Happiness

Posted on September 1, 2011 by matthew

In the most recent episode of the new SyFy programme Alphas, the ability of our antagonist was to overstimulate the penial gland of those whom he inadvertently turned into his victims. The result of such overstimulation was an intense, powerful feeling of happiness combined with visions of lights. The only problem is that eventually, many of those whom he thus affected ended up basically going catatonic (the word encephalitic was involved, but that’s just Greek for brain-related).

This type of happiness is chemically-induced. Your brain produces the happy chemical. You feel happy.

If this happy feeling were the goal of life, the result philosophers and prophets and poets have been seeking for millennia in the pursuit of happiness, then why not seek it whenever you please? I mean, why not find a drug that could make you feel happy all the time? Indeed, imagine if you could get your hands on such a drug that was even safe — no nasty side-effects, no catatonic state, no dead liver, no kidney failure. Just pure bliss. If this happy feeling were perfectly equated with happiness, there should be no problem with such a chemical ecstasy, right?

Most of us do not, of course, seek happiness through drugs, legal or otherwise. Most of us seek circumstantially-induced happy feelings. We are happy and content because we just watched an interesting, action-packed, thought-provoking episode of Alphas. We are happy because we are enjoying a warm cup of tea. We are happy because we enjoy our jobs, our homes, our spouses, our hobbies, our books, our sports, our cities, our arts, our countries, our clothes. Circumstances make us happy or unhappy, even if somehow in the mysterious world of cognitive science these circumstances can make the happy chemical be produced in our brain and thus we feel happy.

The philosophers, from what I have read, would counsel a different approach, neither the chemical nor circumstantial happiness being enough.

They would counsel us to find a form of happiness that reaches beyond our circumstances and is able to be found without the aid of drugs or alcohol. For example, the Stoic philosopher Epictetus taught that we can find happiness in any sphere of life. Regardless of the sorrows of this troublous and transitory life. we can find a deep, lasting contentment. Just because you are a slave does no mean you are not free. Freedom is found within, in your own mind, in your own attitude to the circumstances around you.

Did I mention that Epictetus, unlike the famous Stoic of the next generation, Marcus Aurelius, was a slave?

I’d take his word for it — though I don’t know that he spent time in the death-bearing copper mines.

Still, if you’re reading a blog, neither have you.

Perhaps, though, if we find ourselves grounded in something beyond the mere externals of life, our happiness can run deeper than music, literature, food, warm homes, good tea, even a great marriage alone can bring. I reckon that if we grounded our happiness in such a place, in such an approach to the world, in such a philosophical attitude, in such a quest for equilibrium, that not only might we find happiness more generally, but the pleasures and good things listed above would even deepen.

Where to find this equilibrium? Aristotle, translated into Latin, calls it the summum bonum — the highest good. Aquinas teaches us that the summum bonum is God himself, the Triune God revealed in Scripture. Perhaps there we shall find happiness.

I don’t know where your path to happiness is leading you. But I hope you try to seek it in something bigger and better that chemical ecstasies or the fleeting yet beautiful pleasures of this life.

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A Year’s Worth of Tea

Posted on August 27, 2011 by matthew

Our tea cupboard -- 11 varieties on the go!

One year ago today, my wife and I arrived in Edinburgh after a very long journey that flew from Toronto to Keflavik, Iceland, to Heathrow to Glasgow and then a bus to Edinburgh that ended with a taxi to our flat.

We drink a lot of tea, as mentioned previously — more than in Canada. Here’s a year’s worth of tea to give you an idea — some shared with guests but most just the two of us. Those with a + symbol mean that we have a package on the go:

Teabags

Earl Grey: 420+
Lady Grey: 70
Decaf Lady Grey: 40+
Candy Cane Lane: 20
Decaf Cooperative: 80+
Royal Blend: 50
Twinings Chai: 50

Looseleaf

?Scottish Blend: 125g
Genmaicha: 125g+
Early Grey: 125g+

Infusions

Camomile, Honey, & Vanilla: 20+ bags

Others in Progress

Chili Rooibos (50g)
Camomile (20 bags)
White Peach (20g)
Assam (50g)
Assam (50 bags)
Highland Blend (125g)
Twinings Assorted (5 each of Earl Grey, Lady Grey, Assam, Ceylon, English Breakfast)

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Pedantry or Accuracy?

Posted on August 25, 2011 by matthew

Now, I don’t quite remember the book The Screwtape Letters, but the other evening I saw the play put on by Saltmine at Edinburgh Fringe. And in the play, Screwtape talks about how people misuse words all the time, and many of them with the result of destroying virtue — and those who object are called “pedants”, rather than considered rationally.

Perhaps I am a pedant; perhaps I am merely accurate.

However, how hard is it to learn a few simple rules to produce more accurate use of the English language?

Fewer vs. Less

If you can quantify (that is, count) something, use fewer, if not, use less.

“Less flour” but “fewer apples”

The rule is that easy to learn. And if you Google “fewer”, you get all sorts of results that teach the difference between fewer and less.

Thus, at the blog cute overload, the post ought to be “More Veggies, Fewer Wedgies,” not “More Veggies, Less Wedgies“. It even sounds wrong as it stands. But the hamster is cute — one may argue that the hamster is the whole point, but I don’t see why one can’t speak about cuteness with accurate use of English.

Apparently, fewer women are working in television and film according to PerezHilton.com. Yet the headline reads, “Where My Girls At?! Reports Show Less Women Are Working In Hollywood?” I understand that dropping forms of the the verb to be is acceptable practice in various inflected languages; no doubt Perez Hilton was thinking of Latin usage when coming up with this headline, although the needless at concluding the opening query is a bit puzzling; “Where are my girls at?” really makes no sense. So, perhaps, after an opening like that, one ought not really to expect much, right?

Furthermore, why is there a question mark at the end of this title?

The Clutch Blog also discusses “58 Classic Novels In 33 Words Or Less“. It also capitalises the letter I on a preposition of fewer than four letters in a title, something I am given to understand is bad practice in English-language titles.

News sites are no better than blogs, unfortunately. And advertising boggles the imagination.

Everyday vs. Every day

Yesterday at Tesco Express I saw a sign advertising that the bakery items were baked fresh “everyday”. This is nonsensical.

Everyday is an adjective that describes something as being perhaps ordinary or humdrum or typical. Maybe even bland. As an adjective, it must needs modify a noun. You cannot bake everyday. It just is not possible.

You can, however, bake every day. Every day is a temporal adverbial construction that requires the use of the space bar. It can modify verbs in ways than an adjective such as everyday cannot.

“An everyday bakery” vs. “I bake every day”

Apostrophes

I had students this past term who did not understand apostrophes at all. One student in a rebellious essay of punctuational (I don’t actually know the word for this) warfare eschewed them altogether. Another would put them after the letter S every time, without fail. Another student put them before the S every once in a while when, given that we were discussing Achilles or Trojans, it really belonged after the S.

The apostrophe catastrophes mentioned above all surround the use of apostrophes in possessives. The apostrophe comes before the S if you are adding an S to the word being modified. If the word being modified already ends in S such as Achilles or most English plurals (Trojans, Danaans), you add the apostrophe after the S.

“Achilles’ shield” or “the Trojans’ champion” vs. “Hector’s helmet” or “Agamemnon’s pride”

If misuse of apostrophes bothers you, there are two blogs to help fuel your ire/laughter: Apostrophe Abuse and Apostrophe Catastrophes. On a related note, there is also the excellent “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks.

Its vs. It’s

In the world of apostrophes, people frequently make this error. I’m not even going to Google it because it would be too confusing. The rule is breathtakingly simple: There are two versions of this letter combination. One is a contraction, one is not. Contractions always have apostrophes in English. Therefore, the possessive is its and the contraction is it’s. Every time, without fail.

“It’s raining outside, so the Martian is putting on its leathers.”

Now, these are but a few examples. Nonetheless, learning a mere few grammar, punctuation, and word usage rules would make one’s speech and writing (elocution, if you will) more clear, more accurate, and more pleasant for all involved.

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Han Shot First – And Why It Matters

Posted on August 21, 2011 by matthew

Now, it may not matter in terms of great global or cosmic realities whether Greedo or Han shot first in the Mos Eisley cantina in Star Wars. However, in terms of story and what Star Wars is all about — or was all about, before GL took over complete creative control (perhaps he isn’t a genius after all) — it matters. And not just to me — Googling “han shot first” gets you over 199,000 hits.

When Star Wars was released in 1977, no one knew it would become an iconic, mythical, legendary hit and mainstay of popular culture like few other things. So when we meet Han Solo, he is a scoundrel capable of becoming a better man, but not yet — because Star Wars isn’t a mythic thing that buys into its own hype yet, right?

Anyway, when we meet Han Solo, we meet a criminal who smuggles stuff for some unseen mobster with the unsavoury name of Jabba the Hutt. Chances are, he’d've been a smuggler even if the Old Republic was still in business (unlike Malcolm Reynolds, he doesn’t seem to have fought in any world-shattering wars before taking up crime — oh, right, only the clones did that. Lame.).

So meet this scoundrel and criminal in a cantina in Mos Eisley, of all places — “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.” (Ben Kenobi) We know nothing about him, except that he’s a smuggler who needs some cash, and was boarded by the Empire at some point. And he’s got nothing against shooting first.

So, when things with Greedo appear to be going South, he shoots him. Because Han Solo when we meet him is a greedy criminal who kills people to save his own skin. At least like Malcolm Reynolds’ foes, his opponent was armed, awake, and facing him.

Han Solo is not a knight in shining armour. Maybe towards the end of Return of the Jedi he is. But not in Star Wars in 1977 when we meet him. Not yet. He needs to get thrown into a trash compactor on the Death Star, befriend a kid named Luke Skywalker, join a rebellion, and fall for a princess before that happens. He needs to grow as a man.

If Greedo shoots first, this means that Han Solo, rather than being a scoundrel in need of redemption who can change, is already a good enough man. I mean, sure, he kills people. But only in self-defense. Only if they shoot first. He is no longer as dynamic a character; he does not grow as much. And thus, part of his essence, an important part of what makes this scruffy-looking nerfherder an important character is taken away from us by a man who doesn’t seem to realise that if it was good enough in 1977, it’s good enough in 1997 and good enough in 2007 and good enough in 2011.

Having villainous men become good is important in stories. We don’t need anti-heroes, necessarily, but it’s good not to have every one a Beowulf anymore (although Beowulf’s awesomeness actually decreases through the course of the epic, according to the critics). Everyone likes redemption stories. We don’t need our heroes born as heroes. In fact, having recently read over 100 saints’ lives, I can tell you how utterly boring that gets!

The fact is, we’re all born scoundrels, but we’re all capable of becoming heroes. Like Han Solo, who risks his life, his money, and — most important of all — his ship, the iconic Millennium Falcon in a rebellion he could quite easily have avoided once he got his reward before the destruction of the Death Star in Star Wars. But he didn’t — something in him had changed, and so we see him grow and change as a character from our first encounter with him in Mos Eisley through the battles and adventures of The Empire Strikes Back to the battle on the moon of Endor in Return of the Jedi.

Greedo shooting first destroys that and makes the story less of a story.

Perhaps George Lucas didn’t actually know what he was doing in the beginning; perhaps the greatness of the original trilogy as it was formed came not simply from Lucas but from the team of creative minds, including directors, screenwriters, actors, muppeteers, the Jim Henson Creature Shop, special effects teams, and more, that worked with the incipient vision Lucas had.

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The Sorrows of Aeneas

Posted on August 16, 2011 by matthew

This is a brief thought that floated through my mind whilst reading W F Jackson Knight’s translation of Aeneid V this evening, for there we see Aeneas encounter his father, Anchises’, ghost. As Anchises fades from sight, having given his pius son advice, Aeneas cries:

Where do you go in this haste, so soon? Where dart away? Whom are you hurrying to escape? And who denies you to my embrace?

The above is not the first time we meet Aeneas in a situation such as this. In Book I, we see him encounter his mother, Venus, who has taken on the form of a young maiden out hunting (sort of a sexy Artemis). As she departs, her son realises who it is with whom he’s been talking. Aeneas laments her swift departure as well as the fact that she’d fooled him — again.

This seems to be habitual behaviour on the part of Venus, ‘Aeneadum genetrix, hominum divumque voluptas’ (Lucretius 1.1)

As we learn over the course of the next two books, where Virgil’s narratology employs the methods of Homer’s Odyssey through a first-person narration of the past as told by a character in the book, Aeneas has had a terrible time of it. His wife, Creusa, died in the sack of Troy. When her ghost appeared to him, he attempted to embrace her three times, and three times he failed. Then his dad died. Then, after a lot of wandering, we get to the storm with which Virgil opens his epic.

So he meets his mother in the woods, and she doesn’t even have the decency to reveal herself to him and be a mother (Mehercule!). By this stage, Aeneas is probably feeling sort of like, “Really? Again?”

Then there’s the whole Dido thing (see Acts 3-5 of Berlioz’s masterpiece Les Troyens or Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas for this one), following which we have the “funeral” (one-year anniversary of death?) games for Anchises, in the midst of which four ships get burnt by women driven mad by Juno (Juno likes to choose women as her tools in this epic, and she also likes to provoke madness).

Book VI involves more death and sorrow for pius Aeneas — Aeneas comes face to face with his own failures at pietas as he beholds Dido in the Underworld. And then he lands in Latium, where he gets to spend the second half of the epic fighting a war over a girl betrothed to him in a perfectly normal, binding, arranged marriage. At the last, Pallas is slain and Aeneas turns into Achilles (cf. Iliad 21) against the people he is destined to rule.

When you look over the 12 books of the Aeneid, Aeneas gets very few breaks. After losing his entire culture and city along with his wife due to the devious scheming of polytropos Odysseus and his big horse, he tries settling down but never has the opportunity to rest. His dad dies along the way. He meets a nice girl, but that ends badly. So he follows destiny, fulfilling his obligations as a good, pius Roman, only to face a war in which the gods themselves are against him.

Perhaps these sorrows and the fact that he keeps fighting both for his people — that remnant of Troy that was — and for the will of the gods (save for in that whole Dido thing) are what make Aeneas not only pius but also Virgil’s other favoured adjective for this hero, egregius — outstanding.

Pius — that acts according to duty, dutiful; esp. that performs what is due to the gods and religion in general, to parrents, kindred, teachers, country; pious, devout, conscientious, affectionate, tender, kind, good, grateful, respectful, loyal, patriotic, etc. (of persons and things) (from Lewis & Short)

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Indians

Posted on August 4, 2011 by matthew

I’m partway into Thomas King’s The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, comprising the CBC Massey Lectures of 2003. In chapter 2 of this book (lecture 2 of the broadcast, I s’pose), ‘You’re Not the Indian I Had in Mind,’ King talks about Edward Sheriff Curtis, the man who at the turn of the 20th century immortalised the image of the proud, noble Indian (noble savage? Rousseau, anyone?) through his photographs, many of which were staged to ‘look right’, involving clothing from other native cultures than that being photographed, wigs, horses, the whole bit.

We’ve entered Festival season in Edinburgh. The already-congested-by-normal-tourists streets have become well-nigh impassible almost overnight as the festival-goers, pamphleteers, and street performers compete with frustrated ‘locals’ (like me?) who are just trying to get from A to B.

On the Royal Mile, besides the people trying to construct and immortalise the image of the proud, noble Scot (‘Braveheart’, unnamed other medieval Scotsman/Highlander, bagpipers, cheap cashmere all available on the Royal Mile now!), were some of those South American panpipe players who seem to have sprouted in most major cities, though I never saw any in Nicosia, Cyprus.

What made this group of South Americans interesting was twofold. First, they were playing ‘Chiquitita’ by Abba on the panpipes. Interesting choice. I’ll reserve my comments for that sort of thing, perpetrated by the Red Hot Chili Pipers and others day in and day out, later. Second, and this became apparent upon entering the line of vision to see these South American fellows, their attire was essentially ‘pan-Indian’.

These guys had similar facial features to the other indigenous South Americans I’ve seen either playing panpipes or in photographs; they were also appropriately swarthy, the sort of thing one goes for when trying to look Indian (I have a friend of Norwegian descent who can tan really well and has been known to comment on how much darker he gets in summer than some of the Ojibwe and Cree of his acquaintance — but he’ll never look Indian). They also had facepaint on. These factors alone would probably make them look Indian, or at least foreign to any passersby.

But these guys decided to make it perfectly clear who they were. So they were all wearing leathers, and the lead panpiper had on one of those feathered head-dresses that reach all the way to one’s feet, the sort of thing my immortalised image of ‘Indians’ associates with ‘chiefs’ of the Plains of North America, with Blackfoot or Assiniboine or Cree, not with Peru. Another member of the band had one of those bone breastplates as part of his attire.

When I mentioned them to a man I know who lived for many years in Peru, he said that he’d been unable to place the attire but that it was nothing he’d encountered in South America.

The immortalised Indian of Edward Sheriff Curtis has grabbed a hold of our imaginations to such a degree that ‘pan-Indianism’ is homogenising the image of these varied and vast peoples across the whole New World, taking attire from the Plains of Alberta into the jungles of Peru.

This is not what my Shawnee ancestors, ‘the Prophet’ Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh had in mind when they sought to bring the different native peoples of North America together in the early nineteenth century (the effort was largely Tenskwatawa’s, although Tecumseh’s efforts to gain national and land rights with Sir Isaac Brock are part of the same larger effort to preserve native ways and rights in the wake of the encroaching European colonies).*

Canada is large. Europe is not small, either. Living in Europe (or rather in the northern portion of a large island off the coast of Europe), I am aware of just how many different peoples live here, each of them with their own traditions, languages, stories, customs, literature, music, and so forth. Even on this island, we have three living languages and a gazillion accents with traces of the old dialects creeping in nooks and crannies, fighting boldly against the all-devouring dialect called ‘Standard English.’

Europe is aware of its diversity and embraces it while at the same time making movement within this natural diversity easy. The kilted Scot and the liederhosened German are free to mingle and get to know one another, free to find similarities, quite aware of differences.

One would imagine that North America would be just as varied, and South America equally so. Yet there were these South Americans in North American headdresses, in feathers and leathers, competing with the bagpiper in a kilt.**

It boggles the mind.

*Alas, their sister’s husband, the man from whom I claim direct descent, did not do much to realise the dreams of his brothers-in-law during his much-loathed tenure as Indian Agent on Manitoulin Island. He is not much-loved to this day, which is a shame. Things could have gone so much better, but somehow they didn’t, and unlike Thomas King I don’t blame Genesis 1-3 …

**And is that bagpiper really what my other (and much more numerous) ancestors fought for in the Jacobite uprising of 1715?

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Finding Hadrian’s Wall

Posted on May 18, 2011 by matthew

A couple of Mondays ago, I was in Northumberland, heading up to Scotland along the scenic A68. Based on our map, we knew that we would go right past Hadrian’s Wall. This was not to be missed. So, when the signage told us “Hadrian’s Wall 1/2 m” (that “m” is for “mile” not “metre”), we took that turning on the roundabout and left the A68.

1/2 mile down the B6318, we hadn’t really found Hadrian’s Wall, although I was pretty sure that what looked like a manmade ditch (the vallum) to the north of the road was part of its remains. We stopped at Heavenfield Battlefield of AD 635, observed no remains, and continued along.

Shortly after Heavenfield, I peered over the drystone wall and saw a sign that said, “Hadrian’s Wall,” and a short section of … wall. “There it is!” I said.

For some reason, we continued to the next roundabout — it did have signs pointing us to Chesters Roman fort. But that was a lot further away than what I’d seen. As we circled around and came off the roundabout the direction we’d come, there was a sign telling us that the Wall was 3/4 mile away.

This brought us back to where I thought I’d seen the Wall, where we pulled off the narrow road into a private laneway with gates across it. I couldn’t see into the field across the road due to the wall in the way, but a hiker assured me that there was a bit of the Wall in that field.

I got everyone out of the car, and we climbed the wall on a “stile”, a series of steps on either side designed for walkers. And there was Hadrian’s Wall. Just sitting there. In the middle of a field.

The bit of wall was not overly long. Nor was it overly tall. The Wall made for good building material, so much of it is now gone. But still — Hadrian’s Wall!!! We proceeded to climb all over it and take photos:

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Epic Retellings: Warlord’s “Achilles’ Revenge”

Posted on May 17, 2011 by matthew

I have a habit of keeping my eyes out for epic retellings, if you recall my post about Eric Shanower’s Age of Bronze. My friend Tom recently posted a video on Facebook of Warlord playing “Achilles’ Revenge”.

There is something appropriate about a heavy metal song singing of Achilles and Troy, a song inspired by the Iliad.This genre of music is, as you can guess from its name, heavy. The song has some pretty good electric guitar work going on, including a guitar solo. It is fast, and it is powerful:

The Iliad, if you read it, is primarily composed of line after line of dactylic hexameters about people dying/killing in various ways between the Achaean ships and the walls of Troy. The action itself may slow down everyone once in a while, but usually through an extended simile or speeches by warriors. The actual fighting, the violence, the aristeiai of the warrior-heroes rarely stops, except maybe to sleep (and even then we have the night raid of Odysseus and Diomedes in Bk 10).

I’m no heavy metal expert, but my friend Sebastien once gave me a CD of Power Metal. Power Metal is the epic, mythical sub-genre, to be held in distinction from Death Metal and other sub-genres. Power Metal is so epic that the singers often cast themselves as heroes and warriors riding forth together to engage in some sort of great quest. They sing songs about dragons and wizards and other such things. I understand that it is a largely Scandinavian phenomenon. (If I’m wrong, please correct me.)

As much as I like, say, Les Troyens by Berlioz or The Return of Ulysses by Monteverdi, I think Achilles and his mates would have been more attracted to heavy metal than opera. Opera is beautiful and complex, but heavy metal is also complex and has its own, different beauty.

Heavy metal also has the force and power of an epic warrior driving it along. Opera takes too long to say anything. Achilles will have converse with you, briefly, then plunge his sword through your throat, casting your shade to Hades as you fall face forward and bite the dust.

The Iliad is the poem of force, as Simone Weil demonstrates. Heavy metal is the music of force. This union of the two just makes sense.

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Windy Edinburgh

Posted on April 15, 2011 by matthew

Me, My hat, and Sir Walter Scott

I am a wearer of a hat.* My hat is a black felt cap with the added feature of ear flaps that can fold down if needed. I think this hat is awesome. The only trouble with wearing a hat in Edinburgh is that, well, Edinburgh is windy.

On Tuesday this week, for example, I was crossing Princes Street at North Bridge (meaningless if you don’t know the city, but whatever; google it). As I crossed, the wind grabbed my hat and tossed it into the middle of the intersection (if it wasn’t the wind, it was a fairy, goblin, or gremlin).

North Bridge hits Princes Street as a T-intersection at a statue of the Duke of Wellington. We pedestrians were allowed to cross because the cars turning right (like a left in most of the civilised world) had a green. My hat landed approximately three feet from the outside edge of the turning cars.

I watched as they all drove past my hat. Determining that no car would hit either me or the hat I approached the hat. Then I waited until a bus was turning and grabbed the hat while the bus was beside it. I carried my hat until I was across North Bridge and on the Royal Mile.

This was not an isolated incident. One time, my hat was snatched by the wind, and I turned to see it descending from at least a metre or a metre and a half above my head. Thankfully it landed on the pavement (sidewalk). Another time, at the intersection of Lothian Road and Fountainbridge, the fences that the city erected along Lothian caught my hat before it could be blown into traffic.

My hat is not the only victim of these winds, however.

I used to own an umbrella. A good, sturdy £16 umbrella. Bought it at Boots when we first arrived.** It was a rainy, windy September day, and I was on my way to study, so I had to go up Granny’s Green Steps. These (as in this photo) are a very steep flight of stairs that go right up the side of the craggy, extinct-volcano-hill-thing upon which the castle stands. In order to keep the rain from soaking me and the wind from snatching away the umbrella, I angled my umbrella into the wind as I mounted the steps.

And then the spokes that go out from the stick in the middle (I know nothing of umbrella parts), the ones that hold the umbrella open (yeah, those ones) — half of them collapsed. They bent the wrong way.

Most people get their umbrellas destroyed by the wind turning them inside not, not the wind collapsing and imploding them. But I am not most people, and the high-speed, North-Sea winds that blow into Edinburgh are not normal winds.

These winds are cold and, as you can see from the above, strong. So the BBC will tell you that it’s going to be 10 above. Great! That’s balmy for many Canadians. Aye, but then there’s that wind, eh? Cold, bitter, driving, cutting through everything but wool. Lots of wool.

No wonder Scots raise so many sheep.

So if you ever come to Edinburgh, come equipped for the wind and leave behind your umbrella.

*Not a wearer of hats given that I wear only one.

**Maybe my problem is buying umbrellas at drug stores; I dunno.

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Entertaining Ourselves to Death

Posted on April 14, 2011 by matthew

The title of this post is the sort of thing that usually comes to mind when I’ve just done something like watch an entire season of Doctor Who over four days or something. However, yesterday I watched the music video “Friday” by Rebecca Black, and spent the evening before that watching Tommy Wiseau’s The Room with some friends. Yes, there was Scotchka and spoon-throwing.

Both of these pieces of entertainment, quite frankly, suck.

At time of writing, however, Black’s music video has received 100,534,819 views. Over ONE HUNDRED MILLION. As well, people are spending a lot of time and energy in mocking this terrible, terrible music video. The only such one I’ve read is likely the best.

And people organise entire nights to watch The Room with their friends. The entire purpose is to make fun of it, and the cult surrounding Tommy Wiseau has us all doing things like throwing spoons every time we see spoon art, or chanting “Go, go, go, go, go …” during the excessively long and meaningless pan of the Golden Gate Bridge, or yelling, “See ya, Denny!” And so forth.

We have grown so desperate to entertain ourselves that we will watch, rewatch, and then meticulously critique big piles of crap simply because it amuses us. This is somewhat remarkable. Usually, if hordes of people willingly interacted with a piece of bad art to enjoy themselves (*cough* The Da Vinci Code *cough*), they at least  liked the p.o.s.

I think this may be a sign of the decay of our culture. We have drunk deep from the well of Nirvana: “Here we are now, entertain us.”

Nevertheless, there is more to life than entertainment — even good entertainment! There is more to life than entertaining ourselves at any cost, even if that cost is a mere 2 h of raucous mockery of Tommy Wiseau’s inability to create a plot, or only a few minutes of shuddering at Rebecca Black’s autotuned voice.

Take in some real art. Let it absorb you. Let it transform you. Allow it to act upon  you. This, I think, will be a radically different experience than most of us — self included — tend to have when entertaining ourselves.

Mind you, proper recreation is worthwhile. I am a firm believer in the Tarzan Principle. Perhaps I’ll blog about that next. Nonetheless, if we’re so hellbent on entertaining ourselves, at least do it with something worth our time! And even try to improve ourselves while we’re at it.

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