Small Talk | The Point Magazine

~ Mark

Exchanging small talk with people we’ve just met may be an unfortunate necessity, but with people we already know, it seems to suggest that they’re people to whom we have nothing to say. And yet if small talk is just talk that’s idle, insignificant and without stated purpose, then surely a substantial portion of the chatter that goes on between couples, friends and (or especially) families must count as small. Banality, however, need not always be insignificant. There’s nothing earth-shattering, usually, about missing the bus, what you ate for lunch or the new dress you just bought, but these are just the mundane tidbits that make up so much of the talk between intimates. In fact, such conversations about trivialities can arguably happen only with those close to us—only the members of our inner circle do we presume to burden with the minutiae of our lives.

Small Talk | The Point Magazine

~ Mark

Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives it, there the life becomes genuinely significant. Sometimes the eagerness is more knit up with the motor activities, sometimes with the perceptions, sometimes with the imagination, sometimes with reflective thought. But, wherever it is found, there is the zest, the tingle, the excitement of reality; and there is ‘importance’ in the only real and positive sense in which importance ever anywhere can be.

William James.

The Fast and the Furious

~ Mark

The Fast and the Furious. Almost exactly what I was expecting. One surprise, though: I figured there would be some fun, gratuitous style flourishes, but didn’t think it would be so cinematically interesting. The way they edited the racing scenes, the warps and perspective shifts, reminded me of the welding scene in Thief. It goes from a more neutral third-person observer perspective into this subjective-experience interpretive moment. Nicely done. It’s not high drama, but credit for making some gestures towards character-building, even though that’s not the point. And there’s a fun soundtrack. Two-Lane Blacktop is another good movie with itchy street racers.

~ Mark

A knot is the basal portion of a branch whose structure becomes surrounded by the enlarging stem. Since branches begin with lateral buds, knots can always be traced back to the pith of the main stem.

Ah, this makes so much sense now. Excerpt from Understanding Wood at Cool Tools.

Why are we not much, much, much better at parenting? | Practical Ethics

~ Mark

Economics!

Humans are quite bad at estimating the results of different interventions, if the feedback only comes years later. One needs only to see the plethora of different parenting guides and opposed schools of upbringing thought. Such variety couldn’t maintain itself if it were easy for parents to see which methods worked and which didn’t. Thus parents are poor at knowing what they need, and hence make ineffective consumers from the economic perspective.

Also, “a lot of parenting techniques are procedural, rather than declarative.”

Why are we not much, much, much better at parenting? | Practical Ethics

Nuptial Matters by Ruth Graham

~ Mark

How did reading poetry become an essential part of so many American wedding ceremonies—and why is it still so hard to choose a wedding poem of one’s own? […] It was around the early 1960s that some Protestant denominations began loosening the strictures of approved readings and music, according to Paula Treckel, a historian at Allegheny College who has written about the history of American weddings. The usual suspects were first to acquiesce: Unitarians, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians, responding to counterculture couples who wanted to make their wedding ceremonies their own. Suddenly, weddings were taking place in parks, and couples were writing their own vows. As the journalist Rebecca Mead writes in her 2007 book about contemporary weddings, One True Day, the modern idea is that “a wedding ceremony, like a wedding reception, ought to be an expression of the character of the couple who are getting married, rather than an expression of the character of the institution marrying them.”

Fascinating.

Despite our best attempts at uniqueness, we have generated a canon (as people do). And so what if the canon shifts over time (as canons do)? If, in 30 or 40 years, Cummings brands an early-21st-century wedding as indelibly as Gibran brands a 1970s wedding, well, so be it. Marriage means stepping into an ancient institution marked by hundreds of temporal particulars—everything from the cut of the bride’s dress to who is legally allowed to marry. We hope the marriage lasts forever, but we have to expect the wedding itself will age. Maybe we’ll all look back on our wedding poetry the same way we’ll look back on our wedding photos: with a fondness for those young, goofy people who had no idea how their tastes would change, or what was to happen to them.

Nuptial Matters by Ruth Graham

~ Mark

It is not the young man who is most happy, but the old man who has lived beautifully; for despite being at his very peak the young man stumbles around as if he were of many minds, whereas the old man has settled into old age as if in a harbor, secure in his gratitude for the good things he was once unsure of.

Epicurus. So yeah, I accidentally started a retirement tag today.