One of my former professors is called a “theatrologist” on Wikipedia.
Theatrologist???
Update: to his credit, he was surprised when he saw this on Wikipedia. Apparently, it is an Eastern European title that, here in the US, would be “Professor of Theatre Studies.”
I’m slow in observing things sometimes. It wasn’t that long ago that FOX broadcast the NFC games, and CBS did the AFC. Now, it’s like rock-paper-scizzors. When did this happen???
Tom Loughlin:
We have traded the beauty and the deep silence of the winter season for noise and chaos. The way we celebrate the season now is the biggest indicator we have of how soulless modern culture has become. We cover this reality over with a thin and superficial pastiche of family, friends, and cozy warmth, but this mass-mediated pastiche can’t hide the deep emptiness lodged in a culture where the unending theme of buybuybuy is constantly drummed into us via every media outlet available.
Nature, however, offers us an escape, if we’re willing to take it. I call it the “hibernation effect,” since all the natural triggers that occur are ones that force us to slow down….All this slowing down offers us the opportunity for contemplation, and the chance to think thoughtfully and quietly about life and living."
I couldn’t agree more with Tom. The Spirit of Christmas is not about the economy, about acquisition, and winter presents unique opportunities for introspection, which seems to be a forgotten concept in our culture.
Read the whole thing at A Poor Player
To a man with a book, the whole world is about Winnie-the-Pooh. In this rerun of Ezra Klein’s 2023 podcast about what he calls the “The Quiet Catastrophe,” Klein talks about the loneliness “epidemic” with Sheila Liming, and about her book "Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time," (affiliate link) and it just naturally dovetailed with “The House at Pooh Corner.” To be honest, what Klein and Liming consider a catastrophe I consider my happy place, but your mileage may vary. Still, Pooh and his friends in the Forest might have some things to teach us about hanging out, community, and what kind of culture we’ve created.
Finished reading: The King of Torts by John Grisham 📚 (affiliate link)
A cautionary tale about the spiritually-corrupting effects of too much money. I like Grisham because, especially in this book, the conflict is more about moral choices than violence, and yet the I felt as if the main character didn’t really earn his redemption – it happened too easy.
Thanks to @dfte, I was referred to this interview with Josh Aronson, and this quotation, which oddly I thought connected to my reading of A. A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner, which I wrote about here.
blockquote “MD: What was the starting point for this body of work? Was there a specific moment that catalyzed the project?
JA: I wanted to reimagine coming-of-age from the perspective of the kids I grew up with, and from my own. So I started making pictures of it, not as nostalgia but as an act of invention. The project grew from that question: What could Florida boyhood look like if it were allowed to be soft, curious, even dreamlike?”
JA: “The Florida we usually see is hyper-sensationalized: Tiger King, ‘Florida Man,’ spring-break chaos. I’m trying to show something else. My images imagine a Florida populated by tenderness, empathy, and friendship. Is that a real place? Maybe not yet. But photography lets me build it; an alternate South that feels both familiar and aspirational.”
A few days before Thanksgiving, I finished reading The House at Pooh Corner for the first time. I don’t remember being read to very much as a child, which may simply be a gap in my memory. My mother, who left school in 10th grade, wasn’t a big reader, so that makes sense; my father took us to the bookmobile that came to our neighborhood Monday evenings, and he’d read mostly biographies and sports books, and I inherited a few books that he owned as a child, but I just don’t remember him reading to me. Anyway, I’ve been dipping into classic children’s books lately to fill in the gaps.
My one encounter with Winnie the Pooh was in kindergarten when my teacher decided to read a few stories to us. We all gathered around her to listen, but I am ashamed to say that every time she said the name “Pooh” or “Pooh Bear,” I would started giggling uncontrollably and nudging my fellow kindergartners until she finally had had enough and closed the book in frustration. I still feel embarrassed about that.
Anyway, my wife had recently reread The House at Pooh Corner herself (she’d read it often to the boys when they were little), and she encouraged me to read it when she was finished.
The thing that stands out about reading that book now that I am 67 is the leisurely, casual way of living in which Pooh and his friends didn’t have play dates and organized activities, but got up in the morning and just wandered around until something occurred to them. Sometimes, it was a simple as going to visit everyone to wish them a happy Thursday, and that was enough. I also really felt the closeness of that little community, who, while they sometimes unthinkingly did things that bordered on cruelty, mostly spent their days helping each other with something or other, and sharing a Little Something, and wandering through the woods. They took time to listen to each other, and overlooked their friend’s peccadilloes (“Well, that’s just Eeyore”), and made up little songs.
Which is why the final chapter, “In Which Christopher Robin and Pooh Come to an Enchanted Place, and We Leave Them There,” hit me so hard. The first sentence announced “Christopher Robin was going away.” In earlier chapters, the animals figured out that Christopher wasn’t around mornings anymore because he was spending them at school, and apparently he would be going to school all day now, and may even be going away to school. The group of animal friends came together and decided to find Christopher to say goodbye, and Eeyore has written a poem that he was going to read to him. Eeyore found the writing much more difficult than he expected, and yet the difficulty of saying goodbye permeates all the gaps and frustrations:
Christopher Robin is going.
At least we think he is.
Where?
Nobody knows.
But he is going–
I mean he goes
(To rhyme with ‘knows’)
Do we care?
(To rhyme with ‘where’)
We do
Very much.
(I haven’t got a rhyme for that ‘is’ in the second line yet. Bother.)
(Now I haven’t got a rhyme for bother. Bother.)
Those two bothers will have
to rhyme with each other
Buther.
The fact is this is more difficult
than I thought,
I ought–
(Very good indeed) I ought
To begin again,
But it is easier
To stop.
Christopher Robin, good-bye,
I
(Good)
I
And all your friends
Sends–
I mean all your friend
Send–
(Very awkward this, it keeps going wrong)
Well, anyhow, we send
Our love.
END.
By this point, I was a puddle. Good-byes make me a mess.
They all went and delivered the poem to Christopher, except Eeyore couldn’t quite get it said, and so he gave the letter to Christopher so that he could read it himself, and by the time he was finished only Pooh remained behind. “It’s a comforting thing to have,” Christopher Robin said. And then he asked Pooh to walk with him. Where? Nowhere.
They walked for a while in silence, and then Christopher Robin asked Pooh what he likes to do best in the world. Pooh thought and finally said “What I like best in the whole world is Me and Piglet going to see You, and You saying ‘Well, what about a little something?’ and Me saying, ‘Well, I shouldn’t mind a little something, should you, Piglet,’ and it being a hummy sort of day outside, and birds singing.”
Christopher agreed, and said that his favorite thing was doing Nothing.
Pooh asks him how you do Nothing, and Christopher replied “Well, it’s when people call out at you just as you’re going off to do it, What are you going to do, Chirstopher Robin, and you say, Oh, nothing, and then you go and do it…It means just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”
He then, suddenly,he starts blurting out all the things he’s learned at kindergarten, and I became aware that he was thinking about his future, and what he was leaving behind. “And by-and-by Christopher Robin came to any end of the things, and was silent, and he sat there looking out over the world, and wishing it wouldn’t stop.”
They hang out a little longer in the Galleons Lap – did I mention they’d walked to the Galleons Lap at the top of the Forest, an enchanted place where they can look out over the landscape – and Christopher makes Pooh a Knight. And then:
“Then, suddenly again, Christopher Robin, who was still looking at the world, with his chin in his hands, called out, ‘Pooh!’'
‘Yes?’ said Pooh”
‘When I’m–when—-Pooh!’
‘Yes, Christopher Robin?’
‘I’m not going to do Nothing anymore.’
‘Never again?’
‘Well, not so much. They won’t let you.'"
I’m pretty sure that last sentence will stay with me for a long time. I think of it as The Lament of Adulthood, the realization of what being a Grownup means. And it isn’t until you’re my age when, once again, they “let you.”
But after all the years of adulting, I’ve found it difficult to remember how to do Nothing. It takes time, or at least it has for me.
In the five years since I retired, I’ve written or edited five books. The voice in my head keeps pushing me to share the thoughts I had when I was too busy to write them down. And I’m glad I wrote them. But maybe it’s time to relearn how to “just go along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”
Because the only one not letting me now…is me.
A lovely song by Tuck and Patti: Christmas Wish,
I just sent out a message to my Substack readers announcing I would no longer be writing there, nor on my website blog (scottwalters.net), but am moving my activity here.
My previous plan was to centralize everything on my website. That website will remain as more of a static site for my books. It turned out that the blogging platform I used there was difficult to use than I anticipated, which served as a disincentive to write shorter, more casual observations. At that point it became more of a place for longer, more formal, essays and I have been writing fewer of them lately.
When I was still keeping up with posting, I would then do a weekly newsletter through Substack. Thanks to Notes, as well as the arrival of a bunch of Big Name Journalists, Substack has become increasingly like social media – a constant onslaught of hot takes instead of a place for more thoughtful writing. Goodbye and good luck.
So I came back to MB. I like its simplicity, and the quietness of my feed. I decided not to have my thoughts distributed to the fediverse or social media platforms. I really don’t need strangers discussing my ideas. An occasional reply sounds just fine.
