Oh, good: exercising does nothing to reduce or reverse the effects of drinking. I can only assume this doesn’t apply to smoking.
-TGR
Author Archives: Ryan
Stop Watching “Jersey Shore”
In fact, stop watching all reality shows. While you’re at it, don’t buy any more tabloids either. I know: you do it ironically, you “get it,” you’re amused by the vulgar antics of the famous and the wannabe-famous on the TV. You’re doing this like an anthropologist, so you aren’t really helping to perpetuate this stuff. Right?
Let’s be clear: if you spend any measurable amount of brain-capital looking at the celeb street-candids on Jezebel or buy US Weekly or ever watch VH1, you are supporting a toxic, wasteful, crude, insipid, culturally disastrous economy that runs on 1.) the stupidity of most viewers and all the performers and 2.) the layer of fake detachment with which a purportedly sophisticated minority consumes the shows.
Most pop tele-media is so boring. It raises the total level of national shittiness. Why do so many reasonably sane, intelligent Americans give it their money and time and energy? Why nurse a hobby that makes you dumber? Doesn’t that stuff just make you feel . . . fecal? Just plain bad?
-whiny TGR, who watches a ton of football and baseball, and is the fully aware of the hypocrisy of this rant
The Clinton Tapes
If you, too, are alternately fascinated and disgusted by former President Clinton, then you will enjoy this apt essay (from the London Review of Books) on Taylor Branch’s new sort-of-oral history, The Clinton Tapes. The Man from Hope comes across as absurdly intelligent, maddeningly capricious, gloriously self-centered, and, ultimately, not that bad a guy (especially in contrast with the ghouls who replaced him and his people in 2001). Are you at all surprised by that?
It’s true we aren’t provided with verbatim transcripts – Clinton still has those for release one day to his presidential library in Arkansas – but instead a curious, twice-removed version of the conversations, with Branch having to reconstruct what was said from the notes he made at the time. Yet the account he provides is sufficiently artless – full of digressions, long-windedness, false starts and nagging obsessions – to have the ring of authenticity . . .
Through all this, a clear picture of Clinton’s passions and priorities emerges. The things he loves are politics, hard data and his family, in roughly that order. The thing he hates is the media, above all newspapers, on which he blames almost all his troubles. His love of politics is not a love of the sort of low-level politicking in which [former staffer George] Stephanopoulos and his fellow staffers indulge. Rather, he has an unquenchable fondness for politicians themselves, with all their foibles and all their weaknesses – it is, in other words, a kind of self-love.
If Lincoln and (maybe) Obama are our poet-presidents, and if Jefferson was the smartest man ever to hold the office, then Clinton’s weird mix of empathy, indiscretion, and brains marks him as a kind of sub-mutation of both categories. Read on, read on.
-TGR
A new look at Garfield
One did always sense that John was the true hero of the strip. As evidence, I present you with Garfield Minus Garfield. It may be more harrowing than Peanuts.
-TGR
GRAMMAR? I hardly know her!
Where yr boy been lately? Curled up with two new word-nerd treasures, that’s where. Yes, thanks to the good people in the Points Reward department at Chase / VISA, I am today the proud owner of the latest (11th, Revised) Concise Oxford English Dictionary, in tasteful aurora-esque cover colors, in all its vocabularic immensity,
as well as the third edition of Bryan Garner’s witty, authoritative, never-at-all-pedantic Garner’s Modern American Usage.
This one was published in February of 2009; I first got wind of Garner from David Foster Wallace’s essay “Tense Present” (discussed earlier on this site). Thanks to these two books, I will probably leave my apartment even less than usual this weekend. But hey, in liber carnalis.
Seriously, though, if you write much for your job or hobby or sanity or whatever, consider getting both texts. Dictionaries like Merriam-Webster’s are fine, but the OED remains the recognized standard when it comes to all things English. Garner’s is likewise the best of its kind: it maintains a rational balance between descriptive and prescriptive approaches to grammar, is erudite without being stuffy and compact without sacrificing depth, and, most importantly, it is very funny in places. If you write, you will use these books a lot.
-TGR
two prayers
I hear you and I’m everywhere, a spreading music.
-Rumi
. . . Hence it was,
Preferring text to gloss, he humbly served
Grotesque apprenticeship to chance event,
A clown, perhaps, but an aspiring clown.
-Wallace Stevens, “The Comedian as the Letter C”
The Pervert’s Grand Tour (of England)
Slate has started running a hilarious, erudite travelogue cum (and I mean cum) history of sex clubs, sex societies, sex orders, treehouses, fraternities, and assorted other carnal associations in 18th-century England. Written by the historian Tony Perrottet, each installment takes 5 minutes to read–10 if you are sluggish like me–but will lighten all 24 hours of your day. And your keyboard will remain dry.
-TGR
The U.K. is killing its universities, too!
We know the script by now. The putrefaction of the humanities. The attempt to turn public institutions into for-profit adjuncts of the defense and telecom industries, overseen by wealthy philistines with the complexions of raw potatoes (Google “Mark Yudof”). Increasing tuition matched by bigger, shoddier, haphazard lecture-hall “classes” where only the preternaturally determined learn anything. From the symposium to the balance sheet. The metastasis of bureaucracy, the general, mentally enfeebled, administrative top-heavyness. And a public that, for the most part, just does not give a fuck. I mean, what have universities ever done for civilization?
Anyway, the United Kingdom is accelerating its murder of education, albeit in a somewhat warmer fiduciary environment than California’s. This article from the Times Literary Supplement explains the terrifying rise of Research Assessment Exercises, which are furthering the decay of humanities departments in British universities. Yudof and his toadies need to step up their game: their fragmented, inarticulate, shambling, dark-of-wood-paneled-boardroom approach to destruction is simply less impressive, from a total strategic viewpoint, than the depraved efficiency of their Anglo counterparts.
-TGR
The General Reader 