Self-Help for Self-Help Hacks

Forget the Dummies irony. If like me, you scoff at the self-help genre for overly accentuating the positive at the expense of falsifiable evidence and other critical habits of mind, I offer solace via two self-help titles.

The first, “Surviving on the Streets” by Ace Backwords, is part field-guide, part memoir from an emotionally savvy, homeless habitue of the streets of San Francisco. You never know—the author’s advice may one day help you to make sound decisions about provisions, sleeping arrangements, territoriality, the elements, hygiene, substance abuse, and mayhem avoidance.

Mr. Backwords is insightful about territoriality:

Each street situation is unique. Like I said, there is no rule book - you just have to react to each moment as appropriately and as spontaneously as you can. You must be firm, and you must draw certain lines in the sand, otherwise you'll just get run out of one spot after another. But you must be flexible, too.

And he's adept at reading material remains:

. . .the litter will give you a good idea of the history and the habits of the place. It doesn't hurt to play at being an archeologist sifting through the ruins, or a detective searching for clues.

And in the spirit of  The Graduate, he favors plastics:

PLASTIC BAGS! PLASTIC BAGS! PLASTIC BAGS! They will save your ass in a hundred different ways. At the very least, a plastic garbage bag can be made into a make-shift poncho in case of an emergency.

Deep (Antifragile) Thoughts

Nassim Taleb—a self-help inspiration?  I’d never fancied that, but the ground shifted after the author of The Black Swan paid a visit last month to my campus. Lecturing on “Risks, Black Swans, and Fragile Markets," he touched on antifragility, its opposite depicted via the image of a dainty tea cup projected on a screen.

That evening I began reading his book, Antifragile, which I had egregiously neglected. Most members of our species, he observes, consider the opposite of “fragile” to be “robust” or “resilient.”  Not so: those qualities occupy middle ground between fragility and antifragility, the latter which Taleb coined for the book. Robustness, he notes, holds fast to stability, the status quo. Antifragility pushes convexly—often against resistance—with positive nonlinear outcomes. The dynamic thrives on volatility, randomness, errors, uncertainty, and stressors.

“If you want to become antifragile,” he writes, put yourself in the situation ‘loves mistakes’ . . . by making these numerous and small in harm.” In the fragile category, he says, “mistakes are rare and are large [with large consequences], and hence irreversible,” [when they occur].

As a writer in a large, bureaucratic organization, I suddenly realized that my career-long resistance to evolving into an editor of writers or a manager of editors and writers has been an antifragile stroke. That’s to say that writing new stories two or three times a week from scratch is an uncomfortable, rewarding learning experience. All I need to do now is transfer that M.O. to the rest of this exasperating incarnation (i.e., this life).

 Fragility You Don't Need

 

Finis to Baptisms at the Clarion Hotel

For the past 2 ½ years, guests at the Clarion Hotel in Northampton, Massachusetts have opened their curtains on Sunday mornings to discover members of Grace Baptist Church in poolside baptismal immersions, ablutions, and other testimonies. That will end in two weeks when the kitsch 1960s-era Clarion closes its doors.

At the 46-year-old hotel, two floors of galleried guest rooms with sliding glass doors girdle the indoor pool, beneath a 30-foot diaphanous dome. Sightlines to the pool are optimal from the rooms, and if viewers aren’t careful with their curtains, visitors in and around the pool might return the compliment.

   

Founded in 2013, Northampton’s Grace Baptist Church has deployed “Clarion poolside” as its sanctuary from the beginning. Now it’s in the market for a new venue.

I offer these photos below in comfort: The congregation is sure to find a new venue given the variety, adaptability, and longevity of the baptismal rite!

Labyrinth and Latin Cross Variations

Biblical Immersion in Seoul

And while the pools below have yet to see baptismal service, I contemplate my oolong and say, “Why not?”

Then again, my understanding of the rite is less than complete. For solace and  company, I turn to fellow traveler Larry David and his own brush with baptism in the video below.  A link to the video on YouTube is here.

A Primate's Lament: Notes on a Semantic Misunderstanding

My mood free-fell from enchantment to despair when I discovered that my just-purchased 2007 field guide, What Shat That? (“Your guide to matching feces with their species”) had excluded human scat from its portfolio. There were moose and goldfish, rabbits and rhinos, and 46 other species, but not a Homo sapiens in sight. Perhaps to identify a specimen in the woods, we might consider it human if none of the 50 proves a match? You know, the process of elimination.

Practicality aside, why maroon Homo sapiens from this handy guide and its occupants—even in benign, oblivious neglect? The whole unpleasantness reminded me of one of my pet lexical peeves,  abuse of the word “primate.”  Homo sapiens, of course, along with monkeys, apes, lemurs, tarsiers, etc. are card-carrying members of the primate order. But for many Homo sapiens, primates exclusively connote the hairier, quadrupedal members of the primate club. (i.e., everyone save us.)

  

Zoologists and others who watch their words deploy the differentiator,“nonhuman primates.” But as the Google Ngram graph below demonstrates, that neologism is way more recent than 

"primate” itself.  (No doubt, the coinage “nonhuman primates” was a rejoinder to sloppy language by human primates.)

Regrettably, the depiction of exclusively nonhuman primates on the covers of most primatology textbooks does nothing to rectify the situation. (The authors and their publishers should know better.)

There are, of course, exceptions:

And, even better, there is this book cover (and wonderful book) by the primatologist and essayist Robert Sapolsky. On the cover, Professor Sapolsky, primate, is at one with his and our heritage.  

Judging by his photo, I used to think Sapolsky was just a freaky guy. I still believe that, but I also think he is walking the primate talk—on behalf of us all.