The 15 most interesting paragraphs I read this year
Fascinating stuff re: dancing, lone wolves, reification, narcissism, Buddhism vs. therapy, trauma, death, condensation, prostitution, animal senses, and more.
Quickies
🎯 It's too bad narcissists don't go to therapy. They'd love it. You just get to talk about yourself for an hour.
🎯 If you didn't want me to spit on your baby, you shouldn't have put him in a Sex Pistols onesie. 🤘
🎯 Want a say on what happens in girls' sports? Then I think you should be forced to actually watch girls' sports. Remember “No taxation without representation”? Well, no transphobia without having to sit through 7 hours of this field hockey tournament on ESPN9.
🎯 Saw an Amtrak brochure that said, “AMTRAK: WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER…LITERALLY.” I keep wondering what the rejected copy options were. Maybe: ”AMTRAK: LOOK, WE DON'T LIKE THIS ANY MORE THAN YOU DO.”
🎯 The DSM is the Victoria's Secret catalog for therapists.
🎯 That the white pages of the phone book would now be considered doxxing tells you everything you need to know about the victimhood inflation that's occurred in our society. Paper cuts are considered stab wounds now.
🎯 RIP punching up vs. punching down. That required agreement on who is the establishment and who is a victim. Nowadays, *everyone* is convinced they are the victim and their enemy is the establishment. It’s all trés lame.
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The 15 most interesting paragraphs I read this year
Lo and behold, my annual list of fave paragraphs I read in the past year. (Check out the 2021 and 2020 versions.) Bold emphasis is mine.
My top pick…
➡️ Kurt Vonnegut tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope.
Oh, she says, well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.
I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And I’ll ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is – we’re here on Earth to fart around.
And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And it’s like we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.
…and here are the rest:
➡️ We Are Alive by David Remnick
It took some doing to get [Bruce] Springsteen, an “isolationist” by nature, to settle into a real marriage, and resist the urge to dwell only in his music and onstage. “Now I see that two of the best days of my life,” he once told a reporter for Rolling Stone, “were the day I picked up the guitar and the day that I learned how to put it down.”
[Bruce’s wife Patti] Scialfa smiled at that. “When you are that serious and that creative, and non-trusting on an intimate level, and your art has given you so much, your ability to create something becomes your medicine,” she said. “It’s the only thing that’s given you that stability, that joy, that self-esteem. And so you are, like, ‘This part of me no one is going to touch.’ When you’re young, that works, because it gets you from A to B. When you get older, when you are trying to have a family and children, it doesn’t work. I think that some artists can be prone to protecting the well that they fetched their inspiration from so well that they are actually protecting malignant parts of themselves, too. You begin to see that something is broken. It’s not just a matter of being the mythological lone wolf; something is broken. Bruce is very smart. He wanted a family, he wanted a relationship, and he worked really, really, really hard at it––as hard as he works at his music.”
➡️ Mental Health Is Political by Danielle Carr
Some social scientists have a term, “reification,” for the process by which the effects of a political arrangement of power and resources start to seem like objective, inevitable facts about the world. Reification swaps out a political problem for a scientific or technical one; it’s how, for example, the effects of unregulated tech oligopolies become “social media addiction,” how climate catastrophe caused by corporate greed becomes a “heat wave” — and, by the way, how the effect of struggles between labor and corporations combines with high energy prices to become “inflation.” Examples are not scarce.
For people in power, the reification sleight of hand is very useful because it conveniently abracadabras questions like “Who caused this thing?” and “Who benefits?” out of sight. Instead, these symptoms of political struggle and social crisis begin to seem like problems with clear, objective technical solutions — problems best solved by trained experts. In medicine, examples of reification are so abundant that sociologists have a special term for it: “medicalization,” or the process by which something gets framed as primarily a medical problem. Medicalization shifts the terms in which we try to figure out what caused a problem, and what can be done to fix it. Often, it puts the focus on the individual as a biological body, at the expense of factoring in systemic and infrastructural conditions.
➡️ What Unites Buddhism and Psychotherapy? by Oliver Burkeman
Buddhism’s critical insight, though, is that those personal stories are just stories, as opposed to nonnegotiable, objective reality; that the selves to which they occur are much less substantial than we tend to assume — and that freedom lies ultimately not in understanding what happened to us, but in loosening our grip on it all, so that “things that feel fixed, set, permanent and unchanging” can start to shift. The goal, in a refreshing counterpoint to the excesses of a certain way of thinking about therapy, isn’t to reach the state of feeling glowingly positive about yourself and your life. It’s to become less entangled with that whole question, so that you get to spend your time on more meaningful things instead.
➡️ It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart by Jennifer Senior
It’s the dying that does it, always. I started here; I end here (we all end here). It is amazing how the death of someone you love exposes this lie you tell yourself, that there’ll always be time. You can go months or even years without speaking to a dear old friend and feel fine about it, blundering along, living your life. But discover that this same friend is dead, and it’s devastating, even though your day-to-day life hasn’t changed one iota. You’re rudely reminded that this is a capricious, disordered cosmos we live in, one that suddenly has a friend-size hole in it, the air now puckered where this person used to be.
➡️ What Makes Death Bad? by Lawrence Yeo
Mark Twain seemed to have understood this when he said:
I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
If anything, non-existence is the default state for all of you. There’s only a short blip on this ridiculously long timeframe where you exist, and then you return back to normality.
Remember what it was like before you were born? I didn’t think so. Well, that’s what it’s like after life. Non-existence… just like the billions of years before.
How is that a bad thing?
➡️ The only line comedy shouldn’t cross is the no-laughter line by Casey Michael Henry
Comedy requires passage into the ugly, uncomfortable areas of the human heart, particularly in a live forum. So, in the manner of jesters before medieval kings, comics need a temporary pass, a stay of execution, to do their work. Calling oneself a comedian is tantamount to issuing a personal-injury disclaimer. Like philosophical BDSM, the audience’s response gives signals to the performer in play. Stand-up audiences trust the stunt pilotry of the comedian – to watch the looping-through-obstacles of apparent offence into a broader pay-off.
➡️ Why Do We Love the Music We Love? Susan Rogers, author of This Is What It Sounds Like, explaining why Miles Davis said some of the best musicians that he knew were not musicians.
It took a long time for that message to fully sink in, because as a non-musician, I had branded myself as someone who wasn’t fully qualified to discuss what music is, to discuss good versus bad, and to discuss how it works. When he said that some of that—“some of best musicians I know aren’t musicians”—I hung on to that. And then a few years later, I met musicians who played with him, and two of them independently said when we would play, he would sometimes tell us, “play like non-musicians.” He doesn’t mean play with no technique. He means play from a naive perspective, play like a 97-year-old would play, if they had the physical dexterity. Play like a 3-year-old would play if he had any musical training. I began to recognize that, yes, there’s music in everyone.
➡️ The reality of prostitution is not complex. It is simple. by Rachel Moran
While it is fashionable for some female academics, journalists and social commentators to declare the validity of prostitution as employment and to endorse and support this fiction in their books, articles and opinion columns, I note that they resolutely will not practise what they preach. They are not usually willing to have their own bodies used to prove their point. What’s always been particularly galling to me about socially privileged upper middle-class women who popularise these views is that, just like Marie Antoinette before them, they are so far removed from the experience that they cannot relate to it even at a conceptual level. That they are handsomely remunerated to opine on what’s good enough for desperate women is just the spit and polish on the insult.
➡️ Journey into the world that animals know by Ed Yong (as heard on Fresh Air)
So flowers absolutely are extraordinarily beautiful, but if you had the ultraviolet vision that a bee has, you'll be able to see patterns on those flowers that we can't see…One of my favorite things about the relationship between insect vision and flowers is that if you took all the colors in all the flowers that were out there, and you asked ... what kind of color vision is best at discriminating between these colors? What you get is an eye that's basically almost what a bee has, an eye that is maximally sensitive to blue, green and ultraviolet. And you might think then that the bee eye has evolved to see the colors of flowers really well. That's exactly the opposite of what happened, because the bee eye came first, the flowers evolved later. So the colors of flowers have evolved to ideally tickle the eyes of bees, and I think that's a truly wondrous result. It means that beauty, as we know it, is not only in the eye of the beholder, it arises because of that eye.
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