teacher’s best efforts to convince her of the novel’s “voice of a generation” significance, she found it overrated and thought Holden was whiny and boring. I put “contrary” in scare quotes because, as is so often the case with rebels who refuse to accept that they are the new establishment, I’ve rarely if ever heard a different opinion since. I doubt if any teacher in the last thirty years has tried to present the book as the ne plus ultra of teen angst, but for some reason, people are still invested in rebelling against it as such (when they’re not seeing it as coded Marxist propaganda, that is).

It’s another humbling reminder that sometimes, the most radical thing we can do is to quietly pay attention to avoid missing what’s right in front of us. Too much conversation is simply about changing the subject to something else, to everything else, to nothing at all.

Sisyphus’s Push Mower

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Graham Hillard:

From a purely financial perspective, doing one’s own yardwork ignores well-established theories about opportunity cost and comparative advantage. Just as the United States should focus on soybean production and import its avocados, such thinking goes, so its citizens should leave the lawn-mowing to the professional landscapers lest they misappropriate a billable hour.

Indeed, the answer is obvious if the question is going to be discussed in economic terms alone. I save $200 a month by caring for my own lawn but could easily earn more than that figure were I to use my yardwork hours to teach an extra class or write a bit more second-rate political commentary. What I would lose in the bargain, however, is the moral satisfaction of creating order out of chaos, bringing the land up to my own standards, and performing a task that remains — how else to put this? — proper to a man.

A friend of my stepson’s came over at the beginning of June to watch the Champions League final with us. “Man, I really like what you’ve done out there,” he said, gesturing out the window. “You’ve got a miniature Versailles going on.” I demurred that if anything, we were more inspired by the English garden ideal than the overly-geometric French version, but of course I took the compliment in the spirit in which it was intended. “Thanks, but it’s all her vision,” I said, referring to the Lady of the House. “I’m just the groundskeeper.” That’s not entirely true — I just do the brute labor, like mowing the lawn and picking up branches and offering an opinion while shopping at the greenhouse. She’s the artiste who builds, sculpts, cultivates, plants and harvests. I don’t always appreciate having to stoop under the branches of the redbud trees which nevertheless manage to slap my face and knock my hat off, and it certainly is challenging to maneuver around some of the intricate arrangements she’s constructed, but I know my place.

In my days of renting houses, I always had yards small enough to cut with a push mower. I bought this house twelve years ago, with just under two acres of land, but I didn’t upgrade to a riding mower. At the time, there just always seemed to be better things to do with a thousand dollars, but soon enough, I decided I didn’t need one anyway. It only takes about three hours to do the entire yard, and the mower is self-propelled anyway, even though sometimes I refrain from using it just to make it more challenging. I look at it as three hours of enforced walking, mild exercise, and music listening. And I do love the temporary satisfaction of a job well done, as I look over the uniformly-trimmed grass late on a summer evening after mowing. It will only be about three days until I start to see all my work come undone, but that’s plenty of time to enjoy it. While it remains neat and tidy, it reminds me of the professionally-manicured soccer pitches I spend so much time gazing upon. This is worthwhile labor. It is its own reward. As Camus said about Sisyphus, the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. I, too, conclude that all is well.

What Musician Holds Us In His Hand? Oh Sweetest Song

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Just a little over seventy-two hours ago, I only had a vague awareness of Devin Townsend’s existence. I still pay some attention to goings-on in the world of heavy music, even though, truth be told, I don’t find a lot of it appealing anymore. What can I say? I’m not a young man filled with excess testosterone, and my emotional palette contains more than aggression and depression, so a lot of today’s metal music just strikes me as too limited and boring. Somehow, over the years, I had gotten the impression that Townsend was an avant-garde, abrasive, noise-metal musician. You know, buzzsaw guitars, Cookie Monster vocals, etc. Well, I was very wrong, and I curse whoever misled me. He does have a lot of heavy songs, with galloping-herds-of-Brontosaurus kick-drums, 32nd-note riffs, and detuned guitars (he apparently tunes down to C and even B, which is also what Type O Negative used to get their massive, moaning-glaciers, tectonic-plates-shifting, footsteps-of-God sound), and he’s perfectly capable of shrieking and growling when he wants. But he also has some ethereal acoustic music, and he names Enya’s Watermark album as one of his Top 5 all-time biggest influences. This dude is seriously diverse.

The Lady of the House has had classical training as a singer, and so we’ve been enjoying the YouTube channel of a Scottish vocal coach, Beth Roars, and that’s where I first heard him, performing his song “Kingdom.” The way his spectacular voice climbs and soars from about 6:45 to 6:50 in that video gives me full-body chills every time. From there, well, he’s been recording since the early ’90s, and he’s quite prolific, so there’s a huge back catalog for me to dive into. I’m still only about half-done. Some of his songs, like “Namaste” or “Addicted,” sound like a slightly more melodic Ministry or Godflesh, with an aggro, industrial feel to them. Other songs, like the acoustic “Little Pig,” are more reminiscent of Pink Floyd. (And that song comes from a gorgeous collection of B-sides! Most bands should be so lucky to put out a proper album as good as that, and these are just the songs he had left over!) Some albums are more of a mix of heavy and gentle. His latest release, Empath, which came out this spring, is one where he says he tried, for the first time, to put all of himself into it, rather than compartmentalizing his different tastes into different projects (he’s recorded under Devin Townsend, The Devin Townsend Project, The Devin Townsend Band, and Strapping Young Lad, and probably others I haven’t uncovered yet). The closest comparison I can make is to Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins, who is similarly capable of writing blistering metal riffs as well as feather-light, wispy melodies, similarly prolific, and who also physically resembles a giant thumb. But Corgan’s voice is much more limited (and definitely an acquired taste), and I personally have found much of his post-Smashing Pumpkins output to be forgettable and uninspired. No, Townsend appears to me to be sui generis. I wouldn’t have believed it possible to discover someone like him.

As any middle-aged or older person knows, it’s increasingly difficult to be surprised. History’s weight bears down hard on us; memory stifles imagination. Newer music tends to sound like things we’ve already heard done before (and done better). Older artists tend to be inconsistent quality-wise over a long career. So you can imagine what a total joy it is for me to stumble across a treasure like this. Dozens and dozens of songs to listen to! Genuinely fresh sounds, unlike any other artist I can think of! It’s disorienting, but in a good way. For a couple weeks or so, the whole world will feel almost new again. Every morning, I’ll eagerly look forward to listening again. There will be that delicious unfamiliarity with the songs for a while, where I remember enough of the melody to crave it without being able to remember exactly what’s coming next in the song. I’ll run some songs into the ground, listening on repeat day after day, until several days later, when I move to the next one in the playlist and joyfully realize that I’d already forgotten I bought this one, and I’ll get to fall in love with it again! I’ve been listening to music all day long throughout this weekend, and when I’m not, my head is heavy with melodies, some of which, being only half-remembered, morph into something unique, making me want to grab my own guitar and try to capture them before they drift away. Ah, but it’s so blissful to just stay put and let them ebb and flow over me…

And as it happens, this coincides with the new fitness routines I’m building. We joined a gym at the beginning of summer, where we started working with a personal trainer and a nutritionist. Like always when you change old habits, there’s a novelty to the new way of doing things that focuses your attention and makes a lot of details of everyday life stand out. Plus, we’re at that point in August where it’s still hot out, of course, but there’s a hint of fall coming soon. I’ve come to appreciate August, funny enough. I feel almost magnanimous toward it, as you can afford to feel toward a defeated opponent. “Well, summer, you did your best to kill me, but you’re getting weaker, and you’ll be gone soon. Thanks for putting up a challenging fight. See you next year.”

So, as I’m sure we’ve all experienced many times, there’s this fortuitous constellation of events and feelings that make certain time periods preserve especially well in the memory. I’m old enough now that I can somewhat recognize them as they’re forming, and it’s wonderful to think ahead to next year, when all of these particular details will look as if they’ve been caught in amber. Especially the songs. There’s not much sweeter than a song that calls to mind a specific time and place. Some melodies will go with you anywhere, like carry-on luggage, and will adapt to new circumstances. Some stay rooted to the place where they were born for you. Music that evokes the borderland between summer and fall might be my favorite of all.

A small part of me wonders anxiously how many more serendipitous discoveries like this there are for me to make, or how infrequent they’re likely to be. The wiser part of me just laughs at how quickly we become greedy for more! more! before we’ve even finished what’s in front of us. Who could be so ungrateful to demand to know if and when it will be repeated? It’s wonderful enough that it happened at all. This is exactly where I was always trying to get to. Let time continue on without me for just a little while.

Obiter Scripta, no. 70

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To my mind, the maximum length of an aphorism is whatever can be written in one sitting. Written, not read—for many aphorisms may be taken in at once. An aphorism can be revised, of course, before it is released into the world. It may be improved, simplified polished; but if it is complicated, if another train of thought is added, even one fully consequential to the first… then it is an essay, no matter how short. The reason is, so to speak, phenomenological. Deriving from one glance to the horizon, an aphorism can only contain as much as the eye can take in in a moment. This is more for some than for others, but not very much more. If its essence is not set down in one sitting, usually immediately, then it is lost.

— Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit

That’s how I’ve approached most of my writing here. I’d always thought of my posts as a species of dwarf essay, but maybe I’ve actually been producing plump aphorisms instead.

The Question to Everyone’s Answer

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Alan Jacobs and Anthony Daniels independently encounter and consider a strange species of academic/intellectual conceit: the ideal of open-ended inquiry, which in practice seems more like a pathological fear of commitment. Daniels finds an architect who thinks that being “rigorous in the questions that I ask” is more important than the answers he comes up with, as if buildings are just abstract experiments in self-expression rather than physical structures for people to inhabit. Jacobs notes a Harvard history professor claiming that philosophy “at its best” is about encouraging a critical posture rather than anything as trite as providing answers to pressing questions of how to live (I would hardly consider Theodor Adorno an example of philosophy at even its second-best, but I’m not a professional thinker and no one asked me). The juxtaposition of these two examples makes me realize how accustomed I’ve been to this conceit without ever accepting it; seeing it exposed, naked and shriveled under the light, makes me realize what a scrawny, contemptible thing it is.

Giacomo Leopardi wrote that suicide motivated by existential despair was reason’s one final attempt to assert itself at any price. Self-destruction in protest against a cruel, unjust world is an example of a contradictory, inconsistent human being sacrificed on the altar of logic. The ideal of a “critical posture,” of existing indefinitely in suspended judgment without ever being forced to choose one imperfect stance over another, seems like an intellectual’s attempt to seat himself upon the vacant throne of the God he banished — observing, contemplating, and occasionally prodding lesser mortals from his cerebral redoubt beyond space and time.

Thursday Throwback

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[Originally published Dec. 7, 2012.]

But when I lean over the chasm of myself—
it seems
my God is dark
and like a web: a hundred roots
silently drinking.
This is the ferment I grow out of.
— Rilke

William Deresiewicz:

Thinking well takes time: time for doubt, time for analysis and synthesis, time to let your intuition operate, time to have a second thought. The faster we write, the faster we respond (on Twitter or Facebook, in discussion threads or texts), the more superficial the level of consciousness we’re working from. We’re skimming the surface of our minds (which, like the surface of other things, is mostly foam and crud), forgoing reason, judgment, artistry, craft. That is not the place from which the most intelligent forms of communication, the ones that used to play a larger role in our lives—novels, essays, serious journalism—originate. But it is the place our public discourse, and our private discourse, too, increasingly inhabits.

The Rilkean imagery appeals to me in this context: roots, darkness, silence, fermentation. The type of thought I find most worthwhile needs time to develop, and it can’t always be hurried along by conscious prodding. Those connective webs of understanding just seem to spontaneously emerge in the shadowed corners of our thought while our attention is elsewhere.

Complaints about the social web tend to take the form of curmudgeons lamenting the lack of spelling and grammar in text messages and tweets, but again, it’s a mistake to consider the spectacle of people spending every waking moment typing pidgin-English on their phones as a deformation of writing. What they’re doing is talking, in text. The problem is not that people in the last decade have suddenly gotten stupider and unable to learn basic writing skills; the problem is that those hours that used to be spent in solitude, where boredom or a mere lack of stress can come into play, are now filled with nonstop chattering. Those times when we used to find ourselves alone with nothing to do, when we might pick up a book out of curiosity, or when we would take a deep breath, relax, and stare out the window while letting our thoughts idly meander, or when we could just simply rest in that receptive state in which the seeds of new thoughts could begin putting down roots, in which the fragments of sensory stimulation acquired throughout the day, unimportant in themselves, could decay into organic material to serve as nourishment for those more substantial thoughts; those times, for a variety of reasons, are becoming more rare.

The rootless, constantly-in-motion nature of activity on the social web only puts me in mind of tumbleweeds rolling across sun-baked clay.

Ancient Forms of Party Strife

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Consider, for example, the enormous social difference between an American who embraces Communism and one who embraces Nazism. One of these is a tolerated eccentricity, and one of them is the lowest thing you can be…The real difference between an American Communist and an American Nazi is that American Communists historically have been intellectuals and American Nazis have been rednecks.

— Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics

It’s one of those things that I already knew, but I hadn’t thought of in precisely that way, so the succinctness made me laugh. Mark Forsyth, in his book The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language, makes a similar claim about the original Nazis:

It’s a funny thing, but Hitler wouldn’t have called himself a Nazi. Indeed, he became quite offended when anyone did suggest he was a Nazi. He would have considered himself a National Socialist. Nazi is, and always has been, an insult.

Hitler was head of the catchily named Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party). But, like the Cambridge University Netball Team, he hadn’t thought through the name properly. You see, his opponents realised that you could shorten Nationalsozialistische to Nazi. Why would they do this? Because Nazi was already an (utterly unrelated) term of abuse. It had been for years.

Every culture has a butt for its jokes. Americans have the Polacks, the English have the Irish, and the Irish have people from Cork. The standard butt of German jokes at the beginning of the twentieth century were stupid Bavarian peasants. And just as Irish jokes always involve a man called Paddy, so Bavarian jokes always involved a peasant called Nazi. That’s because Nazi was a shortening of the very common Bavarian name Ignatius.

This meant that Hitler’s opponents had an open goal. He had a party filled with Bavarian hicks and the name of that party could be shortened to the standard joke name for hicks. (Incidentally, hick was formed in exactly the same way as Nazi. Hick was a rural shortening of Richard and became a byword for uneducated farmers.)

Imagine if a right-winger from Alabama started a campaign called Red States for the Next America. That’s essentially what Hitler did.

That sounds almost too good to be true, especially as I’ve never heard this claim anywhere else. But either way, it speaks to the obvious truth of the omnipresent divide between urban and rural, sophisticated and rustic, educated and common-sense. We’re used to thinking this way in terms of consumption patterns — early-adopted gadgets and trends become uncool as soon as they become too popular, and the avant-garde head off in the opposite direction to spite the herd. Backyard breeders and puppy mills are concerned with papers and lineage; the conspicuously-compassionate start adopting rescuing mutts from shelters. Trailer parks are the ultimate low-status household; affluent anti-consumers rebrand them as “tiny house communities.” Now that any troglodyte can afford a smartphone, the upper-class are all about screen-free living. It’s easy to get the impression that social life is one endless game of musical chairs, in which the joy is to laugh at the yokels and bumpkins who are too slow to grab a seat in time. I just find it darkly amusing to see the same frivolous dynamic at work in the realm of “serious” matters like politics. “Oh, yeah, I was really into one-party rule, contempt for liberal democracy, and mass murder of political opponents and other undesirables. Those early releases, from around 1917-1924, were so good. But then around 1933, they, like, sold out and went mainstream, and all these beer-swilling Ignatius-bros started coming to the shows…”

He That Hath a Beard Is More Than a Youth

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Nell Greenfieldboyce:

Science has some bad news for the bearded: young children think you’re really, really unattractive.

A new study suggests that, until they reach puberty, kids are strongly anti-beard — although children with bearded fathers did feel more warmly toward facial hair.

Scientists going all the way back to Charles Darwin have pondered the purpose of beards.

How is this bad news? What self-respecting man wants to be attractive to children anyway? (I’m not even going to make the obvious joke.) Let the little imps fear me so long as they stay quiet and obey, that’s what I always say. With any luck, maturity will bring them glimpses of wisdom, but until then, the bewhiskered have great deeds and pressing duties to occupy them. As for the “purpose” of beards, well, yes; let the scientists puzzle over it, as if theory can ever fully capture raw, hairy experience. To quote Thomas Gowing from The Philosophy of Beards again:

Though there are individual exceptions, the absence of Beard is usually a sign of physical and moral weakness; and in degenerate tribes wholly without, or very deficient, there is a conscious want of manly dignity, and contentedness with a low physical, moral, and intellectual condition. Such tribes have to be sought for by the physiologist and ethnologist; the historian is never called upon to do honor to their deeds.

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