I often wonder just how I would have done my job(s) before the advent of an internet that puts more or less whatever information I might need right at my fingertips. The answer, of course, applies to any question about how we did things in an earlier technological era: we would’ve had to talk to someone. Some of us would’ve had to talk to a librarian, just like the ones The New York Public Library has employed (and continues to employ) to research and respond to any questions people need answered.
The internet, as it happens, has loved #letmelibrarianthatforyou, the hashtag the New York Public Library started using on Instagram to identify the unusual such questions it fielded in the 20th century. Their recent discovery of a box of notecards filled with preserved questions from the 1940s through the 80s, photographs of which they now post on a regular basis, has provided a clear window onto the human curiosity of days past — or rather, the instances of human curiosity that librarians found curious enough to preserve in their box labeled “interesting research questions” and kept behind the desk.
Search technology, of course, hasn’t yet made human consultants of every kind obsolete; there are more Googleable and less Googleable questions, after all. Examples of the former include 1962’s “What is the gestation of human beings in days?” (“I was born on 1/29/62,” replies one commenter. “Maybe my mother was getting impatient!”), 1966’s query about whether Jules Verne wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and the undated “Are Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates the same person?”
Some patrons, on the other end of the spectrum, preferred to ask the unanswerable: one needed the solution to “the riddle of existence,” and another called in pursuit of The Oxford Ornithology of American Literature. Even if the librarians couldn’t help out these inquisitive people of the mid-20th century, I do hope they found a way to satiate your curiosity. It almost makes me want to see what modern humanity is Googling right now. Wait, no — I said “almost.”
David Carr took seven years to get through college. He didn’t have a Master’s degree or a PhD. Before he made it big writing for The New York Times, he spent time in rehab and on welfare. David Carr didn’t fit the profile of your average commencement speaker.
And yet Carr, who died in the Times newsroom on Thursday night, earned his spot speaking before the 2014 graduating class at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Known for his insightful reporting on changes in publishing, television and social media, Carr understood the world these young journalists were entering. And when he offered 10 pieces of graduation advice, you know the students took note. You should too:
1.) Someone who is underestimated will be the one who changes the world. It’s not the person everyone expects. It might be you.
2.) “Do what is front of you.” Focus on the small steps ahead of you.
3.) Don’t worry about achieving a master plan, about the plot to take over the world.
4.) Be a worker among workers. It’s more important that you fit in before you stick out.
5.) Follow the “Mom Rule.” Don’t do anything you couldn’t explain or justify to your mom.
6.) Don’t just do what you’re good at. Get outside of your comfort zone. Being a journalist is permission for lifetime learning.
7.) Be present. Don’t worry about documenting the moment with your smartphone. Experience it yourself.
8.) Take responsibility for the good and the bad. Learn to own your failures.
9.) Be honest, and be willing to have the difficult conversation.
10.) Don’t be afraid to be ambitious. It’s not a crime.
He says it’s a listicle that won’t appear on Buzzfeed. But it fits perfectly on OC. David, we’re so sorry to see you go.
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No one is surprised when authors mine their personal experiences. If they’re lucky enough to strike gold, other miners may be brought on to bring the stories to the silver screen. Here’s where things get tricky (if lucrative). No one wants to see his or her important life details getting royally botched, especially when the results are blown up 70 feet across.
Cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s path to letting others take the reins as her story is immortalized in front of a live audience is not the usual model. The family history she shared in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic has been turned into a Broadway musical.
Now that would be a nail biter, especially if the non-fictional source material includes a graphically awkward first sexual encounter and your closeted father’s suicide.
In the wrong hands, it could have been an excruciating evening, but Fun Home, the musical, has had excellent pedigree from the get go.
It’s also worth noting that this show passes the infamous Bechdel Test (below) both onstage and off, with a book and lyrics by Lisa Kron and music by Jeanine Tesori.
The latest installment from PBS’ BrainCraft video series introduces us to two scientific studies that teach us a thing or two about what brings us happiness. One set of results comes from Dr. John Gottman’s Family Research Laboratory (a.k.a. the “Love Lab”); the other from the Harvard Grant Study, a 75-year study that has traced the lives and development of 268 Harvard sophomores from the classes of 1939–1944. Although the study focuses on privileged white men (the demographic that attended Harvard College during the 1930s and 40s), the Harvard Grant Study has yielded conclusions that apply to a broader population.
One of the longest-running studies of adult development, the study has found, for example, that alcoholism has some of the most ruinous effects on marriages, family finances and personal health. Likewise, it reveals that liberals have sex much further into old age than their conservative peers.
But those aren’t the big takeaways — the conclusions that talk about happiness. If you watch the interview below with George Vaillant, the longtime director of the study, you will hear him conclude that happiness isn’t about “conforming, keeping up with the Joneses. It is about playing, and working, and loving. And loving is probably the most important. Happiness is love.”
According to Vaillant, “warmth of relationships throughout life have the greatest positive impact on ‘life satisfaction.’ ” When we have warm relationships with our parents, spouses, friends and family, we experience less daily anxiety and a greater sense of overall pleasure; we have better health (including lower levels of dementia later in life); and we’re more effective at work and make more money.
Essentially The Beatles had it right, “All you need is love. Love is all you need.”
You can read more about the Harvard study over at The Atlantic.
If I close my eyes on hallucinogens, I get a vision of great scaly dragons in outer space, they’re winding slowly and eating their own tails. Sometimes my skin and all the room seem sparkling with scales, and it’s all made out of serpent stuff. And as if the whole illusion of life were made of reptile dream.
He also mentioned that drugs made him barf. That alone seems a persuasive reason to stop taking them.
Despite his strong desire to continue his pursuit of ever higher levels of consciousness, the cons were beginning to outweigh the pros.
It took nearly a year for the Paris Review to publish the interview. So long that the subject felt the need to revise his earlier statements, via the typewritten letter above.
His post-interview psychedelic excursions appear to have transpired in the sort of benign universe typically imagined by a preschooler with a big box of crayons: “tiny jeweled violet flowers,” “giant green waves,” a “great yellow sun.” Otherwise known as Big Sur on acid.
I wonder if Johnson ever found out he had a rabidly anti-war Beat Poet (and “masses of green bulb-headed Kelp vegetable-snake undersea beings”) praying for his recovery.
Apparently it worked.
The complete June 1965 interview can be read in the Paris Review’s archives. Those who’ve grown unaccustomed to reading courier font as executed by a midcentury manual typewriter will find the complete text of Ginsberg’s letter below.
June 2, 1966
To readers of Paris Review:
Re LSD, Psylocibin [sic], etc., Paris Review #37 p. 46: “So I couldn’t go any further. I may later on occasion, if I feel more reassurance.”
Between occasion of interview with Thomas Clark June ’65 and publication May ’66 more reassurance came. I tried small doses of LSD twice in secluded tree and ocean cliff haven at Big Sur. No monster vibration, no snake universe hallucinations. Many tiny jeweled violet flowers along the path of a living brook that looked like Blake’s illustration for a canal in grassy Eden: huge Pacific watery shore, Orlovsky dancing naked like Shiva long-haired before giant green waves, titanic cliffs that Wordsworth mentioned in his own Sublime, great yellow sun veiled with mist hanging over the planet’s oceanic horizon. No harm. President Johnson that day went into the Valley of Shadow operating room because of his gall bladder & Berkley’s Vietnam Day Committee was preparing anxious manifestoes for our march toward Oakland police and Hell’s Angels. Realizing that more vile words from me would send out physical vibrations into the atmosphere that might curse poor Johnson’s flesh and further unbalance his soul, I knelt on the sand surrounded by masses of green bulb-headed Kelp vegetable-snake undersea beings washed up by last night’s tempest, and prayed for the President’s tranquil health. Since there has been so much legislative mis-comprehension of the LSD boon I regret that my unedited ambivalence in Thomas Clark’s tape transcript interview was published wanting this footnote.
Several years ago, an interviewer asked Stephen Fry to look backward — to reflect on his life and answer this question, “What do you wish you had known when you were 18”? What lessons would you draw in hindsight? Some of his answers included:
Don’t set goals for yourself, particularly material ones. They’re disastrous and will keep you from becoming who you really are.
Keep your ego in check. You’ll be better liked, and more opportunities will come your way.
Get outside your comfort zone by traveling to distant lands and reading books in a serendipitous way.
Be a giver, not a taker. It’s more rewarding.
In the clip above, Gay Byrne, a broadcaster with RTÉ, now asks Fry to look forward and answer another question: Suppose there is a God, and you arrive at the Pearly Gates, what would you say to him, her or it? Fry, an avowed secular humanist, isn’t throwing God any softballs: Why create a world where kids have bone cancer? Why create insects that burrow into children’s eyes and render them blind? Why create a world with so much pain, misery and injustice in it? As he answers these questions, and concludes that such a God (were it to exist) would be nothing short of maniacal, Byrne’s face contorts, revealing his discomfort. You can watch other scenes from the interview here, and catch Fry’s animated primers on secular humanism here.
Ah, the joys of dining at a new friend’s home, knowing sooner or later, one’s hostess’ bladder or some bit of last minute meal preparation will dictate that one will be left alone to rifle the titles on her bookshelf with abandon. No medicine cabinet can compete with this peek into the psyche.
Pity that some of the people whose bookshelves I’d be most curious to see are the least likely to open their homes to me. That’s why I’d like to thank The Strand bookstore for providing a virtual peek at the shelves of filmmakers-cum-authors Miranda July and Lena Dunham. (Previous participants in the Authors Bookshelf series include just-plain-regular authors George Saunders, Edwidge Danticat and the late David Foster Wallace whose contributions were selected by biographer D.T. Max.)
I wish Dunham and July had offered up some personal commentary to explain their hand-picked titles. (Surely their homes are lined with books. Surely each list is but a representative sampling, one shelf from hundreds. Hmm. Interesting. Did they run back and forth between various rooms, curating with a vengeance, or is this a case of whatever happened to be in the case closest at hand when deadline loomed?)
Which book’s a longtime favorite?
Which the literary equivalent of comfort food?
Are there things that only made the cut because the author is a friend?
Both women are celebrated storytellers. Surely, there are stories here beyond the ones contained between two covers.
But no matter. The lack of accompanying anecdotes means we now have the fun of inventing imaginary dinner parties:
ME: (flustered) Oh, ha ha, yes! Alex! … I sent him a Facebook request and he accepted.
LENA DUNHAM: (mutters under her breath)
ME: Design Sponge? Really? What’s someone in your shoes doing with a bunch of DIY decorating books?
LENA DUNHAM: (coldly) Research.
Actually, maybe it is better to admire one’s idols’ bookshelves from afar.
I’m chagrined that I don’t recognize more of their modern fiction picks. That wasn’t such a problem when I was measuring myself against the 430 books on Marilyn Monroe’s reading list.
Thank heaven for old standbys like Madame Bovary.
In all sincerity, I was glad that Dunham didn’t try to mask her love of home decor blog books.
One’s shelves, after all, are a matter of taste. So, celebrate the similarities, take their recommendations under advisement, see below and read what you like!
The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing — Melissa Bank
A Little History of the World — E. H. Gombrich
Anne of Green Gables — L.M. Montgomery
Apartment Therapy Presents: Real Homes, Real People, Hundreds of Real Design Solutions — Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan
Ariel: The Restored Edition — Sylvia Plath
Bad Feminist: Essays — Roxane Gay
Bastard Out of Carolina (20th Anniversary Edition) — Dorothy Allison
Blue is the Warmest Color — Julie Maroh
Brighton Rock — Graham Greene
Cavedweller - Dorothy Allison
Country Girl: A Memoir — Edna O’Brien
Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble: Some Things About Women and Notes on Media — Nora Ephron
Design Sponge at Home — Grace Bonney
Dinner: A Love Story: It All Begins at the Family Table — Jenny Rosenstrach
Eleanor & Park — Rainbow Rowell
Eloise — Kay Thompson
Eloise In Moscow — Kay Thompson
Eloise In Paris — Kay Thompson
Fanny At Chez Panisse — Alice Waters
Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories — Philip Roth
Holidays on Ice — David Sedaris
Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry — Leanne Shapton
Lentil — Robert McCloskey
Love Poems — Nikki Giovanni
Love, an Index (McSweeney’s Poetry Series) — Rebecca Lindenberg
Alex, the protagonist of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange takes teenage rebellion to psychotic extremes, but one act he and hisdroogs never indulge in is getting tattooed. It doesn’t even seem to be on their radar. How different things were in 1962, when the book was published!
It’s also just one of many Clockwork Orange-inspired images that decorates fans’ hides now that tattooing has hit the mainstream. What would Alex think?
The little monster’s ego would’ve have relished the notoriety, but I bet he’d have had a snicker, too, at the lengths to which eager chellovecks and devotchkas will go. It’s the kind of thing his dim droogie Dim would do—mark himself up permanent when he could’ve just as well have bought a totebag.
Whether or not you personally would consider making a salute to A Clockwork Orange a lifelong feature of your birthday suit, it’s hard not to admire the commitment of the passionate literature and film lovers who do.
In assembling the gallery below, we’ve opted to forgo the photorealistic portraits of McDowell—particularly the ones that recreate the aversion therapy scene—in favor of the graphic, the creative, the jaw dropping, the sly… and the unavoidable Hello Kitty mash up, which we’re kind of hoping washes off.
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