OF A GOLDEN AGE

Andrew Sullivan linked to this study on caffeine and hallucinations. Apparently, the “high caffeine users” (equivalent to seven cups of coffee a day) had a higher rate of hearing voices.

Changes in food and drink consumption, including caffeine intake, could place people in a better position to cope with hallucinations or possibly impact on how frequently they occur, say the scientists.

Interesting!

Pajiba reviews the new Fall Out Boy album today and the reviewer admits, publicly, that he likes them.

When I first heard the single off their new album (“I Don’t Care”), I texted Nathan and said something like, “Um, I really like the new Fall Out Boy song.”

The thing is, I’ll always give catchy pop-rock a chance, and Fall Out Boy puts together some pretty okay lyrics too. Bassist Pete Wentz is apparently a very public jerk, but that’s an ad hominem attack in an industry full of really gross awful people who produce good music.

Thanks to Netflix I’m finally seeing season four of Northern Exposure. In the second episode, the opening scenes show a basketball bouncing through town.

Ed: Look what I found.
Chris: Where was it?
Ed: Well, I’m not sure, but that’s the good thing about round things — they can always roll back from where they’ve been.

In the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche criticizes the so-called ascetic priest, who redefines good and evil to criticize those in power, but who is also ultimately wrong:

“To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a desire to overcome, a desire to throw down, a desire to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd as to demand of weakness that it should express itself as strength.”

Kurt Wimmer’s 2002 movie Equilibrium, starring handsome, affectless Christian Bale, reminded me of Nietzsche throughout. In the movie, Bale plays the most successful officer in a worldwide police force whose purpose is to destroy all remnants and provocateurs of human emotion. These men are called “clerics,” which speaks to the ascetic priest, though I think it was just Wimmer’s clunky attempt to be ironic.

Anyway, the movie lifts ideas from Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We, of course Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The incongruous ending was one part The Running Man, one part Fight Club.

Overall, the story was good, since of course its source material is tops. It tried too hard to be The Matrix (improbable gunfights, absurdly underpatrolled totalitarian governments, long black coats with peculiar fasteners), and that was its biggest failing. From what I gather, the movie was panned and had a very small release, which is too bad. It would benefit from the spectacle of big-screen visuals and surround sound.

My colleague recently decided he wants to become a math teacher, and he’s starting classes in about a week at one of Chicago’s universities. He directed me to this column entitled What’s Wrong With Teachers?:

The old view, in place since the 1930s, had held that the key to good education at the K-12 level was to research how kids learn and then fund activities that promoted learning, no matter what the cost. The new reformers by contrast recommended that we as a society decide what kids should learn and then punish those who failed to learn it, ultimately by withholding funds from schools and teachers.

Achievement tests, many of which Illinois pushed down my throat as a child, both set the bar low and give the impression that students may be doing better than they are. I remember math teachers saying things like, “Don’t worry, the test only covers through geometry,” which for the more successful students was a sophomore-year class. One-size-fits-all curriculum does the same thing to students that the columnist theorizes it does to teachers: limits ability to “fail” on paper by eliminating the freedom to succeed.

Now that I’m old I don’t wear underwear
I don’t go to church and I don’t cut my hair
But I can go to movies and see it all there
The way that it used to be.
(Jimmy Buffett)

For most of my life the only grandparent I had left was my maternal grandfather, who was one of the best people I’ve ever met or whom I imagine exist anywhere. He was shrewd, generous, lionhearted, and above all, unfathomably kind. It’s been about three and a half years since he died, and I think about him almost every day, usually more than once. I use one of his old coffee cups at work and his old couch takes up most of my studio apartment. I also pretty often hear myself singing one of his favorite songs, which was written decades even before he was born.

Toby Keith in the January Esquire:

“When I started singing ‘Red, White and Blue,’ the lefties attacked me. And then the Right came in with heavy support. The righties said, ‘You’re a red Republican, right?’ I said, ‘No, I’m a Democrat.’ And you could smell the brakes and clutches locking down. Whoa! All of a sudden you don’t get Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity and the Fox stuff no more. But I don’t see things right-left. I see ‘em right-wrong. I don’t have an agenda. When somebody comes at me like I’m an ignorant redneck, they find out pretty quick that I can hold an intelligent conversation. I disarm ‘em and defuse ‘em and show them how fuckin’ narrow-minded they were and how bad a mistake they made by taking a few words I wrote and rollin’ ‘em into a big agenda.”

You surprising multifaceted galoof! I love it.

For two years I was emperor of my own student newspaper, the Beloit College Round Table, and that meant sassing my staff about every aspect of layout. I’m sure they tired of it, but I had inexplicable and fierce ideas of how the paper should look. They weren’t elaborate ideas, either: clean lines, clean fonts, and a sensical use of space.

So, logically, I liked the documentary Helvetica, which features a dozen talented European design snobs giving more and more irrational reasons why they do or do not love the font Helvetica. It feels right, they say, or it feels wrong; it looks universal, it looks particular. Some adamantly avoid Helvetica and some use it exclusively. One particular flake describes in detail how Helvetica puts us in a very specific mindstate, and her soliloquy made me want to run off and join a George Orwell novel. Is this font a vehicle for negative globalization, or is it an ideal tabula rasa on which to hang more important ideas?

The process is subjective and, as one of the designers points out in the documentary, there is no adequate vocabulary to express why we do or do not care for a typeface. Another speculates that someday a science of typeface may emerge to tell us that these angles or thicknesses speak to our minds in certain ways.

How do we marry these two abstract concepts? Functionality versus elegance? My favorite font is Century, or Century Schoolbook, both exactly what they sound like: the look of old-timey readers, Fun with Dick and Jane, or instruction manuals for products now used only by hipsters. Something about it is wonderful, comforting, and straightforward. It’s a little rounder and more fleshy than Times New Roman, which I would gladly wipe out of every PC and Mac in America if I could.

See, there you go. Irrational font attachment or loathing, a sign of the times.

Marty followed my lead on this one, so I’m posting my answers here also.

1. If I’m at home, I’m probably knitting.

2. I spend most of my time alone, by choice, and most of the rest of my life is very compartmentalized.

3. Whenever you see me, I probably have a lot on my mind, in both a good and bad way.

4. I carry five or six kinds of medicine in my purse. Maybe more. Probably more.

5. This year is the second in a row that I’m applying to get my Ph.D. in English. Last year I only applied to two schools and they were way out of reach.

6. Ten years down the road I see myself living in a college town and teaching English. I want to embed myself in a community like that.

7. Sophomore year of college, my beloved math advisor was leaving to go back to his old job in California, and I stood crying in his office while he told me that I did not devote enough energy to math to succeed at it. He was right: my interests were divided, but I still refuse to see that as any kind of liability.

8. My favorite people are the smartest ones I know. Intelligence is by far my most valued quality.

9. Certain music reminds me of the people who introduced it to me, and this is my strongest lingering sense memory.

10. If I’ve ever known you or we’ve ever been even casual friends, I probably think about you still.

11. There is a lot of injustice and illogic in the world. This frustrates me more than anything else. So many parts of our lives can never make sense, and when people willingly do stupid things, it makes me angry. Why throw away the few choices you actually get to make? (I don’t buy into free will, but that’s a story for another day.)

12. In more than a year and a half since college ended, I have read very little and I feel stupid and guilty about it. The fluctuations of my mental energy disappoint me and I really can’t concentrate enough to read most of the time.

13. Relatedly, I’m a chronic multitasker and usually have trouble focusing if there aren’t several things happening at once. I am easily bored, mostly because if my attention isn’t engaged I start thinking too much about unrelated things.

14. I don’t know that I want to get married or have children. At this point in my life I really don’t want children at all, but people tell me that will change and they’re probably right. I have a brand new niece, born last night, so I can be a cool childless aunt if I want.

15. If you outfox me at something, I love it when that happens.

16. In the past I’ve played the piano, clarinet, and bass clarinet. I played volleyball, basketball, baseball, and softball, and I was a swimmer for many many years.

17. I cry at movies all the time. I cry at engaging television shows or particularly calculated commercials. Did you ever see that Hallmark commercial where the old lady sends a jar of homemade jelly across the street? Oh man.

18. If you have an expertise, I want to know what it is and I want you to tell me about it in depth. I have a chronic urge to know everything that goes on. Part of what disengaged me after college was that I no longer had such a familiar relationship with where I lived and what I did. At Beloit I had a number of outlets for this kind of knowledge-hoarding and exercised it regularly.

19. Yes, I really do talk this way. It’s not a thing and I don’t do it on purpose. For years I was defensive of talking like a smart kid, and now I don’t care, I am what I am. If I tell you some fact or anecdote, it’s not to demonstrate that I’m so smart or something, it’s something I hope you’ll think is interesting too.

20. Also, I swear a lot, and it makes me angry when people suggest that swearing makes you sound stupid. No, it doesn’t. If you’re offended by it, that at least makes sense to me.

21. I still like the music I liked when I was 11, along with all the other music in between. One of my favorite pastimes is driving in my car with the music on, and Chicago has some of the best radio in the country. My taste has evolved and I like a lot of music now that I hated when I heard it first or when it first came out.

22. Most of the time I don’t feel very well. It’s not an emo thing, it’s more that I have a lot of mysterious health issues.

23. I adopt speech patterns of people I’m with. I don’t ever correct grammar or spelling unless someone asks me. I make up words all the time. And I don’t care if you’re a poor speller.

24. My space is always a mess. I could not care less.

25. Do you want to play cards?

They are accidentally organized by length of title, which is far funnier to me than it has any right to be. I saw about 40 movies last year, and for the first time I feel somewhat qualified to express an opinion.

1. Wall-E
2. Iron Man
3. Tell No One
4. The Wackness
5. The Dark Knight

Yes. The Dark Knight was not as good as Iron Man by a long shot, and it is not as good as the other three movies above it on the list either.