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
It might be the heat of this summer day, but do you notice those spectral beings? They look like adults, but they’re not. They are the twenty-somethings who float through college and then boomerang back to live at home, and fifty-somethings who have a mid-life crisis, then morph into Mustang owners who date teenagers. Delaying the onset of responsibility and the start of life is so common now, it’s hardly a trend; more like an epidemic. It can happen at any time, not just when you’re young. Life isn’t in drive so much; often the shifter gets punched into reverse and people are suddenly moving backwards.
First, a little compassion. According to an article by Robin Marantz Henig in the New York Times Magazine, the average 20 year old is going through a lot of changes. One third of 20-somethings change residence every year. Forty percent move back home with parents at least once. Many hold seven jobs through the decade between 20 and 30. That’s a lot of turmoil.
I had a lot of that in my 20s certainly, as my father will attest, but I never moved back home. That simply wasn’t done back then.We wanted to be out in the world, and yes, we held lots of jobs. I worked in restaurants with inflammable chefs and later, when I wrote cartoons, I worked with inflammable executive producers.
Life is supposed to be an old song that goes something like you grow up, go to school, start a career and a family and watch the sun set with a spouse who shares the journey. Everybody experiencing that lately? I didn’t think so.
I’m noticing that there’s no long and winding road. It’s more of a spiral, and it’s not spinning just the 20-somethings until they are dizzy. The dizziness is widespread. Marriages of decades implode and partners become single again. Whole sectors of the economy evaporate and people need to re-train. Natural disasters are taking away homes. Because of these changes from within and outside us, no matter what our age, we’re all adolescents again. Erik Erikson’s eight-stage model of development might turn out to be an infinite-stage model. As had been said before, we’re living life in the first draft.
“The first draft of anything is shit.” – Ernest Hemingway
Have another glass of wine, Papa, and chill. I prefer what Elmore Leonard has to say.
“I try to leave out the parts that people skip.” – Elmore Leonard
It would be great to live in drive all the time, never having to shift into reverse, and it would be great to skip a few boring parts, like Elmore Leonard does in his novels. But life’s first draft turns out to be a pretty bumpy rehearsal for a (hopefully, soon to come) master performance. Surprisingly, for me, I’m feeling for those parents who aren’t encouraging their kids to grow up right away. Some of those parents regret punching the accelerator and rocketing into marriage-career-family-mortgage so soon themselves.
I’ve been trying some breathing exercises lately (called pranayama by the yogis) and some meditation, too, and finding that instead of relentlessly punching the accelerator, a pause now and again has helped me move forward with even more purposeful energy.
Photo by joiseyshowaa via Creative Commons License
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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.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
I’m in New York City spending time in hospital rooms. I have learned two things so far. It’s an outrage that there’s no 72nd Street stop on the Lex Ave line. The closest is 69 Street, which is more of a vague sexual joke than a useful location. The other thing I’ve learned is about the incredible lightness of being.
I wasn’t in the room when it happened, but I have it on good authority that you can stop a man’s heart, cut out a malfunctioning aortic valve, pop in a new one, bypass years of accumulated disease and then start up the system like a reliable old car. And I know for certain – I was in the room – that a man might lie in a twilight state among machines, seeming like a machine himself. But no, not like a machine: There was a glimmer of consciousness. It was a paradox to be witnessed with awe, this man-machine breathing slowly, leaking consciousness.
Funny thing, when people hold heavy objects they think they are more important than lighter ones. A big book, say a Bible, seems more important than the slim volume of famous left-handed athletes. The idea resounds in the languages we speak. You have your heavy issues and light entertainment. There’s research on this:
A research team found that they could alter people’s judgment of importance just by getting them to answer questions using a heavier clipboard. In a series of short elegant experiments, a research team led by psychologist Nils Jostmann found that people holding a heavy clipboard would, for example, value foreign currencies more highly than those using a lighter clipboard.
That’s good science, because the experiment was simple and the measurement clear. Science works because it measures things and assigns values. Sounds good, till you look at a guy in a hospital bed and ask what weight do you assign to consciousness? What weight do you put to love? As Lotta Alsen has written in her blog, everybody knows that love is good, but what measure can we assign it to prove that it exists? Do you look at the number of Valentine’s Day cards sent? Quarts of chicken soup consumed? Love exists, but there is no measure for it.
In the hospital room the next day the human machine does something amazing. It wakes up. It starts talking. It wants things. “I want you to call Milton.” “Get me some water.”
Miracle? No. This was the work of a heroic guy in green surgical scrubs going seven hours straight in order to take a man apart and then reassemble him. That’s great training and expertise and amazing science. But still, there was something else. The human machine has consciousness. There is a soul, and spirit, stuff for which no measurement exists and therefore no science.
What happened in the hospital has affirmed my trust in scientific work, rattled my position as person who takes nothing on faith, and made me wonder if science, in order to fully understand the world, will need to stretch outside itself.
Twitter, sacred? Well, maybe. A recent blog by Stephen Dinan started the ball rolling for me by asking “When something is wildly successful, as Twitter now is, I often ask myself about its higher purpose. In other words, what might be the deeper meaning of Twitter?”
Could a string of 140 characters have a higher meaning?
In his blog, Dinan makes the case that Twitter is propagating new ideas at light speed, helping to create a new form of intimacy and allowing us to connect with our individuality while tracking global concerns.
Let’s break that down. There’s no doubt that ideas propelled at the speed of light are spreading faster than ever before. The concept of intimacy and “friendship” is also changing fast. By looking at my Blackberry I can learn what my friends thought of exploding stereotypes in Julie and Julia or exploding bodies in District 9. One friend is getting metal rods in his foot after a 80 mph racing kart crash. Ok, too much information. Point is, this kind of intimacy doesn’t involve face to face, more like face to screen. You can have involved relationships with people without ever meeting them.
Decline of civilization, ya think? Could be. But I think it’s more about people craving connection and being inventive about finding it where they can. I can’t find the town square of Los Angeles on my GPS; neither can anybody else. 
So we have to invent a town square. Mine turns out to be on a screen. Is that a strange place to find “what it’s all about?”
“I am glad I wasn’t there. I hate crowds. In a field? No in-door plumbing? My sister will tell you that camping, to me, has always meant a Holiday Inn. Music? I’m tone deaf.”
-Mathew Tombers
Tombers wrote that in a blog about Woodstock, the cultural touchstone that happened forty years ago this month. Like Tombers, I too would have stayed away, but only because I can’t deal with using a porta-potty while on acid. The iconic moment of Woodstock has come around again in a surprising way – this time instead of mud and music we have pixels and social progress.
As people seek connection on the Internet they are also trying to do work that matters. The two go together because the exchange of ideas is accelerating while we remain connected with hundreds if not thousands of people. Businesses are going green. People are looking at micro-financing to help the world’s poor. The shows I’m pitching in my company are about healing or consciousness or science and spirit. Ideas travel fast when they’re wired and there’s the sense that we’re all thinking the same thing: How can we do good?
As Lynne Twist writes in The Soul of Money, “The communications explosion has awakened our natural relatedness to one another and the awareness of the fact that we’re interconnected. It has also facilitated a truly global conversation on important issues that affect us all.”
A global conversation on Twitter? That’s technology helping us put a lot of consciousness into 140 characters.
