Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 161

Indian Mascot Nation

by Dish Staff

As the movement to change the Washington Redskins’ name continues to grow – the Secretary of the Interior just on the matter – Hayley Munguia found that a surprising number of high schools have similarly named mascots:

Terry Borning, the proprietor of MascotDB, has kept a database of the nation’s mascots since 2006. He gathers his data from a variety of sources, including state high school athletic associations, websites and local newspapers. Borning’s database doesn’t have every high school, college and pro team in the country, but it does have 42,624 of them. Looking at MascotDB is as close as we can get to understanding how prevalent Native American team names and mascots are across the country. …

I searched the database and found 2,129 sports teams that reference Braves, Chiefs, Indians, Orangemen, Raiders, Redmen, Reds, Redskins, Savages, Squaws, Tribe and Warriors, as well as tribe names such as Apaches, Arapahoe, Aztecs, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Chinooks, Chippewas, Choctaws, Comanches, Eskimos, Mohawks, Mohicans, Seminoles, Sioux and Utes. (Not all teams with the names “Raiders” and “Warriors” are referencing Native Americans, but we spot-checked 20 schools with each name and a majority of each did.) Some 92 percent of those 2,129 team names belong to high schools (the rest were college, semi-pro, pro and amateur league teams). Of all the active high schools in the database, 8.2 percent have Native American team names.

The Science Of Truthiness

by Dish Staff

Katy Waldman delves into it:

Truthiness is “truth that comes from the gut, not books,” Colbert said in 2005. … Scientists who study the phenomenon now also use the term. It humorously captures how, as cognitive psychologist Eryn Newman put it, “smart, sophisticated people” can go awry on questions of fact. Newman, who works out of the University of California – Irvine, recently uncovered an unsettling precondition for truthiness: The less effort it takes to process a factual claim, the more accurate it seems. When we fluidly and frictionlessly absorb a piece of information, one that perhaps snaps neatly onto our existing belief structures, we are filled with a sense of comfort, familiarity, and trust. The information strikes us as credible, and we are more likely to affirm it – whether or not we should.

Mental Health Break

by Dish Staff

A piano was definitely harmed in the making of this surprisingly beautiful film:

This Magic Moment

by Dish Staff

Lev Grossman declares that the fantasy genre has “become one of the great pillars of popular culture and, increasingly, the way we tell stories now,” pointing to examples like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and Game of Thrones. The explanation he offers for this:

If my generation is remembered for anything, it will be as the last one that remembers the world before the Internet. You can’t compare what we’ve gone through to WWI, because that would be insane, but it’s not a trivial thing either. Lewis and Tolkien saw the physical world remade around them. The changes we’ve seen have been largely invisible but still radical: they happened in the sphere of information and communication and simulation and ubiquitous computation.

Which is why it makes sense that so much of the 20th century was preoccupied with science fiction, a genre that, among other things, grapples with the presence of technology in our lives, our minds, and our bodies, and with how our tools change the world and how they change us. Those issues are of paramount, urgent importance right now. But a countervailing movement is happening too: we’re also turning to fantasy. It’s counterintuitive, because fantasy is so often set in pre-industrial landscapes where technology is notable for its absence, but it must have something we need. We’re using it to ask questions. We like to celebrate this world, our new world, as a paradise of connectedness, a networked utopia, but is it possible that on some level we feel as disconnected from it as Lewis and Tolkien did from theirs?

Grossman’s takeaway:

God knows, characters in fantasy worlds aren’t always happy: if anything the ambient levels of misery in Westeros are probably significantly higher than those in the real world. But they’re not distracted. They’re not disconnected. The world they live in isn’t alien to them, it’s a reflection of the worlds inside them, and they feel like an intimate part of it. In the real world we’re busy staring at our phones as global warming gradually renders the world we’re ignoring uninhabitable. Fantasy holds out the possibility that there’s another way to live.

Andrew And Matt Ask Anything: Christian Wiman, Ctd

by Matthew Sitman

Going into our conversation with Christian Wiman, Andrew and I wanted to make sure we gave him the chance to read a few of his poems. Not only is Wiman a brilliant poet, but he’s an exceptionally gifted reader of poetry – he brings an intensity to the task that I always find striking. You can tell this is a man for whom poetry really matters, who sees in an arrangement of words the possibility of revelation. Hearing Wiman read his work transforms how you read it yourself. Or it should. I can’t crack open his books without his Texas-tinged voice crowding out my own.

Both of the poems below are from Every Riven Thing, a volume Wiman published in 2010 that grapples with his cancer diagnosis and renewed Christian faith. The first, “2047 Grace Street,” is one of my personal favorites, and the poem with which I began my essay:

The second poem is “From a Window,” which captures a flash of insight that occurred while looking at a tree:

Dish subscribers can listen to the full podcast here and read my essay on Wiman here. If you still need to subscribe, here’s the link.

A Timely Read

by Dish Staff

James Wood summarizes David Mitchell’s appeal in a review of his new book, The Bone Clocks:

He has a marvellous sense of the real and of the unreal, and his best work keeps these elements in nice tension—a balancing of different vitalities. One of the reasons he is such a popular and critically lauded writer is that he combines both the giddy, freewheeling ceaselessness of the pure storyteller with the grounded realism of the humanist. There’s something for everyone, traditionalist or postmodernist, realist or fantasist; Mitchell is a steady entertainer. Pleasing his readership, he has said, is important to him: “One of the questions I always try to keep in the front of my mind is to ask why would anyone want to read this, and to try to find a positive answer for that. People’s time, if you bought it off them, is expensive. Someone’s going to give you eight or ten hours of their life. I want to give them something back, and I want it to be an enjoyable experience.”

Derek Thompson hails the novel an “almost-masterpiece”:

For diehard Mitchell fans, The Bone Clocks is another six-part, globe-trotting, time-traveling performance in literary ventriloquism. For the unconverted, it offers everything you could possibly want from a conjurer at the height of his powers—a ludicrously ambitious, unstoppably clever epic told through a chorus of diverse narrators that is both outrageous in scope and meticulous in execution.

The story begins with Holly Sykes, a love-struck teenager gushing over her first boyfriend in 1984 England. After a vicious fight with her mother, Holly runs away from home and reveals that she has a history of hearing voices and seeing what may be ghosts. Wandering the countryside in self-exile, she encounters strangers whose clues, threats, and mystic wisdom hint at a fantasy universe that remains present but often unseen for the rest of the novel, coursing under the main narrative like an underground river.

Alan Jacobs recommends the book with more measured praise:

The Bone Clocks is a massive achievement, and allows us for the first time to see just how ambitious a writer David Mitchell is. He is not stylistically ambitious as, say, James Joyce was — as I’ve noted, Mitchell shares Joyce’s love of pastiche, but it’s fairly pedestrian vocabularies that he likes to imitate. His books don’t quite amount to novels of ideas, at least not in a conventional sense. In fact, it’s hard to describe Mitchell’s ambition. But while it has long been noted that Mitchell tends to recycle characters — people who appear as minor figures in one novel reappear as major ones in another — only with The Bone Clocksare we able to see that this is not just a little novelistic quirk but rather a central feature of Mitchell’s imagination. All of his books are starting to look like a single vast web of story, with each significant character a node that links to other nodes, across space and time. And the essential insight, or image, or hope that provides structure to the whole web is the immortality of the human soul.

Kathryn Schulz is also impressed:

You could call Mitchell a global writer, I suppose, but that does not quite capture what he is doing. It is closer to say that he is a pangaeic writer, a supercontinental writer. What is for geologists a physical fact—that the world is everywhere interconnected, bound together in a cycle of faulting and folding, rifting and drifting, erosion and uplift—is, for Mitchell, a metaphysical conviction. Immensity alone, he knows, is psychologically and morally risky; it makes our own lives so comparatively insignificant that it can produce fatalism, or depression, or unimpeded self-interest. To counter that, his fiction tries again and again to square the scale of the world with the human scale, down to its smallest and inmost components. The human conscience matters because it leads to action—a captain holds his fire, a free man saves a slave—and human action matters because, if everything is interconnected, everything we do tugs on the web of space and time.

But David Plotz finds the scope tiresome:

Mitchell hurls people, places, and ideas at us; so many that none stick. From a single page: Noongar, Moombaki, Ship People, Pablo Antay, Five Fingers, Lucas Marinus, Nagasaki, Whadjuk, Horology, Nineveh, Ur, the Deep Stream, the Schism, the genocide in Van Diemen’s Land, Xi Lo, Esther, spirit-walk, the oldest Atemporal, Freemantle, the Swan river, Shakespeare, Rome, and Troy.

Mitchell has written a book about immortality that mimics immortality itself. It feels like it takes forever.

And Emily Temple strikes a middle ground, remarking that though The Bone Clocks isn’t Mitchell’s best, “you should really read it anyway”:

The Bone Clocks suffers from the same essential problem that Cloud Atlas has, which is this: under all the language play and virtuosic storytelling, under all that delight, what is Mitchell really telling us? Surely not simply, in Cloud Atlas, that we are all connected; surely not simply, in The Bone Clocks, that life is precious, that death is scary and inevitable, or that good is preferable to evil. Big ideas, but not complex concepts, at least not as presented here.

For all its many characters and styles, Cloud Atlas wrapped itself up with a bow: we began where we started, having hit all the same steps on the way down, and it felt whole. The Bone Clocks feels somewhat more than whole — it feels exploded, or maybe like one very good novel that invaded the consciousness of another very good novel. Or four.

A Poem For Saturday

by Alice Quinn

For many years, LuAnn Walther, editorial director of Vintage Books, Anchor Books, and Everyman’s Library has orchestrated one of the greatest poetry publishing enterprises in America, bringing out nearly one hundred anthologies in the Everyman Pocket Poets series, including single-author titles such as superb selections of the work of Emily Bronte and W.H. Auden and themed anthologies ranging from Lullabies and Poems for Children and Eat, Drink, and Be Merry: Poems About Food and Drink to Marriage Poems, Jazz Poems, Poems of the Sea, and Love Speaks Its Name: Gay and Lesbian Love Poems.

The newest in this enchanting set of books is Poems of the American South, edited by David Biespiel. We’ve drawn some gems from it for our poems this week.

From “The Ozark Odes” by C.D. Wright:

Girlhood

Mother had one. She and Bernice racing for the river

to play with their paperdolls

because they did not want any big ears

to hear what their paperdolls were fixing to say.

Dry County Bar

Bourbon not fit to put on a sore. No women enter;

their men collect in every kind of weather

with no shirts on whatsoever.

Porch

I can still see the Cuddihy’s sisters

trimming the red tufts

under one another’s arms.

Lake Return

Why I come here: need for a bottom, something to refer to;

where all things visible and invisible commence to swarm.

(From Steal Away: Selected and New Poems © 1991, 1996 by C.D.Wright. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company on behalf of Copper Canyon Press. This poem also can be found in the anthology noted above, Poems of the American South, Everyman Pocket Poets. Photo of the White River in Arkansas by Thomas and Dianne Jones)

Object Lesson

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

Arguing against feminists (but which feminists? more on that in a moment), Ann Friedman defends objectification within relationships:

Within a healthy relationship or sexual interaction, a little objectification is a good thing. Often, it’s a necessary thing. Even the most ardent feminist sometimes wants to feel physically appreciated and desired in a way that is separate from her other qualities. Without a little bit of objectification, every sexual encounter would essentially be gentle lovemaking with lots of eye contact. The sort of eye contact that’s deep and meaningful enough to convey complex messages like, “You really killed it at work this week, you make me laugh, and I love your hot bod.” It’s a nice sentiment, sure, but not exactly a headboard-banging night. Sometimes you just want to get laid.

Especially when you’re several years deep into a relationship, a bit of remove is often essential to getting it up. It can be hard to feel sexy when you’re thinking about the financial stress you’re under, or a parent’s illness, or your partner’s work, or any of the multifaceted aspects of your daily relationship. Focusing on bodies can provide a welcome disconnect. “There has to be an ‘other’ for there to be sexiness,” psychologist Marta Meana told Macleans last year.

All of that sounds reasonable enough, if not as contrarian as Friedman’s making it out to be. She opens her piece by declaring that there’s a feminist consensus that objectification is “bad.” But is there? There is, as she notes, some new research on men who “excessively” objectify their female partners. Fair enough, but who’s arguing against a sensible amount of physical admiration? There’s a feminist consensus, I suppose, that it’s bad to be treated as a sexual object in an inappropriate setting – that is, by your professor or boss, or by a man who’s traveled the length of a public bus just to let you know that he thinks you’d be prettier if you smiled.

And there’s certainly dissent among feminists when it comes to pornography. While I – a feminist, not speaking for all-the-feminists – agree with Dan Savage that the wife in the first letter here sounds… troubled, he might have at least acknowledged that there are ethical concerns about how a good amount of porn is produced, and that even a woman without tremendous “DTMFA”-worthy insecurities might be, I don’t know, miffed, if she really thought about how she stacked up, so to speak, against the women her partner looks at on the internet. But where’s the feminist who, if called beautiful or hot by her male partner, would cry sexism and run for the hills?

Friedman, then, is completely right about the value of objectification within relationships. I disagree only with her assessment of how much of an aberration that position could possibly be within feminism today.

The View From Your Window

by Dish Staff

Laughlin, Nevada, 8 am

Spam Lit

by Dish Staff

Dan Piepenbring close-reads an automated blog comment with fascination:

If you give it your name it will call you by it when you start up the GPS. These incidences come about quite normally, showing that Peter dislikes his daughter. A huge clue that your ex boyfriend still has feelings for you. —geniadove

That swerve at “Peter dislikes his daughter”—whoa! Dissertations have been written about less. And to see a clinical phrase like “These incidences come about quite normally” next to a casual one like “A huge clue”: What does it all mean? The mind searches restlessly, somewhat desperately, for connective tissue, some semblance of conventional narrative. Like autostereograms, these comments always verge on resolving into a discernible whole; unlike autostereograms, they never do.

He goes on to consider spam as part of a literary tradition:

[T]here are a number of literary antecedents here: found poetry, Dadaist ready-mades, collage and bricolage, cutups, aleatoric poems, various Oulipo shenanigans. Most especially, there’s spoetry, spam lit, and flarf, similar movements from the past two decades that have made poetic hay from the Internet’s endless detritus. Flarf descends from Gary Sullivan, who collaborated with other poets online, constructing abhorrently bland poems from the results of random Google searches, workplace memos, Associated Press stories, and the like. (“awe yea You see, somebody’s done messed up / my latvian women’s soccer team fantasy REAL bad, / oh pagers make of cheese,” goes a representative sample.) …

I admire the impulse behind spam lit, and I’ve read some of it with great interest, but I’d argue that any sort of human interference, even if only to “curate” the spam, dilutes its strength a bit—it’s best encountered in its natural environment, which is to say your inbox, where it can baffle, perturb, interrupt, and otherwise fuck with you.