Beauty... a problem?

Why is beauty so problematic these days, here in America, no less, something that, even while working its spell, ends up making us somewhat uncomfortable, dispirited, insecure, resentful? Should it really be such a problem? Weren't we put on this planet in part to take notice of the pulchritude of natural forms - to be inspired by the excellence of shape and line and symmetry? Is it now suddenly tacky to have a genuine response to someone or something that has power to arrest one's senses?  I know what you're thinking. It's not that simple. Certain pesky instincts keep getting in the way. Beauty too easily becomes a commodity, something to be quantified, amassed, consumed.  It's one thing to admire birds or rocks or ocean vistas, and start a collection or whatever, but human beings are not so easily reified and besides that, they induce ambivalent reactions in their fellow creatures - especially those who take them to be their "superiors" in bodily appearance. Thus, beauty has become a ball and chain of sorts; everybody seeks it, but it sure is a difficult mountain to climb and quite a bear to hold onto (if you'll excuse the not-so-beautiful mixed metaphors here). And to make matters worse, everyone is feeling the pressure. So I ask: should the burdens that women have carried for millennia now be placed upon men's shoulders as well - not to mention the new scrutinies being visited upon the young and old alike? I refer here to the manner in which "beautiful people" are, by turns, fretted over, sought after, hooted at, exalted, celebrated or otherwise mocked, ridiculed, dismissed, disparaged or obsessed over in the media or falsely appreciated by plebeian onlookers. Is it the celebration of beauty as such (over ugliness, say, or mediocrity) that in the midst of generating so much attention from all quarters - simultaneously and surreptitiously makes the multitude respond with scorn, even vitriol? Or is it rather the codification of a certain type of beauty, celebrated only as a lure for advertisers or a snare for consumers, to the exclusion of other possibilities, more exotic, more natural, more idiosyncratic, more casual, but no less striking in their appropriate context, beauty that is not stratified or discriminatory in terms of size, age or color? Sure, there's a problem here, but I just hope we don't give into that urge to think of it as an either/or proposition; it's both/and...in other words there's room for a wider panorama. More is more in this case. No need to pretend that we don't notice beauty; that part of human nature isn't going away any time soon...

Obsessing over my New Obsession

Summer is here, fellow neurotics, and it's time once again to find ourselves a new obsession. I think I've settled on exercise for the time-being, which I define as "the rigorous exertion of muscles, skeleton, torso and girth sufficient to induce abundant perspiration and rapid heart beat" and necessitating membership within a quasi-posh, semi-expensive, local fitness center so as to subject my upper body to arduous weight-training of some sort for a time duration meant to exceed 90 days." A milestone put off for so long is now something to strive for relentlessly and petulantly - carping over every small detail. Toning, bulking, sculpting, transforming - all of these verbs have suddenly become relevant to me along with: reps, abs, sets, glutes,  deltoids, triceps, bench press, curls, clean towels, etc. etc. Of course, by throwing oneself into a new preoccupation such as this, one does run the risk of giving up other, older obsessions such as: coffee, acoustic guitars, breakfast cereal, trail mix, Paul Klee paintings, the Beatles, Henri Matisse paintings, Simon and Garfunkel, Pierre Bonnard paintings, James Taylor, Henry James, comfortable t-shirts, Chekhov short stories, detective dramas and mini-series, 19th century prose, polo shirts, Homer's Odyssey,  dress shirts, sports highlights from the 1980s, basketball, basketball sneakers, the color red, comfortable leather chairs, tuned pianos, mowing the lawn, hair-care for middle-aged people, and the list goes on!

Six-Year Old is Youngest Spelling Bee Contestant

"Lori Anne Madison is already in the record books, and this year's Scripps National Spelling Bee hasn't even begun. That's because the 6-year-old from Virginia is the youngest person ever to qualify for the competition.

"She's like a teenager in a 6-year-old body," says her mother, Sorina Madison. "Her brain, she understands things way ahead of her age."

No one is expecting Madison to win the competition, where she will be competing against kids more than twice her age. But when she correctly spelled the word "vaquero" to win a regional qualifying contest in March, she became one of the 278 exceptional children who will vie for the national spelling title.

And it turns out Madison's elite skills extend beyond spelling: She recently won major awards in both swimming and math. In fact, she's so talented that when her parents tried to enroll her in a private school for the gifted, they were told that Madison was "just way too smart to accommodate."

"Once she started reading, that's when people started looking strange at us, in libraries, everywhere," Sorina Madison said. She's actually fluently reading at 2, and at 2 ½ she was reading chapter books."

However, The Associated Press notes that the one thing Madison hasn't been enjoying is all of the media attention.

"I want to go back to being a kid and playing with my friends," she said. And as a condition of her interview with the news organization, she made them tag along while she searched for specimens in a local Virginia river.

"I sort of didn't like it. I asked for no interviews, but the media seems to be disobeying me, and that's why we're looking for snails and water slugs right now."

When Madison gets older, she'll still face stiff competition for winning the National Spelling Bee. On Tuesday, NPR reported that 9 of the past 13 winners have been Indian-American, which one expert called "almost a statistical impossibility," as Indian-Americans represent less than 1 percent of the population." - Yahoo News

When I was a Child, I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson

It Might Scare the Horses...

Before you go through with that "wild and crazy" scheme of yours, to "go out on a limb" and "let loose" like a loon, "in the fast lane" where "the normal rules don't apply" this holiday season, "getting loud, getting reckless," "throwing punches left and right," "cat-calling to all sentient beings within ear-shot" and "letting the chips fall where they may," while you slog on with your insatiable, unoriginal drunken revelries, just remember that.................. it might scare the horses. Yes the horses, those poor easily-befuddled creatures. Or - if you prefer, the bunny-rabbits. It might scare the rabbits also. And the earthworms. And the sheep. And the spotted owls. The spotted owls are getting nervous because of you. Are you feeling guilty yet? What is this?  - you ask. Some pathetic "shout out" from a priggish misanthropic claustrophobe to the vast ocean of vital, vigorous, uninhibited humanity? Yes, in part. Or is this a heartfelt "open letter tweet" from a representative of the "squares" of the world to the irrepressible "cool kids" and "risk-takers" who keep the nocturnal economies churning by collectively agreeing to "unwind" night after night on a somewhat regular basis? Is this some cryptic, antiquarian, 19th-century, tea-sipping appeal to "animal welfare" as a means of putting a check upon our more bacchanalian tendencies at the very moment when warm weather appetites are on the brink of "having their way" with us? Yes. Exactly. I am (indeed) trying to find that perfectly Pavlovian tag-line of moral turpitude that will freeze the most unreflective hedonist fresh in his or her tracks... "So why can't I just stick with the tried and true bromide: "Don't drink and drive." I mean, sure, that works up to a point, and if Paul McCartney is out there providing the public service announcement, I have no problem with that, but I want to go even further you see - not because I want to tell other people how to live their lives (although in a perfect world that would be nice...) It's more about wanting people to police themselves, wipe their own nose, tuck their own shirt in, tie their own shoes, comb their hair, walk in a straight line by themselves, restrain their own vile bodily urges to mayhem, violence, destruction of property and fly-by-night amorous entanglements, if you catch my drift. Oh, maybe I should offer something a little less subtle like: "Don't do that, you will regret it, if not tomorrow, then soon and for the rest of your life!" or "As district rep for the divinely-sanctioned objective moral code that all of us secretly do in fact or should all agree upon, I highly advise you to reconsider what you are about to do because it A.) it will not serve your long-terms interests as a human being possessed of reason, memory and the capacity for regret B.) it will not serve the public interest  or the common good (in case you happen to be a communitarian) and C.) and most importantly of all - it will annoy the heck out of me - the innocent third-party bystander who has to witness yet again another instance of needless public debauchery as I run to my car in panic.... And while we're on the subject of "cool kids" vs. "squares" - i.e. "beautiful people" vs. "also-rans" - let me just say that although the "squares" usually get a bad rap for their uptight, shy and retiring "avoidance behaviors," there's more to the story than just that. Oh botheration - don't get me started...

The Endless Summer

That "endless summer" feeling is upon us, folks, and the summer has barely begun... What makes us feel like we've suddenly got all that extra time on our hands? Do we really? Is this some chronic delusion produced by the change of seasons? I don't know. I just don't know, but I keep staring at those waves and it makes me yearn for long stretches of time near the shore...

Jon Baskin on Franzen's Fiction

"What is the philosophy that informs Franzen’s fiction—is there a vision of the good life in his novels? One might think, given the argument in “Farther Away,” that the answer could be found in the meaningfulness of “close loving relationships.” And it is true that Franzen’s novels are about relationships—between husbands and wives, parents and children, the individual and her country. Yet it may come as a surprise to discover how often, for Franzen’s characters, the “hazards” of living relationships prove insurmountable, or nearly so. The story Franzen tells most insistently is that of the man whose idealism about relationships is eroded and finally destroyed by his experience with them. His characters, having ventured out in hopes of companionship and success, return often to bitterness, despair, and (if they are lucky) some insight into the harsh hypocrisies of human conduct. The entire sphinx-like plot of The Twenty-Seventh City is contrived to bring its hero, Martin Probst—who begins as a satisfied family man and ends as a solitary loner, taking a highway out of St. Louis—to the epiphany that he lived in a world “he was only now realizing he didn’t like.” Franzen’s second novel, Strong Motion, presents a character whose solitude is overwhelmed more often by hatred than by love; even in what is supposed to be an optimistic ending, Louis Holland can only momentarily suppress his sense of alienation from an America where “piggishness and stupidity and injustice … were every day extending their hegemony.  Retraction from relationships, and then from society as a whole—for America itself is a character in Franzen’s fiction, with which his protagonists carry on a highly tumultuous relationship—is in fact the most characteristic movement in Franzen’s novels; the New York Review of Books’s Tim Parks has observed that “his stories invariably offer characters engaging in the American world, finding themselves tainted and debased by it, then … withdrawing from it.” Freedom is no exception. Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times has written of the novel’s “majestic sweep,” which “seems to gather up every fresh datum of our shared millennial life.” yet the America portrayed in Freedom is unmistakably a corrupted one, whose contents Franzen catalogues with a cringe. Although the novel charts the Berglund family’s boomerang course from Midwestern suburb to east Coast metropolis and back again, its protagonists discover everywhere the same greed, superficiality and disregard for sound environmental policy. YouTube videos, BlackBerries and iPods lie strewn across the book’s landscape, monuments to American apathy and a once-vibrant culture reduced to “a trillion little bits of distracting noise.” At every turn, the story reinforces its chief protagonist Walter Berglund’s view that “all the real things, the authentic things, the honest things are dying off.”- from Jon Baskin, "Coming to Terms"