OF A GOLDEN AGE

“okay you win; you take the prize,
but what you said just now –
it isn’t so funny
it doesn’t sound so good.
we are doing okay without it
we can get along without that kind of thing.
take it back.
call that story back.”

(ceremony by leslie marmon silko)

tonight in tom mcbride’s class, we discussed what to do on the last day.

nick hall: can we have cookies?
mcbride: sure. or we can go out for something stronger afterward.
nick hall: . . . ice cream?

john gottman, a ph.d. who studies married couples, accurately predicts a HUGE percentage of couples who will divorce. taken from a 2002 study by his institute:

“derived from post-hoc analyses of the data, we explore the idea that there will be two factors emerging from the data, one factor tapping a volatile affective style, which will be related to early divorcing, and another factor tapping a more neutral affective style, which will be related to later divorcing.”

he uses small populations, but the results are intriguing.

anyway, on the radio show, he also talks about gay and lesbian couples — he did a parallel study with 21 lesbian couples, 21 gay couples, and 42 hetero married couples. people responded on a questionnaire and they were chosen based on what they said was “high relationship satisfaction.” ira glass:

“they found that the homosexual couples were far better than the heterosexual married couples at bringing up an issue in a positive way.”

gottman gave an example where a man asked his partner who initiated sex that morning. his partner said something like, you know you don’t have the kind of body i find most attractive. his partner said, yeah, i know, but who initiated sex this morning? gottman asked ira glass if he could imagine a husband saying something similar to his wife and getting any response at all, let alone the cooperative response of the partner here. gottman:

“so there’s so much less deception, so much more honesty, so much more directness [in the gay couples]. i don’t know if it’s representative, but i was impressed.”

(gottman’s study was published in the family process journal. it’s a long, in-depth analysis of the study’s parameters and findings. here‘s the episode of this american life.)

“sometimes when you get the blues there’s a reason.”
by charles bukowski.

it only takes 6 or 8 inept political leaders
or 8 or 10 artsy-fartsy writers, composers and painters to
set the natural course of human progress
back
50 years
or more.
which may not seem like much to you
but it’s over half your lifetime
during which time you’re not going to be able to
hear, see, read or feel that
necessary gift of great art which
otherwise you could have experienced.
which may not seem tragic to you
but sometimes, perhaps, when you’re feeling not so
good at
night or in the morning or at
noon,
maybe what you feel that’s lacking is
what should be there for
you
but is not.
and i don’t mean a blonde in
sheer pantyhose,
i’m talking about what gnaws at your guts
even when she’s
there.

this morning in computer science, kurt identified gordon moore as one of the founders of intel. five minutes later, when i knew the circumference of the earth was about 25,000 miles, kurt called me a nerd.

santana recorded “black magic woman” in 1970 for the album abraxas, which fucking rules, by the way. the style of it always made me think it was something santana wrote, until today, when i was listening to a fleetwood mac album from 1969 called english rose.

it turns out peter green, the original guitarist and songwriter for fleetwood mac, wrote “black magic woman.” haha i am nerding out about this because it’s yet more evidence of how drastically fleetwood mac changed during its band-life.