Chad Comello

Category: Posts

  • The Wave (Bølgen)

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    There must be something in the water at The New Yorker. The Richard Brooks film In Cold Blood was based off of Truman Capote’s 1965 New Yorker story of the same name. The Spike Jonze film Adaptation was based off of Susan Orleans’ 1995 New Yorker story “Orchid Fever”. And Roar Uthaug’s 2015 film The Wave was based off of Kathryn Schulz’s 2015 New Yorker story “The Really Big One”.

    That last one isn’t technically true, but it might as well be. The same mixture of science, dread, and sense of looming catastrophe I felt while reading Schulz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning story on the mass destruction that awaits the Pacific Northwest’s Cascadia subduction zone reemerged from the very beginning of The Wave, which is set in the real Norwegian tourist village of Geiranger. The town is at constant risk of annihilation when—not if—a rock slide tumbles into the fjord and triggers a devastating tsunami.

    With this inevitability hovering over the town, a geologist named Kristian prepares to move with his family to a bigger city to start a new job in the oil industry. But when an anomaly in the town’s tectonic monitoring system stirs in Kristian an ineffable sense of doom, he can’t shake the feeling The Big One is coming. He already left his job, but it won’t let go of him.

    We know from the movie’s title and poster that The Wave is coming, but no one else does, and that makes watching each character’s oblivious actions, pauses, and second guesses unbearably tense. The potency of this foreboding is the forte of the film, especially the first act. It grafts the fear of the unseen menace of Jaws onto a much larger and elemental force that cannot be fought or killed, only feared and fled from. This makes it similar in tone and story to the 2012 film The Impossible, which dramatized the true story of a family scattered by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. But unlike The Impossible, which had the surprise tsunami happen early on and then focused on the family reuniting, the tsunami in The Wave takes its sweet, torturous time arriving.

    That choice makes it a stronger film, though the search-and-rescue of the second act I think diffuses some, but not all, of the tension that had built throughout the first half. In that way it felt like two different movies, with more of the conventional story/character beats big-budget disaster films tend to revert to happening after the tsunami hits. Yet, for being made for a paltry $6.5 million, the film is no shoddy disaster flick. The visual effects turn the tsunami into a monstrous, atavistic brute force of nature. And the cast—especially the parents played by Ane Dahl Torp and Kristoffer Joner—render a compelling human drama in how they react to the tectonic terror and try to survive in its hellish wake.

    I checked to see which other Scandinavian films I’ve seen and found several great ones: The Hunt and Oslo, August 31 both made my Best Films lists for their years, and Troll Hunter was strange but interesting. These modern films plus the extensive filmography of Ingmar Bergman means there’s lots out there to discover. I’m happy to add The Wave to that list.

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  • Big Returns: How Fantasy Football is Like Stock Market Investing

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    This is a guest post by my friend and fantasy football foe Brian Waters.

    By Brian Waters, CFP®

    Note: Nothing mentioned in this article is meant to be a recommendation for your investment portfolio.

    The rapid increase in popularity of daily fantasy football leagues like DraftKings and FanDuel has triggered a debate over whether these games constitute gambling. One of the biggest arguments I hear in this debate is that playing daily fantasy leagues is as much like gambling as investing in the stock market. As a Certified Financial Planner™ who plays fantasy football, I’ve always been irked by that claim. Though there are similarities between fantasy football and the stock market, which I’ll get to below, there are some blatant differences between the two that should be clarified.

    How They Differ

    The first and biggest difference between daily fantasy football leagues and the stock market is the idea of “winning.” The objective in daily fantasy is very simple: score more points than your opponent to win money. If you score fewer points, you lose the money you put forth to play. This zero-sum aspect to daily fantasy makes it much closer to blackjack than investing.

    In the stock market, each investor has a different risk tolerance, timeline, objective, and experience to factor into each investment decision. These different factors impact performance; therefore, each investor generally has a different idea of what it means to “win” in the stock market. A retiree taking regular withdrawals from their account will likely be invested much more conservatively than a 25 year old who has 40 years before withdrawals will begin. In this example, the retiree and the young worker likely view “winning” differently because they likely have different objectives (income vs. growth) and timelines (short vs. long).

    With investing, multiple investments can win on different levels. Here is a chart showing returns of Company A (blue), Company B (red), and Company C (green) shares from January 1, 2014 to December 31, 2014:

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    Chart courtesy of Yahoo Finance

    As you can see, each gained in 2014; however, Company B was outpaced by C and A. If you held B shares, it would be hard to say you “lost” in 2014 because you still had a 25% gain. “Winning” in the stock market, then, can mean different things for different people.

    How They’re Similar

    Though, in my mind, the differences between investing and fantasy football outweigh the similarities, let’s look at what they have in common.

    Research

    Shifting from daily/weekly fantasy leagues to the season-long leagues, in both investing and fantasy football it is important to do your research. Before the draft and during the season, a manager has to consider a lot of questions that will affect his team’s probability of success: How does this player perform against this team? How injury-prone is my running back? Does my defense play well against a passing offense? Which of my receivers have the most favorable matchup this week?

    Similarly, investors may ask: How does this stock perform in rising interest environments? Will the seasonably warm weather affect sales? Will slower GDP growth in China affect future overseas earnings? And so on. The ability to accurately predict the answers to these questions will likely help a fantasy football team or an investment portfolio find success.

    Diversification

    To maintain a successful fantasy team throughout the season, you want a roster filled with dependable players who perform consistently week to week, along with certain “high flier” players that put up high point totals. Consistent players like Tom Brady, Antonio Brown, Adrian Peterson, and Matt Forte can dependably put up a predictable amount of points and make up your roster’s foundation each week. Supplementing this foundation with high fliers like Odell Beckham Jr, Dez Bryant, Ronnie Hillman, and Danny Woodhead—less predictable playmakers who could put up a huge game one week and get shut down the next—will give you the best chance to defeat your opponent each week.

    Likewise with investing: depending on your risk tolerance and timeline, portfolios generally balance growth and value stocks, as well as bonds and other investment types. Certain stocks carry a lot of risk that can propel a portfolio in good years and drag it in bad years. Because of that risk, investors generally carry different weights of these investment types to help them reach their financial goals.

    Management

    Fantasy football rosters undergo lots of change throughout the season. Good managers maintain healthy rosters through bye weeks, suspensions, injuries, and other unexpected factors. If an injured player is expected to return in a few weeks, managers have to decide if that player is worth holding onto on the bench or if they should be let go for a player who can play right away. When reviewing trades, managers should try to swap overvalued players for those who will likely perform better in the future. And when considering players available on the waiver wire, they should beware overreacting to player having a breakout game and potentially dropping a player whose best performances are ahead of him.

    Principles of investing follow many of these same rules. Many investors ask themselves if a security is worth holding through a bad earnings report or corporate leadership change. They also must decide if swapping one stock for another is an overreaction to a current slide in the price. Ultimately, the general goal is to buy low and sell high with investments, just as it is in making trades and waiver wire pickups in fantasy football. 

    Conclusion

    Comparing investments to fantasy football is like comparing apples and oranges. Just because you may be good at fantasy football does not mean you will be successful at investing. This was an exercise of combining two aspects of my life that I find interesting and relevant.

    (Photo credit: Daniel X. O’Neil)

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  • DDC 450-499: A grossly unfair linguistic ellipses

    A Teach Me How To Dewey production

    This Is How We Dewey:

    • 450 Italian, Romanian & related languages
    • 460 Spanish, Portuguese, Galician
    • 470 Latin & Italic languages
    • 480 Classical & modern Greek languages
    • 490 Other languages

    Here’s the deal: I started trying to find books in each of the above 10-spots but was having trouble finding 3 that weren’t straight up dictionaries or the usual dry if practical phrase books for each of the sections’ languages. And then I didn’t post on TMHTD for a while out of benign neglect, so then I decided, Why don’t I just lump all these disparate languages together into one post so I can catch up and offend people all over the world? The end.

    So yeah, we’re hopping on a redeye to fly over all these beautiful countries and their beautiful, complicated, storied languages, but hey, look out the window! There’s Barcelona and Rome and Athens and whatever the capital of Romania is!

    The Dew3:

    Madre: Perilous Journeys With A Spanish Noun
    By Elizabeth Bakewell
    Dewey: 465
    Random Sentence: “Uncultivated weeds reaching for the sky, taking over the one ground field with entropic gusto.”

    Hide This Italian Book
    Dewey: 458.3421
    Random Sentence: “Stefania e una botte (Stefanie is a barrel).”

    Carpe Diem: Put A Little Latin in Your Life
    By Harry Mount
    Dewey: 478.82
    Random Sentence: “Tom Cruise is the little big man of the screen.”

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  • Mugs Shot

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    We didn’t get to choose which ones survived.

    Ten mugs hang safely on the mug tree that sits next to our coffee maker on the small Ikea table by the kitchen window. Every few weeks I rotate which mugs get to be on the tree for coffee duty. I didn’t know when I put those eight there that they would end up survivors, the silent witnesses of their brethren sitting dutifully in the middle cupboard before on a Friday afternoon tumbling out of the cupboard after the plastic pegs holding up their shelf gave way.

    Had I known, I would have been much more selective, would have made the impossible decisions about which darlings to save and which to let die. The process would have been anguishing—more than it ought to be, realistically, but we are Mug People, so we are not realistic about our mugs.

    But I didn’t know. Mugs that were filled with meaning—inside jokes, souvenirs from faraway places and unforgettable experiences—that were for some unknown reason not the Chosen Ones cascaded to early deaths in a flash, and there was nothing we could do about it. It didn’t happen like Jenga, after placing one too many atop each other and seeing the tenuous heap collapse before my eyes. Then I would have, might have, been able to avert an avalanche and save a few more mugs from shattering on the floor. But it happened during the day, while we were at work and none the wiser.

    I got the pictures from my wife: shards of ceramic and glass littering the counter and kitchen floor. I could make out some of the designs and logos and familiar features of our reliable morning friends in the larger fragments that stood out amidst the particulates. Didn’t matter. They were dead and gone, and the remainders were accidents.

    We don’t get to choose. We can just say goodbye after it’s too late.

    The world doesn’t need more thinkpieces about Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, but I’ll just say her advice about thanking the things you give away for the meaning they provided in their time of service… it’s good advice. Especially for Mug People who lost most of their mugs against their will.

    Stuff is stuff is stuff, except when it isn’t.

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  • Tom, John, Abby & George

    The fourth episode of the John Adams miniseries (“Reunion”) contains two of the best scenes in the show. The first is John hanging with Abigail and Thomas Jefferson in Paris. It’s fun to consider now how these titans of American history would have interacted in their time, before they achieved titan status:

    The second is when John Adams meets with King George III as the first American ambassador to Great Britain. Giamatti perfectly portrays the range of emotions Adams must have felt serving this role: pride above all, I imagine, in every sense of the word. To represent his new country in such a prestigious role also carried with it the custom of bowing deeply not once, not twice, but thrice, to the monarch he had so vociferously criticized:

    Still delighted HBO chose to dedicate a series to the Founding Father who would not land on Mount Rushmore but had an undeniable influence in making it possible one day.

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  • But What If We’re Wrong?

    I read Chuck Klosterman’s Eating the Dinosaur a few years back and remember liking it, but also don’t remember much about it. So when I saw he had a new one out called But What If We’re Wrong?: Thinking about the Present As If It Were the Past, I jumped at the chance to read him again.

    The book’s title also serves as the thesis statement, and it’s one I fully support and think about all the time, probably to a fault. Constantly assuming I could be wrong about anything can be crippling at times, lead to endless perseverating and second-guessing. It is also empowering and relieving: I can rest assured knowing that I am not my ideas, that my identity is not tied to how tightly I cling to beliefs or how many I convert to my causes.

    In But What If We’re Wrong? Klosterman turns this same duality into high cultural criticism. Like a home inspector in search of weak spots, he wends through contemporary issues in sports, politics, science, and history to interrogate the conclusions we’ve turned into self-evident assumptions. Do we have gravity all wrong? Will the NFL be around in thirty years? Are Americans too obsessed with freedom? Removed from his commentary these questions look like clickbaity headlines, but they are worth prodding within the purview of Klosterman’s thesis.

    To start off my highlights, there are benefits to assuming you might be wrong:

    There are intrinsic benefits to constantly probing the possibility that our assumptions about the future might be wrong: humility and wonder. It’s good to view reality as beyond our understanding, because it is. And it’s exciting to imagine the prospect of a reality that cannot be imagined, because that’s as close to pansophical omniscience as we will ever come. If you aspire to be truly open-minded, you can’t just try to see the other side of an argument. That’s not enough. You have to go all the way.

    This is exactly right. Humility and wonder are two sides of the same coin: to be incurious and doggedly certain is to be prideful. It also means you’ll be a pain to be around:

    I don’t think the notion of people living under the misguided premise that they’re right is often dangerous. Most day-to-day issues are minor, the passage of time will dictate who was right and who was wrong, and the future will sort out the past. It is, however, socially detrimental. It hijacks conversation and aborts ideas. It engenders a delusion of simplicity that benefits people with inflexible minds. It makes the experience of living in a society slightly worse than it should be.

    He digs into the current obsession with the “You’re Doing It Wrong” style of commentary, which seeks to replace one idea or style of thinking with a new one, despite the fact that they are not mutually exclusive. It’s not the new idea that’s the problem; it’s the need for someone to insist New Way Desirable, Old Way Undesirable with a disturbing disregard for the possibility that two ways can exist at once.

    “I realize certain modes of thinking can become outdated,” Klosterman writes. “But outdated modes are essential to understanding outdated times, which are the only times that exist.” New does not equal better. This is essential to understand when studying history, or when trying to look at today through the eyes of the distant future.

    We’re all outdated—we just don’t know it yet:

    We spend our lives learning many things, only to discover (again and again) that most of what we’ve learned is either wrong or irrelevant. A big part of our mind can handle this; a smaller, deeper part cannot. And it’s that smaller part that matters more, because that part of our mind is who we really are (whether we like it or not).

    Or, as Ben Folds puts it in the song “Bastard”:

    You get smaller as the world gets big
    The more you know you know you don’t know shit
    “The whiz man” will never fit you like “the whiz kid” did
    So why you gotta act like you know when you don’t know?
    It’s okay if you don’t know everything

    I love those lyrics. It’s applicable in so many situations (especially in an election year), but it’s most applicable to that “smaller, deeper” part of our minds that transcends our earthen fallibility. It’s the kind of thing I imagine a monk learns once he reaches nirvana. Then again, maybe it’s something most of us learn as we age.

    I do think Klosterman goes too far out on a limb here about the use of math:

    We are not the first society to conclude that our version of reality is objectively true. But we could be the first society to express that belief and is never contradicted, because we might be the first society to really get there. We might be the last society, because—now—we translate absolutely everything into math. And math is an obdurate bitch.

    Reconcile this sentiment with what he writes later about sports analytics:

    The problem with sports analytics is not that they are flawed; the problem is that they are accurate, to the benefit of almost no one. It’s being right for the sake of being right, in a context where there was never any downside to being wrong.

    His point about analytics, basically, is that they are overkill in sports, which as spontaneous, low-stakes entertainment should be enjoyed rather than dissected. Yes, math gives us a certain comfort about our certainty about things. But to think we’ve reached the pinnacle of civilized thought simply because we turn everything into numbers directly contradicts the whole point of this book. C’mon, Chuck, don’t go soft on uncertainty now!

    (If I can add another quibble: the book is rife with a pet peeve of mine. It’s when counterpoints start with “Now,”—as in I’m making an assertion. Now, I understand why some would disagree. This drives me bonkers. In absolutely every instance the Now is unnecessary, yet the book is full of them. </rant>)

    The preface insists the book is not a collection of essays, probably because that’s what most readers are used to from Klosterman. He’s right in a way; the chapters depend on and link to each other more than a usual collection of essays. But it also felt like a large merry-go-around that you can jump onto at any point and still enjoy the ride. And I really did. It would make a nice companion to James Gleick’s forthcoming book Time Travel: A History (which I reviewed for Library Journal), another omnivorous and stimulating conversation on a topic you didn’t realize you wanted to consider.

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  • Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

    Finished Lindy West’s Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman in a single evening, not just because it’s a short and fast read, but because I couldn’t stop reading. I heard Lindy for the first time on This American Life: first her story on confronting her troll and then about “coming out” as fat. As in those stories, in Shrill she’s hilarious, raw, cutting—a self-described “unflappable human vuvuzela” who retains her Jezebel-esque writing style.

    Especially memorable was the chapter on her crusade against rape-joke culture within the comedy world. Her endurance of the vicious, demoralizing, and nonstop harassment she receives online is admirable, if also sad and enraging. It’s easy as a non-famous white man to remain oblivious to the vitriol women are subjected to, expected to endure, and refrain from complaining about (“Because that’s how the Internet works”) lest they be viewed as humorless shrews. But the latest fracas with Ghostbusters and Leslie Jones on Twitter is a timely example of just how real and really frustrating the struggle is for women who have the gall to simply exist on the internet.

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  • Everybody Wants Some!!

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    With its likable cast, meandering dialogue, and lived-in plotless feel, Everybody Wants Some!! is more than just a “spiritual sequel” to Dazed and Confused. It’s the middle sibling between that film and Linklater’s Before series, all of which seem to take place in the same film universe where everyone’s a peripatetic philosopher and life happens in the ordinary moments between the usual milestones.

    I say the cast is likable, and they are, but the kind of guys and social life depicted in the film—college baseball players in 1980s Texas—are also what I tried to avoid during my adolescence. I played in team sports (mostly soccer) up through high school, and enjoyed the camaraderie and the opportunity to play in a team setting. But the macho posturing, sexual banter, and competitive saber-rattling common in that milieu made me uncomfortable and kept me from bonding with most of my teammates.

    Those same things are prominent in Everybody Wants Some!!, but with the barriers of time, maturity, and the fourth wall I felt a strange affection for these guys that I didn’t feel for their real-life counterparts. Maybe because Linklater cranks the Bro-ishness right up to the limits of its charm, mercifully saving it from spilling over into being unpleasant. Or maybe it’s due to the lack of malice in their pranks, taunts, and hazing rituals. This isn’t a team of O’Bannons, the paddle-wielding sadist from Dazed and Confused. They clearly enjoy being around each other and find value in their shared experience on campus and on the baseball field.

    Despite sharing the laid-back, chatty vibe of Dazed, a significant difference between the two films is the gender balance, or lack thereof. In Dazed the girls were weaved well into the film’s panoramic story. Every Everybody female, however, save Beverly, is either a potential sex partner or barely regarded at all. Perhaps that’s at it should be in this case, given how sex-obsessed these guys are. Like the one dude who gives lip service to the Equal Rights Amendment while trying to pick up a girl, it would be inauthentic to make these guys more politically enlightened than they really would have been.

    Authenticity being a key virtue of Linklater films, it’s why, despite the quibbles, I loved hanging out in this world. I suspect repeated viewings will confirm this, as is true with most Linklater films.

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  • I Don’t Get It

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    “If you put a gun to my head and told me that I had to vote for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, I would but whisper, “Goodbye cruel world.” But if my family somehow managed to convince me to stick around, in preference to Trump I would vote for Hillary. Or John Kerry, or Nancy Pelosi. In preference to Trump I would vote for the reanimated corpse of Adlai Stevenson, or for that matter that of Julius Caesar, who perhaps has learned a thing or two in his two thousand years of afterlife. The only living person that I would readily choose Trump in preference to is Charles Manson.” —Alan Jacobs

    Here’s what I do get about the Trump phenomenon: it’s real and legitimate and not to be denied. The part of it that isn’t baldly racist/sexist/etc is a well-deserved comeuppance for the policy of establishment Republicans (and Democrats, though they felt the Bern of their comeuppance) to believe the people work for the Party and not the other way around. I’m as surprised as anyone that Trump has gotten this far (just checked… yep, he is actually, literally the Republican nominee), but he didn’t arrive in a vacuum, and any political movement as potent as his demands attention.

    Here’s what I don’t get: why anyone, despite all of the aforementioned reasons, would nevertheless choose to pull their voting booth’s metaphorical lever for an egomaniacal, bullshitting pig like Donald Trump to be president of the United States.

    Not one of the voting blocs Trump currently finds support from would benefit from his presidency. Do low-income whites hurting in the Rust Belt actually think he’ll bring all “the jobs” back from the very places he’s made money from overseas? Do anti-immigration hardliners actually think stopping Muslim immigration is at all feasible and not blindingly unconstitutional? Do “evangelical” “Christians” actually think Donald J. Trump gives one damn about Christianity and won’t immediately throw religious freedom under the bus the moment it’s convenient?

    [Also: He doesn’t want to be president. He probably didn’t expect to get to the primaries, let alone the convention, and is now as usual making it up as he goes, flitting around and stumbling into success because the rotting carcass formerly known as the Republican Party was too dead-eyed to fight off the contagion of Trumpism. This is The Producers come to life. He just wants to be on TV and will hire Roger Ailes to make it happen as soon as possible.]

    Again: I get it. If you hate Obama or can’t find a job or find Black Lives Matter distasteful or want to give the finger to Mitch McConnell, Trump is the train to hop on this year.

    But this is Donald Trump we’re talking about.

    Donald Trump.

    DONALD. TRUMP.

    The man is inherently, self-evidently unfit for the presidency. Denigrate Hillary Clinton for her beliefs and character flaws and hawkishness and subservience to corporate interests, but don’t say she’s unfit for the office, or God forbid, that she’s “just as bad as Trump.” A former senator and secretary of state versus a blabbering reality-TV man-child? Give me a break.

    I ain’t voting for Clinton. Like Alan Jacobs quoted above, forced at gunpoint to choose between Clinton and Trump I’d choose Clinton and then pull the trigger myself. But my greatest hope this year is that Clinton demolishes TrumPence in November and becomes our first woman president. I’m sure that means more Middle East invasions, Clinton family scandals, and who knows what else. But it won’t be worse than President Trump.

    I applaud the prominent conservatives and Republicans who have spoken out against their party’s nominee and the toxic cloud trailing his campaign, knowing and even hoping to damage Trump enough to prevent his election. Whether moved by principle or political calculation, it matters. They are on the record, as are the ones who have cast their lots with Trump.

    #NeverTrump forever.

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  • Norway, July 2016

    This is part 3 of pictures from my summer trip to Scandinavia (previously: Finland and Sweden). I posted pics on Instagram throughout, but these are my favorites from Norway.

    Norway-boat
    Norway-bridge
    Norway-Vardo-house
    Norway-fjords
    Norway-Hurtigruten2
    Norway-mountains
    Norway-trollfjord
    Norway-Trondheim-trains
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  • Sweden, July 2016

    This is part 2 of pictures from my summer trip to Scandinavia (pics from Finland here). I posted pics on Instagram throughout, but these are my favorites from Stockholm and greater Sweden:

    Stockholm-airplane
    Stockholm-flags

    Stockholm-library
    Stockholm-norsk-museum
    Stockholm-norske-museum2
    Stockholm-sign
    Sweden-clock
    Sweden-Karlskrona-church
    Sweden-Karlskrona-flag
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  • Helsinki, July 2016

    Just got back from a two-week trip to Scandinavia, through Finland, Sweden, and Norway. I posted pics on Instagram throughout, but first up here are my favorites from Finland:

    Helsinki-airplane
    Helsinki-birds
    Helsinki-boat2
    Helsinki-clock
    Helsinki-Uspenski-cathedral2
    Helsinki-Suomenlinna2
    Helsinki-Suomenlinna
    Helsinki-windows
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  • Who Tells This Story

    I remember reading the Hamilton-Burr chapter of Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis at least ten years ago and thinking, How is this not a movie yet? The inherent drama of the story, a true one at that, begs for one. I didn’t expect at the time that story would find its (gargantuan) acclaim ten years later as a musical rather than a film. Assuming the Hamilton musical is being developed for the screen, I would still like to see a non-musical film dedicated to the duel specifically. The version in my head would be directed by David Fincher, and star Michael Fassbender as Hamilton and Paul Bettany or Rufus Sewell as Burr. Sewell played Hamilton in the John Adams miniseries, but I think he looks more like Burr, and his role in The Man in the High Castle demonstrates his strong ability to balance humanity and nefariousness.

    Get on it, Hollywood.

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  • One Wild Life’s Too Short

    I’ve learned that when I encounter two different works of art saying the same thing at basically the same time, I should probably listen.

    This is what happened when I recently came across references to this query in two different places: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

    You’ve probably seen this quote, the final couplet in Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day”, on pictures of sunsets or accompanying “Adventure” boards on Pinterest. I encountered it elsewhere. First, it’s the inspiration for Gungor’s One Wild Life, a trilogy of albums entitled Soul (2015), Spirit (2016), and Body (forthcoming). I had Soul on heavy rotation when on a whim I picked up David Dark’s new book Life’s Too Short to Pretend You’re Not Religious, simply because of the provocative title.

    Together, these distinct works of art share more than just the Oliver quote, which Dark also directly references. They preach a similar message in a way that’s accessible to a wide audience of readers and listeners who crave a richer understanding of religion.

    Dark’s thesis is evident from the book’s title. Religion is more than where (or if) you go to church. It’s the “controlling story” of your life, “the story you tell yourself about yourself to others.” Interpreted this way, capitalism could count as a religion for many Americans, though few would self-identify as a born and raised capitalist like they would Catholic. And that’s Dark’s point: the story we tell about our religious backgrounds and assumptions “doesn’t always coincide with what we think — or say — we believe.” Getting who we think we are in sync with who we are in reality is the fundamental struggle of anyone striving for virtue, let alone churchgoers who wear their faith on their sleeves.

    Likewise, One Wild Life — which Michael and Lisa Gungor have described as the result of “the hardest year of our lives” — explores how “our eyes have grown dim to the wonder of our existence, of how fundamentally connected we already are to one another and to everything.” This desire for connection floods the album. In “We Are Stronger,” between clap-like percussion as if to applaud the point, they sing:

    You and me

    We’re the stuff of stars and dirt

    With eyes to see

    I can’t meet you eye to eye

    But I can take your hand in mine

    Both the Gungor album and Dark’s book also share a distrust of labels and of what they do to our relationships. “We love our labels as ourselves,” Dark writes, “even as they don’t — and can’t — do justice to the complexity of our own lived lives or anyone else’s. It’s as if we’ll do anything to avoid the burden of having to think twice.”

    A healthy community, however, demands that burden from its members, if only to promote eschewing self-interest in favor of serving others. “People come to consciousness in relationship,” Dark continues. “This is the phenomenon — oh, how it enlivens a heart! — of shared meaning.” Such shared meaning is lost when labels calcify into dogmatic division and unbind our common membership, not only as a body of believers but as human beings. In “Us for Them,” Gungor addresses this directly, singing beneath orchestral explosions and driving, defiant drums:

    We reject the either-or

    They can’t define us anymore

    Cause if it’s us or them

    It’s us for them

    To some this may sound like a vague plea for world peace; to me it’s the essence of Christianity. I think Dark agrees: “To be whole is to be part,” he writes. “None of us gets to have our meaning alone.” Whatever each of us does with our one wild and precious life, let’s not forget to share it.

    Originally published at ThinkChristian.

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  • Track Changes

    A good argument could be made for several different technologies being the ideal tool for writers. Pen and paper have proved durable and flexible but aren’t easily manipulated. Typewriters provide an attractive single-purpose distraction-free environment but don’t allow for easy duplication. Modern computers are powerful and multi-purpose, but easily distract.

    We all are fortunate to live in a time when we can choose between these options. That wasn’t the case until certain benchmarks in history, which Matthew Kirschenbaum explores in his new book Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (which I learned about from the review in The New Republic). I was born in 1987, so I missed the period Kirschenbaum covers here (mostly the 1970s and ’80s), but I distinctly remember Windows 95, floppy disks, and everything going much slower than they do now. I wouldn’t chose to be transported back to the early 80s, when having a home computer required so much more work than it does now. Some people liked that work, and hey, to each’s own. But I’m a late-adopter. Whether it’s a new device, app, or other web service, I’m happy to let the early-adopters suffer through the bugs and relative paucity of features while I wait for things to get smoother and more robust.

    The book explores several things I’m moderately interested in — chiefly literature, philosophy of writing, and the technical aspects of early personal computers — so I thought I’d give it a whirl and see what it came to. Since Kirschenbaum goes deep on those things I’m only moderately interested in, I found myself skimming through several passages that someone more invested in the topic might find more worthwhile. Overall, though, I thought it was a nice niche history, with perspective on where we’ve come from as a creative species and how the tools writers specifically use have shaped their work.

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  • Looking for a Mind at Housework

    The other day I cleaned the bathroom, swept the porch, kitchen, and living room, washed and dried my clothes, and washed the dishes. There was plenty more I could have done. But I knew I’d be doing those chores again eventually, some sooner and some later, and would have to do others at some point as well.

    What else in life is equally as satisfying and frustrating as doing chores? The gratification that comes from emptying the sink of its dirty dishes evaporates with the realization that more dishes are coming soon. Hanging the last clean shirt in the closet reminds me I’ll have to put whatever I’m wearing now in the hamper and begin the process again. The two feelings are inextricably linked, like they share an orbit that never ends, just keeps spinning.

    I was thinking about this even before reading Gracy Olmstead’s post at The American Conservative on the value of housework, which is itself a meditation on Mary Townsend’s essay in The Hedgehog Review. “The work of maintaining a home,” Olmstead writes, “is tied up inexplicably in the question of what it means to be human, and the person who cares for the home must adhere to a set of underlying ideas and mores that make his or her work meaningful.”

    Those ideas and mores are the key to not going crazy while undertaking the repetitive, unsexy labor that often feels more Sisyphean than sacred. As Olmstead writes, it’s work well suited not to gaining esteem, but for “cultivating virtue”:

    It requires regular exercise of the moral imagination: remembering that what one does when scrubbing floors and bathtubs is much more than menial labor. Perhaps the phrase “cleanliness is next to godliness” came about because of the virtue-carving we often do when we clean and order the same square footage, day after day after day.

    Pondering what any chore or responsibility does for us along with what it requires of us is a clarifying experiment. Cleaning the same square footage over and over again, Olmstead writes, “requires discipline, perseverance, patience, humility—and a good deal of kindness towards the inhabitants of one’s home.” It also requires forgiveness: towards yourself, for being frustrated about having to do the chore yet again; towards your home’s other inhabitants, for making the same mess yet again, and towards whatever you’re cleaning, for being so needy and unable to stay clean.

    Like running, I tend to treat chores as things to endure, to get over with, so I usually fill them with a podcast, audiobook, or music to help distract myself from the pain and make it go by faster. But that distraction and noise can also undermine this cultivation process. Enduring the time in silence, my hands and body occupied by mindless labor, allows my mind to remain open to imagination and creativity. And as this process repeats over and over, a liturgy forms. Suddenly what’s usually an annoyance can become “a set of mental and spiritual disciplines that grow our moral imagination, and point us toward greater happiness.”

    Achieving “greater happiness” through thankless labor seems antithetical to the ethos of the cult of productivity, which promises greater happiness through the latest app or relaxation technique. But thankless labor has been around a lot longer than Getting Things Done, and isn’t trademarked. It’s also abundant, self-replenishing, and always waiting for us, even when we don’t want it. I’d better get to it.

    (For the record, my top five most satisfying chores: vacuuming, lawn mowing, washing dishes, mopping, and shoveling. Least satisfying: dusting, grocery shopping, raking, weeding, and laundry.)

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  • Each’s Owned

    Pictured is the haul ($8 total) from a recent afternoon browsing used bookstores, which I do once in a while, when my time is open and therefore my self-discipline is weak. But I didn’t feel bad about getting more Stuff this time, because I’m coming to something approaching terms with it.

    I love books, movies, and music, but developing an extensive catalog has never been a priority. Working at a library is a factor. With easy, daily access to a plethora of titles, expanding our humble collection of books, DVDs, vinyls, and CDs seems unnecessary. Since I tend not to reread books, amassing more out of fun or bibliophilia isn’t an issue; only the most meaningful or heirloom-worthy books have secured space on our limited shelves. Ditto our LPs and CDs, which are now mostly survivors from several moves and curatorial weedings. For me, less stuff has been better. My friend jokes about being able to move me and all my stuff from college to grad school in one trip in his Geo Prizm.

    That’s changed recently. I’ve rediscovered the desire to own analog media, if only as a supplemental collection to my mostly-digitized life. Also: for their tangible or aesthetic appeal, to preserve tangibility, to not be constantly tracked and advertised to, to escape the mercurial whims of licensing and arcane digital services, or to have something to do when the internet goes down.

    In a way I haven’t even needed to rediscover it: the majority of my movie watching has always come from DVDs or the theater, and I’ll always prefer print over ebooks. We still have Amazon Prime for movies and Google Play for music, and they are often handy. But I need to remind myself once in a while that newer/easier/faster doesn’t always equal better.

    I’m not concerned I’ll suddenly become a hoarder. In fact I’m starting to become concerned we’re not keeping enough things around we’ll regret not having later on, either as historical curios or as cultural artifacts that boomerang from modish to obsolete and back. I can’t tell you how many times, when I bring up my interest in typewriters, I’ve heard something like, Oh yeah, I had one from college, but… or My parents had one but didn’t use it anymore, so… It makes me cringe to ponder the fate of those machines. Whether it’s vinyls, typewriters, love letters, Polaroids, or anything else that doesn’t live in an app or social network, the things we think no longer matter in our lives might in time prove us wrong. And what with the internet ushering in a new Dark Ages, methinks we all should get a little more discerning on what we keep, what we don’t, and why.

    But hey, to each’s own.

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  • Captain America: Civil War

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    Spoilers, natch.

    Finally, a Spider-Man who actually looks like he’s in high school! That, along with ever more compelling character studies of Steve Rogers and Tony Stark, made this latest episode of The Marvel Cinematic Universe Show worth watching.

    Captain America and Iron Man are by far my favorite Marvel characters thus far, and the Avengers I find most interesting. That they find themselves on opposite sides here is made all the more interesting when you realize how both have essentially flip-flopped. Stark, the recalcitrant “genius billionaire playboy philanthropist” playing by his own rules but tormented by guilt, now wants controls on their heretofore unchecked power. Rogers, the patriotic soldier desperate to fight for good, now is disillusioned by authoritarian overreach and wary of a corruptible bureaucracy. Neither of them are wrong. The other superheroes who align with or against them have their own reasons for doing so, but fundamentally Civil War concerns itself with this core conflict.

    I suppose this puts me on the #TeamIronMan side of things, but I think there absolutely should be some oversight of the burgeoning cadre of “enhanced” persons formerly under the purview of SHIELD. Even after gnashing their teeth about the devastation of Sokovia, it takes like two seconds before this motley crew of all-powerful superheroes with fragile egos and hair-trigger tempers are obliterating an airport or whatever building they happen to be in during their latest squabble. It’s like they’re all early-stage Spider-Man, wracked with teenage insecurity, lacking self-discipline, flailing around while trying to discover and control the extent of their powers. Setting aside the ethical debate over the Sokovian Accords, the cost of their property damage alone warrants reparation and regulation.

    As for the film itself, the directors Anthony and Joe Russo mentioned in an interview that they tried not to follow the typical three-act superhero movie structure, which is something I noticed while watching. The film doesn’t resolve where we’re conditioned to expect it; it could have ended at several points but didn’t. Perhaps that’s a product of the ongoing (infinite?) nature of the MCU, wherein each movie doesn’t begin and end in its own self-contained universe like normal movies and needs to set up the next installments. (Which currently include not only the two Avengers: Infinity War films, but offshoot franchises for Black Panther, Spider-Man [again again], Doctor Strange, and a bajillion other products characters.)

    However, for the first time in eight years’ worth of movies within Phase 1 and 2 of the MCU, I’m OK with that. I’m OK with, or at least resigned to, winding through the spider’s web of stories with cautious optimism, knowing not every installment will achieve the same balance of thoughtfulness, wit, and dazzling spectacle the best of the MCU display.

    As much as it’s true that superhero films are eating Hollywood; as much as it’s true that a fraction of the billions being spent on these franchises could and should be allocated to the smaller, non-serialized films that end up on Oscar ballots and Top 10 lists far more often than the latest comic-book fare… I enjoyed watching superheroes fighting each other. It was fun (if sometimes confusing to determine who was on which side and why), and made the case for being seen on the big screen. For another entrant into an already abundant genre, that’s good enough for me.

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