Our Sitch

Reading Metaphors We Live By from George Lakoff and Mark Johnson -1980.

And while I am reading the book as part of a Stylistics  course to improve my writing and while I found the first half of the book quite laborious, things have picked up in the second half but not relative to improving my writing, rather this second-half hotness relates to (gulp) truth.

[Woman Screams]

"What did he say!"

[Child Cries]

"Dad, I'm scared!"

[Sirens Wail]

"Objectivism shot, repeat, objectivism shot! Get an ambulance down here!!!"

Yes folks, objectivism, the idea that there is an absolute truth, non-relative to anything, especially kooky humans, took one right in the chest at point blank range.

From the authors:

A statement can be true only relative to some understanding of it.

Understanding always involves human categorization, which is a function of interactional (rather than inherent) properties and of dimensions that emerge from our experience.

The truth of a statement is always relative to the properties that are highlighted by the categories used in the statement.

Categories are neither fixed nor uniform. They are defined by prototypes and family resemblances to prototypes and are adjustable in context, given various purposes.

 Ah, objectivism, we hardly knew ye.

But, don't fret, don't get your panties in a bunch (unless you enjoy that sort of thing), don't pull your money from the bank, because deep down in places you don't talk about at cocktail parties, you know objectivism isn't true. You know relativism is the case and you don't mind one iota because if you did mind, you couldn't operate in this world.

You certainly couldn't drive in Massachusetts where objectively true driving laws, designed to keep us relatively (see what I did there?) safe, are completely and in all ways thoroughly and objectively violated every god damned second.

They just pull out into the middle of the road! And do you know why? Not because the road is clear - it isn't - not even close. They pull out because they are tired of waiting.

Mid-westerners with a sense of decency and oh I don't know, respect for the law, have trouble adapting to this kind of driving.

When I arrived in RI I advised my brother of this sort of thing and he was dubious.

Fair enough.

He visits.

We drive and what does he see: someone pull out without the right of way.

IN FRONT OF A COP!

But...

wait for it...

The cop doesn't do anything!

Why?

Objectivism isn't tenable. 

Relativism is our sitch (short for situation).

If you don't like it, lump it.

$16 Per Hour

Advice from my weekend:

Don’t head to food city Providence RI all willy-nilly and accept a reservation with a wait time of one hour forty five minutes, especially when you are paying a baby sitter 16 bones per hour.

Don’t accept said reservation with one hour forty five minute wait time then mosey to bar across street where scotch is $16 per glass, especially when you are paying a baby sitter 16 bones per hour.

Don’t, after having accepted reservation with wait time of one hour forty five minutes, drink scotch at $16 a glass then mosey back over to restaurant to check on reservation that hasn’t changed wait time, and realize that you are about to eat your hand, especially when you are paying a baby sitter 16 bones per hour.

Don’t call another restaurant and inquire about seats at bar where they tell you that if you get there “soon” they have two seats at the bar because you will inevitably drive in haste, pass the valet, turn off main drag, double back, hand off to valet, sprint to bar, only for them to tell you “the seats were just taken.” Especially when you are paying a baby sitter 16 bones per hour.

Don’t walk across street to, let’s face it, there-is-no-wait-for-a-reason restaurant, realizing you no longer want to eat your hand, but your whole arm, and order copious amounts of marbled meats and thick homemade pastas and realize you are thirsty from sprinting so hard to the last restaurant, that you take your wife’s wine recommendation (twice) to only later realize it is $25 a glass, especially when you are paying a baby sitter 16 bones per hour.

Don’t then have your wife tell you that same said wine is only $20 at your favorite restaurant, to which you wanted to go all along. 

Especially when you are paying a baby sitter 16 bones per hour.

My Hoarder

My Avery is going to be 3 soon.

He is a certified hoot. He had to take a class at the local YMCA; three Saturdays a month sorta deal. But he passed the final exam and got his hoot certification.

But Joe Pesci bless him, I think he’s a hoarder.

I don’t know when this started, feels like years ago, but when the urge finds him, he gathers up all of what he can hold and doesn’t let go. It seems to go by theme and recently there was a sea theme so every shark, octopus, dolphin, whale, crab, octonaut, squid, coral reef, and Scuba Steve figurine was lugged around the house in his little arms, with some being held under his chinny chin chin.

Have figurines will travel: Down the basement, in the tub, upstairs to Juju’s room, dinner table, on the potty...doesn’t matter.

But it doesn’t stop there: he has to take them to school. Soon I’m going to have to load and unload a steam trunk full of figurines or books every Monday through Friday just so I can get him to go to school. The teachers feel he’s so friggin’ cute they just let it go; in fact his teacher gave him a fanny pack to carry them around. At the end of the day when I go to pick him up they tell me he never let them go, held em’ tight during nap!

I could put my foot down you say, establish some boundaries you urge, do a little parenting you plead, but walk a mile in my shoes I’ll retort.

Actually we did walk a mile recently and what did Avery do?

Hoarded walking sticks of course.

But he’s so friggin cute!

The Sound On The Page

I finished Ben Yagoda’s The Sound On The Page today…

and I feel discouraged.

The book is about writing style. It is a good book, don’t get me wrong; I like his writing a lot but, there are some, oh let us call them, intimations, from the book that are, oh let us say, depressing.

In a book about style, there are obvious connections to musical style which is, yes, obvious. Obvious, in case you missed it.

Consider the old saw that there are eight notes in the musical scale, how you use them is…

style.

i.e., everything.

Now ask yourself how many people you’ve known over the course of your life that have picked up an instrument and compare it with the number of musicians whose style you could name, blindfolded so to speak?

(I could probably tell you the Stevie Ray Vaughan song from just a few bars of a solo).

That’s one thing. The other intimation from the book is that style is the person.

I’m in trouble. I’m not a great person in any sense of the word.

So I’m walking today thinking about the book and the upshots and it hits me:

I started playing the guitar at fifteen and never really made any money from it though I was able to at least get gigs in a small college town and some neighboring big cities in Ohio like Columbus and Cincinnati, some twenty years later. For those of you keeping score at home, that was twenty years. 20.

So if I gained no style musically, in twenty years, how can I hope to gain any style writing?

Sure, Yagoda gives advice like active reading and active writing and active editing but shitballs, I’m 46, I don’t think there is enough time.

Moonlight

Watched Moonlight with my wife Saturday night.

Scrolling through Plex she selected the new version of Independence Day and within seconds I said, playfully mind you, “this looks so terrible.” I meant to intimate that the movie would be so bad it would be good. This is the experience we had watching San Andreas with The Rock. The copious amount of cheesiness leads to insulting the movie so much that the experience itself becomes enjoyable. My wife had a great line from San Andreas for the young girl in the movie: “her breasts had so much screen time they deserved to roll in the credits at the end.”

Leave it to Youtube:

We ended up switching.

Onto Moonlight.

I was hesitant to watch the movie after seeing Manchester By The Sea because that movie was so sad and I sensed the emotional toll involved in Moonlight.

And I was correct to.

Moonlight is disturbingly powerful in the most spartan way; from the score to the performances and direction, nothing is over the top or chewing up scenery because the story is so good and the themes so elemental: poverty, violence, sexuality, addiction.

To wit, Best Supporting Actor Winner Mahershala Ali is only in the first act but his last scene is so incredible, he couldn’t be denied. The score is so sparse and haunting, it alone will give you chills.

The ending though…it feels like you are reaching a pinnacle and the screen goes black and credits roll. Cut off. From what though?

See Moonlight. Be prepared. 

Did I ask to be born licentious, greedy, slightly misanthropic?

Remember this?

http://people.com/celebrity/will-smith-explains-hitler-quote/

“Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, ‘Let me do the most evil thing I can do today.’ I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was ‘good.'”

Which led to this?

“Adolf Hitler was a vile, heinous, vicious killer responsible for one of the greatest acts of evil committed on this planet.”

Evil.

Pure Evil?

Well Steven Pinker says:

You describe the concept of pure evil as a myth in the book. Why?

The myth of “pure evil” is a debating tactic. We don't think of it that way because that very awareness would undermine the credibility of our brief. If the myth of pure evil is that evil is committed with the intention of causing harm and an absence of moral considerations, then it applies to very few acts of so-called “pure evil” because most evildoers believe what they are doing is forgivable or justifiable.

Now take these passages from George Saunders’ Lincoln In The Bardo:

Was I born with just those predispositions and desires that would lead me, after my whole preceding life (during which I had killed exactly no one), to do just that thing? I was. Was that my doing? Was that fair? Did I ask to be born licentious, greedy, slightly misanthropic, and to find Elmer so irritating? I did not. But there I was.

…

We were as we were! The bass lisper barked. How could we have been otherwise? Or, being that way, have done otherwise? We were that way, at that time, and had been led to that place, not by any innate evil in ourselves, but by the state of our cognition and our experience up until that moment.

…

By the fact that time runs in only one direction, and we are borne along by it, influenced precisely as we are, to do just the things that we do, the bass lisper said.

Free will isn’t so free I guess. But if free will isn’t so free then maybe evil isn’t so pure?

Dont' Forget To Look For It

When you grow up your heart dies.

If you don’t believe me, ask Ally Sheedy:

 

If you don’t believe me, as KennethLonergan:

 http://www.npr.org/2016/11/30/503865472/manchester-by-the-sea-director-probes-the-drama and-humor-of-grief

GROSS: And then, of course, you wrote "This Is Our Youth," which is about people in their late teens and early 20s. But when you're writing the roles of teenagers, do you draw on your memories of your own teenage years or on teenagers who you know now?

LONERGAN: I think more the memories of my own teenage years because the teenagers I know now don't really talk to me.

(LAUGHTER)

LONERGAN: My daughter talks to me. She's 14. And some of her friends talk to me. But I mostly watch them talking to each other. They're not - some of her friends are extremely pleasant and nice to us and talk to us all the time, and some of them just say hello, you know, if you make them say hello. So I'm just very interested in teenagers, and I always have been. I remember those years very vividly.

And I - it's always interesting to listen to them talking to each other on the street or walking past a school or anything like that. I just find it to be a very dramatic time of life, for lack of a better word. And I remember what it felt like to be a teenager. And I also remember observing my friends and schoolmates at the time in a - kind of a funny way because I was one of them, but I was also watching and noticing this sort of extreme behavior combined with this, I don't know, really beautiful extra passion for everything that teenagers seem to have. And I find the combination to be endlessly fascinating.

GROSS: So you said you remember what it felt like to be a teenager. What did it feel like to you? What are some of those - yeah.

LONERGAN: Not great.

GROSS: (Laughter).

LONERGAN: I think - well, (laughter) but that's actually not true. I remember really - I remember this - you know, this intense and very - this intense fascination for things that was really at the ready. At the same time, I didn't feel too good socially. I had some close - I had a small group of close friends that got smaller and smaller as I got older. And I think that part wasn't so great. I didn't have a girlfriend in high school. That was a constant problem. And I didn't know what you were supposed to do, you know, in a situation with the opposite camp. And there was all sorts of difficulties in that regard. But there's something about the fecundity of a mind that age that I really think is - that I remember very well and wish I could carry a bit more of that with me as I get older.

fe·cun·di·ty

feˈkəndədē,fiˈkəndədē/

noun

noun: fecundity

1. the ability to produce an abundance of offspring or new growth; fertility.

So you see, I am not the only one who believes there is a death of sorts beyond adolescence.

Do you not get wistful not for specific things from those years to happen again but rather, for the feeling and the intensity that occurred along with those events? It didn’t matter the specific music that you liked during those years –your tastes have undoubtedly changed- but the death is that you cannot recapture the passion and intensity of your love for x or y’s music from when you were a teenager. No one goes on and on about the music they listen to when they are 30 or 40. Music is of course only one example of this phenomenon. Take love or athletic competition or art or what have you, those years, when your brain is fully cooking you, is when you will be the most passionate in your life.

But…

My Joe Pesci there are moments of bliss, even after our teenage heart dies.

If you don’t believe me, just watch this video:

Just look at the smiles on the faces. These are grown people, sure they are stars and famous and all that but don't be fooled, they have problems just like you and me. I said it, just like you and me. But here they are, and the tape doesn't lie, just beaming like children at a birthday party with a bounce house. Simply because a song is playing and people are dancing and performing. 

Some captures:

 That is Denzel Washington from Training Day. Remember "King Kong ain't got shit on me!" Yeah, that's him, smiling like he can't help it.

Oh and these two:

And my favorite, Mr Bardem:

Could he be any happier? Yes, this is the "You've been putting up with it your whole life."Javier Bardem.

So look, your heart, a part of your heart, dies. And your sight goes and your hearing goes and food doesn't taste as good and all of it is true.

But bliss can be found so easily, just don't forget to look for it.