Month: January 2013

Maria Bustillos sees value in it:

That we have the means of doing this—of entering into another mind to find all the riches and the perils that may await us there—affords us the possibility of deep pleasure and understanding. Without the ability to travel outside ourselves, all our conversations are in danger of becoming like tennis games consisting entirely of serves, with never a rally in sight. This is a matter of comprehending and containing the trick of beautiful rhetoric, experiencing the workings of a mind entirely unlike your own.

An example she uses from her own experiences? Edmund Burke:

Reading Burke, or any great polemicist, is a challenging test of one’s own intellectual swordsmanship. There is, or can be, a certain violence, even danger, in the clash of ideas. But I like to think that those hard-fought glimpses of understanding between ourselves and our rhetorical opponents open up the possibility of progress.

In a fascinating essay on the history of the American arcade, Laura June uncovers the fraught history of the pinball machine, which, in 1942, New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia actually banned throughout the city – a prohibition that lasted until 1976:

Though probably overstated at the time, pinball’s relationship to organized crime certainly existed. The end of Prohibition didn’t bring an end to the mob, but it did require the diversification of portfolios, adding the distribution of vending machines, cigarette machines, jukeboxes, and pinball to the “amusements” of booze and prostitution. LaGuardia’s mission gave voice to sentiments which hearkened back to the moral outrage of the Prohibition era, too, most of which had nothing to do with organized crime. Pinball, a “pointless game,” was attractive to children, and this worried parents and “concerned citizens.” Seth Porges, a writer and expert in the history of pinball, says there were “off the books” justifications for the banning of pinball in addition to those that were actually used to make it illegal. On the one hand, he says, “they successfully made the case that pinball was a type of gambling,” but under the surface was a much more temperance-fueled, nearly religious belief that pinball was a tool “from the devil,” which corrupted youths. Newspapers across the country essentially nodded their heads in agreement as games of all sorts — billiards, and even “old ladies’ bridge clubs” — were held up to scrutiny. At the time, it was easy to make the case that pinball was morally corrupting, at least insofar as it was a gateway to gambling, as well as a complete waste of time. Many large cities followed in New York’s footsteps, including Los Angeles and Chicago (San Francisco is one of the only major cities to have never banned the game), and pinball bans became fairly commonplace across the United States.

Conor chips in his two cents:

Mayor LaGuardia wasn’t an idiot or an incompetent. Nor were World War II-era New Yorkers dumb. The fact that their zealous paternalism robbed fellow citizens of an amusement, despite its by-now-self-evident harmlessness, isn’t a reason to condemn them. It is, rather, a reason to tread carefully when we codify our own judgments into binding municipal law. Pinball bans seem unbelievably absurd today. What regulations will seem equally needless to future generations?

(Panoramic view from inside a pinball machine, by Flickr user robinvanmourik)

In an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, the writer George Saunders describes the refreshingly non-Luddite approach to technology he takes in his fiction:

I like technology. I just think it’s complicated and funny, I guess — the way our basic neuroses are always seeking a home, and whenever we invent something new, our neuroses rush over there and get writ large. Before there were cellphones and Twitter and Facebook were people narcissistic? Ha. But those are beautiful ways of heightening our narcissism and putting a big old spotlight on it.

He goes on:

Or to put it another way: if the writer comes up with some strange device, and then lets people play with it, we are going to find out about people.

If we have a device that lets us look into other people’s thoughts, we are going to find out about, say, humans’ need for attention and their pride and so on. “What does she think when she first catches sight of me?What? A big nose? I do not have a big nose!” So that story isn’t really about that device, or about technology — but about, say, pride, or self-regard. So the technology or sci-fi aspects are, I guess, means to an (old, classic, traditional) end: hold a mirror up to human foibles and tendencies.

In a separate interview with the New Statesman, Saunders explains his understanding of literary beauty:

I’m not giving up on beauty, I’m just going to redefine it a little bit. I remember hearing something that the writer Robert Stone said. He was on a navy ship off the coast of Vietnam and they were doing a bombardment and he said it would be wrong to call it beautiful but it was sublime. If something is intense enough, or refined enough, or exaggerated enough – maybe our previous definition of beauty was a little bit dusty.

Charles Fried reads John Fabian Witt’s Lincoln’s Code as “an extended tribute to Lincoln’s moral genius”:

Moral genius, like political genius, is far closer to artistic genius than it is to genius in science or mathematics. It has to do with putting together familiar elements in unexpected ways, combining and recombining the materials to take account of and overcome the constraints of those materials, and finally coming up with a whole that surprises by its power, its aptness, and its sense that we are experiencing something fundamentally new. Relating moral genius to the genius of Keats or Raphael or Bach may seem to diminish the ultimate seriousness, the urgency of morality — or at least to make a category mistake that slights the special quality of each. But they do have things in common. In each case we cannot look at the world again in the same way after we have taken them in. Everything that has gone before and comes after takes on a different valence and hue.

Alan Jacobs wonders who counts as a moral genius:

For a Christian such as myself, Jesus is the obviously ideal exemplar of moral genius, but the category would obviously apply to other founders of religious traditions: the Buddha, Moses, Mohammed, etc. Below this obvious highest level, I wonder whom else we might identify as moral geniuses? The prophet Isaiah, certainly; St. Francis of Assisi; Maimonides; in a peculiar but important sense Montaigne.

Anyone care to nominate others?

A piano tuner shares why he gave up almost all of his possessions:

In an excerpt from his new memoir, My Mother’s Bible, Walter Kirn comes to a realization – “the story of the Fall is about a drug bust and its aftermath”:

It begins by discussing the prohibition of a potent psychedelic substance: a plant or a fruit that grants those who ingest it personal access to divine capacities. … Rather than live for all eternity in frustrating look-but-don’t-touch proximity to the alluring, magical botanical, the humans decide to go ahead and take the stuff. Like God himself, whom they supposedly resemble, they’re restless creatures, unable to keep still, so it’s hard to fault them for their choice.

His takeaway:

How strange, how unexpected and how strange, that the establishing myth or narrative of Jewish and Christian morality deals not with murder, deceit, or theft but with expanded consciousness, with tripping. How strange to learn that our original sin—at least in the minds of those who wrote the Bible—was closer to taking mushrooms than taking a life. Was the appetite there all along? I’m guessing it was. I’m guessing Eve’s choice to get high was not a choice for her.

Kirn elaborated in an interview with Jennifer Vineyard:

The Bible has been through millions of rounds of exegesis and interpretation, but it hasn’t been until quite recently that it’s been taken as the absolute truth, to the point where people expect it to inform ideas about biology and life on this planet. So I went at it like the Bible hadn’t been softened up by metaphor, and when you think about the Fall, and a plant that gave us knowledge of good and evil, I can only think of a few plants that can do that, and they were all taken by Timothy Leary. You’d think Cain and Abel would be the first atrocity — that’s a killing; that I understand. But what’s all this fuzzy business about eating a piece of prohibited fruit? So the only parallel that I can find that makes sense is taking some kind of drug.

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As the 50th anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s suicide approaches, Ruth Padel urges us to look past the poet’s almost mythological life and death and pay closer attention to her brilliant style, arguing that “Plath’s human relationships with father, mother and husband have often obscured the most important relationship a poet has as a poet – with words”:

If you burn away the glamour of myth, you can focus on Plath’s mastery of voice, her address, subjects and images, and on what we learn from her work not about individual psyches but the roles that words play in our constant repositioning of inner and outer, self and world. What poems like “Ariel” and “Elm” actually do (rather than what they reflect, or express) – their shape, beat and energy, their notions, short-circuits and folding mirrors – is to find new ways of putting absolute voice into absolute silence; of laying daredevil verbal shapes on the white space of a page.

(Audio: Sylvia Plath reading her poem “A Birthday Present,” via Brain Pickings)

Pivoting off an essay by Marcia Pally about evangelical Christians who have “left the right,” Joel Hunter – a pastor and former President-elect of the Christian Coalition of America – describes his own shift to a less partisan political stance:

[M]ore and more evangelicals are expanding the definition of pro-life. They are including in a pro-life framework concern with poverty, environmental pollution, AIDS treatment, and more. And issues like abortion are being expanded from focusing on only “in utero” concerns—increasing numbers of evangelicals now see prevention of unwanted pregnancy and support for needy expectant mothers as pro-life. More evangelicals simply want to live our lives according to our spiritual values—unselfishness, other-centeredness, non-presumptuousness—so that when people see “our good works, they will give glory to our Father in heaven.”

Meanwhile, in another response to Pally, David P. Gushee notes that the conflation of evangelicalism and conservative politics was a strange historical accident:

[T]he odd disturbance of global evangelicalism by right-wing Southern Strategy American politics is an aberration that has not quite run its course but is beginning to weaken. What is emerging instead is the robust political polyphony that was there all along. The politicized parachurch lobbying groups of right-wing evangelicalism are weakening relative to the educational, congregational, and missional efforts that have shaped a healthier evangelical public ethic for decades and will do so well into the future.