Category: Culture and anti-culture

Memo to Arlo Guthrie

The dump still closes on Thanksgiving.

A thousand years ago, I persuaded my homeroom at high school #2 to nominate “Alice’s Restaurant” for our class song. It inevitably lost out to “The Impossible Dream,” which was the song every class picked during that historical period, but it’s pleasant to imagine my classmates sashaying into the auditorium singing “You can get anything you want / at Alice’s Restaurant, excepting Alice.”

Alice Brock, who ran the restaurant in the song (which restaurant, as Guthrie notes in the song, was not actually named “Alice’s Restaurant”) died a week ago. It sounds like she was an interesting person, though we probably would have agreed on very little.

Today’s quote: books for children

Madeleine L’Engle:

Sometimes I answer that if I have something I want to say that is too difficult for adults to swallow, then I will write it in a book for children. This is usually good for a slightly startled laugh, but it’s perfectly true. Children still haven’t closed themselves off with fear of the unknown, fear of revolution, or the scramble for security. They are still familiar with the inborn vocabulary of myth.

Today’s quote: the pedant as hero

Joseph Epstein:

The only time I have been able to impose my pedantry upon a group larger than a room of 15 or 20 students was during the time (chiefly the 1970s and ’80s) when I edited the American Scholar, the intellectual quarterly of Phi Beta Kappa. First day on the job, I outlawed from the magazine’s pages a number of words or phrases popular at the time. Among them were “input” and “feedback,” which together always sounded to me a linguistic version of peristalsis. “Charisma” was not permitted to apply to anyone of lesser stature or influence than Gandhi or Jesus. “Lifestyle” was strictly verboten, so, too, weasel words such as “arguably” or “interestingly.” “Author” used as a verb, poof!, was gone; “supportive” was never allowed in the game. “Intriguing” was permitted only if it referred to spying or diplomacy, and “impact” exclusively to car crashes and dentistry. “Caring,” “sharing,” “growing,” “parenting,” “learning experience,” and other psychobabble words were excluded.

Today’s quote: Weirdos

Jeffrey Burghauser:

Great thinkers are often great weirdos; since every constellation of traits now constitutes a bona fide “identity” deserving federal protection and universal huzzahs, the weirdos ought to get into the act…. During Weirdo Appreciation Month, we’d celebrate novelist Marcell Proust (who lived in a cork-lined room), pianist Glenn Gould (who reflexively sang along to whatever Bach keyboard work he was playing), and literary Swiss Army Knife Samuel Johnson (an immense, lumbering figure who, owing to what would today be diagnosed as OCD, Tourette’s, and God knows what else, would alarm the uninitiated with his bizarre gesticulations and involuntary bird-noises). Mathematicians would be robustly represented, including Paul Erdös, who was challenged by a colleague to abstain from chemical stimulants for one month; upon successfully meeting the challenge, Erdös famously said to his colleague: “You’ve set mathematics back a month.”

Today’s quote, bourgeois edition

David Stove, via William M. Briggs:

… if you write down the names of a hundred people who have done something that matters in science or literature or any other branch of culture, you will find that two at most of the hundred come from the most privileged part of the social scale, and one at most from the least privileged…

This is an extremely simple statistic, and one which is very easily verified: anyone who is prepared to take a small amount of trouble can satisfy themselves as to the fact. Yet it is of the greatest importance. If it were attended to, it would be enough on its own to silence forever revolutionary or bohemian ranting about “bourgeois culture”; for it proves that culture is everywhere, and always has been, a middle-class monopoly.

Hero vs. protagonist: the soundtrack

Ted Gioia:

I’ve seen intricate taxonomies of music genres, which divide and subdivide songs into every possible category from glitch hop to folktronica. I’m told that the Spotify streaming platform has identified 1,300 different genres of music. Yet these lists never include the genre hero music—the oldest and most enduring song of them all and the root of all narratives. Like other genres, it morphs and evolves, but it never disappears.

(If you’re not reading Gioia regularly, you should be.)

Slow down

Ted Gioia echoes R.A. Lafferty:

IT’S OKAY TO READ SLOWLY

I tell myself that, because I am not a fast reader.

I can do speed reading, if it’s absolutely necessary—but I find it painful and exhausting. My natural reading pace is languid, almost lethargic.

My lifetime reading plan has been my proven path to Nirvana
Even more to the point, the books I read must be savored and slowly digested. Proust is one of my favorite authors, but I could only handle his ultra-dense writing in small doses. So I read through his 2,000-page novel at the pace of seven pages per day. I started when I was a teenager, and got to the final page shortly before my 30th birthday.

Of course, I read many other things during that period, but I always came back to his massive book—taking it slowly, thoughtfully, in the way it deserved.

For many years, I felt that my slow reading was holding me back. I would be wiser, I would be smarter, I told myself, if I could just read faster. I often keep going back over the same sentences again and again, trying to decipher their inner meaning. This slows me down to a tortoise’s pace—and it’s frustrating.

But now I believe slowness was a benefit. My learning was deeper and more mind-expanding because I didn’t rush it.

By the way, I did the same thing when I learned jazz piano. I spent months learning things that could have been mastered in days. But by the time, I was done, I had internalized my learning at a deep level.

Life is not a race. The journey is its own reward. If we could make the trip instantaneously—like they do with those teleporters in Star Trek—it wouldn’t be worth anything.

See Lafferty’s “The Primary Education of the Camiroi.”