800 Words: How I Learned to Start Worrying and Hate Poetry

July 4th is important in America for many reasons, not the least of which is that it’s the anniversary of the publication of Leaves of Grass’s first edition in 1855. It is the ‘inauguration date’ of American poetry, and to some it doubtless marks the publication of the greatest, most influential, and most significant of all American books. Oh how I wish I was still one of them.

As an eighteen year old boarding school student who covered up insecurity with insufferable intellectual pretensions (how little life changes...), I suppose it was a given that I’d take to American poetry like a fish to water. At the Hyde school, we were surrounded by the lovely dark and deep green coniferous trees of rural Connecticut, a landscape that seemed to radiate the folksy severity that’s defined New England life since the Puritans. No doubt, many if not most of the kids at Hyde used those woods at some point to smoke pot, but when I walked through them, I could convince myself that I was breathing the same air as Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Longfellow, Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, Frost, Stevens, Cummings, and Elizabeth Bishop.

Whether or not that love was real, I certainly believed it was. I felt as though I loved poetry, and I think I even understood some of it. But whether I did or I didn’t, I couldn’t get enough of it. I wrote at least 300 poems of my own, and I held ‘poetry readings’ at the school where I would try to get other Hyde students who exhibited even a glimmer of intellectual energy to get their thoughts down on paper.

I’m 30 years old now, I’ve long since lost touch with virtually everybody from Hyde and can’t say I particularly miss too many people from that period. Those poems of mine currently exist somewhere in an accordion folder, no doubt boxed up somewhere in my parents’ attic. Most of the poetry I once loved seems to me a colossal waste of hormones - an exalting of an inner life and that doesn’t really exist and an escape from dealing with the actual complexities of living. But I miss feeling that way about poetry.

The whole idea that art can bring us into a special world - an inner world of ecstasy and mysticism in which art and philosophy can feed the ‘spirit’ and the ‘soul’ - now seems like the dumb musings of upper class twits who know too little of what life really is to ever reach it. Art is no better than religion at soul-feeding, and all we have to do is look at the sophisticated aesthetic tastes of atheist mass murderers to see that art can be just as dangerous: Hitler was a Wagner-loving painter, Saddam wrote novels in his spare time, Stalin and Mao were both poets in their younger years. If we look to art as a substitute for our baser instincts and fanaticism, we may do no better than we did with religion. Art, like religion, is hopefully a way to pacify our baser tendencies, but there’s no guarantee that either does. In some, art inspires greater humanity and humility. In some, art inspires less. If music or poetry inspires you to listen to other people more attentively, to be more considerate in what you think, to be more skeptical toward the beliefs with which you agree and more charitable to those with which you disagree, then culture can truly be said to have a beneficial impact on people. But is there any truly quantifiable way to measure that? And if we do, what happens if we find out that art affects people’s ability to become better people not at all, or makes people worse?

There is lots of poetry I still love, but most of it is much less grand in intent - small-scale poems by Philip Larkin or Billy Collins meant to make us laugh or cry, without abiding ambition to capture any greater meaning than the emotions we feel every day. The ecstasy of poetry, the feeling that you were reaching some higher level of inward consciousness and aesthetic bliss, no longer seems real to me. The days when Whitman or Dante or Milton or Goethe could bowl me over have likely passed on forever.

Furthermore, I’m not even sure anymore why people should or would read it. Twelve years ago, I certainly thought of myself as a dyed-in-the-wool leftist, but even then I used to bristle at the idea of resenting Dead White Males for writing better poetry than everybody else. To my 17-year-old brain, puffed up in many cases on the Harold Bloom filter rather than the texts of the books themselves, the thought that we’d ditch Milton for Maya Angelou was an abomination. But as I started to carry my own version of precisely that same resentment: the Dead White Goy.

Even until today, the whole concept of the “Dead White Male” never made any sense to me as an aesthetic concern. It makes very little sense for students to read a book by a particular writer because of the ethnic group he or she is from. Supposedly, the best art is created for all of us to appreciate; and if we want our students to be well-educated, then we must have them read the best books - regardless of who wrote them. And unfortunately, for most of human history, White Males were the only people in the world with the time and money to cultivate a highly developed aesthetic sense. Practice makes perfect, and the fact that there’s no equivalent to Tolstoy among Zulus is not a question of racial prejudice, it simply has to do with the unfortunate dumb luck that the vast majority (though hardly all) of people born through history with enough privilege to practice their art were White Males. Most other civilizations lived through far too much hardship to worry themselves about any art that wasn’t expediently made to serve a utilitarian purpose.

But the Dead White Goy is a very simple concept for me - and it was years before I realized that this complaint of mine is precisely identical to the Dead White Male for other minorities (I certainly didn't call it the 'Dead White Goy' until I saw the similarity). I'm a conservative Jew born and raised among other Jews in Northwest Baltimore. What matters is not whether the books I read correspond to reality, but whether the books I read correspond to my reality - the only reality I know. How could a kid raised in my milleu ever hope to understand what makes The Divine Comedy, or Paradise Lost, or The Brothers Karamazov a transcendent experience? I like to think I know more about Christian history and doctrines than many Christians, but my experience of Christianity is almost completely abstract: I know relatively few believing Christians, and I can probably count the times I've been to a Christian service on my hands. How am I supposed to understand why these beliefs mean so much to certain people? Furthermore, how could a person with a childhood like mine appreciate works that are shrouded in Pagan Mythology? How could Faust, or Ode to a Grecian Urn, or the Lady of Shallott, with their classical allusions and/or Norse/Celtic mythological references mean anything to me?

Christianity vs. Paganism is not my fight. Whether Christian or Pagan, all those reams of allegedly great literature which harps on the worlds of the spirit mean very little to a kid raised to believe that within a year of their death, every person gets into Heaven; a place so boring that the only thing to do for all eternity is to study the Torah. The idea itself of the spirit world is an extremely goyisher concept, almost completely at odds with any Jewish mindset I know (Isaac Bashevis Singer being an extraordinary exception to this rule). Judaism, a religion I was steeped in from the earliest age and whose outlook permeates every aspect of my life - whether I like it or not - is a religion of laws, ethics and customs. It is a supremely practical religion, concerned hardly at all with questions of the afterlife and only with how we conduct ourselves in our own world.

But if I, a shy bookish kid who had very little he loved more than to read, could not relate to this literature, how much less relateable is Tennyson or Dostoevsky to the existence of inner city kids from the projects who are barely exposed at all to the written word? If we want to make as many of them into readers as possible, then they need literature that speaks to them as much as Franz Kafka or Saul Bellow speak to me. It's a trial and error process, and we may not like the books which they love.

So why do we hesitate in allowing for these differences of mindset? To my mind, that can only be explicable by the 'Halo' effect - not the video game, but the pretentious cathedral-like reverence that surrounds certain works of art that makes us feel that we should appreciate them even if we don’t. It’s the hush of Milton and Wagner, Bob Dylan and Stanley Kubrick (we kid ourselves if we think such sentiments don’t exist in popular culture as much as aristocratic), in which the self-conscious loftiness of their work dupes insecure people into thinking that dreary loftiness of aim is the same thing as intelligence. a.k.a. This is boring and grandiose, therefore it must be amazing.

This is the hush of the high school English class, in which we read precisely the same books our grandparents read in their English classes (...except for Death of a Salesman), and 16 year old versions of us are expected to appreciate precisely how the work of a 19th century transcendentalist describing the flora and fauna of the New England springtime applies to our everyday life. How is a sixteen year old kid supposed to have enough life experience to relate to Song of Myself? Or The Scarlett Letter? Or Moby Dick? I’m now thirty, and I still don’t relate to them.

And yet I can’t deny that there is something comforting in the very unrelateableness of that literature. The fact that it speaks of a world about which I knew/know nothing was part of its very appeal to my adolescent self. I went to a school I hated with lots of kids I couldn’t stand and no hope of getting out of there before graduation, and here was a world completely unencumbered by reality - a world which tells you that a completely separate reality is but a page away. Today, I don’t think much of the idea that books exist to take you out of yourself - that seems all too much like an excuse to act like an ass in your real life. But I can’t deny that, occasionally, perhaps that’s a necessary sentiment. And perhaps I’ll see more reason for it again as the years go on. 

800 Words: The Super-Secret Supreme Court Deliberation Transcript

The following is a transcript, provided to us only through the deaths of thousands of agents, from the super-secret, booby-trapped fortress of nonitude in the bowels of the Supreme Court building. It is a gigantic, super-secret stone room; not unlike like Westminster Hall in London, adorned with nine thrones, four of which are occupied by Supreme Court Justices Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito, and five of which are currently empty as Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan are trapped in nets on the room’s floor next to their thrones. All justices are dressed in their courtroom robes.

Breyer: You’ll never get away with this Scalia!

Scalia: Oh but I already have! Don’t you see that without Obamacare, most people will only be free to choose between one health insurance plan and another which they cannot afford? People will either have to die or accrue massive personal debts to their providers which will then become the responsibility of their banks to repossess more assets than most people have, thereby forcing the federal government to bail them out yet again! I claim Obamacare as something not stipulated by the original constitution, but in fact I’ve done it only as a way to hold the power of the free market in the palm of my hand! MUHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Kagan: You’re mad! Mad I tell you! Mad!

Ginsburg: But that’s not the power of the free market. The free market means that banks should be allowed to fail. What you’re describing is socialism for the rich!

Alito: And that’s the genius of it. We tell everyone that an uninhibited free market is the American way and only a totally free market can function by itself, and when it fails, we simply say that the market wasn’t free enough! And then corporate hacks that bankrolled our early careers at thinktanks and foundations and give us millions of dollars worth of comped vacations for speaking tours can get more money from the government!

Sotomayor: You dastardly fiends!

Thomas: Indeed. And besides. That’s what HE wants.

Ginsburg: (squirming) Who’s he?

Scalia: (to Alito and Thomas) It’s time. (takes a remote control from out his pocket with a  single large button. Pushes the button and next to him rises Anthony Kennedy from beneath the floor)

All Four Liberal Justices: KENNEDY!

Sotomayor: It was you all along!

Kennedy: HA HA HA! Yes, I play the squishy swing vote justice for publicity’s sake, but it is I who make the absolutist civil libertarian argument that an individual mandate inhibits free choice! The American public should be free to make whatever shitty choices we provide them with! And if they die from lack of health care, then those morlocks should have thought of that before they elected Republican presidents in seven of the last eleven presidential elections!

Breyer: The American people aren’t morlocks!

Roberts: Sure they are! Look at section 5, line 197 of John Marshall’s majority opinion in Marbury vs. Madison. It says plainly, ‘The American People are Morlocks.”

 Kagan: No it doesn’t! Where did you study law?

Roberts: Harvard! The same place as you…or did I go to Yale? Anyway it’s one of the two places at which we all studied.

Ginsburg: I graduated from Columbia!

Everybody else: RETARD!

Kagan: The American people are not morlocks! I hereby summon the spirit of John Marshall to testify. Liberals, get out your rings!

(the four liberal justices take out their plastic Rings of Purposive Interpretation with giant red fiberglass jewels in the middle, put them on their left ring fingers and raise their left arms in the air)

Liberal Justices: LIBERAL JUSTICES ACITIVATE! JOHN MARSHALL!

(the spirit of John Marshall, or something that looks vaguely like David Souter in a powdered whig, appears on a giant television in a blueish, holographic tint)

Ghost of John Marshall: John Glover Roberts Junior! I am the spirit of Chief Justices Past, from John Jay to William Rhenquist, and we have been keepers of the greatest secret of all. It is time that you know the great secret of the American people: the American People are idiots, not morlocks! You must take solemn oath that you shall guard this secret until your dying breath. (starts fading away) Remember your oath! REMEMBER!!

(the hall echoes with John Marshall’s last word.)

Roberts: The American people are not morlocks? Well then everything I’ve ever known is wrong!

Scalia: No, no it’s right Roberts.

Roberts: All those years working as a private practice corporate shill, just because I thought that I was helping them make money off morlocks, not human beings!...

Alito: Please no, no, NOT LIKE THIS!

Roberts: If I vote to strike down the individual mandate by a 5-4 margin, I’ll be the chief justice who approved the early deaths of millions of American non-morlocks. I can’t let this happen. I switch my vote!

Kennedy: It can’t be! No! NOOOOOO I’M MELTING! MELTING! OH WHAT A WORLD! 

Scalia: You're not gonna melt, you’re just a drama queen.

Kennedy: WHAT A WORLD! (runs out of the room)

Scalia: I guess we should free the liberal justices now. No sense in lording it over them anymore.

Alito: You realize he's going straight to George Will to leak.

Scalia: Yeah, I guess that means our super-secret fortress days are over. We could probably make up the millions we'll lose in comped vacations and speaking tours by selling this room on e-bay. Anyhow, Clarence help me get the liberals out of these nets.

Clarence Thomas: Sure thing Nino. (whispering in Sotomayor’s ear): psst. I’m not wearing any pants!

800 Words: Friday List #20 Part II - The Confessions of Zeno, Les Miserables, The True Believer

Fiction: The Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo Let us praise any work of art that has the courage to be about absolutely nothing. Let us praise Uncle Vanya and Waiting for Godot, Seinfeld and The (original) Office, Tokyo Story and Lost in Translation, The Adventures of Augie March and …. The Confessions of Zeno. The subject within each of these is as often as not the total lack of subject. Our lives pass us by without needing a particular story to make it meaningful, why should its art need one? As a result, the work becomes as much about everything as nothing. But at the same time, to say that any of these works are ‘about nothing’ is a gross misrepresentation. A great work whose subject seems so unfocused is so for a reason – the subject of them is life itself. How do we pass our time, how do we cope with the slow crawl of living, how do we deal with the minutia of everyday life? I’m a sucker for any great work without a subject, because it’s that much harder to make it great. If The Confessions of Zeno can be said to have a subject, it’s lying. Not conscious lying, but the unconscious unreliability of the way we perceive ourselves, and the nothingness of self-awareness that lies behind it. Italo Svevo is the pen-name for Ettore Schmitz, an Italian/Jewish writer from Trieste of German extraction. Zeno Cosini, like Schmitz, is a successful businessman, a model bourgeois gentleman; devoted family man and husband, interested in art, literature, music, and science. Yet by the end of the book, his appearance of passion for every one of these things seems like an almost complete lie; not because Zeno set out to deceive us, but because Zeno has no more idea of who he is than anyone else does. Like all of us, he evolves, and his beliefs and desires seem to change and shift so quickly that we can't keep up, and he is a different person on every page. After 460 pages of living inside Zeno’s head, we ultimately know Zeno less well than we did at the book’s beginning. He is the perfect example of how the more closely we study a person, the more unknowable that person becomes. Some desires completely conflict with others, people think they understand each other yet they’re completely mistaken; the harder people try to be competent at life the more they display their incompetence, and the luckier they are to be rewarded for it. Pop Music: Les Miserables Read what I wrote about it last year here I know I know. It’s a total cheat. But since seeing the trailer for the movie version of the musical this Monday, it’s been in my head almost non-stop (except for when Mahler 9 ‘s been there…). How can you not be excited for a version that not only has Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Helena Bonham Carter; but is also directed by Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech, John Adams, Elizabeth I)? Some very good stage musicals become great on the screen, though Fiddler on the Roof is the only one that comes to mind right now… Like so many fine operas of any period, Les Mis does not have particularly great music when taken on its own merits. It takes glee in skirting the line between art and popular trash, and errs more on trash end than most great operas ever dared. The shameless tugging at the heart-strings, the recycling of melodies, the vintage-80’s synthesizers, the incessant merchandizing all make you want to write it off as something tawdry. But the success of Les Mis did not come cheaply – it’s a damned good musical about the 19th century which recaptures all the outsize emotions and sentimentality of so much of the 19th century’s art. It is probably the closest experience which most music-theater audiences will get to a grand opera. Perhaps this is why Les Miserables was the first piece of popular music I ever loved. I’d practically memorized it by the age of 7, and by the time I was eighteen I’d seen it four times though never since – easily the most unforgettable of them being a Tel Aviv production in Hebrew with direction that thought through and revised the original concept to a level no touring Les Mis in America could ever approximate. I went with my parents, my uncle and my Bubbie – all of us were in tears by the end. Leaving aside the amazing marketing...there's clearly something about Les Mis that appeals to the entire world. Has any show in the history of Broadway grossed more money? No one can say for sure what the reason is, but I at least have a guess. For all the lavish production values, this is a musical about poverty and deprivation. It is the perfect Reagan-era musical for the contradictions of an aging Baby Boomer and soixante-huitard crowd grown opulent in its tastes and desiring lavish entertainment that can nevertheless reassure them that their once-cherished passions for social justice are still aflame. It is, surely, one of the more noxious things about Les Mis's success, but no one can deny that whatever hypocritical elements it brings out in its fans, it brings them out brilliantly. Non-Fiction: The True Believer by Eric Hoffer (one of the most inspiring interviews I’ve ever watched) Oh how I wish I’d read this book before I was sixteen. Understanding fanaticism is all too easy for anyone who’d ever escaped from its iron grip. But for those who have never been through an experience which seems like a revelation - whether intellectual, spiritual, or personal, only to later find everything of which you were so certain come crashing down, it is nearly impossible to understand the circumstances which make such dramatic beliefs possible; particularly because the people who try hardest to make you understand what it’s like to believe in something so fervently seem like stark-raving lunatics. What Eric Hoffer does a better job of explaining than any writer I’ve ever read is the particular type of person who is susceptible to mass movements and extremism. It is neither poverty nor wealth, intelligence nor lack thereof, which compels fanatical belief. It is instead a divided self, lacking the self-esteem which a sure place in nature’s balance provides. Those who are poor and have known nothing else find it nearly as manageable to contend with poverty’s curses as those who have always been rich deal with the blessings of wealth. It is the newly poor and newly rich, the newly immigrated and the immigrant’s next door neighbor, who are most susceptible. When a person’s self-conception is uprooted, he becomes frustrated - a misfit who has no certainty upon which to base his conception of himself, and is therefore prone to belief in any movement which tells him that the self does not matter. It does not matter whether the movement is Fascism or Communism, Opus Dei Catholicism or Radical Islam, Revisionist Zionism or Pan-Arabism, (ahem) Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street. The person who is most susceptible to a mass movement is the person who feels the most need to believe in a power and purpose beyond oneself, and any one of those movements could switch members with the ‘opposite’ number listed, and their basic conduct would be almost completely the same. Their true enemies are not each other, they in fact have mutual enemies, and those enemies are moderation, scepticism, self-confidence, and security. It should come as no surprise that in the years around when Italo Svevo/Ettore Schmitz wrote The Confessions of Zeno were the years when Mass Movements like Communism, Fascism, International Socialism, and Falangism, were beginning to assert their stranglehold upon the world. After World War I, there was an epidemic in the loss of confidence for everything, every belief, every institution which people once held dear. The story of Eric Hoffer is one of the most inspiring stories of American History - a lifelong longshoreman from San Francisco who became one of the great American writers and thinkers with no education credential but a library card. Hoffer was a lifelong outsider from any academic or intellectual circle, yet could outthink and outwrite nearly all of them. The only reason anyone has ever heard of Eric Hoffer is because Harper’s Magazine thought his first-hand account of life and work at a Federal Transient Camp was useful - a consideration only made possible because of programs from the Roosevelt Administration like the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), WPA (Works Progress Administration), NIRA (National Industrial Recovery Act), and the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority). Because none of these programs existed after The Great Depression’s End, it is a consideration that could never again be shown to another member of the American underclass. How many other potential Eric Hoffers are there about which will the world never know?

New Kind of Friday Playlist #20: The Ten Commandments, Mahler 9, Louie

Movie: The Ten Commandments

If I ever were able to write an opera – and let’s be perfectly clear, if I wanted it to be any good it would take me until I’m sixty if I started tomorrow and until ninety to produce – the first opera I’d ever write is the story of Moses in Egypt. No, not the Book of Exodus, instead it would be the C. B. DeMille Hollywood perversely sexed up yet tortuously boring version which is inculcated into every Jewish kid’s lexicon from the time he’s five until he can recite the whole movie at his Bar Mitzvah.

Let’s be perfectly clear. The Ten Commandments is an awful, awful movie. It’s very nearly unwatchable without copious doses of liquor – and yes I’ve learned that the fun way; when I was about 23, some friends of mine and I watched the whole 220-minute monsterpiece which I could barely sit through when I was six and took a shot every time a character said the word ‘bondage.’ At least one of us threw up (I don’t remember who).  

But let’s be perfectly clear. The awfulness of The Ten Commandments is of a particular time and place that has completely vanished from any modern sensibility. C. B. DeMille made this move, his last, in his mid-70’s. He grew up an upper-class kid in the late-19^th century, an era of Empire and Great Power Poltiics when electronics did not exist and the most feverish pitch of excitement was made through gigantic displays like the circus or the imperial army drill. It’s a sensibility as alien to us as James Cameron’s movies will in all likelihood be to our grandchildren. A certain type of person, perhaps a particularly authoritarian one, would respond to DeMille’s gigantic displays of coordination even in our day.

So let’s be perfectly clear. I can’t stand the agonizing loftiness of this movie where everybody speaks in a Hollywood’s vision of the King James Bible and the special effects are not even as effective as a B-Movie thriller. If I have a soft spot in my heart for it, I can’t even call my love for it ironic. It’s simply a cornerstone of my life, something I first watched when I was three or four and which I could never imagine my life without.

Finally, let’s be perfectly clear. If I ever tried to make an opera out of it, it would fundamentally be a popera in which the slaves sing gospel and the taskmasters sing heavy metal. The spirit of The Ten Commandments – with its notes of freedom and shaking off oppression – is entirely contemporary and is why the story of the Exodus still means something to billions of people. The problem is that the sensibility of The Ten Commandments – the gigantism, the loftiness, the sluggish pacing  – was dated by the time DeMille’s career began.

Classical Music: Mahler’s 9^th Symphony -

(Bruno Walter and the Vienna Philharmonic, which premiered the work 100 years ago this week, perform Mahler 9 in this live recording – two weeks before the Anschluss.)

It’s honestly not one of my favorite Mahler symphonies (3, 4, 1, 7, DLVDE, 5, 9, 10, 6, 2, 8). I love all 11 of Mahler’s Symphonies (and he wrote 11), but while some of them touch the kind of universality you find in Mozart and Beethoven, there are also symphonies which settle either for a kind of doom-and-gloom or a theatrical bombast which we’re supposed to interpret as profound. Less great Mahler is still greater than nearly any other orchestral composer, but by his own standards, perhaps most of Mahler’s later works were not quite as meaningful as the ones which came before.

It doesn’t help that a kind of DeMille-ish sanctimoniousness has come over many Mahler performances in recent years; for the most part the tempos get slower and slower, the playing smoother and smoother. Even at his most classically balanced, Mahler is not a composer who wrote anything by half-measures – too few artists attempt the very peaks and valleys of creation which you find on every page of Mahler’s scores, and if the listener doesn’t feel that overflowing diversity of vision, it’s not a true Mahler experience. As in so many performances of classical music, audiences would be a lot more inspired by sloppy playing if it had more commitment and character.

One of the biggest problems with Mahler 9 is that Mahler didn’t live to hear it performed. All of Mahler’s earlier symphonies underwent a trial-and-error process in which he revised his scores from performance to performance to get precisely the effect he wanted. And as I think about it, my real trouble with Mahler 9 comes from the first movement, often hailed as Mahler’s single greatest composition. I love the other three movements, but the first never does enough for me. It has too many inner voices and too many clumsy transitions (which seem undeliberate) for the ear to follow. Conductors don’t help matters by slowing the tempo down so we can hear everything. A great performance of the first movement, of the  type one finds from Abbado, Barbirolli, early Bruno Walter, Szell, Kubelik, Hermann Scherchen (and now Jukka-Pekka Saraste), has performers who understand that this is every bit the manic Mahler of the early years and there should be no trace of church-like solemnity. All those inner voices are not meant to be heard, they’re meant to be felt. The first movement is every bit as much a fist-shake at the heavens as anything in Beethoven.

Last year, I wrote about Johnny Cash and compared Mahler 9 to his America IV. Both are dirty, almost shitty mud-wrestles with death, but by the end the listener can detect a kind of peaceful transcendence – as though the musician has resolved that he can’t triumph, and peacefully starts his journey into the beyond. It’s only twelve years after what Leonard Bernstein termed the ‘Century of Death’, and perhaps because of the dark experiences of the 20^th century we’ve managed to overrate Mahler 9 a little bit. It’s a wonderful piece of music, and it’s not a work completely about death, but it doesn’t embrace life in the way the very greatest music should. If I want an overwhelming spiritual experience, I go to Mahler 3.

TV:  Louie

I just finished watching Louie’s third season premiere. Or should I say, I watched half of it because I accidentally pressed a wrong button and it took me at least ten minutes to figure out how to correct whatever I did. What I saw was what exactly what I’ve come to expect from the show – which is that I have no idea what to expect. What I can say is that Louis CK clearly looks older; he’s even more bald, his ghoti is greyer, his skin hangs further off his face. And true to form, he’s letting us see every bit of it.

I’ve been planning on doing a long post on Louis CK for most of the time I’ve been doing the 800 Words thing. There’s a lot to say that I’ll hopefully get to by the end of Season 3, but no comedian seems to play a truer version of himself than Louis CK. He routinely exposes parts of his private life onstage to which no person in his right mind would ever allude, but the reason his talking about his personal life seems so dangerous is that we can all relate to it. In doing so, Louis CK says all the things about our own lives that we’re afraid of other people knowing.

I read an article the other day on Slate (I think) which claimed that Louie is the best show on television. I don’t know if I’d go that far, but the writer made the best possible case: think of all the TV shows you watch – now think of how many in which you have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen from episode-to-episode. No matter what the show is, 99.9% of them have a genre and a style, so even their surprises aren’t all that surprising.   The plots of most shows are either linear or surreal, which mean that you ultimately know exactly what kind of sensibility the show will give you. But occasionally, and I mean really occasionally, a show comes along that expands the Universe – TV’s that is. The universe of Louie is so large that literally anything can happen from low comedy to high tragedy, linear realism to the most surreal turns, and yet it all feels truer to life than most ‘realistic’ shows. Every episode is completely different from the one before, every moment of every episode can be completely different from the one before. In this way, Louie is truer to life than most ‘realistic’ shows. But when I think about that question, the only TV shows I can come up with which can do what Louie does are The Simpsons and I, Claudius. Is Louie really that good?

...Maybe….

Quote of the Day:

HaZmora:  i don't have enough conservative friends on facebook. where is their indignity!

800 Words: It’s Called Pigtown – A Barely Fiction

“You’re not moving to Station North. You’re going to get stabbed!”

“No I’m not Mom, I haven’t even told you about the place.”

“But that kid was stabbed right near Penn Station!”

“That can happen anywhere in Baltimore.”

“Don’t think I don’t know that. Are you sure you wouldn’t want to live in the County? It’s closer to work!”

“Mom if I live another year in the county it’ll be me who stabs someone. And this apartment is an entire floor for $600 a month and comes with a full basement.”

“Is there crime on this block?”

“There was apparently a big drug bust across the street last week. But everybody who lives there's now in jail so it’s totally sa-...”

“-You’re not moving to Station North!”

“It’s all I can afford.”

“We’ll help you make rent. Just find a place in Roland Park!”

“Good luck getting that past Dad.”

“Let me worry about Dad. You just keep looking for places.”

Oh how different this is from Washington – that magical city where the Washington Post announces that a black neighborhood is gentrifying, and within the next six months a mob of rich white hipsters descend upon it to fix the housing stock and repaint when they’re not watching The Wire or listening to Robert Johnson. Within two years there’s inevitably a Best Buy and an IHOP and hipsters bemoan how the neighborhood’s losing its black roots. Those of them who still haven’t bought baby bjorns move on to whatever next neighborhood the Post tells them.

Washington! My Washington! That shining city upon a hill where you can debate the latest economic numbers until four in the morning and nobody will beat you up for it. That thriving metropolis where the scariest person on the street is the Republican congressional aide holding his blackberry. Washington, the only place in America where people can get a job!

Yet here you are back in Baltimore. Anyone in America can get a job in Washington, except you. And day after day you sit at the desk in your father’s office, endlessly posting on twitter during whatever minute Dad isn’t telling you to turn the music down. You try to turn every business meeting into a political argument – and Dad inevitably takes the bait and the two of you spend twenty minutes debating whether we should buy more urban properties because America has to fix its public transit system. After twenty minutes your brother asks what this has nothing to do with why people park overnight in the lots of our buildings, and you then have nothing of value to add and stare intently at your cup of tea.

And so you move into that Roland Park apartment which for which your parents help pay… If it gives them peace of mind, sure, I’ll take your money… But you don’t meet anyone in Roland Park. You bike in the evenings, and everybody you pass on the street looks like a Hopkins sophomore or a WASP-y housewife walking her dog. You ride your bike through Hamden and Remington and watch hipsters with all the ripped clothes and asymmetrical hair of those in Washington. But the Baltimore hipsters look less talkative, less energetic, sadder, like real hipsters. Regardless of how; people move to DC to change the world. People move to Baltimore to…does anybody move to Baltimore?

So you go back to Washington every weekend to relive the ever fading glory of your Washington existence – always visiting with your latest group of close friends whom you once thought of as friends of friends of friends before another circle of yours moved away. At parties you talk to all the girls you never hooked up with, and they're all now married. And as you push thirty, the mere thought of driving forty miles to get drunk and sleep on couches makes you feel ever more pathetic.  

At work, you complain daily about your Baltimore exile on g-chat to some of your best friends who’ve long since left Washington to chase such political glory as to be an aide in the Maine house of delegates, or an economist for the State of Massachusetts, or an elected New Jersey school board supervisor. Their inevitable response: “You just need to meet more people.”

Every day is a reverse commute to the county, which means that you drive ten miles in 40 minutes rather than 60. Lunch is at the house where you grew up, and three-or-so times a week you save money by eating dinner with your parents too. Baltimore is home, yet you hardly know anyone because even your childhood friends moved to DC. In point of fact you neither know this conurbation nor barely a soul in it. Every time your Dad navigates you to assist him looking at some out of the way run-down building in East Baltimore, you’re astonished that anyone could know their way so well around this phantom megalopolis.

Your parents have long since moved out of the old neighborhood. Dad swears that its main intersection is currently an outdoor one-stop-shop for heroin and meth disguised as a wholesale market, but he hasn’t been back there in thirty-five years, so how does he know? Mom lived there until she was 20 with her parents, grandparents, and great aunt: her and her brother the youngest members of her block's last white family. Some of their new neighbors let them know just how unwelcome they were to stay.

Even if you haven’t inherited their fear of Baltimore, you can’t help inheriting a certain dispiritedness at having come back. Baltimore is a city which peaked more than two hundred years ago. For centuries, it's been one of the East Coast’s ‘other' metropolises: a city whose low prices attract immigrants in the hope that their grandchildren can one day have the unlimited opportunities which DC or New York can afford them. You were going to be the one who got those unlimited opportunities, yet here you are, back in the family business, so that one day maybe your grandchildren can get the opportunities you didn’t.

But all is not lost. You do have two good friends in Baltimore - from the Washington days of course - a married couple who commute to Federal Government jobs whom you knew long before they were married or working at the Commerce department; and in all those years you never once observed them fail to curse the soul-crushing fakery of our capital. It’s a high-gloss high-priced, synthetic city full of synthetic people who pretend they mean to change the world as a means of massaging their egos and keeping it exactly the same. You always thought this argument was stupid, merely the ersatz sour grapes of people who failed to find what they wanted in Washington - but now the person who failed is you. And everything you loved about that celestial city of your dreams is now seems as smelly as rotten cheese. Something in you dies every time you meet a guy at a party who says he plans to move back home to build connections for a congressional run or yet another girl who tells you she works at a non-profit.

These two don’t know many people either, but the three of you are pretty happy together - seeing each other at least once a week and bound together by mutual resentment of your old stomping grounds. They take you to what they tell you are all the great Baltimore establishments: Does Washington have a bar devoted to nothing but scotch? Does Washington have an entire Greek enclave? Does Washington have crabcakes as good as Faidley’s? And you have to come around to them in some degree, because if there’s anything which Baltimore does better than any city in the world, it’s crabcakes, nostalgia, and venereal disease. They even tell you about a group for which you can get a political fix; a liberal politics meetup where you discuss the latest outrages at a bar while getting drunk. They can’t go this week, but you should.

You arrive for the meetup and the waitress points you to a table with four people. You make your introductions: a post-grad resident at a Hopkins biology lab, a MICA graduate who teaches high school art, a musician who quickly lets it slip that he knows Dan Deacon, and a retired government file clerk.

The conversation goes something like this:

“It’s terrible what’s happening with the Supreme Court and healthcare.”

“Could you believe how Scalia’s gloating?”

“It’s like he doesn’t even care if people know he’s openly partisan.”

“Well, what’s especially ironic about Scalia was that he was appointed to the court because he convinced the Senate that he was an impartial arbiter of the law after Robert Bork was absolutely upfront about advocating for conservative doctrine. But a year after he was appointed, Morrison vs. Olson happened and everybody knew that was bullshit. Scalia's dissent was thirty pages long and Harry Blackmun said it could be cut down to ten pages if Scalia took out the screaming.”

(long silence...)

“Yeah! And Alito’s just like him!”

It goes on like this for two and a half more hours, and after fifteen minutes you’ve already resolved that you’re not going back.

That Friday night, you’re back at your usual seat at the front bar of Club Charles with your married friends. Is there anywhere in Washington like Club Charles? You and the wife play the usual game: spot the cute hipster girl - on scales of 1 to 10, you rate them on attractiveness, ironic fashion sense, and the sourness of their demeanor. There are a plethora of over twenty-fives in the bar tonight, and you admit, you’d find every one of them attractive enough strike up a conversation if you didn’t think they’d be completely unimpressed by what you have to say.   

But then a completely new type, a familiar type, walks through the door. Everybody else in her group has the usual cute hipster attire, but this girl is wearing a black women’s dress jacket with a matching miniskirt and leather boots; a career pantsuit in a bar where most of the women make jewelry.

This bears more checking out. You walk past her table on the way to the to the bathroom just to see if your impression is right. Even from the top of the staircase you see that she’s extremely cute in that weird-faced way you like. But the second thing you notice is that all the other girls are drinking Natty Boh, but she’s drinking what looks like whiskey. You haven’t seen a girl like this since well... you know...

You force yourself to take a whiz, and then you double back. But right as you walk by, a little more slowly so you might get a little earful of what the girls are saying, you hear one say:

“It’s like that Scalia guy doesn’t care if anybody knows he’s got an agenda.”

“Well, everybody’s known that since Morrison vs. Olson.”

You know what’s coming...

After a silence a little too long, you turn to them just so you can say “don’t forget Mistretta vs. United States when Scalia called the Sentencing Commission a junior-varsity congress.”

Everybody but the pantsuit laughs uncomfortably, a bit shocked that someone heard their conversation. But this girl turns to you and says she’s going to buy you a drink. When you get the waitress's attention you order a Laphroaig and offer to pay for it yourself, she says that's nonsense and ‘Make it two.”

Over the next two hours you learn that she’s an environmental lobbyist who moved to Station North just three weeks ago and commutes every day on the MARC train. She’s exactly your age, worked on six congressional campaigns, and lived for two years in Northern Africa when she was in the peace corps. You tell her some of your history with Washington, and your lack thereof lately. The two of you discuss how Anthony Kennedy is going to find a way to kill the Individual Mandate while still looking like he’s compromising, what obscure justification Roberts will find for his majority opinion, and how this will affect Obama’s campaign in Ohio and Florida. Within two hours, you’re back at her townhouse on the corner of St. Paul and Fayette to spend the night.

Late the next morning, you wake up in her bed. She left a note on the pillow saying she’s already downstairs making brunch. You go down two flights of chandalier-adorned staircases to see her on the other side of her cavernous kitchen. She's still cooking, but on the counter you already see blueberry pancakes, french toast, belgian waffles, steak, smoked salmon, applewood bacon, eggs benedict, homemade bread, grilled scallops, wild mushrooms, pickled olives, sliced bell peppers, fresh fruit, danish, orange juice and champagne on ice. She points to a door and says to go through there to the dining room to meet everybody. 


So there are three people sitting at the dining room table; her flatmates - or technically her tenants. Directly to your right is one of the hipster girls from last night. She tends bar part-time at Ottobar and sells homemade jewelry online. The other two are much older - to your left is a 50-ish divorcee who tells you her kids are now in college and she’s looking to start over. Sitting across from you is a gay guy in his sixties who goes from house to house redecorating in exchange for free room and board.

You’re called back into the kitchen because she needs somebody to help wrap up brunch - lots more people are arriving in an hour and she needs somebody to put everything back in one of her two refrigerators. It’s an amazing spread, but why are you helping her instead of the roommates. You can’t ask her, because she’s on the phone explaining to someone how to get to her house from route 70.

“I should really be going.”

“Oh no, please stay. You’re going to love the other guests. They’re all coming out from Washington - all people I’ve worked with over the years. They’re great. Besides, you never know who you might meet.” ..then she gives me a wink..

So the wink either means she isn’t thinking relationship or she’s super-clingy and already trying to get a DC job for a potential boyfriend. Either way, this is probably win-win. And as you muse on that, you remember that you have a meeting at 2 to look at a building in Parkville. You dial home to try to get out of it.

“Dad, do you need me at the meeting?”

“Why didn’t you call earlier this morning?”

“I was asleep.”

“Well you should be driving already. We’re late too.”

“I thought the meeting’s at 2!”

“It’s at noon.”

“Is there any chance I can get out of this meeting?”

“It’s with Ted Diakanos. We can’t have this meeting without you.”

“Well can’t you just explain...”

“We need you there.”

“...Alright, I'll go...See you then....Bye” 


You hang up the phone and before you can form a word she says:

“You have to go. I’ll pack you a plate.”

“I really have to rush.”

“Don’t worry it’ll just take a second.”

It takes a little more than a second. But as she packs you three plates from her spread with a special bag with three compartments to separate them, she also makes you a mimosa in a plastic cup for the road, and in the seventy-five seconds she takes to do all this you two get to talk in the light of day. She gives you her number and she tells you she's busy during the week but she'd be up for something some weekend.

“Yes, I‘m the dream. Living in Baltimore, working in DC. I don’t understand why more people don’t do it. Even if all the jobs are in DC there are so many cheap places to live here.” She says as she finishes wrapping up the plates and hands me the bag. We start walking to the door.

“Well I can’t imagine it’s quite as easy unless you’re near the train station.”

“That’s not true, there are all sorts of neighborhoods around the 95 junction that are getting all kinds of Washington people. They’ve even called one of them Washington Heights to attract DC’ers. It’s gonna become known as a DC enclAAAAAAH!” She let's out a scream a split second after she opens the door.

And on her stoop lies a man whose mouth is wide open as though he’s snoring. His lips are invisible from his Hemingway beard but clearly he has no teeth. He’s wearing pea green suit but with no shirt to wear underneath and his fly is completely open. It’s obvious he’s neither wearing underwear nor circumcised. Out of the corner of your eye, you think you see a needle on the stoop.

The scream made him open his eyes, he raises his head up for three seconds, then says “It’s not Washington Heights. It’s called Pigtown,” and goes back to sleep.

Abbado Mahler 9

Mahler 9 and the upcoming centenary of its premiere will probably be the subject of this week's playlist. But I have never heard a better performance of this piece than the recording Abbado made in Berlin. No other by Abbado, or anyone else, can touch this performance. Furthermore, no conductor has quite the same private hotline to late Mahler. Few conductors can do all 11 symphonies (and it's eleven!) well. Many simply don't perform ones they like less, and others - like Haitink, Gergiev, Boulez, Chailly...make your own list - can e amazing in certain works and sound utterly adrift in others. For the entirety of Mahler, I generally rate Rafael Kubelik (still) as the greatest of all Mahlerians, with an honorable mention to Lenny. And among living conductors I'd probably give that title to the ever-underrated  Eliahu Inbal and rate Michael Gielen and Rattle above him (meanwhile postponing final judgement on Manfred Honeck and Ivan Fischer). But starting with Mahler 7 (and with a layover at Mahler 5), nobody captures the bittersweet but gloomy fatalism of fin-de-siecle Vienna like Abbado.

800 Words: A Brief History of My Weight

I don’t know where it is anymore, but I used to delight in showing friends my High School ID. I remember that it was the one day of my adolescence for which my face didn’t look like a pebble beach, I made sure to bend my school uniform with a loose-necked tie with an open collar, and I posed with shit-eating, almost thuggish grin. For two minutes of high school, I managed to convince the world that I was cool.

 And most importantly, I was 145 pounds – I managed to be both short and gangly. My face wasn’t particularly handsome, my thinness only emphasized my camel-like nose and Jay Leno-like underbite. But damnit, I was fucking svelte. Six months later, I was down to 131, and my wrestling coach was telling me to gain the weight back so I could get more muscle.

Yes, I, Evan Tucker, an adult who would run halfway around the world to avoid playing a team sport, was a high school athlete – and an absolutely terrible one. At my second high school, we were all required to play sports. In my first term I got stuck with football, and my coach put me on the line as a guard because I was so awful that he didn’t know what else to do with me. From elementary school recess until high school sports, I logged thousands of hours coerced into the realization of how terrible I was at football, and nobody could show me how to be otherwise. My coaches tried all sorts of things to ‘toughen me up’ like sticking me in the middle of a circle of varsity players who could tackle me from any side, or taking me aside after practice to push a whole contraption of tackling dummies by myself. But nothing worked, nothing at all. At the last game of the season, my team still hadn’t won a game all year, and we finally had the lead. My coach put me in for a single play during that game, and during that play the other team’s guard swept by me to tackle the quarterback and recover a fumble for a touchdown. The game ended with a tie.

 Wrestling was much more pleasant, but even in wrestling, I won a single match in two years. As my coach told me, I was New England’s foremost expert on the ceiling designs of New England Prep School Gyms. In order to make weight, we would have to go on five mile runs at five in the morning in the dead of the Connecticut Winter. I would wear five layers of clothing to sweat off as much weight as possible, and at least twice arrived back at school five pounds lighter than my weigh-in two days before.  I suppose you expect to hear that I hated every minute of this, but there was a sick part of my psyche that almost enjoyed this regimen. I was in by far the best shape I’d ever be, still acne-ridden but a couple muscles away from a real sixpack. I hated wrestling itself as much as football, but I occasionally enjoyed the excruciating calisthenics.

I suppose I can’t talk about my weight without talking about the high school itself which to this day controls my feelings about my body, a subject I try not to let come up on this blog too often. I avoid talking about Hyde in part because there’s far too much to say about it, and in part because I worry how some people might co-opt anything I have to say about it for their own agendas. I will say very simply, I don’t have any truck with most of the students who pick fights with the methods of that place. Nevertheless, few people will be happier than I on the day that the Hyde Schools are shut down for mistreatment of their students, and it’s only a matter of time before they are. To this day, I view Hyde as the defining experience of my life, as I imagine most people would who went there, for good or ill. Opinions on that school differ from student to student, teacher to teacher. But given the extremity of their methods, it is impossible not to have an opinion.

After three years at Hyde, a boarding school for bad high school students who’d exhausted normal options, I swore to myself that no one but me would ever make me do any physical activity for the rest of my life. When we all read the reports about the detention camp in Guantanamo, certain methods of theirs rang eerily true to the punishments which Hyde faculty administered (or that students administered to one another). The more I read about the methods of authoritarian regimes, the more similarity there seemed to the methods of extracting information to which Hyde students were subjected. The more I read how propaganda machines manipulate language to create submissive citizens, the closer Hyde seemed to such a model. One day perhaps I’ll write about my experiences there, but even now – eleven years after it was over, much of it is still too painful to revisit.

By no means should anyone compare the methods of a New England boarding school to a totalitarian regime (I feel ridiculous even writing that), and as someone whose grandparents lived under both Stalin and Hitler I should feel particularly sensitive to that sort of comparison. But even my father, a PhD in Eastern European history who spent a year living in Caucescu’s Romania, agrees that the comparison is not without merit. So have Eastern European friends to whom I described what students like us were subjected. Even so, on a basic level, it is absolutely ridiculous to make any comparison between Hyde and any sort of police state. Nevertheless, I can’t deny that in its own infinitesimal way, Hyde School gave me an insight I never wanted into what my grandparents endured.

The greatest benefit Hyde gave me was that it was the greatest possible training for a budding writer – forcing its (often fascinating) students to observe one another to the minutest possible detail. At any moment, any one of us could be accused of doing something wrong – sometimes truly and just as often falsely, and every student there had to evaluate whether or not another student could stab them in the back with these sorts of accusations. In theory, we were all supposed to evaluate one another to help each other achieve our best in all areas of our lives. In practice, such evaluation usually dissolved into a mob mentality in which bullies found an outlet to pick on weaker kids that was completely sanctioned by the school.

Whatever else Hyde did, it gave me one other benefit. In college I found out I was a much better student than I ever was before. But were I a still better student and have managed to get the PhD in political science I’d been contemplating in the years after college, my thesis probably would have been something on the nature and methods of authoritarian states. It was Hyde which endowed me with a lifelong interest in that endlessly fascinating subject, and I suppose that at least in those two ways, I owe Hyde an enormous debt of gratitude.

...But back to the weight problem. Even in my last year at Hyde, where for my last six months I managed to ‘trick’ the school into not making me play sports, I began to put on weight. By graduation, I was certainly well over a 150 pounds, perhaps even 165. During the last ‘punishment-workout’ I ever had to do at Hyde, a mere two days before I graduated, I did the one thing I’d avoided in three years of extreme physical activity – I threw up.

Six months later, my wrestling coach saw me for the first time when I came back to visit. The first thing he said to me was: “Tucker!....Step on the scale!” I was 184 pounds. By the end of my freshman year I was probably 190. By the end of sophomore year, I passed the landmark I thought I’d never reach, two hundred pounds. By graduation, I was 220.

I don’t doubt that there was an enormous confluence of reasons that made me gain so much weight in so little time; everything from laziness to medication to gluttony to anxiety played its own part. Like so many college students, I was eating like there was no tomorrow, drinking like a fish, and smoking like a chimney. All the healthiness I’d gained in those three years I happily gave up for the chance to be a different person. I felt as though I had three years of my life to make up for, and if I could help it I was going to enjoy every minute of it. I can’t say that I derived enough enjoyment to justify gaining eighty-five pounds in seven years (maybe forty-five…), but at least for days at a time, I managed to dispel the crippling fear, guilt, and insecurity with which 3 years at Hyde would leave any student with a shred of humanity.

After college, I went to live in Israel; and as Israel has done for a century of Jewish kids, it boosted my health - to the best it had been since before college. I found a workout partner who became a close enough friend that we’re travelling Europe together for a month this summer. The Harris is a good four inches taller than I, yet weighed less than 130 pounds. The experience of working out with him was everything Hyde was not. He never pushed me to overexert, was always understanding when I couldn’t complete a set, and our workouts often took three hours because we’d talk for twenty minutes between each exercise. By the end of my time in Israel, I was down to 190 pounds, and could do a strenuous, hour-long workout with no break that made me feel better by the end than I did at the beginning.

But when I returned to America, I had no idea what I was doing with my life; without a job, utterly without prospects, stuck in my parents’ house in Baltimore with no sense of direction. Within a year, I’d gained another 45 pounds. At this time five years ago, I was a full 235 lbs. It is, I vow, the largest I ever will be. For normal sized people, 235 pounds is not really that fat. But when you’re 5’4 ½, 235 pounds is enormous – not quite morbidly obese, but certainly obese with a capital O. Were I a foot taller, it would be the equivalent of being well over 300 pounds.

Most of this extra weight is carried my Falstaffian gut. My physique is surprisingly well maintained in other areas, but for years I’ve had a paunch to rival any sexegenarian. A pot belly usually comes with a greater risk of heart disease, and at my largest, I had all the symptoms of heart disease at far too young an age; pain in my chest, tingling in my arm, dizziness, windedness, and constant fatigue. On the other hand, I was eating some damn good food.

I can’t help that I love food – I love all types, all flavors, from the most gourmet to the grossest fast food.  If left to my own devices, I would probably eat every minute of every day. For whatever reason, my body has very little sense of when it’s full, and I can’t understand why people would leave some food on their plate untouched. What an alcoholic is to booze, I am to food. I long since gave up cigarettes with little trouble. I could even see myself cutting out alcohol completely with little regret. But the mere thought of limiting my food intake seems like a cross too great to bear.

In the last two years, I’ve been to two cardiologists, both of whom told me that I have no heart problems whatsoever. I do, however, have rather severe heart burn, terrible back pain, a probable ulcer, and still more severe hypochondria. The last few years have been a steady stream of constant diets and inconsistent physical activity – Atkins, calorie counting, biking, and weight lifting. Today, I start the severest diet of them all – a week-long ‘detox’ diet of nothing but fruits, vegetables and six ounces of protein a day that will hopefully take the edge off some of my most extreme cravings.  For all that effort, my weight has steadily yo-yoed between 225 lbs and 200, and never below 200.

Thin people simply never understand why a person would go to such weird lengths to lose weight. Why not simply limit your food intake and consistently get exercise? Why not indeed? Fat people have been wondering why they’re incapable of following these prescriptions for good health at least as much as their thin friends. There are only two options to believe – either fat people are simply lazy, or we have a biological problem that is not easily cured. Many people, particularly many thin people, believe the former. Perhaps they're right, but my experience tells me to doubt them. Bulimia is considered a disease, yet the condition still involves the somewhat involved process of a bulimic person finding a drain in which to throw up. In the same way, even if one has a choice to stop eating, perhaps one doesn’t. Alcoholism, compulsive gambling, anorexia are all diseases that involve a free choice as much as compulsion – yet they’re still considered diseases.

One day, I will be thin again. I truly believe this. I just hope it’s before I turn 35 or 40 or whatever age it is when ailments from bad body maintenance become truly irreparable. I want to be thin, really I do. But it’s goddamn hard. Asking me to stop eating so much is asking me to amputate one of the biggest parts of myself (no pun intended). It’s almost as though can no longer imagine my life as a thin person.

. 

800 Words: Why Religion Always Wins - Part 4

And so we moved out of the Middle Ages. And thus ended the age when man seemed to know its place in the cosmos best of any age hence,;and with it left the certainty of mind which divided man from man in religious belief and castes. Was there room for doubt in the minds of this Gothic Age? It seems unlikely to our democratic minds that people could once be so unquestioning, yet there is scant evidence of doubt. The art of that age, the philosophy, the historical record, all point to the fact that there was only belief. The true conflict of the age, perhaps the only non-negotiable conflict, was over what belief was true: Christian vs. Islamic, Catholic vs. Orthodox, Caliph vs. Caliph, Greek Orthodox vs. Syrian Orthodox, Pope vs. Antipope. In an age of feudal chaos, belief meant order. Submission to an absolute ruler, heinous as it seems to the 21^st century mind, was likely an improvement for their time on the alternative.

But once order is established in place of unremitting chaos and fear and action, then must come an age of contemplation; and from contemplation comes doubt, and from doubt comes despair.  The most considerate of people can use this forced rumination, and skepticism, and melancholy to achieve a greater self-understanding. But it’s a misnomer to believe that freedom will automatically make most people happier, there is no guarantee of happiness gained from greater knowledge. But it does endow us with the ability to pursue a bit more of our personal vision of happiness, and from this we can gain greater understanding of our world and a greater sense of responsibility for it, and even if we don't achieve happiness, we can achieve self-respect. Freedom may not make us any happier to be alive than we'd be without it, and in time may still prove itself a pyrrhic victory. But freedom certainly made us more interesting.

Nevertheless, regardless of the benefits which freedom bequeaths; many people, perhaps most, find this sense of freedom a curse beyond curses. Even when given all the freedom they could possibly have, they still retreat to the constriction of belief. Whether their dogmas are religious, or political, or cultural, many people find much greater comfort in being told what creeds to believe than to arrive at their own personal creed. They see the world as irredeemably broken, and long to return to their personal version of the Gothic Age, when certainty reigned and we all knew who we were. They look at a planet beset by doubts and see a world almost irreparably broken (though never quite all…) and look to Christianity, or Communism, or the Free Market as our savior. And even when these people are given power, the promised land never seems to arrive, no matter how many lives they ruin in the pursuit of it.

The reason? According to them, it’s because the world didn’t believe hard enough or act with sufficient purity. The irony of what they say is that in every case, they are absolutely correct. If we had a world perfectly run under the kingdom of Christ, or Mao, or the Koch Brothers, the world would then be a perfect place. The only problem with each of these beliefs is that the world is incapable of being run in any such way. People are imperfect, and every attempt to run them by the dictates of a perfect state is doomed to failure.

And once the dynastic feuds of the Early Middle Ages were resolved, and once Western Man became held under the province of a few Kings, it immediately began to see the results of this contemplation. What God would allow the Black Death to kill a third to half of Europe? If men existed under the rule of God’s anointed King and chosen Vicar in Rome, why then was He still angry enough to kill so many?

Beginning in the fourteenth century, Man was neither Medieval nor Renaissance. He lived in a world of unending violence, unbridled superstition, unmitigated greed, and still more virulent hatreds. The world, but a century before so close to achieving the Perfect Kingdom, was a mere Paradise Lost. The infections, both physical and spiritual, festered everywhere and educated people drained them by any means they knew how. Everywhere on the continent, Inquisitions tortured and burned suspected heretics. The grandchildren of absolute monarchs lost their grip on their feudal lords – who in many cases now elected their monarchs and initiated wars between themselves that lasted a century at a time. In their efforts to retain the certainty of the Late Middle Ages, rulers only succeeded in bringing back the chaos of the Early Middle Ages, perhaps with a greater vengeance than ever.

And while the character of our age remains to be seen, the spirit of the transition between Medieval and Renaissance is one which those who lived the twentieth century would find all too familiar. Even now, we can only hope that out of Auschwitz and Hiroshima has risen a new class of persons just as did out of the terrible wars of the 14^th and 15^th centuries. Out of the those ancient wars rose the Middle Class as we still know it, people whose support the noble class deemed essential though they were not lords themselves; a class of tradesmen, burghers, merchants, and seamen - people whose services proved too indispensable to be kept in peasant squalor and whose talents demanded remuneration.  From such people we gained modern business methods, a much greater desire for education, wider patronage of the humanities, and a discovery of a globe much larger than previously thought. The world was again full of unexplored possibilities, and suddenly a bigger, more interesting place.

What equivalent is there to these developments in our day? We have our equivalent to the printing press in the Internet, but sites like Google and Wikipedia (or their successors) may yet prove unreliable fonts of knowledge – with governments policing the dispersion of inconvenient facts as easily as they did with any previous information system. Certainly the Middle Class is larger than ever, but so is the number of people living in poverty and wage slavery. After an amazingly promising beginning, we have virtually abandoned space exploration. So many democratic revolutions end with dictatorships still more despotic than those which came before, and still we live under constant threats of meta-viruses breaking out in the general population, rising temperatures and sea levels simultaneous to dwindling icecaps and food sources. In recent years the financial system comes eerily close to a superdepression every few months, and the birthrate of the hyper-religious exceeds the birthrate of secular people by a factor of much more than 5. The world as we know it today stands on the precipice of a four-fold collapse: financial, environmental, religious skepticism, and resource. Perhaps the world has always been under such dire threats, but statistics rarely lie (no, I’m not going to quote them), and the world’s dangers have to be faced if there is any chance of overcoming them.

I don’t doubt that skeptics of their time viewed the development of the Middle Class in the years before the Renaissance with all the same apprehension in the days of the Middle Ages as we might in our own. But that does not change the fact that history does not happen until it happens, and if the world becomes a more dangerous place, we may stand on the brink of another age in which people turn to certainties as the only bulwark against utter chaos. Is our age more like the Early Middle Ages or the Late Middle Ages?