Month: September 2013

“Maybe we should legalize. We’re certainly moving that way as far as marijuana is concerned. I respect the will of the people,” – John McCain. If only he would smoke some.

Linda Gregerson names John Donne as hers:

Ben Jonson once predicted that Donne’s poetry would perish for want “being understood.” But I think his poems are brilliant recruiting devices for uncertain or inexpert readers like myself at sixteen. I was not equipped for understatement; I had to be seized by the shoulders and shaken. The very strenuousness of Donne’s conceits —those wonderfully far-fetched analogies that defy both visualization and ordinary logic—is flattering to a reader:  Donne’s metaphors put us through our paces, as a well-built puzzle puts us through our paces. Other poets had amused me or touched my heart a bit or afforded some musical pleasure, but here was a poet who gave me honest work to do: for the first time, I felt how thrilling it was to be included. Best of all, the poems that captured my attention with their dazzle and extravagance are by no means for beginners only: their exhilarating breadth of reference—cosmology, cartography, contemporary politics, law, logic, physiology, to name just a few—is anchored by real urgency of mind and spirit. Poetry is a form of bravura for Donne, a way of conjuring presence-in-the-world.  But it is also a form of soul-making, a way of conjuring presence-before-God.

S.E. Smith wants to retire the term. Smith is frustrated that it has been used to describe “fat hatred, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, classism,” among myriad other issues:

This ‘last acceptable prejudice’ rhetoric is highly divisive, creating huge gaps between communities that could be working with each other to accomplish common goals. The fact is that prejudice, period, is widely accepted in society and culture, and this is what needs to change. Fighting all prejudices is important, and considering a variety of strategies and groups in that fight is critical. We must be aware, too, that because prejudices and oppression are variable, a one-size-fits-all strategy will not work. We gain nothing by trying to isolate prejudice into scores of its own little boxes; if you will forgive a Harry Potter metaphor, this ‘last acceptable prejudice’ stuff ends up splinching people as they’re torn between various aspects of their identity and experience.

Do you want to tell a disabled gay woman that fat is the last acceptable prejudice when she’s endured disability hate crimes and homophobic taunting? Would you like to tell a young Black man that sexism is the last acceptable prejudice in a country where being young and Black is grounds for being shot, by police and civilians alike? What are you accomplishing with these statements, other than sending a clear signal that there’s only one community you care about, and that is your own?

Laurie Santos explores the question with Chris Stedman, a humanist chaplain at Harvard and the author of Faitheist:

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Watch the entire video here and subscribe to The Mind Report here.

In a conversation about his memoir, White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin, Michael W. Clune offers insight into how he stays sober:

My memories, my impulses, my reflexes, my relationships, my goals, my future, past, and present were all terminally infected. So to escape the memory disease—to escape addiction—I had to start over, outside me. How to get outside?

The first step was forming new habits. Every night, I just wrote a list of things that are good to do, and the next day I read the list and did them—did them until I didn’t have to read the list anymore. Brush my teeth. Eat a banana. Work on my dissertation for three hours. Take a walk. Go to an NA meeting. Repeat. Pretty soon I’m a different person. The self isn’t really that solid; it’s mostly composed of things from the outside world. And habits are the tape and rope and staples that get things outside stuck in us.

Sometimes people tell me they’re scared to get into recovery, because they’re scared they’ll lose the “real me.” I’ve never been able to understand this. I’ve always been very happy to lose the real me, it’s just hard to find takers. Habit is a taker.

Michael Schulson worries that instant replay in baseball will ruin the game’s charms, likening the technology to religious fundamentalism:

Fundamentalist religions may attack modern culture, but they are also, as an abundant realm of scholarship argues, products of modernity. The kind of precision, authority, and certainty that motivates, say, the belief in the inerrancy of scripture, or the conviction that you can prove, through science, the veracity of the Biblical Flood, is part and parcel of the modern demand that things be absolutely correct and explainable—that things should be not just feel true, but be correct. Perhaps it should not surprise us that religious violence is so often sourced from engineers, schooled in the arts of precision and certainty.

Back to baseball, home of a new and creeping umpirical dogmatism. Part of the sport’s charm is its pre-modern flavor: where football has engineered plays and metrical grid, and basketball not one but two clocks (shot and game), baseball seems to obey a different rhythm, slow and summery and defined only by the necessary duration for its fulfillment, and not some digital device. Naturally, then, baseball is a technologically conservative place. Players use wooden bats. They chew tobacco instead of smoking it. They wear knickers.

He claims instant replay is indicative of our forgetting “a kind of truth thrives in the realm of fate and subjective judgment, and not in the absolutes”:

Now cameras have come along and ruined it all. Baseball is about to get literalist. Or perhaps more scientific. New atheist, fundamentalist, take your pick: starting next spring, the shrines of the diamond will be losing a little of their magic.

“I want to write, partly at least, for the kind of reader I was when I was nineteen years old. I want to address that person because he or she is young enough that life is just beginning to seem a mystery which literature can address in surprising and pleasurable ways. When I was nineteen I began to read Absalom, Absalom! slowly, slowly, page by patient page, since I was slightly dyslexic. I was working on the railroad, the Missouri-Pacific in Little Rock. I hadn’t been doing well in school, but I started reading. I don’t mean to say that reading altogether changed my life, but it certainly brought something into my life—possibility—that had not been there before…

I heard someone say the other day, You have to write for yourself. What shit, I thought. Write for yourself—why? (Though I guess if that produces wonderful work, who am I to argue over conceits?) But I once said that to an audience in France and several people got up and left the room. They said, Hummmph. You’re letting down your vocation if you’re willing to admit that you write for other people. But that’s just not my view. To me, it’s the thought that you can make something out of words, which organizes experience in the way Faulkner is talking about when he says that “literature stops life for the purpose of examining it.” To be able to do that for another person is a good use of your life,” – Richard Ford.