Some Scattered Thoughts about Maestro, Music, and the Meaning of It All

Posted on by Bill Benzon

by William Benzon

I’ve now seen Maestro twice, spread out over four, maybe five, sittings. I suppose the fact that I haven’t watched it straight through in a single sitting might be taken as an indication that I didn’t find it…Didn’t find it what? Good, compelling, interesting, satisfying? If one or some combination of those is true, then why did I watch it twice? Maybe I found it disturbing and wanted to figure out what was bugging me? If it was disturbing, the disturbance was unconscious.

[That I didn’t watch the whole film in a single sitting is certainly an indication of the fact that I watched the film at home, in front of a small screen, instead of in a theater and with a large audience.]

Was I bugged? Yes, I was bugged, about the damned prosthetic nose. I kept reading that Bradley Cooper’s prosthetic offended some people. Bernstein’s kids defended it. There I am, watching the film. There’s the second scene where Bernstein is seated, gray hair, red shirt, smoking a cigarette, and talking about his (dead) wife. He had an intense almost vibrant tan, a color looking like it didn’t quite make the cut for Rudolph’s nose. Did he hang out in a tanning booth? That bugged me, a little.

I don’t know whether or not I’d have been bugged about the nose if I hadn’t heard so much about it. I never saw Bernstein live, but I certainly saw him on TV and saw lots of photos. As far as I recall I never gave two thoughts to his nose.

Now my father, he had a nose. We called it a Danish nose because his parents were from Denmark. Which was bigger, my father’s Danish nose, Bernstein’s (Jewish) nose, or Bradley Cooper’s prosthetic version of Bernstein’s (Jewish) nose? This is silly.

I wonder if all this fuss about a schnoz is part of the shadow cast by the awful events of October 7th? Or the resurgence of antisemitism in the country? Did I know that Bernstein was Jewish the first time I became aware of him, perhaps from one of those Young People’s Concerts on TV or perhaps it was a more straightforwardly didactic program? I’m pretty sure I knew Louis Armstrong was black the first time I became aware of him. Couldn’t miss it. The color of his skin was as plain as the four-letter-word on your face. Read more »

In Defense of the MFA: A Review of “Narrating Pakistan”

Posted on by Sauleha Kamal

by Sauleha Kamal

Narrating Pakistan: An Anthology of Contemporary Creative Writing sets a lofty aim for itself: “to explore the idea of Pakistan through contemporary stories—the term, the country, the nation, the identity…”. There have been a few attempts to anthologize Pakistan in the past few decades. Oxford University Press anthologies like I’ll Find My Way (2014), Muneeza Shamsie’s two collections (which the preface to this book mentions), Granta 112: Pakistan (2011) and, as far as academic explorations of Pakistan go, The Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing come to mind. Ultimately, this anthology sets itself apart by telling, not the story of Pakistan but the story of young Pakistan. The characters in these stories are often young people—children, teenagers and young adults—dealing with the trauma of confronting what is, what could have been and what will be. This anthology brings together various writers who write about everything from dreaming of casting off economic shackles—in small villages, giant metropolises and foreign cities that glitter with promise and danger—to confronting isolation—following the Coronavirus pandemic, immigration or a depressive episode. There are stories that explore humanity through the loneliness of the female experience in a patriarchal milieu and the difficulties of conceptualizing Muslim masculinity in post-9/11 America.

A story about young Pakistan today cannot be told without telling the story of leaving Pakistan, as more and more young Pakistanis do every year. Many of the stories in this anthology are about the consequences of leaving and the challenges of diasporic existence. Many of these stories deal with the alienation of being a person of color in places that are not too kind to people with the wrong skin color, to paraphrase the wording of multiple stories. The idea of the wrongness of an “epidermis” crops up in both Syed Kazim Ali Kazmi’s “Trans/Gress” and Saeed Ur Rehman’s “The Sharpness of Grass Blades”. The narrator in Aatif Rashid’s “Brown Mirror” yearns to peel off his brown skin. Read more »

Monday, December 25, 2023

A Mysterious Encounter: The Owl on the Bench

Posted on by David Greer

by David Greer

Two weeks after my wife died this past October, she briefly returned. Or so it seemed to me.

Not in the flesh, of course. Instead, I received a visit from a creature whose behavior was so unexpected, so unnerving, so uplifting, that it seemed to defy rational explanation, and I felt the presence of my wife as strongly as if she were beside me.

The visitor was a barred owl. I’m familiar with barred owls, though not with barred owls as familiars. At night, I’ve often heard from the forest the signature barred owl query, “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?” Less often, I’ve been jolted awake by a bloodcurdling scream–is someone’s throat being cut?—and my heart pounds until reason clears the fog from my brain: it’s only an owl. I’ve also on occasion gone into the forest to investigate strange querulous whistles that become less strange when I spot a trio of juvenile barred owls begging a parent for food—a freshly killed fieldmouse or flycatcher—and counting on persistent whistling to do the trick.

But the owl that visited me after my wife’s death was silent. She sat outside the door, perched on the back of the garden bench on which my wife had loved to sit after walking unaided became too difficult for her. (I say ‘she’ because female barred owls are up to a third larger than males, and this was a very large owl.) There was no missing her. Barred owls are not unobtrusive. They’re smaller than a great horned owl but considerably larger than the northern spotted owl, whose habitat they have been taking over since first being observed in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s. Their gradual spread west from their native habitat in eastern North America may have been enabled by the reforestation of parts of the prairie after the age-old indigenous practice of burning grasslands was prohibited. Read more »

Ed Simon’s Twelve Months of Reading – 2023

Posted on by Ed Simon

by Ed Simon 

I’m haunted by the enormity of all of that which I’ll never read. This need not be a fear related to those things that nobody can ever read, the missing works of Aeschylus and Euripides, the lost poems of Homer; or, those works that were to have been written but which the author neglected to pen, such as Milton’s Arthurian epic. Nor am I even really referring to those titles which I’m expected to have read, but which I doubt I’ll ever get around to flipping through (In Search of Lost Time, Anna Karenina, etc.), and to which my lack of guilt induces more guilt than it does the real thing. No, my anxiety is born from the physical, material, fleshy, thingness of the actual books on my shelves, and my night-stand, and stacked up on the floor of my car’s backseat or wedged next to Trader Joe’s bags and empty pop bottles in my trunk. Like any irredeemable bibliophile, my house is filled with more books than I could ever credibly hope to read before I die (even assuming a relatively long life, which I’m not).

“A strong and bitter book-sickness floods one’s soul,” writes Nicholas Basbanes in A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books. “How ignominious to be strapped to this ponderous mass of paper, print, and dead men’s sentiments!” My books sit two levels deep on the de rigueur millennial’s sagging white IKEA BILLY shelves, the planks having lost their dowls while buckling underneath the weight, titles creatively pushed into any absence that they can credibly fill. There are cairns of books on my office floor, megaliths of books along my windowsill, ziggurats of books in the mudroom, the basement, the attic. A whole shelf of Penguin Classics, their zebra-colored spines announcing themselves – Castiglione’s The Book of Courtier, Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil. Sprinkled throughout the rest are an assortment of Oxford World Classics, Library of America editions, Nortons. There are other classics – The Aeneid, Moby-Dick, et el. There are contemporary works – Portnoy’s Complaint, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Categories for reference and poetry, academic and journalistic. Then there is the disposable that I’ve held onto (too polite to name names). Naturally, the question posed to me by any visitor who isn’t a bibliophile (though predictably I know few of that sort) is if I’ve read all of these books. My reply, as close to a joke as I can muster about the affliction, is that I’ve at least opened all of them. I think. Read more »

Monday Poem

Posted on by Jim Culleny
—on the song, Twelve Days of Christmas; words here:

https://genius.com/Christmas-songs-the-twelve-days-of…

________________________________________

Twelve Days of Christmas and Other Mysteries

What does it mean exactly,
the chronic return of a partridge,
which, swaddled in melody,
follows an accumulated bullet list
of things my true love gave to me
—what must I have missed?
—
We start with a partridge in a pear tree
—Bosc or Anjou, Bartlett or Comice?
No one knows —but there the partridge sits
among fruit, inchworm green or of early
sunlight blushed with red  —hiding? Could be.
No one knows, but as a poet said, “if it’s
information you want, ask the police” who
today will surely know where a partridge lives,
not to mention how a partridge loves or beds.
—
The next bullet point posits two turtle-doves
which, when you think about it, is an is oddly alloyed
name for a beast, which suggests that a dove who coos
through feathers and a turtle that snaps from shell
are really not individual at all but joined as one
—at least this is what the lyric tells.
—

Read more »

Terrible AI Arguments (and, No, AIs Will Not be Recursively Self-Improving on Computer-Like Time Scales)

Posted on by Tim Sommers

by Tim Sommers

(The butter robot realizing the sole purpose of its existence is to pass the butter.)

In the halcyon days of “self-driving cars are six months away,” you probably encountered this argument. “If self-driving cars work, they will be safer than cars driven by humans.” Sure. If, by “they work,” you mean that, among other things, they are safer than cars driven by humans, then, it follows, that they will be safer than cars driven by humans, if they work. That’s called begging the question. Unfortunately, the tech world has more than it’s share of such sophistries. AI, especially.

Exhibit #1

In a recent issue of The New Yorker, in an article linked to on 3 Quarks Daily, Geoffrey Hinton, the “Godfather of AI,” tells Joshua Rothman:

“‘People say, [of Large Language Models like ChatGPT that] It’s just glorified autocomplete…Now, let’s analyze that…Suppose you want to be really good at predicting the next word. If you want to be really good, you have to understand what’s being said. That’s the only way. So, by training something to be really good at predicting the next word, you’re actually forcing it to understand. Yes, it’s ‘autocomplete’—but you didn’t think through what it means to have a really good autocomplete.’ Hinton thinks that ‘large language models,’ such as GPT, which powers OpenAI’s chatbots, can comprehend the meanings of words and ideas.”

This is a morass of terrible reasoning. But before we even get into it, I have to say that thinking that an algorithm that works by calculating the odds of what the next word in a sentence will be “can comprehend the meanings of words and ideas” is a reductio ad absurdum of the rest. (In fairness, Rothman attributes that view to Hinton, but doesn’t quote him as saying that, so maybe that’s not really Rothman’s position. But it seems to be.)

Hinton says “training something to be really good at predicting the next word, you’re actually forcing it to understand.” There’s no support for the claim that the only way to be good at predicting the next word in a sentence is to understand what is being said. LMMs prove that, they don’t undermine it. Further, if anything, prior experience suggests the opposite. Calculators are not better at math than most people because they “understand” numbers. Read more »

Aristotle and the Pleasures of the Table

Posted on by Dwight Furrow

by Dwight Furrow

It might strike you as odd, if not thoroughly antiquarian, to reach back to Aristotle to understand gastronomic pleasure. Haven’t we made progress on the nature of pleasure over the past 2500 years? Well, yes and no. The philosophical debate about the nature of pleasure, with its characteristic ambiguities and uncertainties, persists often along lines developed by the ancients. But we now have robust neurophysiological data about pleasure, which thus far has increased the number of hypotheses without settling the question of what exactly pleasure is.

Part of the problem is that we have this word “pleasure” that seems to apply to any positive affective state, and we therefore think there must be something common to all the diverse experiences designated by the word. But that unity may be an illusion. There is a vast experiential difference between the pleasures of basking in the sun and the pleasure one experiences from having run a marathon. I doubt that Aristotle’s theory can explain the former; the latter seems more amenable to his focus on activities which would include the pleasures of the table. And so I will set aside attempts to define pleasure in general and focus on the pleasure we take in our activities, specifically the activity of eating. Read more »

On Not Getting What We Want

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Chris Horner

You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometime you might find
You get what you need —Jagger/Richard

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down. —Robert Frost

Life can be full of obstacles to getting what we want. But sometimes we get it, we get there, we get the thing we wanted: the lover, the career, the promotion, the house, the holiday, the PhD. Yet after all that effort, trying, searching and perfecting, to the final goal, the success we longed for, why is it so often a disappointment, something leaving us flat, even sad?  Something is missing. It turns out getting what we want wasn’t what we really wanted. We wanted something else. But what else? Not being completely happy with what we actually get is part of the human condition: we just have to accept it, and tune our expectations better to meet the inevitable disappointments. There is truth in that, but also good reason to think that modern work and consumption is turning mild disappointment into something altogether more toxic.

Achievement Society

There is nothing new about having goals, and working towards them. Nothing new in finding that the things we thought we would get happiness from crumble in our hands as we touch them, and that doesn’t stop us from wanting things. One of the advantages of living in a prosperous part of the world is surely that such possibilities become open to more people: modernity is supposed to be about choice and opportunity. But a society so heavily pitched towards achievement of all kinds – in our careers, love lives, acquisition of things – has brought the experience of dissatisfaction to the level of a social pathology. Achievement has become a commandment, and endlessly receding horizon that entices as it frustrates. We live in an Achievement Society, in which we exploit ourselves in the pursuit of more, more of everything, more and more forever.[1]  The result is a kind of blow out, an infarction of the self, depression, burnout, since no one can keep up the relentless pace of total achievement forever.  Read more »

Typewriter Thoughts

Posted on by Ethan Seavey

by Ethan Seavey

I like the typewriter. 

A gift from a friend. A manual 1963 Smith Corona Silent Super in sandalwood carrying case with keys I understand (letters and the space bar) and even keys I will never understand (SET and CLR). Yes it is the Super Silent but no it is not silent and in fact it is quite loud (when in use) which is fun for me. Tapping keys to be loud and writing to think out loud. 

Here are some snippets from the free flowing thoughts which come out of typewriter therapy:

_____

December the Fourth

most of us would have to agree, yes, that looking at people from very far away (through binoculars) is a creepy habit. but what is so wrong? seeing people without their knowledge, i suppose, but i do that all the time as a peer and it’s only wrong when i am a peer-er

i don’t see anything private because they are in public, after all, walking through the park or parking their cars

but still it’s wrong to spy on that man with a rounded chin and bright eyes, wearing camouflage swoveralls and approaching a parked car to let his dog out. a big black lab and manic pink tongue. 

it is wrong to watch the smile grow on the man’s face as he runs off with the lab

towards the patch of grass

such unforbidden unrestricted emotion, allowed by his solitude, complicated by me, a witness.  Read more »

Jew-dolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the Island of Misfit Goys

Posted on by Steve Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan

by Steven Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan

Andrew Torba, Christian Nationalist founder of the rightwing social media site Gab, recently argued on his podcast that the fact that many of the most beloved Christmas songs were written by Jewish composers was part of a conspiracy to take Christ out of Christmas: to secularize one of the holiest Christian holidays and allow Jews to subtly infiltrate Christian-American culture with their own agenda. He might just be right.

There is, for example, a way of thinking about the 1964 stop-motion animated special Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer as a challenge to the White supremacist, Christian nationalist worldview that Torba champions. What if we thought of Rudolph as a progressive, inclusive retelling of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle?

Rudolph’s Jewish Roots

We all know Dasher and Dancer, Prancer and Vixen, Comet and Cupid, and Donder and Blitzen, but can you recall the origin story of the most famous reindeer of all? Rudolph was created in 1939 by Jewish author Robert L. May, who was working as a copywriter for department store chain Montgomery Ward, which wanted to give holiday shoppers a Christmas-themed children’s book. In writing a seasonal twist on Hans Christian Anderson’s The Ugly Duckling, May dreamed up a new member of Santa’s team, and young Rudolph quickly became an indelible part of the American yuletide mythology.

May’s brother-in-law was a Jewish composer. Johnny Marks made his career creating some of the most iconic Christmas songs of all time, including “Rockin’ around the Christmas Tree,” “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” and “Have a Holly-Jolly Christmas.” In 1949, he put May’s story to music, and Gene Autry’s recording of Marks’ “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” became both a chart-topping hit and a timeless American standard memorized by children across the country for generations. Read more »

A Child’s Christmas in New Jersey

Posted on by Nils Peterson

A Remembering by Nils Peterson

Christmas Eve began with a carol sing at the big Presbyterian Church on Crescent Avenue which many of the rich town people attended. More cathedral than church. My brother and I went to Sunday school there when we were old enough because the small Lutheran church of our parents was not large enough to have one. My father was a chauffeur for one of the rich families.

The caroling was held in a large, handsome meeting room where, in the spring, the flower show would be held. A lot of chairs were set out and there’d be a big tree beautifully decorated and boxes of candy for the children to suck on when it was all over. I remember a particularly revolting lime-green ball sour enough and bitter enough to make even the greediest child spit it out. Some of the gathered Presbyterians had begun their celebrating before the sing, because after about the third carol, some wag would start calling for the “Hallelujah Chorus,” the last song in the songbook, and the calls, catcalls almost for the calls for it increased as the carols went on, grew until at last the leader with a sigh gave up and we hallelujahed our way out of there.

At home, the chauffeur’s apartment above the garage, there would be a supper of Swedish meatballs and boiled potatoes and lingonberry and sardines and cheeses and cookies At the right moment, we’d go down the stairs and, across the driveway to the path leading to the big house – crunch of gravel, full moon shining between tree branches, feel of tended grass – to the kitchen door where Marie, the cook, my father’s cousin and my godmother, waited to let us in. Anet is there, the downstairs maid, and Martha, the upstairs maid. They are “the girls,” the three live-in Swedish servants. Marie, the cook, was my father’s cousin, my godmother, and the one responsible for getting my father the chauffeur job in 1932 in the heart of the depression. He had been out of work since he and mother came back from visiting their parents in Sweden to show off how well they were doing in America. Shortly before their return, the stock market crashed. The year, of course, 1929.  Read more »

When and why ask why?

Posted on by Philippe Huneman

by Philippe Huneman

You’re a railway worker, a teacher, an intern. You’re at a dinner somewhere and someone asks: “Why are you on strike? You reply that this project the government wants to impose on us is unfair, and another person replies: “But why isn’t it fair? Why shouldn’t we have an equal system for all, as they say?” And then we talk about hardship, life expectancy, fairness, etc.

This little word, “why“ punctuates our discussions – how many times a day do we use it? Far from being restricted to politics, it cuts across all fields, from the everyday talk – “why is the baker closed today?” – to the most obviously metaphysical – “Why is there something rather than nothing?” asked Leibniz – to the most intimate – “Why didn’t she come?” It is the question of the scientist – “why does the straight stick plunged into the water appear bent to me?” – as well as the private investigator’s phrase – “Why did the butler put on his gloves on a Sunday?“

Few questions are so common that they characterize at the same time insignificant everyday discussions, technically worded scientific questions and deep philosophical interrogations. This mere constatation should direct us to question the very possibility of asking why, the meaning it can have for so many distinct populations in various contexts, and its connection to general features of human cultures. Here, many philosophers of the past have shown the way, by raising in their own manner similar issues. I propose to directly address the meaning of ‘asking why’, by introducing a set of concepts likely to frame this questioning. Read more »

Monday, December 18, 2023

Tango, Central Banking, and Short Ribs: The Wild Days and Mad Existence of Argentina

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

“It is not often that you see life and fiction take each other by the hand and dance.” ―Lawrence Thornton, Imagining Argentina

Argentine President Javier Milei

Watching the recent elections in Argentina makes an arm-chair economist like me face-palm myself. The country that was once one the richest in the world, the country that has an embarrassingly large assortment of riches—wheat, oil, soybeans, cattle, olives, grapes, minerals and the like–can’t get out of its own way when it comes to retaking its place as a wealthy nation.

In November, Argentina elected Javier Milei, the self-described anarcho-capitalist, as its new president. Milei has a little of everything—a dash of Brazil’s ex-president Bolsonaro, a dash of Trump, and a dash of Elon Musk. He’s like one of those fruitcakes passed around at Christmas with all the colorful little radioactive bits that you can’t quite identify.

Milei was a blasphemous candidate, calling Pope Francis—himself an Argentine– an hijo de puta (son of a bitch), calling the president of Brazil (Argentina’s second biggest trading partner) a corrupt communist and even taking a shot at Micky Mouse, comparing him “…to every Argentine politician because he is a disgusting rodent whom everybody loves.” He’s also a climate-change denier who believes the sale of human organs should be legal and even dithers on the sale of children, saying that it’s essentially context-dependent. Read more »

The techno-optimist case for unlimited economic growth

Posted on by Oliver Waters

by Oliver Waters

In the final moments of the film Don’t Look Up (2021), a group of family and friends sit around a dinner table laughing together while enjoying some delicious organic produce. Leonardo DeCaprio looks up from his heirloom tomatoes with nostalgic despair.

‘We really did have everything, didn’t we?’ he laments, just before the meteor hits Earth, killing billions of its ungrateful, arrogant human guests. The same fate awaits the audience – so the cinematic metaphor goes – if we keep destroying the global ecosystem.

Many promote economic ‘degrowth’ as a way of avoiding such a calamity, notably anthropologist Jason Hickel and climate activist Naomi Klein. In his book Less is More (2020), Hickel asserts that for approximately 97% of our 300,000 years as the human species, ‘our ancestors lived in relative harmony with the Earth’s ecosystems,’ before there was any such thing as economic growth.

In This Changes Everything (2015), Klein diagnoses our existential climate crisis as starting with Sir Francis Bacon back in the 16th century, when he kicked off all that nonsense about systematically controlling natural forces for our own material wellbeing. This was apparently the beginning of a toxic, ‘extractive’ relationship with the Earth, which we need grow out of immediately.

Such critics of growth tend to believe we have collectively amassed more than enough wealth at this stage in history, and that any future growth in wealth via technological innovation will be optional and decadent by comparison. Space travel, for instance, is just a plaything for the rich. And we certainly don’t need any more energy here on Earth: we can just be more efficient with the energy we have.

In The Rise and Fall of American Growth (2016), the economist Robert Gordon lends credence to this view with the historical claim that the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of technological breakthroughs have already been picked:

“In America growth slowed down after 1970 not because inventors had lost their spark or were devoid of new ideas, but because the basic elements of a modern standard of living had by then already been achieved along so many dimensions, including food, clothing, housing, transportation, entertainment, communication, health, and working conditions.”

But this supposedly empirical statement is actually a profoundly pessimistic theory of human potential in disguise. Consider first how arbitrary it is to hold this perspective at any given moment in history. A 19th century British labourer, for instance, could not have been aware that they were desperately poor by our standards today. On the contrary, many thought they were much better off than their ancestors. After all, for the first time in history, they were able to work in a lively metropolis at a coal-powered factory producing textiles, instead of toiling in the fields under the beating sun or pouring rain.

As David Deutch has compellingly argued, there are no fundamental natural plateaus or barriers on the upward journey of technological progress. Rather it’s an eternal adventure that we can simply either choose to embrace or reject. This leads one to the ‘techno-optimist’ vision: one of indefinitely and exponentially improving and expanding human civilisation. Read more »

Monday Poem

Posted on by Jim Culleny

Fundamental Disunderstanding

….—thoughts on Oct. 7th and Gaza

everything ever written or said
everything drawn or played or sung
every headline that cried or bled
every fresco, every poem
everything wrung from our cranial sponge
every inky insult flung
every bomb that leveled a home
….and left a child to fend alone
every instrument ever made
every expletive blasted from lungs
every face on a canvas hung
every righteous canto prayed
…. that pounded the planks of heaven’s floor
every school Kalashnikov-sprayed
every smartass quote with bite
every thought of rich or poor
every Icarus grasping at height
….whose waxy wings soon came apart
every joke and laugh and snort
every misbegotten poison dart
every sentiment or thing
….that burst from brain’s well-tensioned spring
every sura, gospel or verse
every prayer that followed a hearse
every love, lost or won
every song and every hum
every murmuring merciful must
that reached the sky or bit the dust
are not of a glad or angry God
…………………..but of life that thrusts,
inside to out, evil or good, the stuff of us

 Jim Culleny

Fear of FOMO

Posted on by Deanna Kreisel

by Deanna K. Kreisel (Doctor Waffle Blog)

I have no idea what the lyrics to the Oasis song “Champagne Supernova” mean,[1] except for one single line: “Where were you while we were getting high?” It’s a plaintive refrain heard several times throughout the song, not part of the chorus itself but a kind of obsessively repeated lead-in. If it’s been a while since you listened to the song, take a second to wallow in the poignancy of that line. I’ve got it all cued up for you. I’ll wait. I promise not to do anything incredibly fun with all our friends while you’re away.

Even though this is my essay, and I am deliberately drawing your attention to this line, and I know it’s coming, and I even have it playing in the background on my computer as I type these words, I still feel like someone is punching me in the gut as I listen. I don’t like to get high any more,[2] and I didn’t start smoking pot until literally the night before high school graduation so I don’t have a lot of poignant teenage memories associated with it—but it doesn’t matter. The point of the line, the reason it leaves me feeling slightly sick to my stomach with an achingly bittersweet feeling of loss, nostalgia, sadness, grief, and longing, is that it so perfectly imparts the feeling of missing out on something. Something fun, something magical, something intense and transformative and most importantly unrepeatable—that you will simply have to wonder about for the rest of your days on earth. Worse, you will have to listen to your friends talking about it in front of you for the rest of your days on earth: the whole Where were you? cri de coeur implies that you—the listener—are normally part of the gang, should have been there, were sorely missed. If the singer had been lamenting the fact that he himself had missed out on getting high with all his friends, it would not be nearly so affecting. The second-person address puts you in the position of missing out. Oof.

In other words, it perfectly captures the feeling of FOMO. Read more »

The Woman in the Cave

Posted on by Richard Farr

by Richard Farr

This is the second part of a three-part essay, My Drug Problem. Part one, A mere analogy, is here.

Your life is not going according to plan and you’ve started to wonder what the gods are playing at. Still, the decision to consult the Oracle at Delphi is not one you took lightly. First you tried all the usual remedies: drinking too much, blaming other people, listening to soothsayers in the agora. Only when none of this helped did you undertake weeks of travel to reach bucolic Phocis, finishing with an arduous climb to this shoulder of rock a thousand feet above a valley in the middle of nowhere. 

At least the views are nice. On a goat track that will one day be a narrow street clogged with over-fed barbarians in tour buses, you stop to ease your blisters and gaze down towards the Gulf of Corinth. Lovely — you’d take a picture if you could. Mount Parnassus looms behind you. Five minutes later you’re at your destination.

The Temple of Apollo is an important religious center, so you’re surprised to find it painted all over with self-help graffiti: Wherever you go, there you are. If life hands you lemons, make lemonade. The journey is the destination. Life is uncertain; eat dessert first. Over the main entrance, the message spray-painted on the lintel is marginally more enigmatic than the rest: Gnothi s’auton, anthro — Get to know yourself, man.*

(* Shortly after your visit, part of the lintel will fall off in an earthquake and the “man” will be lost to history.) Read more »