OF A GOLDEN AGE

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.

The New York Times has a story on the Kindle and how it affects our ability to judge others by their covers, so to speak:

Michael Silverblatt, host of the weekly public radio show “Bookworm,” uses the term “literary desire” to describe the attraction that comes with seeing a stranger reading your favorite book or author. “When I was a teenager waiting in line for a film showing at the Museum of Modern Art and someone was carrying a book I loved, I would start to have fantasies about being best friends or lovers with that person,” he said.

I have had this same thought more times than I can recall. When someone you see is reading your favorite book! Or something radically different that sounds so interesting! Andy has this giant collection of really glossy gorgeous food books and I love sitting in his apartment flipping through them.

This week’s This American Life rerun is brilliant. It might even be listed on their “Best Of” page, I’m not sure.

In it, a former professional medical test subject, a self-described guinea pig, explains why he never did psychiatric-drug studies:

“The phrase is ‘brain sluts.’ It’s more harsh than most guinea pigs would use, but I think it’s disgusting because they’re becoming retarded for money. I’m just very sensitive about the mind. I personally don’t lay it out for rent.”

Download the episode from this page.

The majestic and indomitable Julie Andrews appeared on Fresh Air last week to talk about her new memoir. I only heard part of the interview (you can hear it here) driving around on my lunchbreak, and once again I marveled at how recognizable Andrews’ voice is, even in speaking instead of singing.

Her speech is impeccable, and it was funny to hear her describe the process by which she learned a Cockney accent to sing Eliza Dolittle in My Fair Lady on Broadway. Apparently she had the words to certain songs written out phonetically as to get the full Cockney effect, though you can still hear her erudite English sneaking through the ‘Enry ‘Igginses in the original Broadway cast recording. In this regard, Audrey Hepburn and Marni Nixon (dubbed as Hepburn’s singing voice) did a better job.

In these modern times, people no longer so adamantly work toward Received Pronunciation (the official title for Henry Higgins’ ideal English accent) — even the BBC no longer holds RP as its standard.

Weekend Edition – Sunday (NPR) 05-05-2002

Commentary: Reflections on Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” after reading a four-page summary of it

Host: LYNN NEARY
Time: 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM

LYNN NEARY: Henry David Thoreau went to Walden Pond to write, observe and reflect. His reflections are still being studied nearly 150 years after they were first published. WEEKEND EDITION commentator Tom Schiff found a handy shortcut that got him thinking about this classic work of literature.

TOM SCHIFF: I wasn’t actually reading “Walden,” I was reading a book called “The Book of Great Books,” something you get at the bargain table at Barnes & Noble. “The Book of Great Books” is itself actually a summary of 100 great books, sort of like Cliff Notes summaries, only shorter. I was reading it mostly out of a genuine curiosity about most of the books, which I haven’t read, and also so that I can seem more educated and erudite than I really am.

Anyhow, when reading the four-page summary of Walden, I was struck that Thoreau, though roughing it, more or less, back there in 19th century rural Massachusetts, was actually living on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 300-acre farm out there at Walden Pond. I mean, this wasn’t like some homesteader tromping off into the wilds of Montana to chop down trees and bring his little slice of modern civilization to the wilderness. It was more, like, `Hey, Ralph, you know me. I’m Henry David Thoreau, the intellectual poet and, you know, you’ve got this 300-acre spread out there in Concord, and it’s your property, so even though civilization is creeping up, you can farm it and hunt on it and fish on it and keep others out, and you don’t mind if I build a place on it and just kind of hang out for a little bit, do you?’ Of course, Ralph, also being an intellectual and a writer, said, `Sure, go ahead. I’ve got 300 acres. Suit yourself.’

So that’s what Thoreau did for a couple of years. And I think having read a four-page condensation of “Walden,” that the moral of the book is live modestly, and you don’t need that many possessions, especially if you’ve got a friend with a 300-acre property that they let you live on for a few years. Which brings me to my other observation about the book, which is about the difference between liberals and radicals. Radicals seem to me to be people who don’t have much and live amongst others who don’t have much and genuinely feel they’ve been screwed by an unfair society or economy. A liberal is somebody who lives on their friends’ 300-acre farm and preaches to others about the virtues of material modesty. Or maybe it’s someone who reads a four-page summary of a book and pretends to be more educated and erudite than he really is.

NEARY: Tom Schiff reads condensed books in Los Angeles.

a recent this american life had a dan savage piece in which he described a promise he made to an ex-lover who was, at the time, dying of aids. the advent of a new drug cocktail extended the length of dan’s promise from a few months to the next several decades. this made me wonder, have i made (and broken) promises? i’m sure i have but the worst part is knowing that i don’t know what they are. the breakees probably remember, the way i remember girls who cruelly teased me in junior high. i wish i could remember.

this american life this week is a rerun about dying words. all of this makes me wonder, if i died today and people looked in on what my life is, what would they think? what would seem consistent with the way i am, and what might come as a total surprise? we rely on our intuition to give us a real sense of what people are, because otherwise, my existence could be boiled down to a messy, colorful room and the half-formed resume of a twenty year old. thank god for intuition. and thank god for messy, colorful rooms.

my very lactose-intolerant father called me just now to tell me that he heard on the radio that soy products may cause migraines. good lord. a full list of potential triggers is here.

this would explain how i go through two prescriptions worth of migraine medicine (twelve doses) in a handful of weeks. looks like i might be switching to rice milk.

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.)