Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

Here's a clip from an episode of the show Freaks and Geeks which originally aired in January 2000. The geeks are welcoming a transfer student from Florida to their high school. Coco and I watched this tonight and our jaws dropped at the same time.

It could have gone another way

So, I am a Word Guy. Philosophy undergrad, master's in Rhetoric, teacher of English, writer of reports, and longtime servant of the pen. I have no gripes with this path; verbal acuity has served me well and helped me build a life of satisfaction and contentment.

And yet...

Numbers still hold their allure. I dig how underneath the universe, it's all math. I loved my statistics class until I had to drop out because I made detective. I enjoy quantitative analyses and have done them on the dialogue of plays I have been involved with and on parking patterns for a college campus. I keep spreadsheets on attendance in the movie group, biking and exercise, and mileage on the car, complete with rolling averages and projections. I daydream about what it would be like to do - or even better, teach - economics.

It is not to be. I have walked down this road too far, for too long, to go back now.

But there was a moment - a time when the crossroads was in front of me, and could have taken a different path. Who knows what would have become of me had I chosen beige over pink.

Ataraxia

So, as I have gotten older, I have mellowed out quite a bit. In my salad days, I may have been a bit, how shall we say... mercurial? Volatile? Prone to expressive responses? I did more than my share of waving my arms around and shouting and the slightest provocation. While I never held grudges, the very act of getting agitated was often counter-productive.

These days, things are a little quieter with me. I'd like to say that it came from compassion and a sense of understanding of the needs of others, but I'm not sure it was quite as altruistic as all that. Much of it came from self-preservation: from realizing that all the sturm und drang was not only not helping whatever situation I was in, but also not helping me much. Some of that wisdom = fatigue idea started sinking in, and slowly, with a lot of influence from Coco, I have been changing into the calm one. The attainment of ataraxia - that "state of consciousness characterized by freedom from mental agitation" so valued by Epicurus and the Stoics - has been a personal goal for some time.

It has been a conscious effort, and sometimes it still takes effort - my loud,  Brooklyn, Italian-American upbringing, while not long on equanimity, instilled a lot of solid values as well as useful ways and means for dealing with the world, and I never want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

And this also isn't just a recent pursuit. As a freshman in college, I wrote a paper extolling the benefits of living in the modern world according to the precepts of Epicurus. My philosopher professor gave this insightful feedback:

Like many freshman initiatives, it mostly went nowhere.

A few years back, I was flirting with Buddhism. It never really took, not because of the discipline - I was ready for that - but because in the end, it's a religion, and that's a deal-breaker. (This Slate piece explains a lot of the conflict I had.) While I was still striving toward ataraxia, I was doing so without any formal structure. So, for one of my projects this summer, I decided to go back and re-read Epicurus more mindfully. Most of what we have of his is fragmentary, but there's enough to make a study of, and I bookmarked The Principal Doctrines - a collection of quotations that comprise a generally accepted sort-of summary of Epicurean philosophy.

I hadn't gotten around to doing much about it, but the past few weeks have been quite the impetus. From the Snowden affair to the debacle in Florida, the national news remains depressing. In my personal orbit, breast cancer, leukemia, and lymphoma have all decided to visit the lives of various people I care about. Ataraxia was slipping away.

I pulled out the Doctrines and took a look. 

1. A blessed and indestructible being has no trouble himself and brings no trouble upon any other being; so he is free from anger and partiality, for all such things imply weakness. 

5. It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honorably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honorably and justly without living pleasantly. Whenever any one of these is lacking, when, for instance, the man is not able to live wisely, though he lives honorably and justly, it is impossible for him to live a pleasant life. 

27. Of all the means which wisdom acquires to ensure happiness throughout the whole of life, by far the most important is friendship.

Yeah, I'll start with those.

Now, as promised:

Some sad synchronicity

So, about a month ago I encountered some buzz about a particularly tasteless event. Apparently an "edgy" online magazine called Vice published a photo spread titled "Last Words" in which models posed as famous women authors who had committed suicide, in circumstances evocative of those suicides. The shoot was designed as a fashion spread, and the notes for each photograph included, along with factoids about the author, the fashion credits for the clothing and accessories each model was wearing/holding/using. There was a pretty severe negative response to the piece, and Vice would up pulling it pretty quickly. You can read their "apology" here, and coverage from Jezebel (including some of the pics) here and here.

Just coincidentally, at about the same time I happened upon a BuzzFeed article called "16 Wonderful Photos Of Women Writers At Work." This was a charming and respectful piece, comprising (mostly) shots of famous women authors that gave a glimpse as to what they looked like when they were actually writing. As is often the case at BuzzFeed, not all the photos actually lived up to the intent - one was a publicity shot and another looked to have been taken at a signing - but for all intents and purposes, it was a pretty nice piece of photojournalism.

Because of the flap over the Vice fashion shoot, a thought occurred to me and I did some quick research into the authors featured at BuzzFeed:

• Sylvia Plath - suicide, carbon monoxide poisoning.
• Doris Lessing  - alive
• Edith Wharton - stroke
• Virginia Woolf - suicide, drowning
• Anne Sexton – suicide, carbon monoxide poisoning
• Alice B. Sheldon - suicide, gunshot (killed husband as well)
• Agatha Christie – natural causes
• Dorothy Parker – heart attack (had attempted suicide)
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman – suicide, chloroform overdose
• Iris Chang – suicide, gunshot
• Marilynne Robinson - alive
• A.S. Byatt - alive
• Flannery O’Connor – complications from lupus
• Toni Morrison - alive
• Noel Streatfeild – natural causes
• Anne Frank – typhus, but actually Nazism

Out of the sixteen authors chosen (I presume) because they were famous and somebody had their photos, twelve are dead. Of those twelve, six were suicides, and another died of natural causes but had attempted suicide; four died of natural causes and one died tragically.

Let's say that again: half the authors who were dead committed suicide.

I might be guilty of the same sin as many of my writing students - creating an essay that has no thesis - but I just don't know what to do with this. Is it something about art and depression? That seems too simple. I haven't done the research, but I'd be willing to bet that you could create ten or twenty random sets of sixteen famous male authors and you wouldn't get close to these proportions in cause of death. There seems to be something gender-based going on, something about roles and acceptance of roles.

On top of that uneasiness, there's the distastefulness of the commodification of women; for every innocuous BuzzFeed list, there seem to be several fashion shoots dancing in the same ballroom as the Vice piece: women bound, women done violence to, women objectified (sometimes literally, as furniture). What is it about female misery that is commercial?

It feels like it's been a particularly rough week to be a human being; I think that the coincidence of these pieces was a little too striking in the middle of that malaise.

Next time: baby pandas. Promise.

Squirrel tale

So, the pal formerly know as RAB twittered this tweet earlier today:

I just saw the most remarkable thing in Washington Square Park: a squirrel carrying an entire slice of pizza up a tree.
— Richard Bensam (@richardbensam) July 9, 2013

And then followed it up with this:

Squirrel was carrying the slice by its crust, went by too fast for a picture.
— Richard Bensam (@richardbensam) July 9, 2013

Now, I'm not trying to play Can You Top This? in regard to the preternatural abilities of new York squirrels, but I do have a squirrel story that I have wanted to share for a long time, and this gives me the opportunity.

I'm sitting in Central Park, sometime during high school. I watch a squirrel dragging a paper grocery bag along the ground. The bag isn't flattened, it's still mostly open; the squirrel looks like nothing more than a cartoon burglar with a giant loot sack. The squirrel crosses the grass in front of my bench and heads to a tree, a tall skinny tree, as I remember, with no low limbs; he climbs about twenty-five feet up the trunk, still carrying the bag with him, until he reaches a open knot or bole or whatever those holes are called.

The squirrel climbs in the hole and starts pulling the bag in after him. The bag is bigger than the hole, so the squirrel pulls the edges of the open end in, side by side, so now the bottom of the bag is kind of ballooning out of the hole. It starts being pulled in little by little, and then just stops. For a few seconds, all is still and silent.

Then the tree starts to shake. And all of a sudden, the bag explodes as the squirrel comes blasting out of the hole right through it. Hot on his tail is another squirrel, screeching and chattering up a storm. The first squirrel flees down the trunk of the tree and tears off; the second squirrel chases him halfway down the trunk, yelling after him, cursing up a storm in squirrel-talk, and waving a tiny little fist.

To this day I still believe I was witness to what might have been the Great Nut Robbery of the Twentieth Century, had our bushy-tailed Raffles not miscalculated and come when his intended victim, apparently the Joe Pesci of squirreldom, was at home. And, my hand to god (as Alan King would say), all of this is 100% true.

Except for the tiny little fist part.

What are you lookin' at?

Seepage

So, I really don't know what a chord even is.

As I mentioned in the prior post, one of my summer projects is the ukulele. This is actually my second formal run at this particular objective. The summer before I went into the deans' hallway, I actually took lessons from a fellow down at Dusty Strings in Fremont. I didn't get very far, probably because I insisted that he teach to my left-brain style. I wanted to understand how music worked, in detail, before I could attempt to actually play anything. I mean, I know there's math in there - it's all about ratios and intervals and how far one note is from another, and it all boils down to numbers of hertz and stuff at the bottom.

Well, it turns out knowing all that stuff, even if you can keep it straight, which I couldn't, really doesn't help much. Or maybe more precisely, that approach is unnecessary. I mean, Coco couldn't tell a hertz from a hearse, but she can harmonize at the drop of a hat and tell me that my A string is out of tune when I have to look at the app on my smartphone.

Harmony is something I have never been able to do. I never understood how some folks just know  what note to sing that will sound good with the note someone else is singing. How do learn that? Not my learning math, apparently.

And I beginning to understand that this is what a chord is - it's a bunch of notes sung or played at the same time that sound good together because they are in harmony. And I think I get that when I play chords on my ukelele, the chords sorta match the note being played or sung to produce the melody - I think because the note is actually in the chord or because it somehow otherwise matches the notes that make up the chord.

Now, that paragraph totally exhausted my musical knowledge. But like Donald Rumsfeld, I recognize the existence of known unknowns. I mean, I know that there are different types of chords, but I have no idea what they are and how they differ from each other. And some of the notes that make up the chords are minor, and some are sharps, and some are flats, and some have a "7," and I don't really know what any of that means, except I think it has something to do with the math and the hertz.

And I guess where I am going with this is that I am not going to try to figure it out beforehand. I am going to practice my chords, and practice my chord changes, and then play the chords to songs I know how to sing and see how they sound. And maybe if I do this like a million times, something will start to seep in about how this music stuff works. And if I start to get some sort of sense of it, maybe then the math will start to make sense.

I might even learn how to harmonize.