Commentary on One to One Conversations

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Got one on one conversations?

I wrote to Derek Sivers, commenting on his 44 hours of being interviewed. (link) Who is he? See the beginning of any interview.

Dear Derek,

Greetings from the best half of North America.

You liked conversing with an Olympian who said, “I do not hang out;” you very much preferred one on one conversations;  when a fellow would surprise you, at a scheduled get together for you and him, by showing up with friends, you would be so disappointed. I can relate.

Commentary

I’ve noticed that when a few people in conversation are interrupted, no one picks up the old conversation thread. I guess because they were merely “hanging out.”

The problem with small social groups? For me? I have to politely go by the “slowest ship in the convoy” regarding vocabulary, intimacy, frivolity and so forth.

As for good group socializing: A young lady confided to me that she despaired of talking too much in the bar. This would be—people varied from week to week—after our campus Toastmasters Club meetings. Despaired. 
I advised her that I secretly count heads, do division, and then only talk my fair share of the time. One day she looked so happy to tell me, "Your advice really worked!"

One afternoon, there I am in the bar with two not-so-young ladies. One has a fiance whom I had never met. The topic was so cool! Intimate and interesting! The fiance enters the bar, walks up, and —like something out of a feminist caricature— he abruptly speaks several flat sentences, as an oblivious centre of attention, hijacks the conversation, and the topic is gone like smoke. I lost a lot of respect for the man, and I was not surprised, when I met the lady only a few years later, to learn she had divorced.

To prevent hijacks, whenever one is late to bars, convention seminars or in everyday life, it helps to remember the old Chinese proverb: “When you go outdoors, look at the weather; when you go indoors, look at the faces.”

I can tell you who truly prefers to converse, as opposed to hanging out or relaxing: 
The social crowd of young 1930’s Paris intellectuals including 

(“but not limited to,” my lawyer hastens to add) 

Simone De Beauvoir and her boy friend, Jean Paul Sartre. I suppose sometimes the whole gang arrived in a group to a big cafe. Simone explains in her memoir something that amazed the cafe manager, given that her friends all knew each other: 

When a pair of people were talking, 

(Of course the pairs would mix and match from day to day) 

and another pair came in, the second pair would find their own table, as would the next pair too. Easily explained: They all relished one on one conversations.

As I found in Derek Siver's notes on the book Geography of Genius: “We’re not talking about conversation as a form of entertainment. We’re talking about conversation as the piling up of premises leading to a conclusion. We’re talking about conversation that takes an issue forward, conversation as a way of getting somewhere.”

I am writing to supportively say that you and I are not the only ones to seek Paris friends. I for one am still seeking.

Sean Crawford
Note: My new blog, at seanessay.com, has an expanded draft of this posted October 2020.

June 2020

Back-trail of Essays and Blogs

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Do you like broccoli? 

Here is an essay that, like the "broccoli movie" Ghandi, is "good for you."

Tis a nostalgia piece, a re-run, from back when blogs could be substantial like the articles in Sunday newspapers. Whatever happened to those days?

But first, a new headnote, from the blog of Seth Godin for October 26, 2019:

If we only forward the easy, short and funny things we read online, why are we surprised that our inbox is filled with nothing we’ll remember tomorrow?

What would happened if instead, we shared the most complex, useful and thoughtful things we discovered instead?

Here it is, my 75^th post. My astute readers will have noticed that for every 25 “postings” I do a piece explaining essays. I say “posting,” not “blog,” because hey, I’m not a blogger: I’m an essayist. But today I'll try to explain blogs too.

When telling people I have a hobby of writing, I merely say I write “nonacademic” essays, and leave it at that. I couldn’t begin to explain in just a sound bite how the essays school kids learn to write are—ahem!— for kids. In the wider world essays start out with different goals and functions, and of course follow different forms. Open any magazine and see: An adult essay never ends with “in conclusion;” it very seldom begins with a topic sentence as a thesis to be “proven.” Such writing would be “bad form.”

I’ve heard that essays in The New Yorker will begin by meandering along and then finally, at the bottom of the first page, announce the topic. This form allows busy New Yorkers, in their fast-paced city, a nice chance to stop rushing… and fix on something that rewards an adult attention span. I wish internet blogs were simularly aimed at adults.

It was a guy with a decent attention span, Paul Graham, who inspired me to do my own internet essays. Graham noted, in his Age of the Essay, that the internet had existed for a few years before people figured out they could use it for blogs. (web log or public diary, with people's comments) His hope was that soon people would figure out they could use it for essays too. This hasn’t happened yet, and I’m losing hope it ever will. So far, no one else writes wide ranging essays like Graham, while my number of bookmarked essayists I can count on the fingers of one hand—not including my thumb. 

I was at university when personal computers arrived for the public—but not for the university, not yet. Computers weren’t quite an everyday topic of conversation for people, not nearly as often as when color TVs or 10-speeds arrived, but still there was a trace of the old “left out” feeling if you didn’t have one. Naturally, among us starving students, only the nerds were motivated enough to get one. After all, a computer cost more than a used car.

I remember, back then, being at a seminar of people from Strategic Studies. Some one asked why armies still had those big expensive all-too-vulnerable tanks. I quipped, “Tanks are like personal computers: Everyone knows you should have them… but no one knows quite what to do with them.” As for computers, what we did with them was do household accounts, write letters, address envelopes and, uh… mostly guys resorted to playing computer games like Space Invaders.

At last came the World Wide Web. Meanwhile, at the university, at this time, there was a very long hallway, enclosed from the elements, running along the entire back length of the physical education building. I was probably the only one to notice that, on a campus of eager helpful opinionated young scholars, no one had posted anything at all. And of course no one posted “comment threads” of replies. 

Soon the nerds began “surfing” and their word entered our vocabulary. But many students still preferred to put their money on a car. At this time the student radio station magazine, Vox, ran a skeptical editorial. The editor noted that guys who wouldn’t be comfortable in a bathing suit were preaching the joy of surfing to find out, say, how to fix their bicycle. From his cozy music hangout amidst a crowded friendly campus the editor’s question was: Can’t I reach out to living people to ask how to fix a bike?

Today, when everyone knows computers are a Good Thing, the reply to that music-loving editor would be, “Yes but—…there’s so much stuff out there.” 

“Yes, I know I should get out and mingle with people, but…” 

“Yes, I know I have all the social skills of a zombie, but that’s why I honestly prefer to stay at the computer playing zombie wars.”

I have sympathy but no answers. I have no idea as to when the line is crossed: When does being in a cybernetic community of bloggers, with words on my cold backlit screen, become an escape from my real local community? I am reminded of Kurt Vonnegut’s image of a dog stopping by a sidewalk vending machine so a cybernetic arm could come out and pet him. 

As for me, I too like to escape. Sometimes I escape away from reading stuff I will long remember, away from essays or that zombie book World War Z, (which I recommend) into reading fluffy forget-me-right-away blogs. “Yes, but— why do blogs seem to outnumber essays by a zillion to one?”

Because: Essays take more effort. I think of that long phys ed hallway. I guess it follows logically that people who wouldn’t make the effort to post with real paper onto a big hallway won’t make any effort for essays even when they finally have access to a computer. Contrawise, the non-college folks who wouldn’t normally write anything, the folks who, before telephone rates were de-regulated, (lowered) would rather make awfully expensive long-distance-phone-calls than write letters, will now write a blog.

* * *

I like young university students. At the same time, being middle-aged, and having been raised working class, I have an old blue-collar perspective. I’m aware that during the 1950’s the “slicks” were fast disappearing. These were the magazines with slick pages giving the world such things as True Romance and True Confessions. My waitress Sue, who reads pretty slowly when she reads aloud, would have liked them. She loves her Stephen King, but the other stuff? She can get it from television.

Yes, TV killed the slicks, and it killed the pulps too. Sue doesn’t blog herself, by the way, but it seems to me that a lot of her friends who type madly onto the blogosphere are literate but not readers. Not of books. They are typists, but not writers. Not for abstract thought. Naturally they wouldn’t care for essays.

I like Sue; I had her over to my housewarming party. She likes me too, yet obviously I would never expect her, let alone her friends, to read my essays. However, when it comes to ignoring my stuff, what is my excuse for any surfer with a university degree, let alone a degree in something considered extra smart like Computer Science? Of course I wouldn’t expect them to literally read my stuff, but I am surprised to find they don’t read anyone’s essays at all. 

Some of the computer “guys”—they don’t merit the honorific “nerds”—are like Sue: they seemingly can’t read or write. How bizarre. As it happens, I already knew there was such a thing as a university graduate who doesn’t read books. Now I am finding that some of them can barely even read a longer blog.

I say this after reading the comments on the blog of one of my four bookmarked essayists, Stevey, who writes for computer programmers. I like Stevey’s humor. For me, a nonprogrammer, half of his stuff I can tell is real good but it’s like trying to read The Jabberwocky. Happily, the other half I get. In Stevey’s post of January 7^th, 2008, Blogging Theory 201: Size Does Matter, he explains how he decides on his blog length. He looks at reading duration

“… and some folks like to read slowly. Heck, some don’t even read at all. It’s one of the amazing miracles of the internet: write-only people. They won’t read but they somehow find a way to write. You see them comment in all the time in my blogs: ‘I didn’t actually read your entry, but allow me to comment on it all the same…’ Lovely.”

I know what he means. I have read too many such comments for Stevey, complaints that his pieces (A) are too long or (B) … should be written as a sound bite. My reaction: “WTF?” They don’t get it that Stevey writes “long,” by their standards, to serve a purpose. Part of their problem is their expectations for “blogs” as being “short.” What’s a man to do… put up a headline “Essays by Stevey?” They’d still complain.

Never mind. All I can do is mutter that quote from Mark Twain. (~)

Expectations by readers are one thing. What are the expectations of the actual bloggers?

* * *

By “bloggers” I exclude the good folks of LiveJournal, as they seem to live in a nice sunny world of their own. Many other bloggers, though, seem to live in a grayer more competitive sphere… As a man from Tennessee says, “our grandparents lived in a troop of monkeys,” with a hierarchy, and therefore people tend to do a lot of comparing. In the real world some people genuinely believe in having a “mono-value,” a simplistic judgmental one-dimension criterion of “money.”

In the blog world a good many truly believe in the value of statistics: simplistically counting the “hits” on their site, or even hits on specific posts. I have even read where a few people were nasty and competitive for who has the best “stats.” Happily, I’ve also read many postings of generous advice on how to increase page hits. For some folks it might be healthier to ignore stats and simply see their blog as a chance for an ephemeral conversation. In other words, as being simply social.

But if a blogger, similar to an essayist, is striving for posts of lasting value, then I doubt the wisdom of choosing to have a mono-value of “stats.” Or, for that matter, having any mono-value in one's life. It’s too easy to be trapped. Graham once reported in an essay that after he received stock in his tech company he suddenly just couldn’t help evaluating his every action by “how it would affect the stock,” rather than “how it would affect the work.” And I once read on a U.S. waiter’s blog where every day, all day, he kept up a mental cost-benefit of how each customer was doing, value-wise, as a tipper. (In fairness, U.S. waiters are paid very little compared to waiters here)

It is money, I am sure, that is the root of some of the competitiveness, as certain bloggers desperately need to advertise their small business or generate funding from running advertisements on their blog. As for me, in my everyday job, as a “professional,” I am legally constrained from having a mono-value of money.

As a "blogger," I could simply type a one-sentence essay, “When you’re hot, you’re hot; when you’re not, you’re not.” After I gave it a catchy title, All I know about sex I could hit the “post” button and watch it get more hits than any other page I wrote. So much for stats.

Lately I’ve been following blogger Penelope Trunk (her pen name) who has a background as a business columnist. She writes on life and careers in a blog that includes lessons from her own life, even some awfully personal stuff. I should expect her blog to include archives. And I’m right, it does. I should also expect that she would write with pride, with substance, with a belief that her pieces have some lasting value. And I do. But her fans don’t. If they comment on a post that is any older than the food in my fridge, then they apologize. My reaction: WTF? I don’t expect a column post to be as lasting as an essay post, but still, I expect that Penelope put a modicum of tender loving care into her baby with hope for its future. And then to have people apologize…

When I am writing or public speaking I know I have made a connection when someone’s eyes light up and they say, “Yes! Let me tell you what happened to me!” In other words, when they feel moved to comment. So don’t apologize.

Of course many blogs, like those of Sue’s dear friends, are expected to be social, with easy social comments. As ephemeral as flowers, they are supposed to be for persons who are attention-span-challenged. Fine by me. I guess. Sure… but I admit I lose patience when I see this blog after blog … After blog. Perhaps this relates to the common wisdom that to be a “success,” as in have “successful” stats, you must blog several times per week, preferably daily. My reaction? (Besides WTF?): You can forget any lasting value.

Maybe that 20^th century Chicago columnist Johnny Deadline can be smart every day, but no one else can. As it happens, the competitive bloggers have proven, in black and white, based on their stats, that their readers will desert them in droves if their blog frequency falls off to (horrors!) once a week. My reaction: What the—! Who are these readers? And why would I “give a care” about them? So I can compete for stats? I’m no dog at a vending machine.

* * *

…What I find hard to wrap my head around is how people can leave a negative comment when they have only skimmed a piece, and have thereby badly misinterpreted things. If it is morally wrong to comment to censor a novel, without first carefully reading the novel, then it is also wrong to write in to censure a writer unless you first carefully read his piece.

This I believe: You have no right to injure the feelings of the writer, and to injure the community of readers, unless you are willing to take responsibility to read. To do otherwise is a vice. As you know, a “vice” is self-gratification at the expense of the community.

Essayist Scott Berkun takes a gentler view. Last week, for his June 16essay-blog on Why you are not an Artist he added to the comments: 

The fascinating thing so far in this post is how many people seem to have skimmed it. It’s very hard to defend myself against things I didn’t quite say : ) 

I see Scott added a smiley emoticon. Before I totally lose my sense of smiley face humor, tossing around words like vice, I had best leave today’s subject of fluffy Blogs to return to today’s other solid subject: Essays. Unfortunately, it’s hard for me to go from fluffy cotton candy to solid potatoes. Especially when I’m feeling uninterested in explaining essays these days. You see, I’ve recently overdosed on explanations. I discovered in a used bookstore, while passing through Kamloops, a decade’s worth of annuals of The Best American Essays. That’s a decade’s worth of introductions regarding: What is an Essay?

Here is a sentence by Joseph Epstein from his forward to the 1993 volume:

"I prefer it when the essay takes a small, very particular subject and, through the force of the essayist’s artistically controlled maunderings, touches on unpredictably large general matters, makes hitherto unexpected connections, tells me things I hadn’t hitherto known, or reminds me of other things I had already known but never thought to formulate so well as has the essayist I am reading at the moment."

After spitting the cotton candy out of my teeth for such solid food, I have nothing left to say.

Sean Crawford

In Cyberspace 

(Hello Lain!)

And in Calgary

June 2010,  February 2020

Footnotes
~A look at the blog world as of 2003 by writer John Scalzi
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2003/06/16/reader-request-2-life-online/ 

~Speaking of statistics, I am surprised that people are skipping from my home page to this page, but not my to my more recent Polite Blogs one. How strange.

Update: Comedian George Carlin changed his life and career when—lightbulb!—he stopped having laughter as his mono stat for the success of his stage comedy, as he explained in his autobiography.

~For my blog website I am the "administrators" of the site. I have a lined accountant's page, where page titles older than the food in my freezer can be seen at a glance. Any new comments there show up in vivid colored ink. 

Update: I can click on "comments" to read them all, listed in reverse order.

~Real writers, when it comes to old pieces, find satisfaction in (ongoing royalties and) comments.

~Mark Twain said, “A person who won’t read has no advantage over the person who can’t read.”

Models, Nerds and Martians

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Hello Reader,

Got a sense of loss?

Let us continue last week’s topic of nerds, as an excuse for two more War of the Worlds poems. 

It seems to me you might hear a pretty lady say, on a TV commercial, “Please don’t hate me because I’m beautiful” but you won’t hear the same plea “… me because I’m smart,” partly because too many of us were too criticized at school, and so being around smart people hurts too much to mention. For my part, being an avid reader, or “smart,” I keep in mind how I might hurt others who “don’t read too good.” 

Have you ever noticed how those glossy page entertainment stories often include lines about a glamorous woman once being too skinny or too shy or something? It’s for (figuratively) setting you at ease around her. I once, as we two drank in the bar, reassured an international advertising model by saying, “There are categories of people that intimidate me, but models and show business are not one of them.” At the next party we attended together, I observed another model, just in from a shoot in Germany, setting the other people at ease for my friend by saying “she used to have hips up to here!” A good friend, doing for the model just like I would read in a glossy article.

If I had said in the bar whom I would be at ease with, then I could have included celebrity media-types, journalists and famous best-selling writers—stemming from my days as a volunteer student newspaper reporter. (As for show biz actors, I took theatre career classes in college—I knew them well) 

I have lost count of the times I have been on the TV news—but, being a journalist myself,  I have never once bothered to watch myself, even when, as often happened, I was near a TV set at the time. Once, when I was on CBC, I snacked with someone in a student food court rather than suggest we go downstairs to the student restaurant, directly below us, having an idiot box up in the corner. 

Note: The students don’t have a “real restaurant with cutlery” anymore, this was back during the capitalist reaction-swing of the pendulum: the Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney years. (Update: the fancy graduate student lounge, just under the posh faculty lounge in the student building, has been opened to undergraduates)

And of course, having earned a degree, I’m not intimidated by scientists. Speaking of knowing smart people, my buddy Blair was so smart he attended medical school without taking any Greek or Latin: He had already picked up those ancient vocabularies on his own. I essayed about him among regular guys in Blair, Being Smart archived September 2011. 

…Poems…

I once complimented a fellow worker, Tracy, in the presence of our peers, for having enough self esteem that I never have to worry or hold back. She held up two hands to show that I bring her up towards my level. 

Here’s a poem of how nerds have to know their own strength, from the years after the Martians are gone.

A Regular Human

In the Museum of Natural History,

    —Don’t say, Museum of Flora and Fauna—

a Martian is pickled in brine.

    —Don’t say, is preserved in a solution of formaldehyde—

A motionless handling-machine,

once so graceful,

stands in the British Museum.

    —Don’t speak of polarized discs and quantum mechanics—

As for that long spar,

explain, 

while motioning with your hands,

it goes at right angles, straight out like this—

    Don’t simply say, perpendicular.

It’s what you don’t say that matters,

if you wish to pass among regular humans,

undetected,

lonely.

As a nerd amongst regular society, it took awhile to believe in “just being myself.” How relieved I was to read computer startup millionaire Paul Graham. He pointed out that startup nerds don’t prefer the same cities as normal people and rich investors, instead preferring Boulder and San Francisco to Miami and Vegas, preferring quiet conversations and used bookstores to thundering discos and fashion malls. I read Graham and thought, with all due respect to the regular majority, “Hey, me too!”

From my poetic War of the Worlds poetry manuscript, from the part where the war’s aftermath includes a sense of loss, comes this metaphoric look at second hand bookstores (in Edmonton) now being hard hit by the digital age.

Gone the Bookstores

With top of lungs anticipation

I have enjoyed strolling past pretty meadows,

pockets of golden canola, dandelions, daisies

and five or six second-hand bookstores.

Not now.

With it’s yellow door atop a long flight of stairs,

the Untitled Bookstore is gone.

Strathcona Books is no longer a meadow but a drab crater,

dull, vacant.

Athabasca Books has long bare birch wood shelves,

in a bare room.

Alhambra Books was smacked by a dragon,

swayed on its foundations;

No one allowed inside, now;

an accident, they say.

With all the pretty meadows gone

I walk on sidewalks of broken slate.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

2019

Footnotes: 

~As an enthusiastic writer, and nerd, as advised by Rita Mae Brown, one of the best things I ever did was take a vocabulary class in ancient Greek and Latin: taught by the classics department for science majors. See my essay Loving Greek and Latin archived March 2012.

~While the culture shock was immense if I went from “there” to the physical education students lounge, nevertheless, one of my joys in life at university was “being there,” huddled in a corner of the theatre students lounge, eating my lunch, watching all those shy people be as flamboyant as God intended, without fear.

Nerds and Normals

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Hello Reader,

Got nerds?

Nobody believes me when I say am a nerd. So then I chuckle to myself thinking, “OK, then I’m a recovering nerd.”

Here’s a cool nerd factoid: How about that South Korean flag? It includes a prominent Yang and Yin symbol, two-in-one black and white teardrops. 

It was Chairman Mao, the first communist ruler of China, who pointed out that, actually, the black and white did not have to be scrupulously fifty-fifty. In his essay On Contradiction he explained how one color can be dominating, sixty-forty, for example, then—flip!—The colors can switch places, so the other one is more prevalent. He wrote this to explain the philosophy of “dialectical materialism,” (footnote) to give brand new leaders, after the revolution, some self confidence that they could replace the mandarins and officials—who were given the boot— and then go run the “people’s republic.”

Right now, I am imagining those two colors as nerd and non-nerd. I’m sure all of us have a touch of nerd, as when we like factoids, while all of us have a touch of that Regular American: a plain fellow who believes that everything could, and should, be explained simply, distrusting educated complexity. That distrust is why Hollywood rivals and villains, like that clown on The Simpsons, are often educated Britishers… implying that US universities, except for the household name ones, are below the level of British and Canadian ones. (Probably so, given that my degree equals a US masters degree, according to my professors who have compared curriculums while at American conferences) 

As for understanding nerds, it was a computer millionaire, Paul Graham, who wrote of how the really smart boys, back in high school, were supposedly, somehow, not smart enough to figure how to appear normal and be popular. His explanation was: Yes, teens all want to fit in—something easier to do back in elementary school—but teenage nerds want something even more: to be smart. OK, I’m oversimplifying. Graham also said teen “high school society” has a lack of shared real problems. Therefore the only shared “problem” they have, of helping each other strive to be “normal” and popular is, for a nerd, just too unreal, too un-motivating, and too airy-fairy. But for an unthinking regular teen, “normal” is whatever other teens say it is. 

Of course, in the adult world, with real group problems, status is not from being the most conformist, but from who will help the most with tackling a group’s problem/project/shared goals. There’s a reason why, at the annual dinner, people clap for the volunteers. Those hardy volunteers have earned some status. 

A few decades back, a baby boomer wrote a book called Is There Life After High School? I answer: Sure there is, but I think, in adult society, the trick is to find your vocations and avocations within groups small enough for a person to be noticed for achieving some “status and popularity” through real contributions.  Graham, who preferred small computer startup companies, would warn that in the big conventional companies it is harder to measure your actual contribution, hence there is more attention to office politics and image and fakery. Call it, ‘high school lite.’

Some former teens will see the entire country as their peer group, and resort to status from the only thing they have left for such a gross undiscerning crowd: conspicuous consumption. Money. But adult nerds are quick to see through that ploy. That’s why in Silicon Valley no brainy millionaires will desperately crave to know what is the latest, most excruciatingly correct clothing-fashion-for-the-wealthy. In fact, they dress rather like nerds.

I have been over simplifying, so far, by making nerds seem non-regular because of their brains. But there can be another reason for being different: social isolation. At the end of the movie Revenge of the Nerds II, as I dimly recall, a laundry list of nerd characteristics is recited, a list which includes things having nothing to do with being smart, such as poor hygiene or being able to burp long and loud. Well. If I was a proud hermit, coming into town only occasionally for supplies, then I would nevertheless make it my business to cultivate an “awareness level” for what is normal among the townsfolk. Examples of folks employing such an “awareness skill” would be undercover spies, television set decorators, actors, and the writer of the Jack Reacher mysteries. Being observant, as every Boy Scout knows, is fun. 

Oh, such a fun life the founder of Boy Scouts had! Life would never be boring for the man who once drew a few sketches of different men to show how each man’s personality is reflected by how he tilts his hat. As for folks who would never do the Boy Scout thing of being “observant,” well, I think they would risk living in their own little bubble. As if they value being oblivious.

What I observe, besides other things, is nerds: Because if I’m real smart, then being a nerd would be my default—I want to know what to avoid.

I wonder: Are nerds stiff and humor-challenged? Then I could take a night class in stand up comedy improvisation. Not that I ever have, but I could. Do they dress dull? Then I could rip through my closet tossing out anything beige. Hey, maybe I’d look good in mauve. Are they close-minded and set in their ways? I could take a night class in liberal arts. 

Are nerds scared to meet and mingle? Me too, sometimes, but …then I remember how comedian Red Green ends each show by saying, “We’re all in this together” adding “I’m pulling for you,” and “remember to keep your stick on the ice.” As I see it, the best way to de-nerdify would be, just like Red Green, to care about others. Call it the Zen of Caring—No wonder the Boy Scouts  learn to do a good turn every day. Here’s a mantra: “If I care about others, then awareness of others will come naturally.” And for mingling, there’s always that mantra from Galilee: “Perfect love casteth out all fear.”

I enjoyed mingling in my shared house. I’m still chuckling over talking to the parents visiting a young man there. “For an only child,” I marvelled, “your son is sure unspoiled.” 

“We had the only swimming pool on the block. That way, when the other kids came over, they made sure he wasn’t spoiled!”

I guess somewhere along the trail I must have mingled enough, because no one today believes I’m a nerd.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

June

2019

An abstract footnote:

~”Dialectical materialism, “the trick of seeing things “in terms of their contradictions,” can be a life-changing trick, according to Barak Obama’s mentor Saul Alinsky, in his book Rules For Radicals. I must confess I don’t do any dialectical materialism myself, but I’m throwing it out there. I suspect it was Karl Marx who saw things as “thesis, antithesis and synthesis.” Just throwing that out for you.
Or as a comic book hero says:
“Contradiction is the seed of conciousness. I knew, from the pain of contradiction, that I was. And what I was.” 
― Joss Whedon, Astonishing X-Men, Volume 2: Dangerous

Some not so abstract footnotes:

~In his review (link) of Revenge of the Nerds II, (a movie of regular popular culture) Roger Ebert explains what nerds are, saying it’s something the movie doesn’t understand.

~I sympathize with struggling nerds and “social isolates”: Nora Ephron once remarked in an interview, “Nobody interesting had an ordinary childhood.” She wrote interesting things like her 2006 bestseller I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman and, back in the 20th century, Wallflower at the Orgy where she slightly mocked editor Helen Gurly Brown’s articles in Cosmopolitan magazine saying “She’s just trying to help” which is, I guess, what folks might say about my own essays. (And yes, her book title is more literal than figurative)

~Nora mentioned that her fellow writers wrote “beneath themselves” doing simple articles for popular magazines in order to pay the bills. If here, for my essay site, I write simply with very few complex-compound sentences, it’s because I write for regular people, in keeping with my journalism past. As feedDigest Channel on the web says:

QUOTE: 

According to the data and stats that were collected, ‘Essays by Sean’ channel has an excellent rank. The channel mostly uses long articles along with sentence constructions of the basic readability level, which is a result indicating a well-balanced textual content on the channel.

UNQUOTE

link to more stats: http://channels.feeddigest.com/Essays_by_Sean

Also, my site has “low traffic” and “extraordinary global rank.” Hurray! The blog sometimes gets translated too, which I only know about from having google statistics. The translators are never polite enough to say hello.

~As for our cultural belief that it is best to speak plainly, that everything can be simplified and paraphrased and summarized to be simpler: Wrong! There is a reason why professors don’t talk like high school teachers, but will instead use several clauses in their sentences. Samual Delaney said that, for detailed sentences, to even paraphrase is to change the meaning.

I’m angry at our culture because: It was “busy” politicians who wouldn’t read past the summary and into the actual report, which had nuance and qualifiers, probabilities and footnotes, who would then conclude that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One politician, too self-important to read the report, bleated like a sheep, “We mustn’t let the smoking gun be a mushroom cloud.”

Meanwhile, I am a little angry, mostly contemptuous, at the UN because the IPCC, the UN’s climate change guys, according to a Manchester reporter, write their UN report summary first, and then the various scientists are expected to constrict their reporting to fit the summary.

Here’s a dense sidebar about the consequences of our distrust of complex talk, 

in the form of a quote included in my essay Death of the Liberal Class archived May 2015:

<< …(The liberal class was) forgetting, as MacDonald wrote, that “as in arts and letters, communicability to a large audience is in inverse ratio to the excellence of a political approach. This in not a good thing: as in art, it is a deforming and crippling factor. Nor is it an eternal rule: in the past, the ideas of a tiny minority, sometimes almost reduced to the vanishing point of one individual, have slowly come to take hold on more and more of their fellow men.”

The cultural embrace of simplification, as MacDonald warned, meant reducing a population to speaking in pre-digested clichés and slogans. It banished complexity and further pushed to the margins difficult, original, or unfamiliar ideas. The assault on radical and original thought, which by definition did not fit itself into the popular cultural lexicon, saw art forms such as theatre suffer.  (P. 88) >>