It was foolish to think I could keep the Handlers at bay with my friend’s stories and links to great pop songs, and now I must blog lest I be shuffled off this mortal by one hundred twenty-one fanatical medieval cult recreationists.  They told me not to cheat or shortcut this time.  Five hundred words of original thought for May 18, or else it’s a shiv in my liver while I sleep.  Not that I am left without a choice, but I am nothing if not cautiously prudent and if extending my life by typing some bunkum is all it takes… well, let’s just say it seems worth it.

Although there are some big news items regarding things I like and advocate for on the site (new season of Radiolab starts today, MD Matheson recording music again, among others), this needs to be a special entry to make up for time wasted.  While this is not a diary, these blog entries tend to be inward looking, and this is no different.  Lately I am really concerned with seriousness.  Clearly someone who believes their blogging is motivated by serial threats from a retro-cult cannot be serious, but I assure you that I am.  So let me invoke the most serious icon that I can to provoke some thought.  Here is Allen Konigsberg writing about perspective:

We are a people who lack defined goals.  We have never learned to love.  We lack leaders and coherent programs.  We have no spiritual center.  We are adrift in the cosmos wreaking monstrous violence on one another out of frustration and pain.  Fortunately, we have not lost our sense of proportion.

I would consider that passage serious, even though if you read it correctly it’s funny.  Seriousness and humour are not mutually exclusive.  But I don’t think it’s just smart and funny.  The Colbert Report is not serious, but Woody Allen can be.  Someone like Thomas Friedman has the appearance of seriousness, but utterly lacks in this quality.  I think I will come back to making distinctions later.

The whole concept was inspired by an interview with Marilynne Robinson, and if you read this with any regularity then you know how powerfully unsurprising that is.  Here she is talking about how Barth and Bonhoeffer were serious people, and she elaborates on the concept:

I have a feeling that there has been a pressure away from seriousness in much modern thought, as if we could sort of scale reality down to a size that we are more comfortable dealing with… The loss of seriousness seems to me to be, in effect, a loss of hope. I think that the thing that made people rise to real ambition, real gravity was the sense of posterity, for example -- a word that I can remember hearing quite often when I was a child and I never hear anymore.

So, to my mind, seriousness has two main qualities:  honesty; and the ability to attribute to things an appropriate weight.  The problem with either of these is that they can be difficult, but are more so because things like celebrity relationships or weekend movie openings are given so much weight.  Another difficulty is the lack of pith in this entry.  Let the concept boil another week.

Currently Listening Dream House/Dedications to Flea By Windy & Carl see related