thursday throwback

Some white people may choose 👍 because it feels neutral — but some academics argue opting out of 👍🏻 signals a lack of awareness about white privilege, akin to society associating whiteness with being raceless.https://t.co/9g3rochT0K

— NPR (@NPR) February 9, 2022

This is our culture’s version of Scholasticism. Instead of debates over the number of angels on the head of a pin, we get analysis of the amount of racist pixels in a cartoon image. Ploosa shawnje, as they say:

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[Originally published Feb. 24, 2015.]

“Always remember, young ‘un”, my grandpappy used to say as he bounced me on his knee, “it’s no coincidence that ‘semiotics‘ and ’emoticons’ are damn near anagrams.” Wise words, indeed:

But with new edition, emoji commentators (myself included) asked: Where are the emoji for people of color? For while there were hundreds of emoji, and more than 100 different representations of human bodies or faces, nearly all were white or a “neutral” yellow. Only two—an apparent East Asian boy, and an apparent South Asian man—seemed to be people of color. There were no non-white women whatsoever, and no black people.

Then, in November of last year, the Unicode Consortium made a quiet announcement in its draft of the new Unicode standard. Different skin tones would be introduced to the emoji standard through a toggle board: A user could click and hold on an emoji while typing it and a menu would coming up, letting them type it in one of five skin tones. (The tones correspond to the Fitzpatrick scale, a numerical method of categorizing human skin pigmentation.)

“People all over the world want to have emoji that reflect more human diversity, especially for skin tone,” said the draft.

Great. Without the background context consisting of the shared, unconscious assumption of white supremacy, how are my friends and I supposed to communicate with whimsical symbols of basic emotions now?

Now, anyone can make the easy joke about how, even as we speak, sites like Salon, Alternet, Vox and the like are in a race to see who can be the first to publish an article about how white privilege is being able to take for granted one’s majority status in a crowded room full of emoji. I, on the other hand, prefer to stalk bigger game. I’m shielding my eyes and looking toward the horizon, anticipating the inevitable article analyzing the phenomenon of white flight from emoji use, dating back to this policy change. For that one, I think we’ll need the New Republic, or maybe the Atlantic itself.

[Originally published Nov. 23, 2017.]

After a little reflection, I came to the conclusion that my dislike of waste arises from a whole approach to life that seems to me crude and wretched. For unthinking waste — and waste on our scale must be unthinking — implies a taking-for-granted, a failure to appreciate: not so much a disenchantment with the world as a failure to be enchanted by it in the first place. To consume without appreciation (which is what waste means) is analogous to the fault of which Sherlock Holmes accused Doctor Watson in A Scandal in Bohemia: You see, but you do not observe.

…Attention to and gratitude for socks is not a commonly expressed attitude. And yet I cannot help but think that this habit of throwing things away the moment they become defective leads to an unpleasantly disabused attitude to life. Computers, washing machines, televisions, refrigerators, clothes, out they all go the moment they break down or require repair. I know it is a tribute to our immense productivity that it is far cheaper to obtain a new machine than to repair the old, but in a world where everything is so replaceable, what affection or gratitude develops for anything? What do we notice and appreciate if everything is instantly replaceable?

…I suppose that what I would like is an abundance that everyone appreciated and did not take for granted. This would require that everyone was aware that things could be different from how they actually are, an awareness that is increasingly difficult to achieve.

— Theodore Dalrymple, “Attitude or Gratitude?,” Farewell Fear

I have a distinct memory of being fifteen years old and going with my mom to an office-supply store, where she let me get a cool pen. I remember being aware that the novelty of this pen would be a small but genuine pleasure over the following few days, and I also remember thinking that this was the sort of thing that was considered silly, and that I should keep it to myself. Like socks, being grateful and happy about something as ordinary as a pen was lame and uncool, especially for a teenager. Over the years, though, I’ve secretly retained sentimental attachments to all sorts of humble objects, from clothing to electronics, which had long since outlived their “usefulness” by usual standards.

I recently read Robert Samuelson’s excellent book, The Good Life and its Discontents: The American Dream in the Age of Entitlement. In brief, he argued that Americans in the postwar era had come to believe in a teleological vision of life which took for granted a constant upward trajectory of both material and psychological improvement, and that our post-’60s malaise was primarily due to our inability to understand that this was always a chimera. The pursuit of ever-increasing affluence and convenience eventually produces diminishing returns. People who expect perfection will inevitably be disappointed, and our disappointment has led to several decades of fault-finding and finger-pointing as we attempt to pinpoint who or what is to blame for depriving us of our birthright. We still haven’t gotten to the point of questioning whether we ever had any good reason, let alone right, to expect it. As Louis C.K. said in a popular routine of his, “everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy.” All we can think about is what we feel was owed to us and wrongly withheld, no matter how much we already have.

Epictetus famously advised that if we are fond of a ceramic cup, we should remind ourselves that it is only ceramic cups in general that we care about, so that we won’t be bothered if this particular one breaks. He applied the same logic to spouses and children, too, a conclusion to which very few people would follow him. Still, even if we keep this line of thought confined to cups (and pens), I feel that the cure is worse than the disease here. The contingencies which make us feel insecure also allow us to feel gratitude if we choose to look at it from that perspective. The fact that all enchanting things will eventually be lost and turn to dust is the very reason why we should be appreciative of having them at all, rather than cursing our inability to possess and control them forever. I wasn’t guaranteed any of this. It could so easily have been different. But it’s here for now, and that’s enough. I’m thankful for all of it.

[Originally published Jul. 29, 2013.]

Lady, people aren’t chocolates. D’you know what they are mostly? Bastards. Bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling.

— Perry Cox

Margo Rabb:

Falling in love with a book is a unique and sometimes strange experience; it’s not hard to make the leap from adoring a novel to adoring its creator. The writer Justin Cronin compares it to a celebrity crush: “When you read a book, you spend hours in intimate contact with the mind of another person — it’s an intense, but one-sided relationship. If any reader knew who we really were, it’s guaranteed they’d find us disappointing. The experience of a book is so much better than the experience of a person.” The author Elizabeth Gilbert agreed. “When I meet readers, I feel a responsibility not to disappoint them. But how do you not disappoint someone who’s invented you?”

…But some writers enjoy discovering the darker sides of their favorite authors. “I’m always comforted when writers and artists I admire have terrible problems in their lives, as I did,” the novelist Kate Christensen told me. “I like reading about their struggles and misbehavior.” The poet and memoirist Mary Karr is also forgiving of flaws. “Tolstoy I’m sure was an incredible jackass, but I still love him. I still love Stevens, I still love Pound. If we didn’t read people who were bastards, we’d never read anything. Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.”

If I had to credit any particular text with being a formative influence on my intellectual and psychological development, well — I’m afraid I’ll have to reveal my utterly mainstream, lowbrow roots and name RIP magazine. For those who don’t know, it was a hard rock/heavy metal magazine, produced by Larry Flynt’s media empire, that existed for about a decade in the ’80s and ’90s. The first issue I got had Lars Ulrich on the cover with a long interview inside, and with that bait, I was soon hooked on what I thought was the best rock journalism around (there may have been better for all I know, but this was pre-Internet, and I was limited to what I could find in the mall bookstores). Lonn Friend, the editor during the magazine’s heyday, has, on a couple occasions that I’ve seen, summarized a large part of RIP’s guiding philosophy:

Because one of the edicts was that we weren’t going to prostitute these artists over their bad behavior. If it fell into the story, we would discuss the party and then whatever else. But if it was to damage or hurt the image of an artist rather than the heroic image of the artist because that’s what RIP was all about — heroes — then I chose not to.

RIP definitely erred on the side of generosity in its articles. A lot of magazines — especially British ones, I noticed — specialized in reporting the seediest gossip and exulted in sneering mean-spiritedness toward their subjects, but RIP, even though half its lifespan was spent covering the most decadent, trashy Sunset Strip glam-metal, never went that route. Bands were always presented in the best possible light, and the music was always described in terms of its highest potential, rather than its (frequently) humdrum reality. Even the most generic hair bands were treated as capable of moments of transcendent artistry.

It was largely through years of reading RIP while dreaming of a career as a musician that I formed my weltanschauung (there, perhaps that ten-dollar word will redeem my intellectual pretensions!), my ideal of a life lived in accordance with low-key, bohemian foolosophy values. I had an idealized image of the rock/metal world as being something like an itinerant tribe of minstrels, poets and plainspoken philosophers who devoted their lives to pondering the meaning of it all in between ritual musical performances. An insight here, a perspective there — I clothed my burgeoning sense of self in a patchwork quilt painstakingly stitched together from the scraps of interviews with creative people. I assembled an idealized personality that would take years to fully grow into. And of course, the flawed mortals behind those pull quotes and aperçus were bound to disappoint upon closer examination, as they often did. But the ideal they all contributed to is no less powerful for all that.

[Originally published Dec. 16, 2010.]

Phil Davidson:

It wasn’t that long ago, you’ll recall, that Twitter was derided as an exercise in vanity for famous people to feed their comically-obsessed fans a glimpse of the celebrity lifestyle, no matter how mundane the details. (“No way. Kelly Ripa likes pear slices in her salad? So do I!”)

But in the last two years or so, the comedy industry’s opinion of Twitter did a complete 180. There’s been a wave of comedians, writers, performers and producers joining the early adopters and utilizing Twitter as a platform to tell 140-character jokes and reach new fans.

It’s easy to see why. Twitter is in a way a virtual writer’s room where, at your leisure, you can have an immediate audience with comedy legends, professionals and the occasional undiscovered talent as they deliver jokes, witty observations and other miscellany. And it’s free. You won’t have much luck asking Lebron James to come over and entertain you with some free basketball, but on any given day you can observe the next comedy superstar test out a joke on Twitter before making it part of his act.

Yeah, that’s great and all, and I’m sure it’s been a boon to haiku poets as well. (Was it really all that difficult to find bon mots, witticisms, zingers and one-liners before? Anyway.) But for the non-early adopters among us, those who dropped Twitter off in a basket on the front steps of the orphanage in the first place, whether or not it has any useful function at all is a peripheral issue.

When people complain about the cold, impersonal nature of online communication, I feel that what they’re mainly reacting to is the fact that most people are, quite simply, shitty writers. It doesn’t mean they’re stupid; it just means that they find it difficult to turn their thoughts into nuanced sentences that do a good job of capturing enough of the full flavor of their personality. It’s all they can do to convey basic information without burying it under a mound of misspellings, typos and bad grammar. I know enough people who are smart and capable of intelligent conversation, but their emails (or handwritten letters) are brief and utilitarian to a fault.

Now, you may find this hard to believe, but I was not always the finely honed, chiseled, sculpted wordsmith you see before you, no indeed! When I first started writing online oh-so-many years ago, I was undisciplined and unformed. My pacing had no stamina and was easily winded, my metaphors were flabby and sagging, my ideas themselves were paunchy, and my overall coherence and paragraph structure was pockmarked with quirks and irregularities like dimples of cellulite. My ability to spew hot air was more like a hairdryer on medium setting than a blast furnace.

I did not spring onto the Internet fully formed, like Athena from Zeus’s forehead, is what I’m saying. I reeked (and I trust you’ll politely overlook my repeated use of the past tense here), but I learned by constantly being exposed to better writers, especially once I discovered blogs. I read so many people who said what I wanted to say, only more clearly and concisely, and I shaped my own writing accordingly to reflect their styles. And as I’ve said before, the more I did it, the more fun it became.

So for me, the biggest problem with the inexorable trend toward social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook postings and the ubiquity of texting as opposed to email is that it solidifies online writing around the absolute lowest common denominator. Instead of challenging themselves to exploit the potential of a largely text-based medium like the Internet, people are reshaping the medium to suit their limitations. Instead of trying to become better at expressing themselves through writing, they’re settling for banding together around mediocrity, where the goal is to express yourself with as little effort as possible. Fine, Twitter is great for delivering stand-alone lines and simplistic expressions of agreement or disagreement. But trying to follow an actual debate or back-and-forth conversation one or two sparse sentences at a time is utterly maddening, and as I keep complaining about, that unfortunately seems to be the only type of conversation a lot of people want to have anymore.

…right on cue.

[Originally published Apr. 6, 2017.]

 

[Originally published Apr. 26, 2017.]

Lary Wallace:

Some of us are more susceptible than others, but eventually it happens to us all. You know what I’m talking about: the inability to appreciate new music – or at least, to appreciate new music the way we once did. There’s a lot of disagreement about why exactly this happens, but virtually none about when. Call it a casualty of your 30s, the first sign of a great decline. Recently turned 40, I’ve seen it happen to me – and to a pretty significant extent – but refuse to consider myself defeated until the moment I stop fighting.

Aging is like hiking up a mountain. I speak as someone who has done a fair amount of both. What seems like a unique and fascinating tree down at ground level is just another tiny dot of green in nature’s stippling when seen from above. Only a few striking landmarks stand out from that vantage point. The broader perspectives seem more meaningful than the particular nuances. The further you climb, the more you tire, and the more important it becomes to conserve your breath and energy. The external boundaries of the environment constrain your choices.

As a middle-aged music listener, your ability to luxuriate in new sounds the way you did when you were a teenager is constrained by the responsibilities of adulthood. It’s curious that Wallace never mentions, over the course of three thousand words, the most obvious reasons why most people don’t keep up with the contemporary music scene beyond their young adulthood: they have careers, families, and household chores which consume most of their limited time and energy. It doesn’t mean it’s impossible, of course; it just means that you’ll have to sacrifice things, and frankly, a lot of rock and pop music, obsessed as it is with the adolescent themes of horniness, chemically altered consciousness, and emotional melodrama, becomes less compelling for people who have moved on to more mature interests. Plus, when you’ve already loved and lost geniuses like Mark Sandman and Peter Steele, you simply don’t have it in you anymore to give your heart to some derivative band who, if they’re lucky, might write three decent songs. There’s no squirming out from underneath the weight of history.

Moreover, as Shakespeare said, there are more things in heaven and earth than can be contained in the typical baby-boomer experience. (Or something like that. I’m paraphrasing from memory.) That is, what Wallace is bemoaning as some perennial mystery of human nature has only been the norm for the three generations born after World War Two. The world of pop culture and mass media as we understand it only developed in tandem with the famously self-centered boomer generation, notorious for its inability to age gracefully. It’s not a surprise that the people who turned “never trust anybody over thirty” into a slogan would have bequeathed to their children a Peter Pan-like desire to stay in Neverland playing air guitar in front of the bedroom mirror forever. Our early thirties loom in our awareness like the River Styx, with Charon extending his bony claw before us, demanding payment in the form of our golden years, before ferrying us across to the land of responsibilities, opportunity costs, and music containing more than three chords. A living death, in other words. But why should we assume that this pattern will still be the same three generations from now?

[Originally published Sep. 3, 2016.]

Alan Jacobs:

Anyway, a few weeks ago I decided to resume my tumblr, on which I was very active for around eight years or so — I’ll have my 10-year Tumblrversary next March — because I wasn’t getting a ton of traffic here and I thought “Why bother to post stuff that almost no one reads?”

I resemble that remark, so allow me to offer some answers.

• For the sheer joy of expression which requires no external validation
• To avoid pestering individual friends with long-winded emails
• For posterity
• To nurture a self-pitying fantasy of yourself as a misunderstood genius surrounded by unappreciative philistines
• Montaigne wrote his Essays without an audience for ten years before publishing them (if it was good enough for him…)
• To give solid form, structure, and clarity to your thoughts
• Because when you read a lot of books, your head gets filled with words, and if you don’t empty them out periodically, they’ll start talking amongst themselves, and the din will be unbearable
• To look busy at work
• For its own sake, as with other spiritual disciplines and practices
• To be surprised by how often a piece of your writing looks better when rediscovered
• Because even the latent possibility of an audience keeps you from lapsing into “Dear Diary” self-indulgence
• For the same reason we do almost anything beyond eating, sleeping, and reproducing: to distract ourselves from thinking about our inevitable deaths
• Because the older generations walked miles every day to work tirelessly on the website factory assembly lines so that you kids could one day have the luxury of playing with preassembled, smoothly-functioning text editing platforms in any color or design you could want, so I really don’t think it’s asking too much that you take a few minutes to sit down and use the thing without crying about the fact that it doesn’t come with an audience included.

[Originally published Oct. 1, 2016.]

Phil Torres:

Thus, a world without religion would be a significantly improved world than the one in which we now inhabit.

Lord, these people make me embarrassed to be unchurched. The rest of the article is the usual collection of New Atheist tropes that will likely be enshrined in the Constitution of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s utopian nation of Rationalia, and you almost have to admire the unblemished, uh, faith in the salvific potential of evangelical atheism, given the prominent and entirely predictable implosion of one of its most prominent online hubs. Bertrand Russell, favorably quoted, as always, in the article regarding the intrinsic obstacle religion presents to moral progress, could have warned them about the danger of trusting pure logic to trump animal nature — in fact, in his autobiography, he did. Reflecting on the messy damage caused by his progressive experiments with free love, he admitted that, “Anyone else could have told me this in advance, but I was blinded by theory.”

All that aside, I’m just impressed by the blithe confidence with which our hero asserts the above sentence. We’ve been here before, and the point still stands: for people who prattle on and on about the value of evidence and experiment, they seem remarkably indifferent to the fact that “a world without religion” is something that has quite literally never existed, making summary pronouncements on its shape and character quite literally meaningless. Faith-based, you might even say. “Religion” is not a mere integer to be easily subtracted, or a simple proposition to be assented to or denied, but rather a tangled knot of threads comprising everything from culture and history to personal identity and psychology. But presumably new developments in “enhancement technologies” will succeed where previous political attempts to rationally remake the world failed horribly. I’m afraid I’m incapable of making such a leap of faith.

[Originally published Dec. 23, 2010.]