Author: Jessie Roberts

Faith Without Belief?

by Jessie Roberts

Nat Case articulates how he reconciles being both an atheist and a committed Quaker:

If you are really going to be part of a community, just showing up for the main meal is not enough: you need to help cook and clean up. So it has been with me and the Quakers: I’m concerned with how my community works, and so I’ve served on committees (Quakerism is all about committees). There’s pastoral care to accomplish, a building to maintain, First-Day School (Quakerese for Sunday School) to organise. And there’s the matter of how we as a religious community will bring our witness into the world.

Perhaps this language sounds odd coming from a non-theist, but as I hope I’ve shown, I’m not a non-theist first. I’ve been involved in prison visiting, and have been struck at the variety of religious attitudes among volunteers: some for whom the visiting is in itself ministry, and others for whom it’s simply social action towards justice (the programme grew out of visiting conscientious objectors in the Vietnam era). The point is: theological differences are not necessarily an issue when there’s work to be done.

But the committees I’ve been in have also had a curious sense of unease too, a sense of something missing, and I’ve now been on three committees that were specifically charged with addressing aspects of a sense of malaise and communal disconnect. The openness of liberal religion resonates strongly with me. It means I do have a place, and not just in the closet or as a hypocrite. But I wonder if my presence, and the presence of atheists and skeptics such as me, is part of the problem.

People need focus. There’s a reason why the American mythologist Joseph Campbell chose the hero’s journey as his fundamental myth: we don’t give out faith and loyalty to an idea nearly as readily as we give it to a hero, a person. And so a God whom we understand not as a vague notion or spirit, but as a living presence, with voice and face and will and command — this is what I think most people want in a visceral way. In some ways, it’s what we need.

And I do not believe such a God exists in our universe.

On Comedy Podcasts

by Jessie Roberts

Marc Maron interviews Louis CK for his “WTF” podcast:

Cameron Tung explores the world of comedy podcasting:

Curiously, many comic-hosted podcasts are not shows that could be strictly defined as comedy. Instead, their salient features are often honest, uncensored, and insightful repartee between comedians. At times, podcasts function as salons where comics can gather to work out bits, exchange career advice, and engage in meaningful dialogue. The creative control that comics have over their podcasts allow them to do what they do best—talk—without restraints on time or content. The most skilled use this freedom to manufacture a unique, intimate product for a specific audience that is also a genuine reflection of the comic’s persona and artistic sensibility.

It is, perhaps, this sense of intimacy that producers and consumers of comedy podcasts find most captivating. Writing at Slate, Patton Oswalt asserted that the most remarkable quality of the standup Louis C.K.’s television series “Louie” is its ability to give “outsiders a clear and affectionate feeling for a world they might not inhabit.” This is the service that “WTF,” “You Had To Be There,” and a host of other comedy podcasts provide. Through millions of computers and smartphones, they offer audiences anywhere in the world an on-demand glimpse into a universe that’s normally curtained off from observation. And, it seems, a lot of people like what they hear.

Just There For The Articles

by Jessie Roberts

dish_playboy

Amy Grace Loyd describes working as an editor at Playboy:

Working at Playboy does mean working alongside a parade of breasts (real or fake but always protuberant), an opera of breasts, really, but over time, in the course of my weeks and months there, I didn’t remark on them much. We worked in the New York office on Fifth Avenue, near one corner of Central Park and The Plaza. There were no photography studios on site, no auditions held for Playmates or Bunnies. So it was all the easier to believe what us editors and staff writers told ourselves: The women showcased in the magazine were carnival barkers. They got the folks into the tent, but it was the articles, the essays, the interviews and reviews, the short stories, that kept them there. I saw us as misunderstood, as an underdog.

You bet I’d drunk the Kool-Aid. It helped that my fellow editors were among the best I’d ever worked with. I expected some sexism, a run-in or two with sexual harassment, but I was disappointed in this, happily. Certainly sex was in the air, the stuff of endless humor, of puns, double-entendres. You had to be light on your feet. Usually the only woman in editorial meetings, I was especially good at providing straight lines, unwittingly, until I became better at playing along, keeping up. It was infantile but necessary to subdue all the elephants in the room, all the content we had no say over, and juxtapositions of that content, of high and low, that can still make me laugh out loud, still delight me for their irreverence and denial of this country’s determined conservative tastes, conservative everything. We worked hard, maybe harder than most monthly magazine staffs, to prove ourselves, in the hope, however slight, that readers, and the industry we were part of, might see the forest for the breasts.

Earlier Dish on the working environment at Playgirl here.

(Photo by Flickr user r2hox)

The Art Of Ink

by Jessie Roberts

Margot Mifflin reviews Ed Hardy’s memoir, Wear Your Dreams: My Life in Tattoos:

[Hardy] opened Realistic Tattoo in San Francisco, the first appointment-only shop devoted to custom designs. Realistic is the reason tattoo shops today are more like art dish_tattoo2 studios, galleries, or hair salons; the reason name tattooists have waiting lists stretching sometimes years into the future; the reason more people plan out their tattoo collections and research the best artist for a particular job; the reason so many art school graduates are pushing ink; and the reason that despite the ocean of bad skin art sloshing around the globe, the best work is increasingly excellent. Do an online search, for instance, of Duke Riley (Brooklyn), Roxx TwoSpirit (San Francisco), Colin Dale (Copenhagen), Saira Hunjan (London), or Yann Black (Montreal), then sit back and allow your brain to quake.

Hardy’s ambition has always been to bridge the worlds of fine art and tattooing. “I wanted to elevate the art form,” he writes:

Having graduated from art school, I brought […] a sense of art history, a fierce dedication to the medium, and something of a chip on my shoulder toward the rest of the world that failed to hold the art of tattoo in the same regard I did.

Until recently, that was a failed mission. The establishment art world has shown little interest in tattoo as design, fine art, street art, or fashion, for reasons involving money, class bias, and the difficulty of exhibiting human bodies. But the first stirrings of change are evident: last year, the Honolulu Museum of Art mounted a show of ten contemporary Hawaiian tattooists. The Milwaukee Art Museum just opened an exhibit of the work of Amund Dietzel, a legendary Old School Milwaukee tattooist. And this year, museums in Germany (The Museum Villa Rot) and Switzerland (the Gewerbemuseum) have organized tattoo exhibitions.

Recent Dish on tattoos here and here.

(Photo of work by Amund Dietzel at the Milwaukee Art Museum by PunkToad)

Picasso As Playwright

by Jessie Roberts

Jerome Rothenberg is translating The Four Little Girls, the second of two plays Picasso wrote in the 1940s:

While there may be less razzle-dazzle here than in the better known Desire Trapped by the Tail, there was a pop, almost juvenile quality in the language, or in how I perceived the language, that I wanted to emulate in the version I was starting to transcreate. My sense of Picasso poète then & now, contrary to Gertrude Stein’s dismissal of him, was that what he offered was the real goods which his awesome reputation as an artist only tended to obscure.

An excerpt from a scene that takes place in a vegetable garden:

little girl i – singing – we’re not gonna go to the woods no more the laurel trees are down on the floor & the beautiful babe hey (she shouts) hey hey hey cause the cat has taken a dish_houseinagarden bird from the nest in his mouth & he’s choking it now with his claws & dragging it back of the lemony cloud dipped in butter that melts on the edge of a wall that’s all bunged up with earth & a sun that’s covered with ash.

little girl iii – oh that’s just too dumb

little girl iv – go take your places down by the flowers the knitting yarn trailing all over the garden & hanging its rosary beads up like eyes & the full cups of wine in fine crystal the organs we listen to short little arms pitterpatting the cotton wool sky from somewhere in back of the big rhubarb leaves.

little girl i – go take your places your places life’s wrapping me up my passion’s like chalk on my coat it’s in tatters & full of black ink stains that flow down my throat from the blind hands that seek out the mouth of the wound.

little girl iii (hidden in back of the well) that’s it yes that’s it yes that’s it.

little girls i – ii – iv – dumb dumb – you’re so dumb – you’re two times as visible there – yeah yeah everyone sees you – you’re totally naked & covered with rainbows. Go fix up your hair it’s on fire it’s starting to burn up the string of bows scraped on the tangled-up hairdo of bells licked clean by the mistral.

little girl iii – that’s it – yes that’s it – that’s just it you can’t catch me alive & can’t see me – I’m dead.

little girl iv – don’t be such a jerk

(Image: House in a Garden, by Picasso, via Flickr user jmussuto)

Pynchon In Profile

by Jessie Roberts

Boris Kachka assembles a brief, detailed biography of the famously reclusive Thomas Pynchon:

There’s an apparent randomness to his public excursions, but mostly they hinge on ordinary personal connections. Take his decision to write liner notes for—and then do an Esquire interview with—a pretty good indie-rock band called Lotion.

Around the time his father died, in 1995, Pynchon went on an alumni tour of his old high school. He and Rob Youngberg, Lotion’s drummer, happened to be visiting the same music teacher. Dr. Luckenbill had taught them 25 years apart. Then Pynchon ran into Youngberg’s mother in an Oyster Bay bank, and she pressed Lotion’s new album on him. Pynchon dug it, and soon he was in their recording studio, taking notes and ­rattling off obscure facts about ribbon microphones.

“I just remember being amazed at how fluidly funny he was,” says Youngberg. His bandmate Bill Ferguson was copy chief at Esquire; the magazine pitched an interview, and, to everyone’s surprise, he agreed. The Q&A ran beneath text so strange Pynchon must have written it: “The reclusive novelist loves rock and roll, and its name is, well, Lotion. He wanted to play ukulele, so the band gave him an interview.” Ferguson was impressed by Pynchon’s knowledge, humor, and intensity—but also the skittish, mercurial quality of the interaction: “He’s somebody who just—you see him and he sees you. The thing I have in my head is Robert De Niro in Brazil. He knows the truth but he’s got to get out of here now: ‘Keep doing what you’re doing, I won’t be here long.'”

Trend Lit In Higher Ed

by Jessie Roberts

dish_books

Ashley Thorne co-authored Beach Books: What Do Colleges and Universities Want Students to Read Outside Class? (pdf), an analysis of the summer reading 309 American colleges assigned their incoming first-year students during the 2012-2013 academic year. The major findings:

1. Ninety-seven percent of colleges and universities chose books published in 1990 or later.
2. The most popular book by far was The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
3. Politically-themed books abounded.
4. Very few of the colleges with common reading programs chose classics.

The top two subject categories were Science and Multiculturalism/Immigration/Racism, and the top genres were memoir and biography. Some book types were notably missing from common reading assignments. Classic texts and books published before 1990 were scarce, and fiction was far outpaced by nonfiction. There were no classics of history; no biographies of, nor autobiographies, speeches, or writings by, American political leaders; no works by ancient philosophers; no works of the Enlightenment; no classical works of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or Confucian thought; and no scientific classics.

Thorne elaborates on the study:

The faculty and administrators who devise these programs seem to think that unless the living author can stroll into the classroom and explain what she had for breakfast this morning, the students will be unable to “relate” to her written words. … Defenders of the choices say they want “accessibility” and “relevance”. Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and even Zora Neale Hurston just don’t make the cut when it comes to relevant social issues. In response to critics, some of the colleges say that the books they pick are likely to be the “classics of the future”, but the turnover among the choices from year to year suggests either that we are due for an unprecedented avalanche of new classics or that most of these hunches are off the mark. …

The choice of a recent book that is often the only book students will have in common with one another points to the death of a shared literary culture. To the extent that colleges want to approach that culture, they display willful selfishness in confining their sights to the present. Contemporary books are worth reading, but their richness is many times increased by the knowledge of what came before. That knowledge is evanescent.

(Photo by Flickr user shutterhacks)

How Do We Define Love?

by Jessie Roberts

Maria Popova spotlights E.B. White’s thoughts on love and passion:

Even after one has experienced love, one finds difficulty defining it. Likewise, one may define it and then have all kinds of trouble experiencing it, because, once having defined it, one is in too pompous a frame of mind ever again to submit to its sweet illusion. By and large, love is easier to experience before it has been explained — easier and cleaner. The same holds true of passion. Understanding the principles of passion is like knowing how to drive a car; once mastered, all is smoothed out; no more does one experience the feeling of perilous adventure, the misgivings, the diverting little hesitancies, the wrong turns, the false starts, the glorious insecurity. All is smoothed out, and all, so to speak, is lost.

Ending Their Psychological Misery

by Jessie Roberts

P.W. Buchanan discusses a study that compared seniors who committed suicide to seniors who died from natural causes:

While debate about the ethics of elder suicide tends to revolve around terminal illnesses and loss of autonomy, those end-of-life issues didn’t turn out to be the common causes of real-life suicides among the elderly. The study found that those who took their own lives actually had less impairment of “functional autonomy” in their final months of life. Those who took their own lives also had fewer chronic health problems than those who died naturally. “In our study,” the report observes, “suicide cases were found to have a lower risk of having cancer, emphysema, and cardiovascular disease at the time of death.”

Now, one could posit that these elderly people had decided to end their lives precisely because they were still able to and because they anticipated imminent impairment. Significantly, however, the study found that mental health, most notably depression, was a variable that showed up much more frequently in the suicide cases than in the control cases. Based on the psychological autopsies, “the suicide cases were ten times more likely to present a current psychiatric disorder during the six months preceding death than the controls.”

All of which complicates how we think about elder suicide. It might be another vestige of dogma, but why am I more inclined to privilege physical pain and external circumstances when I consider the ethics of suicide? Why does internal pain, in the form of mental illness and chemical imbalance, strike me as a less acceptable reason? And isn’t this why physicians’ opinions are part of the law—because we want to limit suicide to those who are unarguably rational?

Recent Dish on suicide here, here, and here.