Another SITE Ends: Self-Restrained Aggression, Praise vs. Criticism, Cheesus Strikes Again, Galli on Substitution, DFW on Addiction and Self-Help, 3eanuts, Richard Ashcroft

THE NEW SITE: On Monday we will be launching our new website, www.mbird.com, which will be an integration and significant upgrade of everything we've been doing and have done thus far. We could not be more excited!! Hopefully there'll be very little that needs to be done on your end, i.e. this site/blog will redirect to that one, including all links, and everything that's here will be there as well. Of course, it means we'll be moving over the weekend, so there may be a few hours here and there where everything is down. Commenting will be turned off tonight at midnight (and back on Monday morning). Please bear with any broken links while we make the switch. For those of you who subscribe via a feed, check back to this address on Monday if your reader doesn't show our latest entries then.

This is a super exciting development and probably a long overdue one as well. We've loved this little blogspot, it's certainly treated us well, but I'm sure you'll agree that it's time to "up our game." See over there! Now, on to my final blogger entry... sniff sniff:

1. A Scientific American podcast/article brings to light an interesting study on the correlation between self-control and aggression, which ties in to JDK's conference talk about the thin line between threat and promise (recording coming Monday!), ht JD:

Past studies have shown that exerting self-control may increase irritability and anger. But the new research found that the increased aggression brought on by self-restraint has a much broader effect. The researchers studied different types of self-control and the subjects' subsequent behavior. For instance, participants who carefully controlled their spending of a gift certificate were more interested in looking at angry faces than fearful ones.

Dieters preferred public service ads that were framed in threats, such as "if funds are not increased for police training, more criminals will escape prison." Subjects who picked an apple over chocolate were more irritated by ads that used words like "you ought to" or "need to,” which sound controlling. They were also more likely to choose to watch a movie with a theme of hostility over other options.

2. Also on the social science tip, an absolutely fascinating/vindicating entry on the Harvard Business Review blog, "Why Does Criticism Seem More Effective Than Praise?" - emphasis on the "seem" - which draws the connection between the "regression to the mean" and our genuinely mistaken conclusions about criticism, ht NW.

3. Conference speaker Mark Galli drops yet another bomb over at Christianity Today with his thoroughly sympathetic recent column "The Problem with Christus Victor," (a fitting rejoinder to his excellent conference talks on chaos and control - did I mention they'll be up on Monday?!), rightly and pastorally guarding against the tendency to reject substitution as the model for atonement. Bravo!

4. A top-to-bottom fantastic article by Maria Bustillos on The Awl which takes David Foster Wallace's private papers, which were just donated to the Ransom Center at the University of Texas (clear eyes full hearts), as a jumping off point to discuss his relationship to AA and depression and his own talent, among other subjects. Read the whole thing:

Much of Wallace's work has to do with cutting himself back down to size, and in a larger sense, with the idea that cutting oneself back down to size is a good one, for anyone... The love his admirers bear this author has a peculiarly intimate and personal character. This is because Wallace gave voice to the inner workings of ordinary human beings in a manner so winning and so truthful and forgiving as to make him seem a friend.

The article includes a priceless quote, apparently from Wallace himself, talking about his own experience in recovery:

Six months in Granada House helped me immeasurably. I still wince at some of the hyperbole and melodrama that are used in recovery-speak, but the fact of the matter is that my experience at Granada House helped me, starting with the fact that the staff admitted me despite the obnoxious condescension with which I spoke of them, the House, and the l2-Step programs of recovery they tried to enable. They were patient, but they were not pushovers...


People at Granada House listened to me for hours, and did so with neither the clinical disinterest of doctors nor the hand-wringing credulity of relatives. They listened because, in the last analysis, they really understood me: they had been on the fence of both wanting to get sober and not, of loving the very thing that was killing you, of being able to imagine life neither with drugs and alcohol nor without them. They also recognized bullshit, and manipulation, and meaningless intellectualization as a way of evading terrible truths—and on many days the most helpful thing they did was to laugh at me and make fun of my dodges (which were, I realize now, pathetically easy for a fellow addict to spot), and to advise me just not to use chemicals today because tomorrow might very well look different.

5. Thanks to some detective work by the great Caleb Maskell, we've unearthed an interview with Verve singer Richard Ashcroft from 2000 in which he makes his religious convictions explicit:

" I can't pin myself on any fixed religion, really. I'm just one of those sad, early-century people who just drifts around and picks up a bit of this and a bit of that. Cuz we are a scanning culture. We are turning over local drug culture and we suck in as much as we can in that given time that we are given, you know. So really, I don't know. It's a celebration of Jesus Christ. But whether that means I'm with the whole [malarky] that happened after he died, or left us, who knows... But I'm intrigued by all that, by religions, I'm intrigued by Jesus Christ. It's all fascinating.

This blogger maintains that pretty much all of Ashcroft's solo work is criminally underrated, both musically and, yes, as a laudable example of spirituality done right in rock (he very well may be the rightful heir to Mr. Dark Horse himself). Instead, it's overshadowed by haters who wish he'd record Storms in Heaven over and over again. Sigh...

6. In TV, have you been watching Mildred Pierce on HBO? Not personally being much of a Todd Haynes or Kate Winslet fan, I've been pleasantly surprised by how superb it is. A harrowing study in mother-daughter dynamics, not to mention the self-seeking underbelly of the American/Hollywood dream, with some stunning setpieces. Think Chinatown by way of Betty Friedan and The Omen. And don't forget, Friday Night Lights: The Fifth Season came out this week on DVD, a full three weeks ahead of its debut on NBC.

7. Conference follow-up: Beyond the recordings, if you enjoyed the delicious food, we invite you to "tip" our chef Edward Crouse by backing his very cool new Kickstarter project "Between Folks and Forks". If it takes off, who knows - he might forgo culinary school abroad and serve us again next year...

8. Finally, in "humor", the inspired 3eanuts showcases the bleak worldview underpinning Schultz's classic strip. Or, as the force behind the site puts it: Charles Schulz's Peanuts comics often conceal the existential despair of their world with a closing joke at the characters' expense. With the last panel omitted, despair pervades all. Ht WV:

P.S. Don't miss FailBlog's "Bible Study Fail." Bye Bye!

PZ's Podcast: Bishop Bell's Play

EPISODE 42
 

A fascinating play exists about Bishop Bell. Well, actually, the play is more about Winston Churchill. But in this play, entitled "Soldiers" and first performed in Germany in 1967, Act Three ("The Garden") stages a confrontation between Churchill and George Bell on the ethics of 'carpet bombing'. Although such a meeting never took place, "Soldiers" carries the emotional truth of the Bishop's costly public stance.

"Soldiers" was written by Rolf Hochhuth, who also wrote the controversial play "The Deputy", which was made into a movie, Amen (2003), by Costa-Gavras. The writer studied Bell's speech and letters well, and his life. The play is hard on us who have been taught differently to see the P.M. portrayed on stage as an exponent of Power Politics, and of unscrupulousness in the name of a great cause. Not only is Churchill seen as the power behind the murder from the air of countless non-combatants, mostly young mothers and their small children, and seniors; but it is also claimed that he engineered the assassination of the Polish Prime Minister, General Sikorsky. You could skip most of that, and just read act three.

Toward the end of the play, Bishop Bell is 'bested' by Churchill and ushered out of the Great Man's presence. Here is the playwright's stage direction at that point:

"BELL turns away, he is forced to, overcome by despair, and the trembling in his voice. ... -- his voice fades like that of mankind in the tumult of the massacre of history....

CHURCHILL, alone, sunk in thought, gives himself up, unobserved, to the impression BELL has made on him."

The play's last words concerning Bishop Bell are these:

CHIEF OF STAFF: Well -- did the P.M.

        silence the old demagogue?

SECRETARY (sighs, smiles) :

       If he ever got to be Archbishop of Canterbury ... !

CHIEF OF STAFF: I expect that will be taken care of.

P.S. The first English-language production of "Soldiers", which was in Toronto, was well cast:

Winston Churchill was played by John Colicos, whom we know as 'Baltar' from the original Battlestar Galactica. George Bell was played by Chris Wiggins, whom we know as 'Jack Marshak' in Friday the 13th: The Series. How did they know?

Listen here.

Keeping a Reckoning in The Idiot

From Dostoevsky's The Idiot. Prince Myshkin is retelling to the Ivanovna girls a memory of a friend who was imprisoned and suddenly had his death sentence reversed. A telling depiction of our most human response to grace given us. The Prince, though, seems to find hope that it is possible, though maybe not observably so.  Myshkin begins by retelling his friend's inner-monologue while imprisoned:

"...he said nothing was more oppressive for him at that moment than the constant thought: 'What if I were not to die! What if life were given back to me--what infinity! And it would all be mine! Then I'd turn each minute into a whole age, I'd lose nothing, I'd reckon up every minute separately, I'd let nothing be wasted!' He said that in the end this thought turned into such anger in him that he wished they would hurry up and shoot him."

..."You're very fragmentary," observed Alexandra. "...That is all very praiseworthy, but, forgive me, what ever happened to the friend who told you all those horrors...his punishment was changed, which means he was granted 'infinite life.' Well, what did he do with so much wealth afterwards? Did he live 'reckoning up' every minute?"

"Oh, no, he told me himself--I asked him about it--he didn't live that way at all and lost many, many minutes."

"Well, so there's experience for you, so it's impossible to live really 'keeping a reckoning.' There's always some reason why it's impossible."

"Yes, for some reason it's impossible," the prince repeated. "I thought so myself...But still it's somehow hard to believe..."

Counting Sheep with Andre Dubus

From "Out Like a Lamb," in Dubus' collection of essays, Broken Vessels (ht MS):

"They were enclosed by a wire fence in a large section of the meadow. They had a shed there too, where they slept. All we had to do about them was make sure they didn't get through the fence, which finally meant that when they got through, we had to catch them and put them back in the pasture. This was my first encounter with sheep. When I was a boy, sheep had certain meanings: in the Western movies, sheep herders interfered with the hero's cattle; or the villain's ideas about his grazing rights interfered with the hero's struggle to raise his sheep. And Christ had called us his flock, his sheep; there were pictures of him holding a lamb in his arms. His face was tender and loving, and I grew up with a sense of those feelings, of being a source of them: we were sweet and lovable sheep. But after a few weeks in that New Hampshire house, I saw Christ's analogy meant something entirely different. We were stupid helpless brutes, and without constant watching we would foolishly destroy ourselves."

Paying Taxes To The Pale King

Tax Day marks the release of Mockingbird icon David Foster Wallace's posthumous novel, The Pale King. Quotes forthcoming, but from the few reviews that have appeared already, it sounds predictably ripe... Italics mine.

Michiko Kakutani in The NY Times: [DFW's] posthumous unfinished novel, “The Pale King” — which is set largely in an I.R.S. office in the Midwest — depicts an America so plagued by tedium, monotony and meaningless bureaucratic rules and regulations that its citizens are in danger of dying of boredom.

Just as this lumpy but often stirring new novel emerges as a kind of bookend to “Infinite Jest,” so it demonstrates that being amused to death and bored to death are, in Wallace’s view, flip sides of the same coin. Perhaps, he writes, “dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there,” namely the existential knowledge “that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we’ve lost one more day that will never come back.” 

Happiness, Wallace suggests in a Kierkegaardian note at the end of this deeply sad, deeply philosophical book, is the ability to pay attention, to live in the present moment, to find “second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive.”
---------------

Garth Risk Hallberg in NY Magazine: The Pale King is, for great swaths, an astonishment, unfinished not in the way of splintery furniture but in the way of Kafka’s Castle or the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. And it reduces chatter about the provenance of its author’s late renown to background noise. The book demands our attention precisely because while we’re reading it, David Foster Wallace is again the most alive prose writer of our time—and the one who speaks most directly to our condition.
[CONTINUE READING]

Even More From Franny and Zooey: Jesus vs. St. Francis

I know I'm risking overkill, but F&Z has got to be one of the two or three most quotable books I've ever read:

"Your age has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. There are no big changes between ten and twenty - or ten and eighty, for that matter. You still can't love a Jesus as much as you'd like to who did and said a couple of things he was at least reported to have said or done - and you know it. You're constitutionally unable to love or understand any son of God who throws tables around. And you're constitutionally unable to love or understand any son of God who says a human being, any human being - even a Professor Tupper - is more valuable to God than any soft, helpless Easter chick."

Franny was now facing directly into the sound of Zooey's voice, sitting bolt upright, a wad of Kleenex clenched in one hand. Blooomberg was no longer in her lap. "I suppose you can, " she said, shrilling.

"It's beside the point whether I can or not. But, yes, as a matter of fact, I can. I don't feel like going into it, but at least I've never tried, consciously or otherwise, to turn Jesus into St. Francis of Assisi to make him more 'lovable' - which is exactly what ninety-eight per cent of the Christian world has always insisted on doing. Not that it's to my credit. I don't happen to be attracted to the St. Francis of Assisi type. But you are. And, in my opinion, that's one of the reasons why you're having this little nervous breakdown. And especially the reason why you're having it at home."
---------------

"Franny, I'm being serious. When you don't see Jesus for exactly what he was, you miss the whole point of the Jesus Prayer [i.e. "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a miserable sinner"]. If you don't understand Jesus, you can't understand his prayer - you don't get the prayer at all, you just get some kind of organized cant. Jesus was a supreme adept, by God, on a terribly important mission. This was no St. Francis, with enough time to knock out a few canticles, or to preach to the birds, or to do any of the other endearing things to close to Franny Glass's heart. I'm being serious now, God damn it. How can you miss seeing that? If God had wanted somebody with St Francis's consistently winning personality for the job in the New Testament, he'd've picked him, you can be sure. As it was, he picked the best, the smartest, the most loving, the least sentimental, the most unimitative master he could possibly have picked. And when you miss seeing that, I swear to you, you're missing the whole point of the Jesus Prayer.

Another One from William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience

"Where God is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution are not the absolutely final things." (517) 

A Note from Somerset Maugham on Preaching

Somerset Maugham wrote a comment in 1948 concerning Emily Bronte's 'persona' as the author of Wuthering Heights, which could apply just as well to the 'art' of preaching a sermon. This is what Maugham wrote:

"Is it strange that [Emily Bronte] should have put herself into the two chief characters of her book? Not at all. We are none of us all of a piece; more than one person dwells within us, often in uneasy companionship with his fellows; and the peculiarity of the writer of fiction is that he has the power to objectify the diverse person of which he is compounded into individual characters: his misfortune is that he cannot bring to life characters, however necessary to his story they may be, in which there is no part of himself."  (Page 117, Great Novelists and their Novels)

All you need to do is substitute the word "preacher' for Maugham's word "writer" and you have an interesting thought. The preacher, like the writer, cannot "bring to life" the sermon -- its narrative, illustrations, and dynamic point -- unless the preacher is part of the action. The preacher himself or herself has to be the object -- the dramatis persona -- of the Word of God, in order for the hearer to see himself also as the object of that Word.

The main failing of sermons is that the preacher is not invested in them personally enough. Likewise, the main memorable thing from a sermon which lasts, is that the hearer is able to say to herself/himself: "The preacher was speaking to me." That preacher's being the object of his text made me into the object of his words. His words, God willing, were God's Word.

Maugham was one of those inspired 'channels', from time to time, through which came widely applicable insight.

To get your hands on the recent Mockingbird Preaching Seminar, "Breaking The Fourth Wall," available on a donate-what-you-can basis, go here.

Two More from Franny and Zooey

"Just because I'm so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else's values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn't make it right. I'm ashamed of it. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I'm sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash." (p. 30)

"For about a whole month, at least, whenever anybody said anything that sounded campusy and phony, or that smelled to high heaven of ego or something like that, I at least kept quiet about it. I went to the movies or I stayed in the library all hours or I started writing papers like mad on Restoration Comedy and stuff like that -- but at least I had the pleasure of not hearing my own voice for a while."  (p. 145)

Wendell Berry and the Full Potential of the Individual

From "Men and Women in Search of Common Ground," an essay in a collection called The Art of the Commonplace. A touching depiction of the failure, beautiful and enticing though it may be, of self-intervention and self-industry.


"Some time ago I was with Wes Jackson, wandering among the experimental plots at his home and workplace, the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. We stopped by one plot that had been planted in various densities of population. Wes pointed to a Maximilian Sunflower growing alone, apart from the others and said, "There is a plant that has 'realized its full potential as an individual.'" And clearly it had: It had grown very tall; it had put out many long branches heavily laden with blossoms--and the branches had broken off, for they had grown too long and too heavy. The plant had indeed realized its full potential as an individual, but it had failed as a Maximilian Sunflower. We could say that its full potential as an individual was this failure. It had failed because it had lived outside an important part of its definition, which consists of both its individuality and its community. A part of its properly realizable potential lay in its community, not itself."

"Cathedral" Part Two: Marital Division, Religious Paralysis (Or "I Had The Feeling She Didn't Like What She Saw")

For Part One, click here.

Though the narrator’s not seeming to sweat it too much, it’s evident that his wife’s blind visitor comes highly regarded—immediately adding aura of oppressive expectation on his arrival. The narrator is aware of the gravity of Robert’s impression on him, but more importantly it's his impression on Robert that matters most. We hear it in the kind of tone Carver manipulates through the husband:

“Maybe I could take him bowling,” I said to my wife. She was at the draining board doing scalloped potatoes. She put down the knife she was using and turned around.

“If you love me,” she said, “you can do this for me. If you don’t love me, okay. But if you had a friend, any friend, and the friend came to visit, I’d make him feel comfortable.”

… “I don’t have any blind friends,” I said.

When Robert comes through our narrator’s door, this kind of expectation has manifested a personal-social paralysis, an inability to speak freely, or at least to do so self-evidently. This man, through whom the narrator’s wife has had sublimely inner-personal—almost religious—episodes, has created not only a preconditioned unease with Robert's existence, but has frozen him from any ability to be himself around him, and feel the visitor out. This, in turn, brings about the disappointment they both feared (yet foreknew). Carver paints it sparely, but beautifully.
[CONTINUE READING]

PZ's Podcast: No Popery!

EPISODE 40

Religious partisanship is something I know about. It is something Charles Dickens knew about, too.

In his 1841 novel Barnaby Rudge, Dickens sought to understand religious strife from the inside out,

taking the "Lord Gordon Riots" of 1780 as his occasion for a cautionary tale.

The "Gordon Riots", also known as the "No Popery" riots, were a flash of mob violence, ostensibly ignited against legislation to relax the laws against the practice of Catholicism in England, which shocked Britain. George Gordon, a sincere but insecure Scottish nobleman, put legitimate fears about the Catholic religion, rooted in vivid historical memories of the reign of Bloody Mary, into a giant petition to turn back the repeal.

Lord George's delivery of this petition to the House of Commons triggered a wave of hysteria, soon fueled by alcohol, which resulted in massive arson and pillaging. Only after three days of dithering did the Army finally take charge, and restore order. Many of the instigators were hanged. Lord George was acquitted of treason, but soon converted to Orthodox Judaism, which is an interesting story in itself.

Dickens anchors his complex novel around the character of a good Protestant, 'Gabriel Varden', a middle-aged locksmith who goes some several extra miles in the cause of mercy and loyalty; and a bad Protestant, 'Martha Varden', Gabriel's wife, who exemplifies the pharisee and whose obtuse self-righteousness almost succeeds in destroying her life and the life of her family.  Fortunately, Mrs. Varden is saved -- by her husband !

There is also the title character, Barnaby Rudge, an autistic man of 25, whose insights -- and insight into the nature of God -- are to be listened to; and a vicious villain, Hugh, who himself experiences a conversion to grace in the catastrophe of the ending. Listen to Hugh at the end of the novel.

Barnaby Rudge, which I had delayed reading for years because I feared to read it, is an x-ray into the good of the Gospel, and the "devil in the details', i.e., the danger of putting secondary things in first place, and first things in second.  

Episode 40 of 'PZ's Podcast' exposits the shattering conversion of Martha Varden.

Listen here. Or subscribe to PZ's Podcast here.

P.S. For Mockingbird enthusiasts, George Gordon's sudden jump from Reformed Christianity to Orthodox Judaism will offer some delightful grist for the mill.

Psychoanalysis and the Grace of God in Franny and Zooey

 From pp 109-110 of J.D. Salinger's other masterpiece:

"I don't know," he said. "It seems to me there must be a psychoanalyst holed up somewhere in town who'd be good for Franny -- I thought about that last night."  [Zooey] grimaced slightly.

"But I don't happen to know of any.  For a psychoanalyst to be any good with Franny at all, he'd have to be a pretty peculiar type.  I don't know. He'd have to believe that it was through the grace of God that he'd been inspired to study psychoanalysis in the first place. He'd have to believe that it was through the grace of God that he wasn't run over by a goddam truck before he ever even got his license to practice. He'd have to believe that it's through the grace of God that he has the native intelligence to be able to help his goddam patients at all. If she got somebody terribly Freudian, or terribly eclectic, or just terribly run-of-the-mill -- somebody who didn't even have any crazy, mysterious gratitude for his insight and intelligence -- she'd come out of analysis in even worse shape than Seymour did.  It worried hell out of me, thinking about it. Let's just shut up about it, if you don't mind."

"Cathedral" Part One: An Alien Logic (Or "He Was No One I Knew")

For anybody who hasn’t read it, “Cathedral” (1982) is probably Raymond Carver’s most famous short story, and provides an endearing picture of what could be called a modern-day, suburban visitation from the upside-down world of grace. It begins, though, through the narrator’s lovable perspective, with the blatant understandability of such a thing to feel, well, “upside-down,” alien, creepy.

An unnamed narrator and his wife are expecting a visitor from out of town, a friend of the wife’s. Robert, the visitor, a blind, recent widower, has had a history of correspondence with the narrator’s wife, who had worked as Robert’s assistant in the past. The kind of correspondence—audiotapes sent back and forth for years (that sounds a lot like some uneasy introduction to prayer!)— makes the narrator queasy about the whole visit to begin with:

“Once she asked me if I’d like to hear the latest tape from the blind man. This was a year ago. I was on the tape, she said. So I said okay, I’d listen to it…The tape squeaked and someone began to talk in this loud voice. She lowered the volume. After a few minutes of harmless chitchat, I heard my own name in the mouth of this stranger, this blind man I didn’t even know! And then this: “From all you’ve said about him, I can only conclude—“ But we were interrupted, a knock at the door, something, and we didn’t ever get back to the tape. Maybe it was just as well. I’d heard all I wanted to.

“Now this blind man was coming to sleep in my house.” [CONTINUE READING]

J.D. Salinger and the Apple-Eaters

A great little exchange from his short story, "Teddy":

"Nicholson looked up at (Teddy), and sustained the look -- detaining him.  'What would you do if  you could ever change the educational system?' he asked ambiguously. 'Ever think about that at all?.' ...

'Well... I'm not too sure what I'd do,' Teddy said.  'I know I'm pretty sure I wouldn't start with the things schools usually start with.'  He folded his arms, and reflected briefly.  'I think I'd first just assemble all the children together and show them how to meditate.  I'd try to show them how to find out who they are, not just what their names are and things like that... I guess, even before that, I'd get them to empty out everything their parents and everybody ever told them.  I mean even if their parents just told them an elephant's big, I'd make them empty that out.  An elephant's only big when it's next to something else -- a dog or a lady, for example.'  Teddy thought another moment.  'I wouldn't even tell them an elephant has a trunk.  I might show them an elephant, if I had one handy, but I'd let them just walk up to the elephant not knowing anything more about it than the elephant knew about them.  The same thing with grass and other things.  I wouldn't even tell them grass is green.  Colors are only names.  I mean if you tell them the grass is green, it makes them start expecting the grass to look a certain way -- your way -- instead of some other way that may be just as good, and may be much better... I don't know.  I'd just make them vomit up every bit of the apple their parents and everybody made them take a bite out of.'

'There's no risk you'd be raising a little generation of ignoramuses?'

Why? they wouldn't any more be ignoramuses than an elephant is.  Or a bird is.  Or a tree is,' Teddy said.  'Just because something is a certain way, instead of just behaves a certain way, doesn't mean it's an ignoramus.'

'No?'

'No!'  Teddy said.  'Besides, if they wanted to learn all that other stuff -- names and colors and things -- they could do it, if they felt like it, later on when they were older.  But I'd want them to begin with all the real ways of looking at things, not just the way all the other apple-eaters look at things -- that's what I mean.'"

Sources of Poetic Inspiration in the Democratic Age - Alexis de Tocqueville

Some anthropological insight from said chapter of the master's Democracy in America (ht MS):

“There is no need to traverse earth and sky to find a wondrous object full of contrasts of infinite greatness and littleness, of deep gloom and amazing brightness, capable at the same time of arousing piety, wonder, scorn, and terror. I have only to contemplate myself; man comes from nothing, passes through time, and disappears forever in the bosom of God. He is seen but for a moment wandering on the verge of two abysses, and then is lost. If man were wholly ignorant of himself he would have no poetry in him, for one cannot describe what one does not conceive. If he saw himself clearly, his imagination would remain idle and would have nothing to add to the picture. But the nature of man is sufficiently revealed for him to know something of himself and sufficiently veiled to leave much in impenetrable darkness, a darkness in which he ever gropes, forever in vain, trying to understand himself.”

Two from Salinger's Franny and Zooey

"The part that stumps me, really stumps me, is that I can't see why anybody -- unless he was a child, or an angel, or a lucky simpleton like the pilgrim -- would even want to say the prayer to a Jesus who was the least bit different from the way he looks and sounds in the New Testament. My God! He's only the most intelligent man in the Bible, that's all! Who isn't he head and shoulders over? Who? Both Testaments are full of pundits, prophets, disciples, favorite sons, Solomons, Isaiahs, Davids, Pauls -- but, my God, who besides Jesus really knew which end was up? Nobody. Not Moses. Don't tell me Moses. He was a nice man, and he kept in beautiful touch with his God, and all that -- but that's exactly the point. He had to keep in touch." (p. 170)

"(Zooey) said he was -- this is exactly what he said -- he said he was sitting at the table in the kitchen, all by himself, drinking a glass of ginger ale and eating saltines and reading 'Dombey and Son,' and all of a sudden Jesus sat down in the other chair and asked if he could have a small glass of ginger ale. A small glass, mind you -- that's exactly what he said." (192)

Those Winter Sundays - Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early 
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, 
then with cracked hands that ached 
from labor in the weekday weather made 
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. 

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. 
When the rooms were warm, he'd call, 
and slowly I would rise and dress, 
fearing the chronic angers of that house, 

Speaking indifferently to him, 
who had driven out the cold 
and polished my good shoes as well. 
What did I know, what did I know 
of love's austere and lonely offices? 

From W. Somerset Maugham's "The Happy Man"

The opening lines of the great author's (very) short story: 

"It is a dangerous thing to order the lives of others and I have often wondered at the self-confidence of politicians, reformers and suchlike who are prepared to force upon their fellows measures that must alter their manners, habits, and points of view.  I have always hesitated to give advice, for how can one advise another how to act unless one knows that other as well as one knows oneself?  Heaven knows, I know little enough of myself."

Episode 36 of PZ's Podcast, which talks at length about Maugham and the nature of Unconventional Thinking is up now!

PZ's Podcast: Conventional Thinking, and Unconventional (Alan Watts and Somerset Maugham)

EPISODES 35&36

Just because Alan Watts said it, doesn't make it wrong. Or, putting it another way, just because Alan Watts said it, doesn't make it right. He is not the point. But he did say some interesting things in the course of an interesting, morphing life.

Here is something Watts said in an essay prompted by The Dharma Bums. (He was not happy with Kerouac's portrayal of him in that book.): "Conventional thought is the confusion of the concrete universe of nature with the conceptual things, events, and values of linguistic and cultural symbolism."

He is talking about abstraction, which is 'conventional thought', versus concrete observation, which is unconventional thought.

When this quote begins to make sparks inside you, you begin to see that a lot of your everyday thinking is putting things, people, and events into categories; rather than letting them exist in their uniqueness, or on their own terms. When we set particular things into an intellectual 'frame' or grouping, we are working to deny them their individual reality. Whenever you say of a thing, 'This is that', rather than 'This is this', you're adding to the thing, and thereby really detracting from it. You're seeing it in terms of something else, such as a category you already have or an interpretation through which you already see things, rather than seeing it as it is, right there in front of you.

Conventional thought, if Watts is right, is a way of controlling reality. His theme relates to our upcoming Mockingbird Conference in New York City (March 31-April 2).

In case you think this sounds abstruse or unrelated to what you're interested in, think the late Medieval struggle between the philosophers who called themselves Nominalists and the philosophers who called themselves Realists. It was the essential background for Luther.

Episode 35 of PZ's Podcast considers the nature of things if they don't have names.

Episode 36, which will be released Thursday, gives some examples of un-conventional thinking, the thinking which eschews categories.  An instance of this, and quite hilarious if you've been exposed to what he is lampooning, occurs in Somerset Maugham's 1938 novel Christmas Holiday. There we are given a tour through the Louvre that is conducted by a pompous parent for the edification of her two young children. That painful tour represents 'conventional thinking'. But then, immediately afterwards, we are given a tour conducted by a most afflicted young worker in a Paris bordello, as she guides a befuddled and supposedly intellectual young man right to the spot where they can both appreciate a somewhat hidden still-life unconventionally. The whole thing's a hoot, but it's also moving.  

I hope you'll hear me out, as we begin with that 'genuine fake' Herr Watts, survey the punctures of abstraction in the wheel of reality, then allow suffering 'Lydia', in Christmas Holiday (who was played by Deanna Durbin in the movies), to bring us straight to the hem of a specific beautiful thing.

Listen here.