I'm having a very Arts & Letters Daily kind of morning.
This article warmed my heart, and made me a little bit misty-eyed for English grad school:
Can anyone think that there is more understanding to be gained about the human heart from Freud than from Shakespeare�that the studies of Dora or the Wolf Man approach anywhere near to the profundity of understanding embodied in Macbeth or Lear, with their unflinching elucidation of man�s (and woman�s) capacity for evil? Can anyone think that the studies of Margaret Mead or Alfred Kinsey tell us anything nearly as true as Ovid or Turgenev? Does the sociobiology of E. O. Wilson or Richard Dawkins tell us any more than we learn from Homer or Virgil?
Hell no it doesn't! Fuck a bunch of Richard Dawkins!!!
Ahem.
To hear this guy Myron talk, you'd think people still read books, literary or otherwise. He kind of admits at the end of the article that he's a dinosaur---nobody thinks about literature this way anymore, and if they do they won't admit it because doing so would probably get them immediately ejected from the tenure track. Plus, it's not very cool. Deconstruction? Cool. The love? Not so much.
Speaking of: I think I'm in love with old Myron. Just a little bit.
Anyway.
Then there's this other article, which is all about me:
It is a common complaint that every place is starting to look the same. But in the information age, the late writer James Chapin once told me, every place becomes more like itself. People are less often tied down to factories and mills, and they can search for places to live on the basis of cultural affinity. Once they find a town in which people share their values, they flock there, and reinforce whatever was distinctive about the town in the first place. Once Boulder, Colorado, became known as congenial to politically progressive mountain bikers, half the politically progressive mountain bikers in the country (it seems) moved there; they made the place so culturally pure that it has become practically a parody of itself.
And the same for Seattle, kinda, although there are maybe four main types of white people here instead of just the one. I moved here because I feel comfortable here in a way I never did in the South. But why do I feel that way, exactly? The South is certainly a hell of a lot more diverse. (Black people live there, for example. Not necessarily in the same block as the white people, but you do run into them from time to time.)
And my friends here are a lot like me. I mean sure, some of them are better-looking or louder or hairier or whatever, but essentially? Just like me---especially in terms of social class, education, etc.
This is apparently from "the non-controversial first chapter" of the Bell Curve, which I never read because the politics offended me:
Think of your twelve closest friends. If you had chosen them randomly from the American population, the odds that half of your twelve closest friends would be college graduates would be six in a thousand. The odds that half of the twelve would have advanced degrees would be less than one in a million.
You lucky dog, you.
But how do you go about meeting people who aren't like you? Friendster won't do it. (I know I said I'd never bring it up again. I lied.) I used to know a guy who went to the "black bars" to try to make black friends. Something about this always struck me as sad and desperate and poseur-ish, but I don't have any better ideas.
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