“Once you become an idea’s defender, you have a harder time changing your mind about it.”
— Michael Lewis, The Big Short, paraphrasing investor Michael Burry (slightly paraphrased again by me)
Odds & Ends
Explaining Insomnia
Jonah Lehrer on why we can’t sleep, an affliction that has me thrashing around every night:
Because insomnia is triggered, at least in part, by anxiety about insomnia, the worst thing we can do is think about not being able to sleep; the diagnosis exacerbates the disease. And that’s why this frustrating condition will never have a perfect medical cure.
Bill Gates on Energy
Is there a more demoralizing problem than global warming? Discussing it feels utterly hopeless. Climate skeptics are unmoveable despite the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence. Intelligent, well-meaning conservative friends of mine, people I like and respect, simply reject that the problem exists, let alone that we ought to fix it.
So I found this video of Bill Gates at TED heartening. Saddled as we are with a feckless government and a venomous, polarized political climate, it is good to know there are actual adults working on solutions. It is a hopeful note to take with you into the weekend.
Also, it occurs to me that Bill Gates has become, surprisingly, a model of how the obscenely wealthy ought to behave. Instead of using his wealth for self-indulgence or simply to go on making more and more money to no real purpose, as so many rich guys do, he has become a powerful, articulate force for good. Whatever you may think of his products or his business tactics at Microsoft (and I am no fan), Gates has become a sort of self-funded NGO, consciously emulating enlightened plutocrats past, Carnegie in particular. No longer the nerdy villain to Steve Jobs’s hip, black-turtlenecked rebel, Gates now takes on problems that seem too big even for governments: disease and poverty in Africa, global warming. Isn’t that a greater contribution than, say, the iPad?
Rest and Re-creation
Reading Little Dorrit the other day, I came across a sentence describing Mr. Pancks as a man who rarely “appeared to relax from his cares, and to recreate himself by going anywhere or saying anything without a pervading object” (ch. XXV).
This obsolete sense of recreate, meaning to refresh or energize, obviously shares a common root with our noun recreation. The American Heritage Dictionary helpfully explains that there is a distinction in pronunciation which is preserved in the surviving noun. When you mean recreate in the sense of “to create again,” the first syllable is pronounced reek; when you mean “to take a break from work in order to play,” the first syllable is pronounced wreck.
I have never heard anyone use the verb recreate in this sense. The OED lists a couple of oddball examples from the 1970s (e.g. “The President plans to recreate on Labor Day,” from something called Verbatim magazine in 1978), but for the most part the usage seems to have lapsed by the end of the 1800s. Today the word is as dead as Dickens.
The root in both cases is the Latin creare, “to create.” I quit Latin after three years — that is, as soon as the Roxbury Latin School let me — but a quick web search turns up a few alternative definitions for creare: “to elect to an office” or, of parents, “to bear or beget.” Nothing about play, refreshment, or relaxation.
All of which is a long, pedantic way of saying, What a strange, awful idea that your work would destroy you so that you would need to withdraw from it in order to be literally re-created. Personally I don’t feel this way. It is precisely my work that energizes and “creates” me, and I hate to be dragged away from it for vacation or anything else. (I’m with Cormac McCarthy on this one.)
Scrapbook
For more than 10 years, the intricate, multiseason narrative TV drama has exercised a dominant cultural sway over well-educated, well-off adults. Just as urbanish professionals in the 1950s could be counted on to collectively coo and argue over the latest Salinger short story, so that set in the 2000s has been most intellectually, emotionally, and aesthetically engaged not by fiction, the theater, or the cinema but by The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Deadwood, The Shield, Big Love.
— Benjamin Schwartz, “Mad About Mad Men,” Atlantic Monthly
So that’s where all the readers went.
A few links
Random bits found floating around on the web today:
- At About Last Night, Terry Teachout dug up a great video of Vladimir Nabokov and Lionel Trilling discussing “Lolita.”
- At A Commonplace Blog, critic D.G. Myers names his five best novels of the decade (with no room for Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children — repent, D.G. Myers!).
- At In Character, Joseph Epstein advises writers to make it look easy, even when it isn’t.
- And if Nabokov and Trilling is a bit much on a hot summer day, try this video of new Red Sox outfielder Joey Gathright. Gathright has a decent glove and a noodle bat, but never mind all that. What makes him interesting is that he can jump over cars. I say again: the man can jump over cars.
Henry Ford: “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted”
If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said, “A faster horse.”
— Henry Ford (via)
Follow your own vision. Do not write what you think readers want. They do not know what they want until you show it to them.
Julia Child: “The way to a full and healthy life”
I do think the way to a full and healthy life is to adopt the sensible system of “small helpings, no seconds, no snacking, and a little bit of everything.” Above all — have a good time.
— Julia Child