Month: July 2013

Continuing her arguments about bringing poetry to the public, Tasha Golden takes on the myth that “wanting readers isn’t a noble enough desire for ‘real’ poets—that we should instead write strictly ‘because we must,’ or because ‘the muse has us'”:

[A]s George Orwell has famously illustrated, there are (valid!) motivations for writing that actually require a readership. And if our work is driven to any degree by its potential human impact, as Orwell’s was, it’s irresponsible to eschew the work of reaching out. This was what I wanted us to translate from pop music: Its gritty determination. Its insistence on being heard. Its put-our-stuff-where-folks-will-find-it creativity. Its refusal of insularity.

It’s time for writers to stop feeling shallow or guilty for wanting what only makes sense: to be read. It’s time we stop policing each other’s motives and frowning on self-promotion, and instead empower each other to explore where our poetry can go. Why? Because if readers are required to want and seek poetry in order to find it, we’ll never get beyond each other. If the wider world’s not reading poetry, it’s at least in part because it rarely encounters it. That’s what we can change.

Martin Amis makes an analogy to describe two kinds of authors:

A great part of writing is hoping to make things as nice as possible for the reader — be a good host, have them put their feet up by the fire, pull up a chair, get out a good wine. The writer who loves the reader always feels that; Nabokov would always give you his best chair.

But there have been one or two writers who didn’t give a shit about the reader, like Joyce — partly because he had patronage, he didn’t need the reader to earn a living. And Henry James, who went off the reader in a huge way, which is why those last few novels became impenetrable. If you look at early James, he’s almost middlebrow, then you get The Ambassadors, this incredibly convoluted thing. Joyce and James became bad hosts: If you wandered into their house you wouldn’t be welcomed. You’d stagger around while they were in the kitchen making some vile concoction which might amuse you, but it would taste disgusting and eccentric.

Astronaut Sunita Williams describes how space travel changes your perspective:

When you’re flying in space some of the things down on Earth seem trivial. Things like politics leave your mind. I didn’t feel like I was a person from the United States, I felt like I was lucky enough to be a person from Earth. For me, [most] news wasn’t important but people are important, so when you hear about natural disasters like hurricanes and fires, that makes you miss home and wonder how everybody’s coping. But I would also look back at the planet and think, “Gosh, it’s a pretty little place, everybody’s going for a walk on the beach or something like that, they must be enjoying life down there.”

Like so many children of the ’90s, James Patrik learned about bisexuality from Friends:

“Sometimes men love women/Sometimes men love men/And then there are bisexuals, though some just say they’re kidding themselves.”

As an impressionable kid, those lyrics [from Phoebe], comedic as they might be, represented the first time television had told me what to think about bisexuals. Whoever these bisexuals were, I was taught, they were foolish and cowardly. Too scared to just come out and admit their obvious gayness.

Growing up, the television and the community sold me a binary world view: gay or straight. There were only two viable options, and I secretly dreaded the eventuality of having to pick one. So I didn’t. I proceeded, undefined, not wanting to belong to either one of these groups. Not out of spite or youthful rebellion, but out of truth. I never really believed I was straight, and I never really believed I was gay.

After years of identifying himself as either one or the other – “I was always ashamed of my dishonesty when I did this, but also relieved at having avoided a potentially complicated conversation” – Patrik came out as bisexual. But he says the stigma remains:

Some likened my sexuality to a light switch, flicked in either direction on a whim. Some have regarded me as foolish and simply afraid of admitting my attraction to men. Some have just called me greedy. … What is it about bisexuality that so confounds? Labels and categories inform so much of how we interact with others. They flavor our expectations of how people will (and should) behave and force us to see otherness where none exists. In a society so bent on ‘outing’ celebrities and public figures, the bisexual man or woman circumvents this game and evades inquiring minds by sitting on the fence and defying categorization.

Read the whole Dish thread on bisexuality here.

Don’t play Assassin’s Creed. Or go to a hospital. Or do much of anything else. That’s the takeaway of this neat visualization of the world’s worst data breaches.

Jessica Love parses a study that finds we’re significantly less conscious of the flavor and quality of our food while we do other things. She calls it “zombie eating”:

Just about anything can turn us into zombie eaters: reading the newspaper, listening to Pride and Prejudice, even socializing. As distractions mount, so do the dangers. When our focus isn’t on our food, we may be slower to notice the physiological cues that tell us we’re full. And without tangible evidence of our binge—a pile of incriminating candy wrappers, say—we tend to lose track of how much we’ve eaten. This spurs us to eat more, for this meal and—hey, why not?—even for our next.

The antidote to zombie eating is mindful eating, where one focuses on eating—just eating—in a deliberate, even meditative, manner. Yesterday over lunch I gave mindful eating a whirl. To my mind the experience was not unlike silent hiking: my movements slowed, my senses piqued, the familiar became wonderfully strange.