The Right Kind of Obsessed

Dearest Amelia,

I tried really hard not to bring this up on the internet, but the subject of infidelity is impossible to ignore.  My friends are talking about it.  My husband is talking about it.*  And listening to an episode of Other People podcast with the author Austin Kleon of the book Steal Like An Artist, I heard the line, "The world needs a decent human being more than it needs a great artist." 

It made me think of two things:

1. Our ongoing conversation about how to balance raising babies with the inevitable panic we feel that we aren't doing enough to advance our careers.

2. The prolonged media mess that is Woody Allen's life these days.

My argument against Woody Allen goes thusly: where there is (a ton of) smoke, there is probably fire, and where there is pedophilic/oversexing fire, I draw the line.  Without getting into the nitty gritty of the sordid Allen legal stew, or dragging Grizzly & Golden fans through the gravel of politics, legal teams, and he said/she said headaches (too late!), I want to recap what I have learned over the past few years of personally reacting to this stew:

I guess I am "a family man," above all things.  I'm not saying bad stuff never happens, or every relationship deserves to be seen out, but I do think there are consequences in the adult world, and I feel like this fact is one that Woody Allen's movies alone want us to ignore.  Few of his characters are ever moved by anyone else's pain.  They occasionally wrestle with guilt, but that is not the same thing as being compassionate or considerate.  One might argue that guilt is a sign of transgressing one's own value system, so the fact that these characters are often dissuaded from taking their guilt seriously is its own verdict: the world of his movies is, essentially, an amoral one. 

In case I don't sound blow-hardy enough, I balk at artists who give that calling a bad name.  Of course, as Austin Kleon talks about via a George Saunders anecdote in the podcast mentioned above, being a good person and being a good artist are not mutually exclusive endeavors, and this is, I think, why I get so worked up about Woody Allen.  I'm not saying the man did or didn't do something.  I'm saying, if he did, that matters.  I oppose deifying anyone who is famous for or in spite of behaving badly.  Bad behavior causes suffering, and I make art to alleviate suffering. 

There, I said it.  Phew!  The other thing I want to tell you is that in listening to a different Other People podcast, one with Joshua Wolf Shenk, I had my tail sufficiently "cranked" as we say in our house, a throwback to our late, great, and hyper-active Border Collie, may he rest in peace.  Joshua Wolf Shenk is the author of a book called The Powers of Two which debunks the myth of the solitary genius.  I haven't read the book but I love this man's message, which is that there exists electricity within creativity, electricity that is, in fact, activated in the right company.  I.e. the most prolific artists are often ones who have found their ideal collaborators. 

To which I say, hi!!! 

Mr. Wolf Shenk also sounds like Jeff Goldblum which, if you ask me, is reason enough to listen to anyone. 

Thinking of you!  Relying on you?
XOXO
Kara

* I just threw that line in there about Tim thinking about infidelity as a joke.  He does talk about the reasons marriages - and people - fall apart in our ongoing time-waste-activity of being two people who posit ideas habitually and live together under one roof, chewing on them, often together, sometimes separately.  This chewing on ideas is one of the things that brings us together, but if you get a desperate call from Tim that he "can't take it anymore" or that the girl who sells hotdogs and Cheez Whiz in his workplace lobby looks appetizing, please feel free to tell me.  The first person to divorce is the one who has written a book on marriage, you know?  I don't want to be that person.


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10/12/14

Dear Kara:

First of all, thank you for getting me to open up a new Word document. It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve written anything other than email responses.

In a way, I could respond to the above post with a simple: I agree! But I’m afraid (very afraid) it’s not that simple.

You see, on first read, I took no issue with that line you shared about the world needing a decent human being more than it does a great artist. But then, I thought about some of the pieces of art that have touched and inspired me, and how I don’t know anything about some of the personal lives of the artists behind these works. Or perhaps more importantly, I don't care to find out. Just by way of example, in college, I fell in love with the poetry of E.E. Cummings—so much so that I included Estlin (what the second E stands for) in a list of possible girl names that I had going in my journal—as a twenty-year-old. (I know, hilarious.) I pulled out this list when I was pregnant and briefly considered Estlin (before I knew Teddy’s sex), but then Matt remembered not liking something about Mr. Cummings' personal life. So we gave it a quick Internet search, and sure enough, we discovered that, according to Wikipedia, Mr. Cummings was a supporter of Joseph McCarthy. (The name was probably too weird for us anyway, but this personal factoid put an end to Estlin even as a middle name.) What’s my point? My point is that I’m glad I found Mr. Cummings’ poetry first before his political leanings. I’m glad that my experience of reading his work hadn’t been sullied. Furthermore, even now, I feel guilty for taking Wikipedia at face value, for not doing more research to try and confirm what kind of a person the poet really was before casting him off as someone I might not have wanted to be friends with.

As an even weirder (and possibly just plain stupid) example, let’s take the world of gymnastics. You know that I love watching this sport and follow it quite religiously. Well, sometimes, when the gymnastics news cycle is slow, I go to the Twitter feeds of the gymnasts themselves to see if they’ve posted a video of a new skill they’re working on or something like that. This is always a mistake as I am instantly reminded that these women whose work ethic and determination and skill I admire so much are teens, and if they aren’t posting selfies, they are posting something about the Kardashians or a fairly cheesy inspirational quote. It’s a rude awakening, and as I close the Internet browser, I do my best to forget what I’ve just seen so that I can go on loving the sport and admiring its competitors.

All that said, in terms of my own personal battle between caring for Teddy and getting any writing done at all, I quite like the idea of the world needing a decent human being more than it does a great artist.

If only Mavis could actually babysit...

I also quite like the sound of Joshua Wolf Shenk’s book, The Powers of Two. I had never listened to that podcast before either, so thanks for the introduction!

So now: what should we collaborate on next? More Bolognese? A new title for Mommy & Me classes? Finding a way to really stick it to Amazon for being so unfair to Hachette authors? Whatever it is, I’m looking forward to it.

Decently,  ;) ;)
Amelia