telling stories

The next annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (SAAP) is scheduled for next March in Spokane, Washington. The announced conference theme is "narrative and identity."


How ironic, then, to note that Spokane native and former SNL cast member Julia Sweeney, one of the world's great storytellers (God Said Ha!, Letting Go of God), has declared her intention to begin a new chapter in her own personal narrative. Her blog announcement, posted this past March:

I plan to stop being a public, personal, storyteller.

Her new story begins with an old one, the one she'd recently told at a TED conference involving her 10-year old daughter Mulan's introduction to the sex lives of frogs. 

It got big laughs and even a partial standing ovation at the end.  People really loved it and I was so high and happy afterwards. 

I'm proud that I have the skill to tell a good story and make people laugh. I have a million happy memories of being onstage and making people laugh.  

But, she went home and thought about the embarrassment potential, of that and other of her stories-- their potential to embarrass the people she loves, mostly, but also their subversion of her own privacy and dignity. She was 

mortified and could not believe that I hadn’t considered this before.  Mulan looks good in the story – a curious, smart nine year old.  But the whole topic is embarrassing to a girl her age. 

As for herself, 

I no longer wish to be so naked and bare.  I am surprised I ever did want to do it.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad I did.  I am proud that I learned to craft my experiences into a story and I am proud that I learned the craft of being on-stage.  But now, I need to stop doing it.  I am happily married, for one thing, and it’s boring and inappropriate to talk about.  My daughter is ten and she reads my blog, (OMG!) she goes to my shows.   In fact we have spoken at length about the stories I tell about her.   Not that, at ten, she is really capable of understanding the ramifications.  Still, she says it’s okay to tell the Mulan-frog story.  But ugh.   I don’t think she really understands.  I feel the need to protect her from myself!

The posted reactions of Julia's fans have ranged from supportive and  sad to hurt and angry. I consider myself a fan, and my own reaction is a combination of understanding and discomfort.  I blog, I have kids, and while I tend not to tell personal stories I consider overly revealing or invasive of their or my privacy, I still have to wonder if I am contributing (along with millions of others) to a phenomenon of public disclosure and transparency whose implications are not entirely sunny. 


Julia Sweeney is-- was?-- a professional "public, personal storyteller." Countless more of us are amateurs. What do we stand to gain and lose, specifically in terms of our personal and collective "identity," through the incessant spinning of all these public "narratives"?


Nick Carr, Clay Shirky, Jaron Lanier and others have begun to address these issues. What should a public philosopher steeped in the spirit of James and Dewey say about them?


Don't know yet. I'll ask around. 

Happy b'day MO

Missourians are supposed to be modest and self-effacing midwesterners. I used to be one myself. 

The state of Missouri was admitted to the Union on Aug.10, 1821. Missouri is called the "Show Me State," a motto dating back to the 1890s and a speech where Congressman Willard Vandiver declared: "I come from a country that raises corn and cotton, cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I'm from Missouri, and you have got to show me."

For the past several decades, the mean center of the population of the United States has been in Missouri.

Missouri is the center of America in other ways, too: St. Louis, Missouri, is considered the farthest west of America's Eastern cities, and Kansas City, Missouri, is thought of as the farthest east of America's Cities of the West. In the past, Missouri was a Southern state; now it's generally thought of as a Midwestern state.

It's what's called a "bellwether state" in politics. Missouri has voted for every winning U.S. presidential candidate since 1904, with just two exceptions: the 1956 election and the 2008 election.

Missouri was settled by German brewers and has always had among the most lenient drinking laws in the nation. When Prohibition fever swept the rest of the nation, Missouri never enacted statewide prohibition. State law specifically bans arrests for public intoxication. Open containers of alcohol are permitted in moving vehicles (passengers can drink).

Missourians count among their ranks: Mark Twain, Langston Hughes, T.S. Eliot, Sara Teasdale, Tennessee Williams, William S. Burroughs, William Least Heat Moon, Joseph Pulitzer, J. William Fulbright, Walt Disney, Walter Cronkite, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Jesse James.

Writer's Almanac

What is philosophy?

The Philosophy Bites podcasters are sponsoring a twitter contest to find the best 100-character definition of philosophy. Lots of interesting and preposterous proposals are turning up at #philbitescomp. 


My entry, exapted from William James and melded with linguistic skepticism:

Philosophy: an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly about what can & can't be clearly stated. 

And then there's Ambrose Bierce's:


PHILOSOPHY, n. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.


He must have had a bad class. Existentialism was after his time.

words

Nice to see fellow Nashvillian and journeyman pitcher R.A. Dickey getting good notices for both his knuckleball and his vocabulary.

"If he's not the most thoughtful and well-spoken person in that clubhouse, he's near the top of the list," said Mike Sielski, Mets beat writer for TheWall Street Journal.

"In the visiting clubhouse at Dodger Stadium, R.A.'s locker was next to Jason Bay's. Within a five-minute span, Jason used the word kerfuffle (disorder) and R.A. used the word surmised (infer). The reporters were joking, 'Who uses words like this in a baseball clubhouse?' I made the comment that there's more intelligence concentrated in these two lockers than just about any clubhouse in professional sports in the United States."

But... for "surmise" he's an intellectual? Really? And he's underpaid at $600K?

On the other hand, he's an old man at 35. Kudos to him for persevering.

less strident

"Strident, and for that reason easy to ignore." Slightly ironic, no? But I'm finding Hitch's graceful and humbled bout with cancer anything but strident. Experience is the great teacher of us all, if we pay attention long enough.

"powerless"

Hitch on CNN: don't expect a death-bed conversion, and don't pray for him unless it makes you feel better - it won't do anything for him. (Unlike Dan Dennett*, though, he won't ask if you've sacrificed a goat.)

*Dennett:  I have had to forgive my friends who said that they were PRAYING for me. I have resisted the temptation to respond "Thanks, I appreciate it, but did you also sacrifice a goat?" I feel about this the same way I would feel if one of them said "I just paid a voodoo doctor to cast a spell for your health." What a gullible waste of money that could have been spent on more important projects! Don't expect me to be grateful, or even indifferent. I do appreciate the affection and generosity of spirit that motivated you, but wish you had found a more reasonable way of expressing it.

pitiless

Christopher Hitchens has many faults, but sentimentality and self-pity are not among them. He's writing about his recently-diagnosed esophageal cancer now, interestingly confessing that he'd been deathly ill the morning of his appearance on The Daily Show earlier this summer when he so charmingly acknowledged-- while inwardly in denial about-- his mortality.

 To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?

Right. The universe really could not care less.  


He says he'll have something to say about the "astonishing number of prayer groups" who've been trying to intercede on his behalf, if he is "spared." I do hope he is.

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future of life

Sir Martin Rees, thinking deep and long at a Long Now Foundation seminar [video]:

We tend to get a distorted view of history as a long, boring past during which nothing much happened, and then a very short period of rapidly accelerating change leading up to the present. In reality, however, the Sun isn’t yet even halfway through its life cycle.

Despite that, people who predict things “a million years from now” are considered to be talking about the unimaginably distant future, but a million years is only a few dozen clock ticks of cosmological time. We as humanity are responsible for the future of not just the next few thousand years (the timescale on which civilization has so far existed) but for “spans of time six or more orders of magnitude greater than that.”

Over the truly long term, our posthuman descendants will become — not just second-generation intelligences — but thousand-generation or million-generation intelligences. He quoted Darwin on how no species can pass its likeness into the distant future unaltered; in a billion years of biological evolution, we’ve gone from bugs to humans, and technological evolution is a lot faster than biological. Our distant descendants will be not just strange, but completely alien to us.

During this century, we not only have unprecedented opportunity, but unprecedented responsibility. If the new technologies we build have a high chance of causing civilization-wide catastrophe (and Rees thinks they do) for the first time in history, then we are, all of us, are responsible for actively preventing that from happening, not just trying to predict it or understand it. The key thing here is the commitment to taking action to alter the future instead of just trying to predict it.

deep reading

It's a bit ironic to find Nick Carr's The Shallows, which complains-- among other things-- about a Rhodes Scholar (& philosophy major!) from Florida who never reads entire books but relies instead on the far more "efficient" surface reading facilitated by Google Books...in Google Books.

But wherever you find it, in whatever medium or format, this deserves to be read deeply end to end. Carr has read his William James on "attention."

shells

At the beach I'm not a shell-gatherer. But I do stoop to punctuate the end of each day's walks, finding some small token to stick in my pocket before reversing direction.

Like tweets, posts, moleskine journal entries, and sands through the hourglass, shells at the seashore serve nicely to notch the days in tangible form.

And like footprints in the sand, they're a good reminder: we're all destined for fossil-hood of one sort or another. This too shall pass.