500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
I am an elitist to the extent that I am likely to call myself a snob, unless I am in the company of other snobs. Then that would mean that I have joined their group, and that wouldn’t be good. I am more likely to quote Groucho Marx than the other Marx: “I refuse to join a club that would have me as a member.” I am not a man of the people. I do not care for pop music. I pretend not to know who Justin Bieber is. This, given my proclivity for populist movements, is a great contradiction.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
-Walt Whitman
The poem to which those lines belong is Song of Myself. Perfect reading for a snob, but then I didn’t read it all the way through because it was about him, not about me, and that was intolerable.
I love mankind, it’s people I can’t stand.
- Linus, of the Peanuts comic strip
The New York maitre’d who won’t seat me in his restaurant without a jacket and tie or the San Francisco barrista who berates me for putting sugar in my espresso are irritating only because they are bigger snobs than I am. They have outdone me, beaten me at my own snobbish game. I enjoy being a snob in yoga class, watching newbies struggle with a pose, until somebody bests me by executing a posture far better than I ever could, or worse, I am corrected by a teacher who sees room for improvement. (“Can you get your foot completely into your mouth? Yes! That’s the pose.”)
I admit that being a snob is a rough and lonely game sometimes, but there is a purity to it that is greatly appealing. Reading Metamorphosis in German is a great way to get all of Kafka’s jokes, and even better, from a snob’s perspective, is telling somebody you’re reading Metamorphosis in German. I’m reading Paul Theroux’s travel book The Old Patagonian Express and one of its finer pleasures is his unflinching assessment of national character. He describes entire nations as crabby or backward; his highly-polished crankiness could also be called snobbery. This is good, because he’s not afraid to be who he is, which is sometimes tired, cranky and impatient. He’s not running away from himself, like the people at the American Association of Retired Persons who renamed their organization AARP, which is the sound a dog makes when you step on its tail, or those liberals who are afraid of being called liberals and instead want us to call them “progressives.”
Once upon a time being a populist was good, but the Sarahpalinization of culture has dumbed things down fast, and I’m going to let the Tea Party claim the populist territory for a while. If you want to hit the strike zone of meaning, I say, you have to be a snob sometimes. Do you agree? I hope not, because then we will have formed a club of which I would refuse to be a member.
Photo Credits: Snob dog by ~ggvic~ and snob drawing by Oldmaison, both via Creative Commons.
500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
I have a secret life. I read Bon Appetit for the recipes. (“Jeeze, I thought living in California with all the crazy people he’d have a more interesting secret life than that.”) No, really, that’s it. I like to cook.
Bon Appetit has hired a new editor in chief, formerly of GQ, and he has given the magazine new mojo. The lace curtains have parted in the current issue, revealing a view of a real, working kitchen. It’s good to know that I don’t have to channel Martha Stewart any longer to make the food. The magazine was graced with shockingly non-frilly photographs. There was even a engineer-geeky article on moka coffee makers. The new Bon Appetit seemed so promising, so genuine … until I saw the Botox ad, and the ad for some kind of drug called Latisse that you use to make your eyelashes longer. Right then, Bon Appetit went limp and trivial in my hands. Its new day rising was hijacked by a drug lord named Allergan.
Know what? Lines on a face are not a bad thing. They are history’s map, and I don’t think I’ve ever made a serious decision about anybody based on the length of their eyelashes. The disconnect between genuine food and fake faces generated this open letter to Bon Appetit’s new editor, Adam Rapoport.
Dear Adam,
I realize that magazine editors are all-powerful beings. You make the absolute call on what goes on and between the covers of Bon Appetit. I admire your dedication to showing people how to eat well. You don’t write too much about food with preservatives and you don’t seem to be a fan of high fructose corn syrup, unless you could maybe use it to make a good martini. (Doubtful.) Your magazine seems to be about fresh, local ingredients prepared inventively. So I wonder why the hell you need to run a bunch of ads from Allergan about chemically messing with your face? Look, I know magazines can be desperate for ad revenue. Men’s magazines have lots of Viagra ads. There are forward-looking journals that carry backward-looking oil company ads. But drug-centric ads in super-fresh, living-large Bon Appetit? Big-time mismatch, you ask me.
I was kidding about you having absolute control over the magazine. When the ad department says they want to run an ad from Allergan you probably say, “Can it be a two-page spread?” Bon Appetit has to make money. How it does — that’s not always up to you. But don’t you wish it was? Wouldn’t it be great to say something like:
“We here at the new Bon Appetit are going to follow our gut…food matters to us… and this may sound corny and earnest, but I really believe that having good food in your life makes your life better.”
Oh, wait, sorry. You did say that. Those are your words from your editor’s letter in the Italy issue. Words like those sound authentic, like they come from a guy who shouldn’t have ads in his magazine for fake big-pharma crap. An authentic magazine about authentic food really needs to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. Great piece in the Italy issue, by the way, from Gabrielle Hamilton. Doesn’t look like she’s had Botox, and the same for her 80-odd year old mother-in-law, who was the focus of the article.
500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
I like the little things, like when the wrapping paper pattern lines up perfectly when you tape it. I like the sense of being a skilled diplomat when the hummingbirds that we’re feeding get into an intense aerial battle and we have to talk some peace into them. I like that Mark Twain wrote, “A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.” Sam Clemens is also my inspiration and guiding light for this column. He said once of a piece of writing, “If I had more time, I would have made it shorter.”
Brevity: soul of wit. What makes us laugh is often quick. Steve Martin used to include a bit in his act: He would raise his hand and ask, “How many people have never raised their hand before?” How about Hunter S. Thompson: “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.” And he also said, “Some may never live, but the crazy never die,” and it was true.
Uncrazy also works. Adam Savage, the Mythbusters guy, gave a nearly perfect commencement speech about belief, faith and humanism and how they can all work together for a scientific thinker, and another favorite of mine is Steve Jobs’ talk about how, after he dropped out of Reed, his impulsive act of taking a course in calligraphy changed so much about computers.
Little things. Small decisions. Big results.
I’ll come up with the remaining 200 words for this article another time. For now, be well and let’s all have a great 2011.
Typographic bicycle: from Aaron Kuehn via Yay Everday.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
photo credit: Sally_12 via Creative Commons license
The most challenging thing about writing this blog is not the deadline every week, nor is it generating the snappy content, nor putting an edge on the sharp wordplay. It’s the damn title. 500 words is a cruel master. (Thursday is OK, though.) Some readers have noted that this writer often fails to hit the 500 word mark. Not this time. The word count is on, the clock is ticking, and I’m writing about writing about 500 words. But not about 500 words. Exactly 500. So here goes.
As Mark Twain once said, “If I had more time, I would have made it shorter.” Brevity is not only the soul of wit, it’s damned hard and it’s slow work.
Ernest Hemingway once became known for writing a six word epitaph:
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
Sad, even brutal, but surely effective and short. And nobody really knows if he actually wrote it, but I’m buying it for now. So did the editors of a book called “Not Quite What I was Planning,” a collection of six-word memoirs. Yes, just six words to capture an entire life. That’s worse than Twitter’s 140 characters and it has to be meaningful. Here are a few who had a go at a six-word memoir:
“Nobody cared, then they did. Why?” - journalist Chuck Klosterman
“Well, I thought it was funny.” – Stephen Colbert
“Brought it to a boil, often.” - chef Mario Batali
“Fix a toilet, get paid crap.” – from a plumber
“Cursed with cancer. Blessed by friends.” - nine-year-old Hannah Davies
“Yes, you can edit this biography.” - from Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia.
If I had to write my six-word biography on a nametag, I would write, “I’m not really a nametag guy.”
If you want to get fancy, you can look at six-word memoirs that contain palindromes, that is, words that read the same way forward as they do backward. Racecar. Deed. Radar. Madam.
One of the most famous is, “A man, a plan, a canal – Panama.” It describes Theodore Roosevelt, the driving force behind the Panama Canal and it reads the same to the front as to the back. Sadly, it’s seven words. No good.
We could look to Demetri Martin, comedian and palindrome constructor, who wrote a poem that is a palindrome, and is titled with a palindrome. It’s called, “Dammit, I’m mad.” (Check it out – same way backward as forward.) Alas, that’s only three words, unless you say it twice, “Dammit, I’m mad, dammit, I’m mad,” and that’s getting a little emphatic.
Creating a palindromic six-word memoir is too hard, and anyway I can feel my 500 word limitation breathing hard behind me, as though we’re running a 10K together and I’m the pacer. I see the finish line ahead, so I will leave you with my six-word memoir for the year.
Enough of 2009, bring on 2010.
500 Words will be on vacation next week. See you in 2010. Happy New Year everyone.
What if I told you there’s a way to pick stocks that is so reliable you’ll do better than the experts? But in order for it to work, you’d have to give up something: Your access to information.
Ignorance is power.
In 2000, an investment magazine held a stock picking contest. More than 10,000 people submitted portfolios, some of them professionals with access to loads of data. One portfolio in the contest stood out: it was based on collective ignorance. Researchers asked fifty people to pick stocks based solely on whether they recognized the name of the company. What happened? The stocks picked by people who knew little gained in value by 2.5 percent. The stocks picked by the editor in chief of the magazine, who knew a lot, lost 18.5 percent.
Experts like Jim Cramer are ready to help you become a market expert. Will you make any money? Well, too much information (and too much Jim Cramer) can be a bad thing.
“There’s a limit to the information a human mind can digest, a limit that often corresponds to the magical number seven, plus or minus two, the capacity of short term memory.” — Gut Feelings, by Gerd Gigerenzer
Your short term memory is good for about seven things. You’ve experienced this in Whole Foods if you attempt to shop without a shopping list. You wind up standing in front of the cheese display trying to remember the eighth thing you meant to buy.
If you go with intuition, on the other hand, you tap into something much deeper. Many believe that intuition comes from higher powers. If you listen to it, you will be guided by God, by a universal energy source, or if you are trying to pick stocks, by Warren Buffett.
That may be true, but scientists are learning that intuition accesses the unconscious mind, and that part of the mind is really smart.
A research study has suggested that gamblers who trust their gut instincts are more likely to pick up subtle visual cues from the dealer and other players. To make winning decisions they let the unconscious drive for a while. Less information turns out to be more – especially when things turn unpredictable.
When you are working with an unstable system, like the stock market or a gun battle or both (“How was work today, honey?”) having too much on your mind will slow you down. The noise between your ears blocks the wisdom of the subconscious.
This was explored in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink. If a police officer in jeopardy has to think too much, the bad guy shoots him first. If a baseball player performs differential equations in his head to calculate the trajectory and velocity of an incoming fly ball, he’d never catch it. (I think this is the Mets’ problem.)
“Woman’s intuition, as everyone knows, is a true faculty that most women possess in a form far more highly developed than anything the random male ever acquires.”
Ashley Montagu, The Natural Superiority of Women
Women are good at intuition and men are bad at it. You think so? Not so.
In another study, Dr. Richard Wiseman showed 50,000 people photographs of a person smiling. Only one was of a real smile. The other was of a fake smile. Using their intuition, men were able to guess which smile was real 72 percent of the time. The women guessed right 71 percent of the time.
I’m going to sell some stock soon, but I think I’ll wait until Warren Buffett is smiling.
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