The Looming Danger of Justices Thomas and Alito & Is Asbestos in Makeup Giving Women Cancer?
The Looming Danger of Justices Thomas and Alito & Is Asbestos in Makeup Giving Women Cancer?
Microplastics are in Our Bodies, Texas Tried to Ban Books that Mention "Butt" and "Fart," Liam Neeson is the Easter Bunny, Crowded House Sings “Don’t Dream It's Over"
What I’m Discussing Today:
Kareem’s Daily Quote: Don’t understand art? Maybe this quote will help.
The Looming Danger of Justices Thomas and Alito: This man is morally and intellectually unfit. What can we do about it?
Appeals court tells Texas it cannot ban books for mentioning ‘butt and fart’: This story is much more insidious than it first appears.
Kareem’s Video Break: Liam Neeson is back, this time auditioning for the role of the Easter Bunny.
Is there asbestos in your makeup? Why women with cancer are suing big beauty brands: Women have been poisoning themselves for decades. Are their children next?
Microplastics found in every human semen sample tested in study: This disturbing study should be a wake-up call. But only if you’re listening.
Crowded House Sings “Don’t Dream It’s Over”: There’s something mesmerizing about this song.
PERSONAL NOTE FROM KAREEM:
My very close friend Jerry West died this week. Coming so soon after the loss of Bill Walton has left me shattered. I’ll probably write more on this after I’ve had some time to recover. Just know that aside from being one of the greatest basketball players ever, he was a man of integrity and passion. For now, I’ll just share what I said that day: “The reason Jerry West is the logo for the NBA is because he embodied the qualities we admire in our best athletes: skills as a player, dedication as a teammate, and integrity as a person. He was my coach and my advisor, but mostly he was my friend. Today, a part of the continent has broken off and we are all left a little smaller.”
Kareem’s Daily Quote
Timms: Sir. I don’t always understand poetry.
Hector: You don’t always understand it? Timms, I never understand it. But learn it
now, know it now and you’ll understand it whenever.
Timms: I don’t see how we can understand it. Most of the stuff poetry’s about
hasn’t happened to us yet.
Hector: But it will, Timms. It will. And then you will have the antidote ready!”
Alan Bennett, The History Boys
This dialogue exchange is from the brilliant play (and the movie adaptation) The History Boys. Timms is a young, lonely high school student frustrated with the poetry lessons from his very caring teacher Hector. What I love about this exchange is how wonderfully Bennett captures the typical complaint people have about art while also offering a powerful defense of art.
Art has the power to entertain, comfort, inspire, give us insight, and lift our spirits. But it can also make us feel dumb. We read a poem and scratch our heads. We stare at an abstract painting and shake our heads at the waste of paint. Yet, experts are fawning over those works as genius. That frustration is what Timms is expressing. Why bother to create art that most people won’t get? Because top-shelf art wants us to reach higher than a limerick, a Fast and Furious movie, or a cozy mystery. Yes, we can enjoy those things (I sure do), but sometimes the mind hungers for more than tasty snacks for the mind. It’s the same motivation for why some people train daily to run faster, jump farther, or score more points.
The reason good art can appear to be dense and inaccessible is because it wants to force you to look closer. Usually, everything you need to know is right there in front of you in the work, but it nudges you to be the detective and see the clues. This isn’t a gimmick, it’s a means to train the audience to be more observant of the clues in their own lives so they can be more in control of their happiness. People repeatedly make the same mistakes because they don’t recognize the signposts screaming at them: Unsafe Relationship Ahead! or Justification Slippery When Hasty!
Timms’ point is that the life lessons in most of the poetry they study are for things that haven’t happened in their young lives—yet. The narrator in Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is contemplating suicide because of the emptiness of his life; the narrator of W.D. Snodgrass’ “Lying Awake” bemoans his inability to change his mundane life because he lacks the will power. That kind of drama is down the road for a high school student, so why study it at all?
Hector’s explains that you’re assembling an emotional first aid kit for the maladies later in life so that when they happen, you are prepared to understand and cope with them because you’ve already thought deeply about them. So many times in my life something momentous has happened that knocked the wind out of me, but I was able to recall a passage from a novel, a song from Marvin Gaye, a stanza from a poem, a painting I once saw, and that helped give me a way to think about what had happened to me. It helped me cope because it provided a language for me to understand what was happening and put it in a larger context.
Sometimes art takes a little effort—but that effort is rewarded with a lifetime of pleasure and understanding. Art can be a key that unlocks some of our most intimate and profound thoughts—if we let it.