OF A GOLDEN AGE

I have mixed, uncemented feelings about discrimination against obese people, having been technically obese (BMI-wise) for significant stretches of time and now only on the furthest reaches of the “overweight” range. There is an interesting piece in the New York Times about the social acceptability of fat discrimination, which some view as one of the last bastions of public prejudice. I was most moved by an assertion that the diseases and conditions we associate with obesity are exacerbated, or even caused by, chronic stress:

“Stigma and prejudice are intensely stressful,” he explained. “Stress puts the body on full alert, which gets the blood pressure up, the sugar up, everything you need to fight or flee the predator.”

Over time, such chronic stress can lead to high blood pressure, diabetes and other medical ills, many of them (surprise!) associated with obesity. In studies, Dr. Muennig has found that women who say they feel they are too heavy suffer more mental and physical illness than women who say they feel fine about their size — no matter what they weigh.

I’ve never felt stressed by my size, even when I was at my heaviest. Yes, looking at pictures of myself or realizing clothes no longer fit was embarrassing in a private way, but more than that, it became an inconvenience and made me feel unhealthy.

I cannot praise Chris Jones’s deep, magnificent profile of Roger Ebert (in the new Esquire) enough. It moved me in every familiar way and some I never expected. Ebert’s passion for his life’s work shows in every detail:

Ebert scribbles constantly, his pen digging into page after page, and then he tears the pages out of his notebook and drops them to the floor around him. Maybe twenty or thirty times, the sound of paper being torn from a spiral rises from the aisle seat in the last row.

Jones also cleanses the palate of the notion that Ebert has gone soft in his reviews — Yes, he assigns higher ratings to more movies, but Ebert has explained that he judges movies based on what they’re aiming for, not where they fall in an objective continuum of all moviekind. Jones also makes it clear that Ebert’s changing life of surgeries, illness, and steely resolve has effected if not his taste then his attitude. As in all cases, I support people’s publicly changing opinions as their circumstances change, and I appreciate without bounds anyone who is willing to admit a change of heart.

I thought the Jones piece was the end of it, and then Ebert wrote an equally magnificent response. He is more gracious than can really be believed and it is a suitable end to the story Jones began.

On Friday my tutee and I went over the word “refuted.” I realized I got into too much detail and nuance when describing the words to him, which I can’t help, but refute was especially tricky.

“So you argue for something?” he said.
“No, not really. You argue against something someone else said, and back up your point,” I said. “So, yeah, you do kinda argue for something, but only because you’re proving something else wrong.”

We used it in a sentence, which I think was about the President and the Senate. Then real life presented me with a much better example. Tanya Gold wrote a regrettably stupid, bitter-sounding piece on why fashion is the worst, including — no, really — blaming high heels for a sixteen year old’s fatal fall between subway cars. In it, she makes a lot of straw-man arguments about thinness and unhappiness and blah blah blah.

One of the first commenters on the post swiftly refutes Gold’s claims. But the best answer came from Tavi of style rookie, who shoots the straw men down with one sentence:

What Tanya Gold and many others, including myself, hate is the everyone-has-to-look-the-same-and-also-sexy philosophy, which is NOT fashion.

Plenty of people have enormous style that isn’t tied to any era, any designer. To imbue your appearance with verve and personality has nothing to do with thinness OR sexiness unless you want it to. And to completely give up on your appearance, as it seems Gold has, isn’t making any statement against fashion. Most everyday people don’t participate in fashion, and even those who follow it don’t necessarily buy or wear any designer fashion at any point. She mentions feeling nauseous or something when she passes the Banana Republic, which is one of the classiest and most classic chains around and which has only occasional ties to trend.

I think Tanya Gold actually hates clothes that fit properly, and where that comes from I can’t say. Listen, friend Tanya. I am 5′11″ and 200 pounds, several standard deviations away from the average, and I diligently rifle through LOTS of wrong things before coming up with a right thing. And yes, on those days when I dress like a bum, I know that’s what I’m doing. In other words, here’s a quarter: Take your frumpadump “I hate fashion, t-shirts and broomstick skirts forever!” and call someone who cares.

The January 25 New Yorker fiction is Trailhead, an account of the life and times of an ant queen and the colony she establishes. Ants are kind of gross, and some of the details are kind of gross too, but it’s compelling stuff and doesn’t romanticize the ants:

First, however, she had to take a few minutes to shed her wings. To do that, she simply bent her middle legs forward, pressed them against the base of the wings, and snapped them off. This mutilation caused no injury to the rest of her body; it caused no pain. The Queen was a parachutist who slipped her harness upon landing. Now she could move more quickly to avoid the ants, spiders, and other predators hunting around her in the grassroots jungle.

The same issue has a long profile of Neil Gaiman and this insane piece on cryonics. It’s definitely worth picking up.

Obama heavyweight and hometown hero David Axelrod made a funny as a guest on George Stephanopoulos’s first episode of Good Morning America:

[Stephanopoulos] questioned Mr. Axelrod about the health care bill; the president’s plans to badger “fat cat” bankers about bonuses; and the economy. Mr. Axelrod presented him with an alarm clock permanently set to 3:30 a.m., a gift from, as he put it, “your friends in the White House.”

And apparently something’s rotten in the state of cohost rapport between Stephanopoulos and Robin Roberts:

After noting that surveys suggest that women view Mr. Woods less favorably than men do, the new anchor said dryly, “Well that’s a shocker, huh?”

Ms. Roberts, using a “Romper Room” tone that suggested that she didn’t realize he was kidding, replied, “We’re learning something new every day.”

With a name like Robin Roberts, I can see why this person may lack a sense of humor.

This weekend, Speaking of Faith reran a 2008 interview with John O’Donohue, Irish poet, former priest, and Hegelian (What an array of descriptors!), done shortly before his death. This moment took me aback:

Yeah, I feel like in the book I wrote on beauty, I was trying to say that one of the huge confusions in our times is to mistake glamour for beauty. And we do live in a culture which is very addicted to the image, and I think that there is always an uncanny symmetry between the way you are inward with yourself and the way you are outward. And I feel that there is an evacuation of interiority going on in our times. And that we need to draw back inside ourselves and that we’ll find immense resources there.

We have largely evacuated interiority, at least in my portion of the Western world, and I can’t think of a better way to phrase the situation. One of history’s favorite literary zingers is from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

We are all large and should contain multitudes, which is, I think, why O’Donohue suggests we “draw back inside ourselves” — plus, a nice Hegelish note there when Whitman expresses himself as the combination and synthesis of his own contradictions and dualities.

Stanley Fish really stirred up some murk last week with his column advocating a limit on curiosity. Fish himself is a source of controversy and I find it hilarious and awkward that anyone accuse this bastion of individual thought and intellect as a curiosity-hater — seriously? Someone widely revered or reviled as the best or worst kind of rhetorician or theorist, who makes his living in the world of higher education?

This is Fish’s thesis in the column, an idea originally situated in the Garden:

The provocation was to go beyond the boundaries God had established and thereby set himself up a rival deity, a being with no limits on what he can conceive, a being whose intellect could, in time, comprehend anything and everything.

I think that Fish views destructive curiosity as the end of wonder and humbled awe, the kind of smug quest for “understanding” that characterizes literary examples Faust and Frankenstein, among others whom Fish does not cite. It is the product of two competing but parallel forces: First, that we are not grounded enough by our families, communities, or otherwise to ever have reason to stop the quest for new knowledge; and second, that we arrogantly assume this quest will lead us to something better, bigger, greater.

But more importantly, as Fish’s weekly column is aptly titled, he simply encourages us to Think Again, to not evacuate our interiority.

It is genetic, so I could see this . . .

The research begins with the question: Why isn’t depression more rare? Maybe, like obesity, it afflicts us because modern conditions are so different than the ones in which we evolved. But no, apparently depression is common to all cultures, even small scale, isolated ones.

Andrew Sullivan guest blogger Hanna Rosin links to a Scientific American article in the above-quoted post on depression.

The possible genetic motivations for depression could be an emphasis on analytical thinking, the article says, of scrutinizing a problem on a micro level. I guess the problems start when you fractalize a problem until its minutiae paralyze you. Also: In what way could loss of appetite or energy be considered a genetic advantage?

frog design has a funny and somewhat provocative essay on the Star Wars universe and its, well, terrible aesthetic choices. It focuses on greebles, needless details added to futuristic objects in order to make them seem bigger, more complex — think of the ornately rendered Borg cube from Star Trek TNG.

The original Star Destroyers were an exercise in selective greebling, extraneous parts protruding everywhere on the overall form to give the effect of scale and drama. The Millennium Falcon is essentially one large greebled serving plate. The desire for an imperfect form is a quest for more believability, based on the idea that, as humans, we respond and empathize more with imperfection than the perfect sculpted object.

The starship Enterprise is enormous, with, well, varying quantities of greebles over the years. It still manages to be somewhat simple among its peers in the world of science fiction.

• The Caustic Cover Critic has a funny roundup of the obscenely irrelevant covers of a print on demand (POD) outfit dealing in public domain works.

• Today’s Garfield Minus Garfield mimics my life, and I am not ashamed.

• Another genuinely funny and clean Jerkcity.

• Andrew Sullivan’s blog has these three posts on shitty work: first and second lists of reader thoughts on menial jobs and some opinions on President Obama’s job history.

• No Caption Needed examines photos of the death of the Virgin Megastore in New York:

More importantly, we are privy to the mourning process; we see human grief for the loss of commerce, exchange, goods often enjoyed in common.

• This is poignant in a consumer climate where, the New York Times reported this week, consumers are still saving over spending, totaling in a .1% loss instead of the .7% gain expected:

Major clothing chains including Macy’s, Nordstrom, Liz Claiborne and Kohl’s posted earnings declines this week. Even Wal-Mart Stores, the nation’s largest retailer and one of the hardiest survivors of this recession, reported lower sales on Thursday.

Oh, Social Q’s!

My office is next door to the county jail, so I walk by it several times a day. What is the polite thing to do when passing two sheriff’s deputies and a guy in handcuffs chained to leg irons? Smile? Ignore them? Look away? Jane Gressang, Iowa City

When I sang for the inmates at Folsom Prison — no, hang on, that was Johnny Cash, wasn’t it?

If you don’t already read Social Q’s I recommend it in general, as it makes me laugh almost every time.

This question made me “hmm” though, because it took me way back to my carefree childhood and adolescence in Oregon, Illinois, where our equally sprawling, lovely, and decrepit old home was one block from the Ogle County Courthouse.

There, the inmates who displayed good behavior were allowed to do government chores like mowing the lawns, and as the County bought property closer and closer to our house, the government lawns did too.

I don’t know, this might be different because most of the guys held in the county clink were small potatoes, waiting out short DUI sentences or other relatively petty atonement. But I saw these guys in their jumpsuits very frequently, especially in the summertime, and never really gave it a second thought. If I’d seen someone I’d known among them, that may have been a different story.