Wahoowa, episode III: The worm has turned

One of the great pleasures of the last decade or so of my relationship with Mom has been her discovery of UVA men's basketball, the only sport she has ever willingly sat down and watched with me, without having to be coaxed into it with a back rub. Mom's fandom reached its acme on April 8, 2019, when UVA beat Texas Tech in overtime to win its first and only national championship. Since then, well, we haven't won a single NCAA tournament game, culminating in our First Four pantsing this week by a mediocre Colorado State team, in a game in which they shot 55% and we shot 25%, including missing 19 consecutive shots at one point. In the wake of that fiasco, ESPN loudmouth Stephen A. Smith (you can insert what you're thinking of for the "A") called for Coach Tony Bennett to be fired "strictly because of being boring." Once again, I say I missed my calling in life if you can get paid the big bucks for quality takes like that.

 

Even before that game, UVA pissed down their leg in blowing a six-point lead in the final minute of regulation in their semifinal game in the ACC tournament by, among other things, going 1 for 5 from the free-throw line (also known as the "charity stripe," though not so much when this year's UVA team was shooting foul shots), and fouling former UVA player Casey Morsell while he was shooting a three-pointer. For context, Morsell shot 123 three-pointers while he was here and made 25 of them, which is 20%. Morsell, of course, drained all three free throws, while UVA was clanking theirs at the other end of the floor.

 

Smile when your partner walks into a room

I recently read You Could Make This Place Beautiful, the poet Maggie Smith's 2023 memoir. (The title is essentially the last line from her as-famous-as-poems-get poem "Good Bones.") Lesson #1 from this book: Unless you're 100% certain that you'll never get divorced, do not marry a writer—you will not come off looking too good when they write their memoir.

 

At one point, Smith muses about the qualities she's looking for in her post-divorce "dream partner," but what she wants is "so basic, so low-bar, I’m almost ashamed to say it out loud: Someone who’s happy to see me. Someone who smiles when I walk into a room. Someone who can be happy with me and for me[.]" It may be basic and low-bar, but it's a great lesson #2 from this book: When your partner walks into a room, smile and let them know you're happy to see them. And while you're at it, give them a hug too, if you haven't seen them for a while. It's hard to imagine a simpler way to keep the fire burning.

 

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The holy song of thanksgiving

And speaking of those butter-loving Danes....

 

This is a fabulous video of the Danish String Quartet playing what is, in my opinion, the most beautiful 15 to 20 minutes of classical music ever written: the middle movement of Beethoven's String Quartet No. 15, Op. 132. Beethoven took the very rare, for him, step of giving this movement a title, translated into English as the "Holy song of thanksgiving of a convalescent to the Deity, in the Lydian mode." Beethoven composed the quartet in 1825, two years before his death in 1827. But Beethoven was sure he was dying of a severe intestinal illness in 1825; when he miraculously recovered, he wrote this piece, dedicating it to his conception of the "Deity," who it sounds like the fiddles are reaching heavenward to carry Beethoven's message of thanks directly to, especially at the end of the movement.

 

I am most partial to the classic recording of this piece by the Quartetto Italiano, and not just because they're the Quartetto Italiano. But I have to admit to taking special pleasure in seeing these black-clad, stern-looking Danish mfs sawing away on their fiddles in the most emotive piece ever written:

 

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Toothbutter

I learned a great new word recently: tandsmør, which translates literally from the Danish as “toothbutter” (tand = tooth, smør = butter). The Danes use it to describe butter that it is spread so thickly on a slice of bread as to reveal teeth marks when bitten. If you've ever eaten a meal with Grandma and Pop-pop with bread and butter present, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

 

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My epitaph

At my longstanding Saturday morning breakfast yesterday with my running buddies (few of whom actually run anymore), the subject of movies came up. One friend asked if anyone had seen Barbie, which of course I had. I gave my (solicited) opinion, noting especially the scene where America Ferrera's character shouts the whole point of the movie at anyone too dense to understand it for themselves. I also noted how you all told me that was exactly what you would have expected from an old white guy. This at a breakfast with a bunch of white guys who are all at least a decade older than me.

That led one of my friends to say that he had read a piece in the New York Times Book Review in which the author described Henry James's work as being too male, pale, and stale. My friend, who has a Ph.D. in English and loves the classics, was irked enough to go back and re-read The Portrait of a Lady, which is a massive undertaking.

 

I searched for the book review but immediately hit upon this article instead: "Too Male, Too Pale, Too Stale: Why Academia Is Turning Its Back on William Shakespeare." The article explains that the Globe Theatre in London, "Shakespeare's home turf," is giving fans "trigger" warnings about upsetting themes in Romeo and Juliet and offering a number to call for emotional support after seeing the play. But at least the Globe is still mounting productions of Shakespeare's plays, as the article also reports that English departments "are binning the Bard in favour of classes on Lady Gaga and Game of Thrones." I'll let you form your own opinions on that one. In the meantime, you have a good epitaph for my tombstone (were I actually to have a tombstone, which I will not):

 

Too male, too pale, too stale

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My 2023 reading

According to StoryGraph, I read 68 books, totaling 20,065 pages, in 2023. Of those, ⅔ were nonfiction and ⅓ were fiction, which is more fiction than usual. That's because I read all three books in the Scholomance series (teenage wizards, but incredibly dark) that Cassie recommended and all eight books in Mick Herron's Slough House series (so far; they were released from 2010 to 2022) that my friend Bill recommended. In a New Yorker profile, Jill Lepore asked "Is Mick Herron the Best Spy Novelist of His Generation?" I don't read enough spy novels to have an opinion, but I do highly recommend all of the Slough House books, as well as the three seasons of the Slow Horses series on Apple TV+ based on the first three books. 

As recent episodes might suggest, one of my contenders for the best nonfiction book I read in 2023 is The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness (2023) by Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz. The subtitle says it all. The book distills the lessons the authors learned as the director and co-director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. They boil 85 years of the study down to one principle for living: "Good relationships keep us healthier and happier." They go through the evidence and give suggestions for how to "cultivate warm relationships" in all aspects of your life. There's a ton of good information in the book, conveyed in an approachable style.

 

As much as I enjoyed and learned from The Good Life, my favorite nonfiction book I read in 2023 is Why Fish Don't Exist (2020) by Lulu Miller, which I picked up for $1 at the Fall 2023 book sale after first learning about it on one of those employee recommendation cards at the independent Third Place Books shop near Dylan and Moriah's house. It's an odd book which doesn't fit into any neat categories. As the publisher describes it, it's part memoir, part biography of David Starr Jordan (the founding president of Stanford University), and part scientific adventure, but the total effect is significantly greater than the sum of its parts. The book is probably not to everyone's taste, but I found it both intellectually stimulating and packing an emotional punch. One of a kind.

Some other books I'd recommend if the subject matter interests are: Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us (2023) by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross; The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (2023) by David Grann; Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come: One Introvert's Year of Saying Yes (2019) by Jessica Pan; Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage (2022) by Heather Havrilesky; and Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully (2023) by Kelly Starrett and Juliet Starrett.

All the books I read in 2023

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20 percent bullshit allowance

I have a whole lineup of podcasts I listen to when I'm driving around or working out. Last week on the Next Big Idea podcast episode with Morgan Housel, author of The Psychology of Money (2020), I heard an idea I think is really useful: the "20 percent bullshit allowance." Housel explained it like this:

Like anything else in life, anything that is rewarding comes with a cost attached to it. And the cost for a lot of things in life is the willingness to put up with and endure uncertainty, hassle, nonsense, pain, bullshit, all of it. I think in anyone's life, you should give yourself a 20 percent bullshit allowance, that 20 percent of the time and 20 percent of the days, 20 percent of the things that happen are gonna be things where you're like, alright, I guess I gotta put up with this. My flight is delayed, my toilet is leaking, my car broke down, I'm sick, my kids are sick. Whatever it is, 20 percent of your life is going to be some form of b.s. And if you are not willing to put up with that, you are blown apart by the tiniest petty annoyance in your life.

This strikes me as a corollary of the idea that you'll have a happier life if you just lower your expectations. The best-known formulation of that idea is this equation (though there are variations*):

Happiness = Reality − Expectations

There's an article in Psychology Today describing the "pitfalls" of maintaining low expectations to boost happiness levels, but it can definitely have some benefits for those of us who let our enjoyment of some things (like new restaurants) suffer because our expectations going in are way too high. And it’s a great reminder that you can have an awesome vacation despite the inevitable travel hassles.

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*I've also seen the equation expressed as "Happiness = Reality/Expectations,”which really bumps up the effect of lowering expectations. In the much less pithy version in Mo Gawdat's book Solve for Happy (2017), he gives the equation as "Happiness ≥ your perception of the events of your life − your expectation of how life should behave."

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