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very interesting
Oct. 9th, 2012 08:45 amThis public post is painfully trivial, but I am sick of getting nothing but Slavic spam in my comments (even though the stuff once again has entertainingly nonsensical subject lines, much like my own). So:
Every so often I realize—after decades of not realizing it or forgetting that I have already realized it a few times before—that one or another of my favorite jokes actually sums up my whole methodology. (Grady Harris, a.k.a. utopyr and a few other consequential pseudonyms, would say my whole methodology is a joke.)
The other evening I cited a long-forgotten moment from the late-‘60s TV show “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In,” the super-fast-paced collage of comedy skits that included Artie Johnson (I was told that was the actor’s name) dressed as the Hollywood-movie-cliché of the intellectual German Kommandant, who would pop up only to utter the words “Ver-r-r-y interesting.”
At the end of one show, he uttered his usual “Very interesting,” only to have a coarser-looking soldier pop up next to him to declare, “It was STUPID!” After a momentary pause, Johnson replied, “Yes. It was stupid. But it was also very interesting.”
I find a good many stupid things very interesting. And well-meaning literal-minded types keep giving me stupid stuff that I don’t want because they don’t understand what it is that I find very interesting.
All human activities, from the most degraded to the most transcendent or from the most hardcore lowbrow to the most intellectually elevated, are like that: simultaneously stupid and very interesting. People immersed in them and identifying with them usually can’t see the stupidity, and people outside them who find such topics alien seldom see what makes them interesting.
In some activities, the trick is to filter out (but not negate) the stupidity so that we end up with something useful, such as the laptop on which I am writing this, or a book of anthropological theory. Every time I hunt for some counterintuitive command on the laptop’s desktop menu bar that seemed perfectly straightforward to the software writer, or read some thick-headed application of theory in an anthropological text (or make the mistake of re-reading my posts to the joculum blog), I am reminded of how difficult it is to correct for our own stupidity. (Ludwig Wittgenstein would bang his hand against his forehead in Cambridge seminars and exclaim, “Ach! You have such a stupid teacher!”)
It is equally difficult to filter out the effects of our own interest. When I announced the theme of my “From Cosmology to Neurology and Back Again” art show, I was besieged by people who insisted that their visual interpretation of hard-science cosmology absolutely had to be in the exhibition; I didn’t realize until right now that I should have asked, “And what exactly makes you think that that fact about the universe is interesting?” “Well, it’s true!” is not a sufficient answer. Many things are true that very few people find interesting: the scarcity of a particular type of Portuguese wine cork, the difference between second-century and third-century Samian ware. We need to be told why someone might find this interesting, even when the topic involves something as major as our own survival, or the question of why we are here. Like everyone else, I usually forget this fact.
Every so often I realize—after decades of not realizing it or forgetting that I have already realized it a few times before—that one or another of my favorite jokes actually sums up my whole methodology. (Grady Harris, a.k.a. utopyr and a few other consequential pseudonyms, would say my whole methodology is a joke.)
The other evening I cited a long-forgotten moment from the late-‘60s TV show “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In,” the super-fast-paced collage of comedy skits that included Artie Johnson (I was told that was the actor’s name) dressed as the Hollywood-movie-cliché of the intellectual German Kommandant, who would pop up only to utter the words “Ver-r-r-y interesting.”
At the end of one show, he uttered his usual “Very interesting,” only to have a coarser-looking soldier pop up next to him to declare, “It was STUPID!” After a momentary pause, Johnson replied, “Yes. It was stupid. But it was also very interesting.”
I find a good many stupid things very interesting. And well-meaning literal-minded types keep giving me stupid stuff that I don’t want because they don’t understand what it is that I find very interesting.
All human activities, from the most degraded to the most transcendent or from the most hardcore lowbrow to the most intellectually elevated, are like that: simultaneously stupid and very interesting. People immersed in them and identifying with them usually can’t see the stupidity, and people outside them who find such topics alien seldom see what makes them interesting.
In some activities, the trick is to filter out (but not negate) the stupidity so that we end up with something useful, such as the laptop on which I am writing this, or a book of anthropological theory. Every time I hunt for some counterintuitive command on the laptop’s desktop menu bar that seemed perfectly straightforward to the software writer, or read some thick-headed application of theory in an anthropological text (or make the mistake of re-reading my posts to the joculum blog), I am reminded of how difficult it is to correct for our own stupidity. (Ludwig Wittgenstein would bang his hand against his forehead in Cambridge seminars and exclaim, “Ach! You have such a stupid teacher!”)
It is equally difficult to filter out the effects of our own interest. When I announced the theme of my “From Cosmology to Neurology and Back Again” art show, I was besieged by people who insisted that their visual interpretation of hard-science cosmology absolutely had to be in the exhibition; I didn’t realize until right now that I should have asked, “And what exactly makes you think that that fact about the universe is interesting?” “Well, it’s true!” is not a sufficient answer. Many things are true that very few people find interesting: the scarcity of a particular type of Portuguese wine cork, the difference between second-century and third-century Samian ware. We need to be told why someone might find this interesting, even when the topic involves something as major as our own survival, or the question of why we are here. Like everyone else, I usually forget this fact.
