OF A GOLDEN AGE

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.

Ta-Nehisi Coates offered interesting thoughts on courtship and relationships this week. In the post, TNC politely scoffs at a David Brooks piece lamenting the shift from family-selected, slower-paced matches to a more frenetic, presumably less-committed environment.

Do people mostly meet through texting today? Are schools, friends and work largely irrelevant? Is it true that there are no social scripts for young people? Or is Brooks merely unfamiliar with them? Did people not meet at jazz clubs back in the 50s, at the Drifters show, or at the beach? And taking Brooks’ point, has the actual essence of dating changed that much? Are young people better or worse of for it?

I never dated in high school and didn’t really go on “dates” in college — since we were all in such close proximity, things were very fluid and undefined, for better or worse. The germane point in Brooks’ piece is this:

People are thus thrown back on themselves. They are free agents in a competitive arena marked by ambiguous relationships.

He makes it sound very commodified and crass, whereas I’d say the ambiguity does way more emotional harm than anything else — It’s always been considered bad behavior for people to date around without being honest about it, but as relationships are less and less defined, those lines blur and allow each person to interpret as he or she wishes. And you know what they say about assuming.

I have never been a one-size-fits-all eater, and while on the one hand I envy those who can eat anything, order anything in a restaurant, try any new food fearlessly . . . There’s a certain meaninglessness to a foodlife with no limitations at all. Where’s the challenge to learn to cook for yourself if you can eat anything you find? How will you learn what purpose a certain ingredient serves if you never try something different in its place? If you’ve never thought about where it comes from or what it does to your body?

At some point in my childhood I stopped being able to drink cola (I don’t remember if this was all soda or just the browns, haha), and I was also lactose intolerant. Then that went away for a while, but I developed general digestive malfeasance and have gone through that ever since — the kind of thing doctors tell me is IBS, which is doctorese for “I don’t know, and gosh, that sucks for you. Will your copay be cash or credit?”

I’m back to lactose intolerance these days, and with migraines in the mix since college, I try to avoid some of the standout migraine trigger foods. Soy’s the biggest offender here, since regardless of what I read about soy and how much it can fuck you up, I know that the way it mimics estrogen in your body does affect my occurrence of headaches, and I know that it did for my dad as well, since we were both chug-a-lugging soy milk and getting migraines three or four times a week or more.

The most poignant moment of apartness came in high school when I was talking to a friend about something I’d eaten recently that had made me sick right away. “About five minutes later, I knew something was really wrong,” I said.

“No, that’s impossible,” she said. “Digestion takes six to eight hours.”

O ho ho, simple girl, I envy you your blissful unawares.

My first Vegan Mofo post is dedicated to my good old friend C. Andy, a genuine sasspot who has made my life immeasurably better in many ways. While waiting for friends outside of Tanoshii last Friday, I texted C.A. and said I was thinking of going vegan for a while after being a vegetarian for a little less than six months. He called and reminded me that, not so many years ago, I had been critical and judgey about “the vegans” and acted a fool.

Well, I acted a fool about a lot of things, and was critical and judgey about a lot of things — we can charitably self-label this as personal growth. But I remember the time he, a then-professed vegetarian, insisted on eating part of my chicken burrito and then fell deathly ill. Who’s acting a fool now?

We can all sometimes benefit from keeping a lid on it.

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.

Will at A Suitable Wardrobe asks bespoke shoemaker Tony Gaziano about patched shoes after noticing them on the feet of Prince Charles:

[Gaziano:] “To be honest it looks better on black which is ok because most of the guys that would have this done come from an era where only black shoes were worn.”

The problem with owning a rotating roster of not-expensive shoes is that they tend to wear out all at once. Bonding a patch to leather that’s paper-thin in the first place doesn’t accomplish much.

But the good thing about owning a rotating roster of not-expensive shoes is how I have one fewer thing in common with Prince Charles!

Ernest Hemingway friend-cum-memoirist and allaround talented good guy A.E. Hotchner has an ethically shocking editorial today. Apparently the new edition of Hemingway’s final (posthumous) book A Moveable Feast contains extensive edits by a family member:

[Hemingway's] grandson has removed several sections of the book’s final chapter and replaced them with other writing of Hemingway’s that the grandson feels paints his grandma in a more sympathetic light. Ten other chapters that roused the grandson’s displeasure have been relegated to an appendix, thereby, according to the grandson, creating “a truer representation of the book my grandfather intended to publish.”

Hotchner presents a narrative about his friend Hemingway working on the book over time, sending manuscripts to his publisher, and so forth. The San Francisco Chronicle tells the story flatly without mention of the editorial wherewithal of son Patrick or grandson Sean Hemingway. The Boston Globe criticizes the rearrangement of and additions to the text but in a less pointed way.

So who has the higher ground? The children and grandchildren of Hemingway’s second wife, who began as a mistress and, Hemingway wrote in the original Moveable Feast, homewrecker? Or Hemingway’s peer who seeks to do honorably by his friend’s memory and legacy?

In middle school, our chorus sang under a shrill egoist with some seeming emotional problems. She had that tightly wound temperament where she spun from ecstatic to totally pissed in two seconds flat, contributing to my worst middle-school grades. She constantly used the phrase “brain fart,” which sounded more ignorant than anything I’d never heard.

Partly inspired by The Second Pass’s thoughtful, well-reasoned list of far overrated classic novels, Pajiba posted one of its regular Comment Diversion features on which classics readers “Just Didn’t Get,” an idea that has merit in theory. I opened it anticipating something with some logical backbone, or even something with which I could agree. Pajiba readers have brain power and usually make interesting conversation.

Uhhh, nope. The level of discourse reminded me of a Sunday article in the New York Times: Approval by a Blogger May Please a Sponsor, which presented the issue of kickbacks or free products for bloggers with large followings. But the primary takeaway has nothing to do with money: Why should we care what these people say or endorse?

So far almost 200 people have left various kinds of “OMG I hate this book” comments on the Pajiba post, and few have any reasoning. Someone pointed out that many of us read these “hated” classics during junior high or high school, but few make the connection between hating high school and hating its reading list too.

Mostly, it makes me sad that a smart group of people rounded up straw men like Moby-Dick (a very difficult book to read on your own at any age, but still one of the greatest) and dismissed them as boring, or worse, overrated. I may think that astrophysics sounds boring but that doesn’t mean for one millionth of one second that astrophysics lacks merit or intrinsic value. It means I do not care for astrophysics, which explains why astrophysicists exist. It also means that I don’t have a leg to stand on when it comes time to critique.

If you read for fun, then read for fun. Put down books you don’t care for and don’t return to them. I do this on a regular basis, including with some heralded classics. People who study books, who read for theory and meaning, who try to fit pieces of literature into the human world where their authors worked, work on a different rubric that should garner the same respect. Everything has a place, and history sloughs off those classics suffering from datedness or mediocrity, while elevating overlooked works to classic status in hindsight.

“Still, I slogged through until the last line, repulsed by the sloppiness” — Second Pass’s commenter on Kerouac’s On the Road accidentally summarized my feelings toward the Pajiba post, which I consider a brain fart to the nth degree. Yes, anyone can voice their opinions anywhere they choose. Without reasoning, these opinions come off as maudlin, whiny, or ignorant.

In the past I was a devoted fan of Nordstrom, the only (and higher-end) department store toward which I had any allegiance really. Their shoe department was unmatched in variety, quality, and customer service. In fact, on several occasions I have spent a little more than I should have on well-fitting shoes, because my feet are large and hard to fit and it is especially nice to tell a salesperson, “Bring me all the size 11 or 12 sandals you have.”

Especially in hard economic times, you’d think Nordstrom would welcome with open arms anyone who wants to spend money there, but I guess not. A couple of months ago, I approached a salesperson at the Oak Brook (Oak Brook, Ill.) Nordstrom and said, “I’m looking for a pair of sandals under $40 in a size 11.” She actually laughed and said, “I don’t think I’ll be able to do that.” Was she kidding? I’d just walked past a whole display marked, verbatim, “Sandals Under $40.”

This weekend, at the Old Orchard (Skokie, Ill.) Nordstrom, I gave vague instructions to a helpful salesperson, who brought me five pairs of sandals. Only the final pair fit right, and when he told me they were over $100 I mentally blanched and said, “I’m sorry, I can’t afford that.” He said, “Well, thanks for trying them on,” left the shoes scattered all around where we’d been sitting, and quickly walked away from me without another word.

Andrew Sullivan linked to this post I devoured and loved. The role of the educated, reasonable theologist has been marginalized by those whom Andrew appropriately labels “Christianists,” wielding carefully parsed scripture and quotations as weapons of intolerance or self-congratulation.

Governor Mark Sanford claimed recently to be a King David figure, or at least to draw significant parallels between this parable and his situation. From the WaPo:

And that King David analogy surely is understandable for Sanford, since it makes the governor’s errant ways seem exceptionally minor.

Father Stephen gets to the heart of the matter:

The problem with such use of Biblical imagination is that it simply has no controlling story. Nothing tells us which story to use other than our own imagination (which is generally a deluded part of our mind). [ . . . ] The gospel is not preached – souls are not saved – the Bible is simply brought into ridicule.

One of the problems inherent to our soundbyte-obsessed culture is that people don’t feel the need to acquaint themselves with context before they speak or cite. Recently, Sarah Palin tweeted an out-of-context remark from Walter Cronkite on the “liberal” nature of the media. Of course, Kronkite’s whole conversation involved a more literal definition of liberal rather than political, and he was encouraging the evenhanded and voracious acquisition of knowledge and viewpoints.

Palin acting a fool is no big news, and I think she’s too ignorant to understand the way she manhandles information. But she represents a larger movement toward a people who love quotations more than books, who pull lines from websites and use them as “Favorite Quotes” when they don’t even know who the speakers were or what they represented.