As far as I know, my bathroom mirror isn’t magic. I never actually tested the hypothesis by asking it who is the fairest of all, which is just as well either way; if it had an answer, no doubt it would break itself laughing before saying it. The glass needed no magic, though, to reveal a trip to the barber is in my immediate future. In a way, this is one small thing for which to be grateful. A modest majority of my head hair is still there, and from a distance still looks dark brown. On my last barber visit, however, I couldn’t help noticing that the falling trimmings on balance were lighter than they once were.
“Am I going blond by any chance?” I asked.
“No,” she answered simply.
The reflected shagginess this morning raised a couple questions in my mind, however, for which I can find no definitive answers in the books on my shelves or in internet searches. There are plenty of speculative answers though. It is currently fashionable among anthropologists to classify humans (and all extinct hominids/hominins) among the Great Apes. Why are we the only members of that family with a mane that, uncut, will grow to the waist or longer? Why, at the same time, did body hair all but vanish?
In truth we don’t know. The most common answer for the mane is “sexual selection” – rather like the peacock’s tail. Any peacock that can keep its life-threatening encumbrance of a tail looking good must be healthy and a good catch, so the argument goes, and so the flashy-tailed bird attracts more mates and has more offspring; good lustrous hair says much the same about a human. Maybe. When did the trait develop? Did Neanderthals have long tresses? Homo erectus? We have no idea, but it is rather fun to picture them that way.
There are competing (perhaps complementary) ideas about body hair. Two lead the pack. One, once again, is sexual selection, though it is hard to see what (originally) would have been so attractive about hairlessness, either in a positive way or in the peacock tail encumbrance way. Another possible reason is thermal regulation. In combination with our exceptionally abundant sweat glands, hairlessness lets us shed heat far more efficiently, which would have been a daytime advantage on the hot African savanna. On the other hand, it would have been a nighttime disadvantage. Besides, our baboon cousins live in the identical environment, and are both hairy and maneless.
Didn’t hairlessness just put us to the trouble of making clothes? Apparently not for quite a while: Doctors Rogers, Iltis, and Wooding make a good argument in Current Anthropology that hairlessness dates back at least 1.2 million years. Clothing, on the other hand, may be no more than 70,000 years old. How do we know anything about the timing of clothing? Our friends the lice tell us. The various species of lice are very particular about what species they infect and where. They are specialists. In the case of humans, there are three separate species of lice who enjoy our company: head, pubic, and body. They are related to each other, and using a DNA clock (the mutation rate) we can make a good estimate about when they diverged from each other. Body lice are not really body lice: they infest clothes. They snack on their hosts, but live in the clothes. They diverged from head lice only 70,000 years ago, which strongly implies there weren’t any clothes before then; lice would have adapted to the niche soon after it became available. This is also close to the time modern humans left Africa for chillier climes where the clothes would have been handy, despite the little bugs.
The million years of nakedness and the lice suggest another possible advantage to hairlessness: a million years without body lice. It would have reduced the spread of disease significantly, and disease always is a bigger killer than all the predators, accidents, and wars combined. Is that the real message when people flirtatiously show skin? “Hey look! I’ve got no bugs on me!”
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
The Curse of Verse
Since the skies they are ashen and sober and the leaves they are crisped and sere (and it is night in the lonesome October of my most immemorial year), it is time to break out Edgar Allen Poe. If you don’t mind, though, I’ll pass on visiting the dank tarn of Auber, in the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. I’m, of course, stealing from Ululume. I don’t revisit Eddie much these days, but Halloween time simply cries out for him. So, once per year anyway, I blow the dust off my 1967 edition of his essential stories and poems, open it up, and let the raven jump out to croak his favorite word.
In doing so once again, a tangential thought occurs. I can’t help wondering what has happened to make poetry so much less significant in the culture than it once was. Oh, there is a vast quantity of it being written. (For the record, my sister, not I, was the poet of the family.) Plenty of young writers know their anapests from their dactyls and have something to say. Their trouble is finding anyone to listen. Literature departments of universities still take (some) new verse seriously, but, outside of this isolated niche, contemporary poetry has little currency. Once upon a time, poets were rock stars. Tennyson, Eliot, Kipling, Coleridge, Browning, Whitman, and their like were famous in their own lifetimes not just in Academe but in the marketplace. Common folk knew who they were. W.B. Yeats was so lionized by the Irish in the 1920s that they made him a Senator despite that little pagan quirk. (How much luck would an announced pagan have running for the Senate in the 21st century USA?) The mystical philosophy of Aleister Crowley, Yeats’ competitor for control of The Order of the Golden Dawn, would not have received a tenth of the attention it did had he not been a recognized poet.
By the end of the 20th century all this had changed. The last time contemporary poetry has had a broad cultural (actually, countercultural) impact was the oft-parodied Beat era. Who was the last U.S. Poet Laureate selected by the Library of Congress whose name a majority of Americans would recognize? I’d venture it was Robert Frost, and that was half a century ago.
The current Poet Laureate, by the way, is Philip Levine. I think I’m being generous with the guess that maybe 5% of the adult American population is in any way aware of him, despite the fact that he is an 83-year-old master of the craft whose published collections have been critically acclaimed for decades.
On the (rare) occasions when I raise this subject in company, I’m sometimes told that modern poets have become songwriters – that the current poetic rock stars are, well, rock stars. I don’t buy it. The 19th century and early 20th century had popular music, too. While the best of it is very good indeed, it’s not quite the same thing. If it were, the lyrics should stand alone as literature, but by and large they don’t. Nor should they. They are intended for a related, but nonetheless different, purpose – though I’ll admit to blurring at the boundaries (some of Bob Dylan, for instance). Song lyrics with musical accompaniment target emotions in a much more immediate and primal way than literary poetry. In an early Tonight Show episode, Steve Allen brought this home in funny fashion by reading Be-Bop-a-Lula as poetry: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpxhEoV5IsE .
What has changed in the modern era? I suspect it is that we have ways of expressing ourselves today that simply weren’t available a century or two ago, the movies for instance, and that these fill some of the same role poetry once did – after all, Scorsese, Kubrick, Tarantino, the Coen brothers, and so on are recognized by the public in the same way leading poets once were. Perhaps they do the job better, too, hard though that is for anyone of bookish bent to admit. Well, the old-fashioned versifiers still exist for those who prefer them, so there is little to bemoan in this – unless you happen to be someone trying to make a living from your poetry sales.
Actually, I have a few Halloween flicks lined up for my DVD player, but, just for now, I’ll rejoin Ed among those Bottomless vales and boundless floods, And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods, With forms that no man can discover For the tears that drip all over.
Philip Levine
In doing so once again, a tangential thought occurs. I can’t help wondering what has happened to make poetry so much less significant in the culture than it once was. Oh, there is a vast quantity of it being written. (For the record, my sister, not I, was the poet of the family.) Plenty of young writers know their anapests from their dactyls and have something to say. Their trouble is finding anyone to listen. Literature departments of universities still take (some) new verse seriously, but, outside of this isolated niche, contemporary poetry has little currency. Once upon a time, poets were rock stars. Tennyson, Eliot, Kipling, Coleridge, Browning, Whitman, and their like were famous in their own lifetimes not just in Academe but in the marketplace. Common folk knew who they were. W.B. Yeats was so lionized by the Irish in the 1920s that they made him a Senator despite that little pagan quirk. (How much luck would an announced pagan have running for the Senate in the 21st century USA?) The mystical philosophy of Aleister Crowley, Yeats’ competitor for control of The Order of the Golden Dawn, would not have received a tenth of the attention it did had he not been a recognized poet.
By the end of the 20th century all this had changed. The last time contemporary poetry has had a broad cultural (actually, countercultural) impact was the oft-parodied Beat era. Who was the last U.S. Poet Laureate selected by the Library of Congress whose name a majority of Americans would recognize? I’d venture it was Robert Frost, and that was half a century ago.
The current Poet Laureate, by the way, is Philip Levine. I think I’m being generous with the guess that maybe 5% of the adult American population is in any way aware of him, despite the fact that he is an 83-year-old master of the craft whose published collections have been critically acclaimed for decades.
On the (rare) occasions when I raise this subject in company, I’m sometimes told that modern poets have become songwriters – that the current poetic rock stars are, well, rock stars. I don’t buy it. The 19th century and early 20th century had popular music, too. While the best of it is very good indeed, it’s not quite the same thing. If it were, the lyrics should stand alone as literature, but by and large they don’t. Nor should they. They are intended for a related, but nonetheless different, purpose – though I’ll admit to blurring at the boundaries (some of Bob Dylan, for instance). Song lyrics with musical accompaniment target emotions in a much more immediate and primal way than literary poetry. In an early Tonight Show episode, Steve Allen brought this home in funny fashion by reading Be-Bop-a-Lula as poetry: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpxhEoV5IsE .
What has changed in the modern era? I suspect it is that we have ways of expressing ourselves today that simply weren’t available a century or two ago, the movies for instance, and that these fill some of the same role poetry once did – after all, Scorsese, Kubrick, Tarantino, the Coen brothers, and so on are recognized by the public in the same way leading poets once were. Perhaps they do the job better, too, hard though that is for anyone of bookish bent to admit. Well, the old-fashioned versifiers still exist for those who prefer them, so there is little to bemoan in this – unless you happen to be someone trying to make a living from your poetry sales.
Actually, I have a few Halloween flicks lined up for my DVD player, but, just for now, I’ll rejoin Ed among those Bottomless vales and boundless floods, And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods, With forms that no man can discover For the tears that drip all over.
Philip Levine
Friday, October 7, 2011
October Stein
October is chock full of holidays. Among the many are Columbus Day, Leif Erikson Day, and Coming Out Day (that’s the 11th if you’re interested). There is World Vegetarian Day, World Teachers Day, Skeptic Day, and Chocolate Covered Insect Day. The 28th is both Mother-in-law Day and National Chocolate Day (Celebrated how? Buy a box of chocolates and don’t give it to your mother-in-law?) It all culminates in Halloween, which, in the US, polls as the second-favorite holiday of the year. Additionally, there are month-long observances including Hispanic Heritage Month, Polish-American Heritage Month, and National Book Fair Month. Incongruously, it is both National Pork Month and Vegetarian Awareness Month. Not least, it is National Collegiate Alcohol Awareness Month.
I suspect collegians are aware of alcohol every month, despite the 21-year-old drinking age. The insistence by older adults that under-21s should abstain is not taken at all seriously by the younger group. It is silly to expect that it would be. On the contrary the demand is counterproductive. Abstinence is a fine choice for some individuals in this as in other matters (I’m a near teetotaler myself), but we run into trouble when we try to impose it by force. When we turn something ordinary into an offence (say, drinking a single beer), we provoke “in for a penny in for a pound” excess instead.
When I was 18, the drinking age in the US varied by state or district. In NJ it was 21, in NY it was 18, and in some places (e.g. the District of Columbia) beer and wine were 18 while hard liquor was 21. By the end of the freewheeling 70s, the age had dropped to 18 almost everywhere. In NJ, a major motive for the drop was to discourage teens from getting drunk in NY and driving back. All this reversed in the 80s, and 21 is now the rule nationally. Raising the drinking age to 21 was intended to reduce alcohol-related road fatalities among young people, and proponents of the change point out that teen road fatalities indeed have dropped significantly since the 80s. The flaw in their argument is that teen road fatalities have dropped by the same amount in Australia, Canada, and the UK where the drinking age is still 18. Stricter traffic enforcement, harsher penalties, and safer cars rather than the legal drinking age appear to deserve the credit.
The prohibition of alcohol to 18-20 year-olds is counterproductive in ways that go well beyond auto safety. Precisely because alcohol is not readily available at any time, the young are very inclined to binge drink (defined as 5 or more drinks at one sitting) when they do get their hands on it. This is the pattern of drinking that is the most likely to lead to accidents, health problems and alcoholism. Bingeing actually was less prevalent than today in my college years when I legally could buy bottles from the liquor store literally next door to the dorm. That observation may be dismissed as anecdotal, but here is one that is not. There is an inverse relationship between consumption of alcohol and alcoholism at national levels; in other words, countries where people drink more per capita (e.g. Italy and France) have fewer alcoholics than countries where people drink less (e.g. Sweden, Russia, Ireland, and the United States). [See www.peele.net/lib/temperan.html] The reason is that binge-drinking is common in low-consumption countries and rare elsewhere. Two, four, or six glasses of wine will cause no problems if you spread them out over an entire day every day (the Franco-Italian manner). If, on the other hand, once per week you knock back six drinks at once (the Russo-American manner), you are loaded. A 200 pound man will be triple the legal limit to drive.
People are better off when they develop sane and safe drinking habits, but in the US we don’t give young people the opportunity to do it. I understand the reason. There always will be a connection between alcohol and tragedy. There is no getting around that, and it is natural for the rest of us to want to “do something,” even if it is the wrong thing. But Prohibition really is the wrong thing, as much for 18-20s today as it was for everyone else in the years 1920-33. Rather than unintentionally training young people to drink in the worst possible way as we do today, thereby making tragedies all the more common, we’d do better to encourage a healthier and less intense relationship – at a younger age – with the world’s favorite intoxicant.
I suspect collegians are aware of alcohol every month, despite the 21-year-old drinking age. The insistence by older adults that under-21s should abstain is not taken at all seriously by the younger group. It is silly to expect that it would be. On the contrary the demand is counterproductive. Abstinence is a fine choice for some individuals in this as in other matters (I’m a near teetotaler myself), but we run into trouble when we try to impose it by force. When we turn something ordinary into an offence (say, drinking a single beer), we provoke “in for a penny in for a pound” excess instead.
When I was 18, the drinking age in the US varied by state or district. In NJ it was 21, in NY it was 18, and in some places (e.g. the District of Columbia) beer and wine were 18 while hard liquor was 21. By the end of the freewheeling 70s, the age had dropped to 18 almost everywhere. In NJ, a major motive for the drop was to discourage teens from getting drunk in NY and driving back. All this reversed in the 80s, and 21 is now the rule nationally. Raising the drinking age to 21 was intended to reduce alcohol-related road fatalities among young people, and proponents of the change point out that teen road fatalities indeed have dropped significantly since the 80s. The flaw in their argument is that teen road fatalities have dropped by the same amount in Australia, Canada, and the UK where the drinking age is still 18. Stricter traffic enforcement, harsher penalties, and safer cars rather than the legal drinking age appear to deserve the credit.
The prohibition of alcohol to 18-20 year-olds is counterproductive in ways that go well beyond auto safety. Precisely because alcohol is not readily available at any time, the young are very inclined to binge drink (defined as 5 or more drinks at one sitting) when they do get their hands on it. This is the pattern of drinking that is the most likely to lead to accidents, health problems and alcoholism. Bingeing actually was less prevalent than today in my college years when I legally could buy bottles from the liquor store literally next door to the dorm. That observation may be dismissed as anecdotal, but here is one that is not. There is an inverse relationship between consumption of alcohol and alcoholism at national levels; in other words, countries where people drink more per capita (e.g. Italy and France) have fewer alcoholics than countries where people drink less (e.g. Sweden, Russia, Ireland, and the United States). [See www.peele.net/lib/temperan.html] The reason is that binge-drinking is common in low-consumption countries and rare elsewhere. Two, four, or six glasses of wine will cause no problems if you spread them out over an entire day every day (the Franco-Italian manner). If, on the other hand, once per week you knock back six drinks at once (the Russo-American manner), you are loaded. A 200 pound man will be triple the legal limit to drive.
People are better off when they develop sane and safe drinking habits, but in the US we don’t give young people the opportunity to do it. I understand the reason. There always will be a connection between alcohol and tragedy. There is no getting around that, and it is natural for the rest of us to want to “do something,” even if it is the wrong thing. But Prohibition really is the wrong thing, as much for 18-20s today as it was for everyone else in the years 1920-33. Rather than unintentionally training young people to drink in the worst possible way as we do today, thereby making tragedies all the more common, we’d do better to encourage a healthier and less intense relationship – at a younger age – with the world’s favorite intoxicant.
Sunday, October 2, 2011
Unbleeped
Dr. Timothy Jay is a formal expert on cursing – yes, there really is such a thing. (See his webpage at http://www.mcla.edu/Undergraduate/majors/psychology/timothyjay/ .) He says that children are swearing earlier and more often than in previous decades: "By the time kids go to school now, they're saying all the words that we try to protect them from on television." He attributes this to the rise of casual cursing by adults – especially by parents.
This comes as no surprise. I'm old enough to remember when cusses were heard on construction sites, in army barracks, and in locker rooms, but hardly anywhere else. This wasn’t because we consciously restrained ourselves. We didn’t have to. Cussing just wasn’t part of our habitual speech in general company. It didn’t occur to us to do it, any more than it occurs to people today to give the finger in casual conversations. Everyday speech started to coarsen in the late 60s, and the trend has continued ever since. Nowadays the vocabularies of high school girls at the mall and of Marines on drill are essentially the same. OK, not quite: the Marines are politer. As a friend recently complained to me, apparently with no irony intended, “People have gotten so fucking crude, man.”
We now are at the point where cursing is so normal and expected that euphemisms actually have greater impact. A common term applicable to Oedipus, for example, is used, as often as not, neutrally or even affectionately, while the mild “jerk” is almost always an insult.
My own speaking habits remain rooted in the transitional 60s (my “groovies” are long gone, but the occasional “far out” still escapes my lips), but I don’t take offense at the presently prevalent profanity. In art-forms of a certain type, the profanity is an improvement. There is something both silly and distracting in 1950s war movies when, for example, some enraged GI at the front utters no harsher adjective participle than “ever-loving.” Post-60s films such as Scarface or The Big Lebowski sound ludicrous when shown on a free TV channel that replaces all the cusses with innocuous words. The original language of the scripts is appropriate to the characters. If Rapunzel ever gets similar dialogue in a Disney flick, I’ll object, but only because that would be as silly as the speech of the ever-lovin’ 1950s soldier.
My only real reservation about the modern reliance on cuss-words is that the words lack subtlety: they crowd out a richer lexicon with nuanced meanings. They thereby encourage simplistic thought, and we have quite enough of that already. You may recall in Orwell’s 1984, the super-state Oceania is in the process of simplifying English into Newspeak, “the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year.” The purpose: shrinking the dictionary shrinks the ability of individuals to think and to express themselves in complex (possibly treasonous) ways. Without any push from the state, we are doing it to ourselves.
This comes as no surprise. I'm old enough to remember when cusses were heard on construction sites, in army barracks, and in locker rooms, but hardly anywhere else. This wasn’t because we consciously restrained ourselves. We didn’t have to. Cussing just wasn’t part of our habitual speech in general company. It didn’t occur to us to do it, any more than it occurs to people today to give the finger in casual conversations. Everyday speech started to coarsen in the late 60s, and the trend has continued ever since. Nowadays the vocabularies of high school girls at the mall and of Marines on drill are essentially the same. OK, not quite: the Marines are politer. As a friend recently complained to me, apparently with no irony intended, “People have gotten so fucking crude, man.”
We now are at the point where cursing is so normal and expected that euphemisms actually have greater impact. A common term applicable to Oedipus, for example, is used, as often as not, neutrally or even affectionately, while the mild “jerk” is almost always an insult.
My own speaking habits remain rooted in the transitional 60s (my “groovies” are long gone, but the occasional “far out” still escapes my lips), but I don’t take offense at the presently prevalent profanity. In art-forms of a certain type, the profanity is an improvement. There is something both silly and distracting in 1950s war movies when, for example, some enraged GI at the front utters no harsher adjective participle than “ever-loving.” Post-60s films such as Scarface or The Big Lebowski sound ludicrous when shown on a free TV channel that replaces all the cusses with innocuous words. The original language of the scripts is appropriate to the characters. If Rapunzel ever gets similar dialogue in a Disney flick, I’ll object, but only because that would be as silly as the speech of the ever-lovin’ 1950s soldier.
My only real reservation about the modern reliance on cuss-words is that the words lack subtlety: they crowd out a richer lexicon with nuanced meanings. They thereby encourage simplistic thought, and we have quite enough of that already. You may recall in Orwell’s 1984, the super-state Oceania is in the process of simplifying English into Newspeak, “the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year.” The purpose: shrinking the dictionary shrinks the ability of individuals to think and to express themselves in complex (possibly treasonous) ways. Without any push from the state, we are doing it to ourselves.
Rolling on Three River
The Jerzey Derby Brigade’s A-team, The Corporal Punishers were back on the track in Morristown NJ last night, facing Three River Roller Derby from Elkton MD. Both are experienced teams and well-matched, which made for an exciting bout.
Morristown started out strong. #27 Criss Catastrophe broke free and lapped the pack in the first jam and #157 Maggy Kyllanfall followed in her tracks in the second. For the next few jams the Punishers seemed set to dominate the bout, but Three River soon got its footing and came back strongly with #187 Li’l Red Riot Hood bringing in a grand slam (5-point lap). From there to the end of the bout the score teetered back and forth, sometimes favoring Elkton and sometimes Morristown.
Both teams showed well-coordinated defensive play by the blockers, with Criss Catastrophe frequently playing strongly for Morristown as pivot. Jammers on both teams showed their stuff with grand slams (sometimes multiple) a frequent occurrence. Outstanding for Morristown were Maggy Kyillanfall and Syd Deuce, with Syd at one point lapping the pack three times. For Elkton, #1001 Daizee Haze and #K80 The Green Harlot stood out, with Harlot bringing in grand slams at key moments.
At the end of the second half, with only enough time on the clock for one jam, the score stood at 111 to 101, Three River in lead. This was close enough for Morristown to overcome, and, as the whistle blew, Morristown’s jammer broke through in an effort to close the gap, but the jam was halted as refs called a false start. The jam restarted but this time the clock ran out before additional points were scored. Final score: 111-101, favor Three River.
Morristown's second team, The Major Pains, will be up against the New Jersey Hellrazors on November 5. I plan to be there.
Morristown started out strong. #27 Criss Catastrophe broke free and lapped the pack in the first jam and #157 Maggy Kyllanfall followed in her tracks in the second. For the next few jams the Punishers seemed set to dominate the bout, but Three River soon got its footing and came back strongly with #187 Li’l Red Riot Hood bringing in a grand slam (5-point lap). From there to the end of the bout the score teetered back and forth, sometimes favoring Elkton and sometimes Morristown.
Both teams showed well-coordinated defensive play by the blockers, with Criss Catastrophe frequently playing strongly for Morristown as pivot. Jammers on both teams showed their stuff with grand slams (sometimes multiple) a frequent occurrence. Outstanding for Morristown were Maggy Kyillanfall and Syd Deuce, with Syd at one point lapping the pack three times. For Elkton, #1001 Daizee Haze and #K80 The Green Harlot stood out, with Harlot bringing in grand slams at key moments.
At the end of the second half, with only enough time on the clock for one jam, the score stood at 111 to 101, Three River in lead. This was close enough for Morristown to overcome, and, as the whistle blew, Morristown’s jammer broke through in an effort to close the gap, but the jam was halted as refs called a false start. The jam restarted but this time the clock ran out before additional points were scored. Final score: 111-101, favor Three River.
Morristown's second team, The Major Pains, will be up against the New Jersey Hellrazors on November 5. I plan to be there.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Happiness is a Kilimanjaro Snow Cone
I seldom turn on music radio these days except when driving, and I don’t commute more than a few miles. I do make a deliberate effort on those short trips to tune to stations with contemporary formats in order to keep minimally conscious of current sounds. So, I’m not totally clueless about this aspect of popular culture, just nearly so. I certainly cannot recite lyrics to any of 2011’s Top Ten hits, or tell you what they are, though at least I might have heard a couple of them. The tracks played on the oldies station that provides the background music at my local supermarket are another matter; I could karaoke nine out of ten of those – if I ever were to karaoke, that is, which, fortunately for potential listeners, I won’t.
On this morning’s drive, however, after a particularly cacophonous three minutes of squawking from my speakers, a caller to the station requested the Janis Joplin version of Me and Bobby McGee. I know that one. Yes, I admit it, I sang it, but there was no one else in the car, so nobody suffered for it. It seemed an odd request, though. Then I remembered: Janis died around this time of year. Most likely, the caller was aware of it. Once at my computer, I checked Wiki: Janis died on October 4, 1970. Close enough. I posted about Joplin around this time last year ( http://richardbellush.blogspot.com/2010/11/kozmic.html ) so I won’t repeat those remarks. I do notice, however, in the comments to last year’s blog, Ken mentions that Amy Winehouse is like Janis in some ways. How prescient is that?
Both Amy and Janis had problems with depression as well as drugs and alcohol. Depression is a common problem that doesn’t exempt successful people. It is often associated with substance abuse, though not always. Jim Carrey and Woody Allen, as examples, have been open about depression but have avoided substance problems. Winston Churchill certainly drank to excess, but not so much as to impair his effectiveness. Others self-medicate prodigiously and self-destructively in an effort to feel better.
As I whistled the Bobby McGee tune one more time while walking from my car to my door, I wondered what was missing in Janis’ life that she needed to fill the hole with Southern Comfort and heroin. Why are some folks who seem to have it all still miserable? You got me. “Chemical imbalance” some say, though that is more of a description than an explanation. For people facing immediate threats to their lives, limbs, or (for that matter) finances, it can be a little hard to sympathize with the wealthy and healthy. Yet, it is plain that depressed folks (whatever their circumstances) are not just being self-indulgent. They would turn the mood off if they could. Some opt to turn it off by an extreme solution. Ernest Hemingway, for one, had wealth, fame, fortune, family, and a critically acclaimed body of work. He also had alcoholism. At age 61 he decided enough was enough and ended his life in gruesome fashion.
Why? Again, I don’t know. Nothing about Hemingway’s early life jumps out from his biographies as a source of future pain. There is no big Rosebud moment. If anything, he seems to have been pampered by his upper crust Oak Park family. He was dumped by his first love, but isn’t everybody? Ray Bradbury once contemplated the matter and concluded that Hemingway lived too long – he outlasted his ability to do the things that were important to him. In a 1965 short story The Kilimanjaro Device Ray arranges for Hemingway to die in 1954 on an adventure while at the top of his game. A character in the story explains, “Most of us don’t have brains enough to leave a party when the gin runs out.” Ray Bradbury, it is worth noting, is now a cheerful and productive 91-year-old, still very much alive. I guess he keeps his gin well-stocked.
By the way, I am not the biggest of Hemingway fans. (Reading the collected short stories frankly became a bit of a chore, though I do like several of them and also the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.) Kurt Vonnegut wasn’t much of a fan either. In his play Happy Birthday Wanda June the lead character Harold Ryan is a parody of Hemingway – not Hemingway the writer but Hemingway the man. Harold Ryan’s blustery macho ideas of manliness are portrayed as ultimately a form of cowardice. The characterization is funny, harsh, and a bit cruel, but perhaps not altogether unwarranted. (Vonnegut didn’t like the movie version, but, despite what it says on youtube, he did like the play.)
In the end, what is there to say except that some folks have trouble being happy? If you're not one of them, be happy you’re not. If you are, well, hang in there, and do as Ray does, not as he says.
On this morning’s drive, however, after a particularly cacophonous three minutes of squawking from my speakers, a caller to the station requested the Janis Joplin version of Me and Bobby McGee. I know that one. Yes, I admit it, I sang it, but there was no one else in the car, so nobody suffered for it. It seemed an odd request, though. Then I remembered: Janis died around this time of year. Most likely, the caller was aware of it. Once at my computer, I checked Wiki: Janis died on October 4, 1970. Close enough. I posted about Joplin around this time last year ( http://richardbellush.blogspot.com/2010/11/kozmic.html ) so I won’t repeat those remarks. I do notice, however, in the comments to last year’s blog, Ken mentions that Amy Winehouse is like Janis in some ways. How prescient is that?
Both Amy and Janis had problems with depression as well as drugs and alcohol. Depression is a common problem that doesn’t exempt successful people. It is often associated with substance abuse, though not always. Jim Carrey and Woody Allen, as examples, have been open about depression but have avoided substance problems. Winston Churchill certainly drank to excess, but not so much as to impair his effectiveness. Others self-medicate prodigiously and self-destructively in an effort to feel better.
As I whistled the Bobby McGee tune one more time while walking from my car to my door, I wondered what was missing in Janis’ life that she needed to fill the hole with Southern Comfort and heroin. Why are some folks who seem to have it all still miserable? You got me. “Chemical imbalance” some say, though that is more of a description than an explanation. For people facing immediate threats to their lives, limbs, or (for that matter) finances, it can be a little hard to sympathize with the wealthy and healthy. Yet, it is plain that depressed folks (whatever their circumstances) are not just being self-indulgent. They would turn the mood off if they could. Some opt to turn it off by an extreme solution. Ernest Hemingway, for one, had wealth, fame, fortune, family, and a critically acclaimed body of work. He also had alcoholism. At age 61 he decided enough was enough and ended his life in gruesome fashion.
Why? Again, I don’t know. Nothing about Hemingway’s early life jumps out from his biographies as a source of future pain. There is no big Rosebud moment. If anything, he seems to have been pampered by his upper crust Oak Park family. He was dumped by his first love, but isn’t everybody? Ray Bradbury once contemplated the matter and concluded that Hemingway lived too long – he outlasted his ability to do the things that were important to him. In a 1965 short story The Kilimanjaro Device Ray arranges for Hemingway to die in 1954 on an adventure while at the top of his game. A character in the story explains, “Most of us don’t have brains enough to leave a party when the gin runs out.” Ray Bradbury, it is worth noting, is now a cheerful and productive 91-year-old, still very much alive. I guess he keeps his gin well-stocked.
By the way, I am not the biggest of Hemingway fans. (Reading the collected short stories frankly became a bit of a chore, though I do like several of them and also the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.) Kurt Vonnegut wasn’t much of a fan either. In his play Happy Birthday Wanda June the lead character Harold Ryan is a parody of Hemingway – not Hemingway the writer but Hemingway the man. Harold Ryan’s blustery macho ideas of manliness are portrayed as ultimately a form of cowardice. The characterization is funny, harsh, and a bit cruel, but perhaps not altogether unwarranted. (Vonnegut didn’t like the movie version, but, despite what it says on youtube, he did like the play.)
In the end, what is there to say except that some folks have trouble being happy? If you're not one of them, be happy you’re not. If you are, well, hang in there, and do as Ray does, not as he says.
Friday, September 23, 2011
Go Ask ALA
Tomorrow begins Banned Books Week, which was started in 1982 by the American Library Association (ALA). It is always the last week of September. The week is intended to call attention to ongoing efforts to defend against censorship in libraries.
With all the electronic media about which to fuss these days, you might think concerned parents would have lost sight of libraries. You’d be wrong. School and public libraries remain under constant pressure to ban books, or at least to age-segregate them more rigorously. Organizations such as Family Friendly Libraries object to Banned Books Week itself for belittling "requests made by citizens in local libraries for books to be relocated to a section aimed at older readers or removed due to objectionable content."
I trust the “or removed” did not go unnoticed. The ALA keeps count of objections from parents and parents’ groups, and publishes lists of the books that receive the most complaints. The Top Ten list varies from year to year, but the reasons for the objections remain pretty constant: sexual content, homosexuality, insensitivity in matters of race or gender, religious viewpoint, and offensive language. For 2010 (the most recent available year) the Top Ten targets were these (Source: ALA website):
1. And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson
2. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
3. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
4. Crank, by Ellen Hopkins
5. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
6. Lush, by Natasha Friend
7. What My Mother Doesn't Know, by Sonya Sones
8. Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich
9. Revolutionary Voices, edited by Amy Sonnie
10. Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer
The Top Fifty most targeted classics were the following:
1. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
3. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
5. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
6. Ulysses, by James Joyce
7. Beloved, by Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
9. 1984, by George Orwell
10. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
11. Lolita, by Vladmir Nabokov
12. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
13. Charlotte's Web by E.B. White
14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
15. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
16. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
17. Animal Farm, by George Orwell
18. The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
19. As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
20. A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway
21. Heart of Darkness by Josphe Conrad
22. Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne
23. Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
24. Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
25. Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
26. Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
27. Native Son, by Richard Wright
28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey
29. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
30. For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
31. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
32. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
33. The Call of the Wild, by Jack London
34. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
35. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
36. Go Tell it on the Mountain, by James Baldwin
37. The World According to Garp by John Irving
38. All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren
39. A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
40. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
41. Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally
42. The Age Of Innocence by Edith Wharton
43. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
44. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
45. The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair
46. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
47. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Frank Baum
48. Lady Chatterley's Lover, by D.H. Lawrence
49. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
50. The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
Forty-two of these were on my required reading list in high school.
I’ll concede that there is a place for children’s sections of libraries and that librarians need a modicum of common sense when stocking them. But the major issue is really “reading level.” The lists make it clear that the broader stacks are being targeted, too.
Of the Top Ten for 2010, I’ve read only Brave New World (a high school freshman assignment, as I recall). The other nine were published well after my tween-time, but is even one of them actually inappropriate? Judging from Huxley, I doubt it. Should it be banned if it were? The banning itself surely is more inappropriate (as an act and as a lesson) than anything in the book could be.
As for Hemingway, Faulkner, and Orwell, I’d high-five any 10-year-old who sought them out and read them. I’d recommend him or her for a scholarship.
So, be a rebel this week: read a library book.
With all the electronic media about which to fuss these days, you might think concerned parents would have lost sight of libraries. You’d be wrong. School and public libraries remain under constant pressure to ban books, or at least to age-segregate them more rigorously. Organizations such as Family Friendly Libraries object to Banned Books Week itself for belittling "requests made by citizens in local libraries for books to be relocated to a section aimed at older readers or removed due to objectionable content."
I trust the “or removed” did not go unnoticed. The ALA keeps count of objections from parents and parents’ groups, and publishes lists of the books that receive the most complaints. The Top Ten list varies from year to year, but the reasons for the objections remain pretty constant: sexual content, homosexuality, insensitivity in matters of race or gender, religious viewpoint, and offensive language. For 2010 (the most recent available year) the Top Ten targets were these (Source: ALA website):
1. And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson
2. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
3. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
4. Crank, by Ellen Hopkins
5. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
6. Lush, by Natasha Friend
7. What My Mother Doesn't Know, by Sonya Sones
8. Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich
9. Revolutionary Voices, edited by Amy Sonnie
10. Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer
The Top Fifty most targeted classics were the following:
1. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
3. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
5. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
6. Ulysses, by James Joyce
7. Beloved, by Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
9. 1984, by George Orwell
10. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
11. Lolita, by Vladmir Nabokov
12. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
13. Charlotte's Web by E.B. White
14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
15. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
16. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
17. Animal Farm, by George Orwell
18. The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
19. As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
20. A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway
21. Heart of Darkness by Josphe Conrad
22. Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne
23. Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
24. Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
25. Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
26. Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
27. Native Son, by Richard Wright
28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey
29. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
30. For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
31. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
32. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
33. The Call of the Wild, by Jack London
34. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
35. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
36. Go Tell it on the Mountain, by James Baldwin
37. The World According to Garp by John Irving
38. All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren
39. A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
40. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
41. Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally
42. The Age Of Innocence by Edith Wharton
43. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
44. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
45. The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair
46. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
47. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Frank Baum
48. Lady Chatterley's Lover, by D.H. Lawrence
49. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
50. The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
Forty-two of these were on my required reading list in high school.
I’ll concede that there is a place for children’s sections of libraries and that librarians need a modicum of common sense when stocking them. But the major issue is really “reading level.” The lists make it clear that the broader stacks are being targeted, too.
Of the Top Ten for 2010, I’ve read only Brave New World (a high school freshman assignment, as I recall). The other nine were published well after my tween-time, but is even one of them actually inappropriate? Judging from Huxley, I doubt it. Should it be banned if it were? The banning itself surely is more inappropriate (as an act and as a lesson) than anything in the book could be.
As for Hemingway, Faulkner, and Orwell, I’d high-five any 10-year-old who sought them out and read them. I’d recommend him or her for a scholarship.
So, be a rebel this week: read a library book.
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