Almostgotit.com

Speaking of tubas and the like: check out this great website. One great product per day… and sometimes (like today) they even give stuff away for free! Don’t miss out, though, ’cause every offer expires at midnight.

Penelope Trunk  recently wrote a wonderfully iconoclastic column in The Huffington Post entitled Hold CEOs Accountable for Their Bad Parenting.   It seems that corporate boards don’t mind their CFO’s having mistresses, or even having three mistresses at once: they just don’t like it when all three mistresses go public and embarrass the company. 

Even more horrifying, however, is how universally this “success” culture celebrates bad parenting by lauding wealthy fathers who work 100-hour weeks and assure their colleagues that “My Family is You.”

Trunk writes:

I can’t decide which is more pathetic — the way these men approach their role as a parent, or the way that Fortune magazine writes about it without any commentary.

How can there be no mention of the fact that these CEOs are neglecting their kids?

We have a double standard in our society: If you are poor and you abandon your kids, you are a bad parent. But if you are rich and you abandon them to run a company, you are profiled in Fortune magazine.

Don’t miss the article, nor the comments, either.  One is by Harvard Business School’s Bob Sutton.

Who washes his own family’s dishes.

———
Related Posts:
Woman vs. Rabbit Hole

What would you do if you had no fear? 
Living your dreams
while quakin’ in your boots

By Diane Conway,
with foreword by Anne Lamott

One of the things I’d do is be the first to comment on Powell Books’ website on a book I hadn’t even actually read yet. (they give random prizes for first-persons-to-comment, and ever since I won Door Prize #3 that one time, I’ve grown a bit cocky.)

I keep googling this book. I’ve been wanting to buy it for about a year now but keep running out of book money (I’m a little bad).  But look: it’s got about the world’s best title. And it has a foreword by Anne Lamott, how cool and irresistible is that? Because that’s enough reason to buy the book right there. And another reason is because I wish I had written it. Do you think I could use the same title, and get Anne Lamott to write my foreword, too?

I did submit a review for Powell’s, and even rated the book. I give it a “4,” not because it’s not worth a full “5″ but because giving it a 5 at this point may have been getting a little ahead of myself.  I would have edged up to a 4.5 had Powell Books given that option, but it didn’t.  

Maybe you could read this book yourself and then you can give it a five on Powell Books, and that would pull the average up to where it belongs.   Or have you read it already?  If you have, please let us know what you thought of it!

Here is what the publisher says about the book (which appears on the product page on both Powell Books and Amazon)

For this book, author Diane Conway approached a police officer, a waitress, a politician, a lawyer, a cab driver, and many others, and asked them each the same question: “What would you do if you had no fear?” The results, chronicled in this book, were both surprising and enlightening. Her respondents told her their secrets, their long-hidden dreams, and their fears. Their dreams included quitting mind-numbing jobs, applying to medical school, buying tickets to South America, finding true love, quitting drinking, or having an affair. The distance between dreaming and doing, according to Conway, is surprisingly short. In What Would You Do If You Had No Fear? her fresh voice and “Studs Terkel in drag persona” challenge readers to stop, open their hearts, and truly live. Included are self-tests, quizzes, growth exercises, and inspiring quotes for realizing one’s fear-free potential.

The author, calling herself our “slightly neurotic, frequently shaky guide” (channelling Lamott for sure) adds on Amazon that

When I saw the profound effect [asking this question] had on people, I started asking people everywhere I went. I had to overcome the fear that people would think that I’m: a) delusional or b) trying to pick them up for kinky sex.

Now doesn’t that sound like a fun read? 

We have a wonderful used-book store in our city, which until recently was within walking distance of our house.  One of our favorite pastimes was to rummage through the “free bins” parked outside the store. 

We found many treasures in it:  a whole entire set of encyclopedias, for instance, missing only “volume 11.”  Thousands of Martha Stewart magazines, back when she even still dared put her face on every cover.  Tattered books in Italian, or about calculus, with which to impress one’s older brother.  And once, an ancient copy of Atlantic Monthly, in which I found an essay by Marilynne Robinson about courage and the petty coercion of society that conspires against it.  It was gorgeous.

It drove me crazy to misplace it, which I inevitably did, almost immediately.

Anyway, a few weeks ago, in a fit of extravagance, I ordered several books from Amazon.com (to get the “free shipping,” of course) and among them I chose one by Marilynne Robinson called The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought.  I’d seen the list of contents and knew my essay wasn’t in it.

But tonight, after an exhausting day I started leafing through the book.  And there, at the very end, the final essay in the collection, I found it.  Really!  I don’t know how it got there, but it feels like a gift.  This is what it’s called:

“The Tyranny of Petty Coercion.”

Which (my usually good memory not-withstanding) apparently appeared in the August 2004 issue of Harper’s Monthly, not in the Atlantic, and here, moreover, is a quote:

Courage seems to me to be dependent on cultural definition.  By this I do not mean only that it is a word that blesses different behaviors in different cultures, though that is clearly true.  I mean also, and more importantly, that courage is rarely expressed except where there is sufficient consensus to support it.  Theologians used to write about a prevenient grace, which enables the soul to accept grace itself.  Perhaps there must also be a prevenient courage to nerve one to be brave.  It is we human beings who give one another permission to show courage, or, more typically, withhold such permission.  We also internalize prohibitions, enforcing them on ourselves – prohibitions against, for example, expressing an honest doubt, or entertaining one.  This ought not to be true in a civilization like ours, historically committed to valuing individual conscience and free expression.  But it is.

. . .

It is sad to consider how much first-rate courage must be devoted in this world to struggling out of the toils of sheer pettiness.  The Saudi women who first drove automobiles risked and suffered penalties, overcame inhibitions, and shattered norms, heroic in their defiance of an absurd convention. We have our own Rosa Parks.  That such great courage should have been required to challenge such petty barriers is a demonstration of the power of social consensus.  How many minor coercions are required to sustain similar customs and usages?  How aware are any of us, absent direct challenge, of how we also deal in trivial coercion?

Click here to read The Tyranny of Petty Coercion article

I’m very excited about my friend Emily Anderson’s new blog, The Rocky Road of Love and Other Great Recipes which officially launches today.  Emily is the author of All-American Comfort Food, and writes for television and the Web and is on the staff of Paris Notes.  It should be clear, then, that Emily herself is far too busy to do any of the actual writing on the blog she produces.  Today’s recipe, for instance, was submitted by Samantha, whose own story of Great Food and Tempestuous Love will unfold in weekly episodes also appearing on the blog.  Tune in now!

Many years ago, a very tall man and I went on our first date.  After watching East of Eden in the campus auditorium, we went back to my dorm room, made popcorn, and talked. 

One of the things my new friend mentioned was an article he’d just read in the Atlantic Monthly called “The Size of Thoughts,” by Nicholson Baker.  It begins like this:

Each thought has a size, and most are about three feet tall, with the level of complexity of a lawnmower engine, or a cigarette lighter, or those tubes of toothpaste that, by mingling several hidden pastes and gels, create a pleasantly striped product. Once in a while, a thought may come up that seems, in its woolly, ranked composure, roughly the size of one’s hall closet. But a really large thought, a thought in the presence of which whole urban centers would rise to their feet, and cry out with expressions of gratefulness and kinship; a thought with grandeur, and drenching, barrel-scorning cataracts, and detonations of fist-clenched hope, and hundreds of cellos; a thought that can tear phone books in half, and rap on the iron nodes of experience until every blue girder rings; a thought that may one day pack everything noble and good into its briefcase, elbow past the curators of purposelessness, travel overnight toward Truth, and shake it by the indifferent marble shoulders until it finally whispers its cool assent—this is the size of thought worth thinking about.

Really large thoughts.  That’s what we talked about, and then he went home, and I couldn’t get to sleep that night because something huge had just happened, I could tell. 

Two years later, I married him.

A few years after that, with our children, I had cause to revisit an old friend, the illustrious Dr. Seuss.  Who wrote, of course  “Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!”

Sometimes, I channel Seuss, like this:

Maybe it matters, though,
Matters a lot.
Whether we don’t, or we do
have a thought.
It might make you rich -
But then it might not.
It might make no difference
or might make a lot.
It might be the kind
that gets in the way,
but it also might lead to
your future, that day.
            * * *

Mr. Baker makes the best point of all about the importance of thoughts, though, so my final words must be his:

Would it be possible to list those features that, taken together, confer upon a thought a lofty magnificence? What makes them so very large? My idle corollary hope is that perhaps a systematic and rigorous codification, on the model of Hammurabi’s or Napoleon’s, might make large thoughts available cheap, and in bulk, to the general public, thereby salvaging the 19th-century dream of a liberal democracy.

——-

Related Posts:
In defense of thoughts (part 1)
To have as many thoughts as possible (part 2)
The size of thoughts (part 3)