We have posted one of Brian Jay Stanley‘s essays before, and heaven knows we’ve posted nearly everything that’s come from the Opinionator’s “Anxiety” series. This one is an unique take. Stanley here is talking about the body-soul/body-mind dualism we still believe today, the gnostic cleanliness we desire over the viscera and guts of nature. We are made anxious, in other words, by the body and the parts of nature’s innards we cannot control. Stanley points to Plato’s discourse of mind over matter, and inverts it: as much as we’d like to lord our big hearts and nervy wits over the…
On the Religion of Mindful Self-Loathing
We know the old trope, either in family sitcoms or from within our own dramatic units: the inner-mirror moment when we realize we’ve just said something we always hated our parents saying. We find ourselves–or someone close finds us–doing the things we promised we’d never do when we got out of the house, when we one day had kids, when we held a steady job… The revelations in these vernaculars are generally lighthearted, but not all are, and it is nearly always painful to see that we have “accidentally” become the non-example we had striven to prove wrong.
This is what…
Love in the Time of Credit Scores
Well, you thought you had met Mr. Right. Everything lined up, all the expectations you had compiled since middle school, all the inner-complexities you had longed for and, what’s more, there’s spark. It’s not just that he’s everything you thought you wanted, you actually like him, too. And then you ask him… “What’s your credit score?”
This was published in the Christmas New York Times, an assumable but no-less-shocking progression in sizing up a mate. It again just goes to show the endless bounds to which we circumvent love for love-of-law, and how quickly we can feel snuffed on the other…
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Five Golden…Themes! What We Just Couldn’t Get Enough of in 2012
One of Mockingbird’s most distinctive features is the repetition. Like Christmas itself, we’re trying to point that one “old, old story,” that ancient theme, as we see it dug up time and again. It’s dug up in all sorts of places, of course, from 18th century poetry archives to slasher films, from church basements to top-tier corporate office towers. But it’s still resonating a singular focus–the Gospel–from these unforeseen, albeit obscure, sources.
Despite the wide-spanning scopes and intentions of some of our favorite “news” sources, the same thing unwittingly tends to happen. After all, reporting the news means telling and retelling…
Another Week Ends: Near-Death Visions, Zombees, River Kwai Forgiveness, Lena Dunham, Rock Bottom Films, and the Biology of Deceit
1) “Who’s in Charge Inside Your Head?” asks the New York Times this week, and the answer? Not as much you as you think. The op-ed from David Barash compares the human mind to a phenomenon that’s taking place in honey bees around the world, that are infected by flies and suddenly have powerless compulsions to fly at night, something they never had the compulsion for before. This night-flying, parasitic takeover is Barash’s comparison to the way the human mind (and will) works in porous interaction (dependence, even) with the world around it. The piece itself may not leave much…
Debilitating Anxiety and The Great American Search for Happiness
A little collaboration with DZ:
The Opinionator‘s Anxiety series continues to impress! Its most recent installment, “America the Anxious” by Ruth Whippman, is a Brit’s perspective on the American fixation on happiness, or at least, happiness-language. As a jumping off point, Whippman talks about the palpable differences between the Facebook feeds of her friends on either side of the Atlantic. While her British friends are often dismissively even-keel about their daily lives, her American friends are perpetually fitting the narrative of their days into the rubric of (capital H) Happiness.
Whippman goes on to frame Happiness as America’s Greatest Commandment, the declarative…
Love Laughs Out Fear: The Quirky Grace of Southwest Airlines
I’m generally a nervous flyer. It’s gotten better in the last couple years, but I still get sweaty-palmed and tightfisted when the plane is ducking and bobbing through even the most minor bits of turbulence. When the pilot’s ding sounds, I always mute my music to listen in. I’m quick to buckle-up. I’m quick to assign my own seat if I can–I always pick a window. I don’t know why that matters, as if knowing exactly where I’m going to be sitting in a nosediving 757 is some hellbent way to have some control in certain death. I guess I’d…
Battled Out: Cancer’s Civil War of the Self
I gave myself to sin, I gave myself to Providence,
And I am there and back again, in the state I am in.
–Belle & Sebastian
The Good News is so called because of the comfort it brings, the rest it gives to “the weary and the heavy-laden.” But what about the heavy-laden who kind of love the weight? What about the restless who live off the adrenaline? Conditioning has worked out well, job offers are on your voicemail, things are busy, but busy is good. A call to rest, to lay your head down, to give up, doesn’t sound like…
Prostitot, The New Accessory by Marc Jacobs
And he said, “Let the little children come to me.” A New York Times article that gives us an amazing portrayal of the lengths to which we go to accessorize and craft an identity that will justify us. Interestingly, Jesus tells us, like Charles James, that we must become little children: “Most American fashion is based on older women trying to look like babies.” Ironically, this trend towards the accessorization of children, and the fashion industry’s relevance-seeking chops, has inverted the biblical paradigm–and children are becoming adults, way too soon.
In the last year or two, Lanvin, Gucci, Stella McCartney and…
A Night to Marimba!
Commentary abounds! The NY Times has interviewed him, it was on CBS Nightly News, YouTube videos have been made to recreate the experience of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony overrun by the all-too-commercialed Marimba ringtone; it all seems to be a nose-snubbing witch hunt. Who hasn’t been here in some way, shape, form? The nameless “Patron X”–the infamous front-row iPhone bandit–came to hear the New York Philharmonic last Tuesday, as he had done numerous times before, as he had enjoyed numerous time before. A guy with a taste for classical music, he had numerous connections in the Philharmonic, had a subscription for…
Fancies of Satisfaction: A Psychoanalysis of Pain, Pleasure, and the Good Life
The New York Times blog snagged a brilliant interview with British philosopher and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on Western culture’s fixation with happiness. According to Phillips, this notion that a good life is a happy life is a detrimental misnomer that consequently drives the individual into deeper dissatisfaction. Insofar as pain happens regardless, the pursuit of happiness is an unachievable end, an ideal unrealized. This cultural philosophy is fundamentally hedonistic, “evacuating pain” and caulking the holes with something more palatable. It sees pain as a privation–an appetite–and in fear seeks to substitute the appetite with an overfeeding of the wrong kind…
"Lonnie Loosie" on the Bound Will
An article that appeared in Monday’s New York Times discussed something absolutely fascinating to me. I had no idea of the problems that the New York City cigarette tax has created for so many New York residents.
According to the article, an average pack of smokes now costs $12.50 in Midtown Manhattan, a price that is outrageous. Even with the salary premiums that New Yorkers enjoy when compared with other parts of the country, such a high price is going to price people out of the habit…or should price people out. But instead, it simply turns them to…
Narrative and the Grace of God: The New ‘True Grit’
Stanley Fish is doing our job for us over on the New York Times Online OpEd Section. Fish, an academic known for his postmodern literary criticism (think interpretive communities) and guest writer for the NYT, wrote a piece entitled Narrative and the Grace of God: The New ‘True Grit’ which sounds like something Nick Lannon would write about here at Mockingbird. Be Warned: Dr. Fish’s article contains spoilers though this post does not!
I haven’t seen the new Coen Brother’s movie yet, but rest assured that will be remedied in the next few days. Until then, I figured…
Page: I've always been fascinated by anonymous and stranger interactions lik...
Bryan J.: I love this image of trying to "out-sacrifice Jesus," or even trying ...
Chris: That was good. Mature wickedness... that's honest too....
Chris Rookus: Top shelf Nick - I was just talking with a friend AT THE MOCKINGBIRD C...
mark mcculley: http://www.thefix.com/content/mary-karr-liars-sober91684?page=1...