Lao Tzu Was A Hero To Most, But He Never Meant Shit To Me (Mostly Because I Had No Idea What The Fuck Any Of It Could Possibly Mean)

When we were adolescents we read a lot of books that as adults we never would have considered reading. The Bell Jar sticks out in my mind. I remember slogging through the Tao Te Ching, too, except that it wasn't really a slog on account of me allowing myself to let my mind wander freely while my eyes skimmed some words on the page; I sort of think that I shouldn't even say that I "read" it, more than displayed it on a bookshelf for however long until my parents moved out of my childhood home and the book disappeared to I don't know where while I was living thousands of miles away.

Reading a book and understanding like none of it is kind of a crummy feeling. Part of me wonders whether high school English instructors keep teaching Shakespeare just to tweak children; they just seem to really enjoy explaining what stuff like "the beast with two backs" means. Me, I hate riddles. And all that is faux-homespun. Like I said, you can feel real crummy sometimes.

Which is why I eventually gave in to my insecurities and at some point decided that I really shouldn't care that I don't "get" Lao Tzu. And once you do that, it's just a slippery slope down past Pynchon, Joyce and whatever else until you one day realize that you summarily dismissed Blue Valentine after 45 minutes on account of it not seeming to have much of a plot: "Don't give a fuck; can we please just watch Breaking Amish already?"

All of which is to say, it wasn't all that clear to me after finishing Herbert Read's The Green Child how much time I needed to spend thinking about all that I didn't understand about the book. I decided it wasn't worth that much time.

Basically, there's a world with no weather where ex-dictators go to stare at crystals and die.

I remember talking to Frank's dad about Edward Albee's The Goat a while back when it was on Broadway and he was just exasperated: "I don't get it; it's a goat! He's bonking a goat!" He didn't use the word "bonk." I don't remember him using a more robust word, either, but you could see it in his soul: Edward Albee wrote a whole play about a guy who fucks a goat. And we're supposed to care why?

The Wikipedia page for Green has a couple of funny moments. One is a relatively recent remembrance of the novel, which I think can be boiled down to something along the lines of, "If you're going to write one novel in your life, you might as well make it fucking ridiculous." (Actually it said, "But The Green Child is the kind of book to write if you are going to leave just the one novel behind: singular, odd, completely original." Go big or go home!)

The other funny thing in the Wikipedia entry is the Orville Prescott The New York Times review of the book, which is basically this: "But, in spite of the limpid grace of his writing, his parable is ridiculous as well as vexatious. One feels constantly that shining truths are about to be revealed; that there is something important, something significant, hidden in these pages. But it is never made clear, while the ridiculous details remain all too conspicuously in view." It's funny how contemporary reviewers feel like they need to really represent a book. I don't know that you have to spend that much time thinking about a lot of stuff, but it's good someone does.

The other thing Prescott rips is Kenneth Rexroth's "pretentious introduction of uncommon density." I read it after finishing the book and thought that I must have really missed something. It's a hoot:

There has been a great proliferation of fiction in our day. There has been an even greater decline in quality. Since Ulysses, if you accept Ulysses as a great novel, there have been very few really great novels in English. Lady Chatterly, The Rainbow and Women in Love; Ford Madox Ford's Tietjens series, really one novel; some of Sherwood Anderson; the unfinished promise of William Carlos Williams' First Act; a few others. The Green Child is fully the equal of any of these, although it is of a rather more special kind. Graham Greene speaks of it as surcharged with a sense of glory — gloire — that special lustre and effulgence which Aquinas marks out as the sign manifest of great works of art. . . .

It goes on like that — for less than two pages, though it seems like 20 given how many names are dropped: Landor, Bagehot, Mill, Clerk, Maxwell, Walton, Gilbert White — you're like, fuck, was I high or something through undergrad? But this is the kicker:

I am not going to tell you the meaning of Read's allegory — the secret of his myth. At Eleusis the priestess rose from the subterranean marriage bed of the hierosgamos and exhibited an ear of barley, and today, scholars in their ivied halls by the Cam and Thames and Charles dispute about what she means. . . . What does it mean: What does the Tao Te Ching mean? What does the Book of Changes, that immemoriably subtile document, mean? All myth, all deep insight, means the same as and no more than the falling of the solar system on its long parabola through space.

Say what now?

So then of course I went down a rabbit hole about Kenneth Rexroth. What a charmed life! I mean, sure, he lost both parents before he really hit puberty and then got locked up in jail after being accused of running a brothel, but when you think about the way life goes, there are way worse outcomes than hitchhiking around the country, bumming around Paris, Mexico, South America and Greenwich Village before moving to San Francisco and becoming a poet. A poet! Who does that?! It's awesome. I mean these days running a food truck is considered "edgy." Artisanal mayonnaise, on the other hand . . .

I'm Not Using My Brain Right Now So You Can Fool Me If You Want To

Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow is a slog. Not because it's dry or uninteresting but rather because you have to pay attention.

It's not that Thinking is hard to read, but you have to take some time out of your day to do it. It's not something you pick up while you're commuting to work or otherwise distracted because you'll have to read passages again and again. Which is kind of the point of the book.

Kahneman explains that our brains have two "systems," "System 1" and "System 2." To simplify, System 1 is intuitive and unconscious and System 2 applies the rest of your brain to what System 1 perceives. And most of the time, System 2 is a lazy piece of shit who goes back and screws up everything.

As an example, Kahneman opens with a simple question: If a ball and a bat cost $1.10 and the ball costs a dollar less than the bat, how much do each cost? You probably almost automatically answered $1 and 10 cents, which is wrong, because that would be 90 cents less. The correct answer is $1.05 and 5 cents. Most people get this question wrong, probably because they're busy or otherwise distracted and because unless we're really sharp and on it, our brains just suck, and no amount of 5-Hour Energy can ever fix that.

It's a slightly depressing prospect, or at least slightly humbling — if we can't really rely on our ability to rationally work through simple problems, then what of bigger, more important things? Don't answer that.

And to be fair, Kahneman doesn't attempt to do that, which is a little frustrating, but understandable — that's not what he's setting out to do. But if there's one thing Jonah Lehrer taught me, it's that we should demand more from popular scholarly writing, and less of ourselves; sometimes you want Kahneman to lob up some policy softballs for us to glom onto; tell us what to think, what we need to know, you know? Because as it stands now, sometimes Thinking comes off as a 400-some-odd-page parlor trick.

That's not to say that the book is not really fascinating and entertaining and that Kahneman is probably a hoot to talk with at a cocktail party, but in all seriousness, I was sometimes itching for more wisdom about how this insight can be applied to the world — more than just noting that most (90 percent!) of rail projects cost more than was projected and end up serving fewer passengers (the "planning fallacy").

The other thing I'm curious about (maybe Jonah Lehrer can elucidate this point) is why? Which is to say — and I don't think Kahneman explained this, or at least even mentioned it — what anthropological purpose does it serve for us to think so poorly? Maybe it doesn't have to serve a purpose, but it's such a feature of our brains that you start to wonder. And that's really dispiriting, when you think about it.

I remember some teacher at some point in either middle school or high school advising us on standardized test-taking strategies, saying that when a question seemed like a trick question, we shouldn't overthink our answer and instead go with our "gut." (And I'm lucky I never interviewed for a smart-person job, what with all those stupid questions they ask.) Like a lot of bad advice, I never forgot it. And that's part of why Thinking, Fast and Slow never stopped blowing me away.

Satisfice It To Say . . .

There's a thing people do when they reach some sort of milestone where all of the sudden they're really engaged by certain topics, where conversation about stuff like gas water heaters, the optimal level of collision coverage or male incontinence becomes really engrossing and the players turn very animated. It's this thing where someone's like, "I just had a guy come and lay tile," and the other person will be like, "Oh, wow, what kind of grout did he use?" and basically if you don't have a bathroom — or care about owning one — you're kind of like, "Can't we just talk about the latest episode of Homeland or something, you know, important that I might actually care about?"

All of which is to say, when I started reading Lori Gottlieb's Marry Him: The Case For Settling For Mr. Good Enough, the one thing I couldn't get out of my head was how this writer — who is a single parent with a young child — found the time to write this book.

The point of the book is not that she's a single parent but rather that she's single, period. And that the reason she's single, she explains, is that she spent too much time before she got old and mommed being a big bitch about who she would or wouldn't deign to go out with until one day only 50-plus men would ask her out.

But for the first 100 or so pages I could only perseverate on the fact that even as a single parent, she had all this time to go interview groups of women and men in bars, visit with matchmakers and dating consultants and generally do this gumshoe investigative reporting about how women in their 20s and early 30s are, before they know it, in danger of becoming old and single, or at least only attractive to prospective AARP members. Seriously, even with a nanny or or whoever, how do you write an entire book? Because all I can find time to do when I'm home with Monkey is answer a few emails and maybe finally brush my teeth at some point mid-morning — either that or eat. It sucks. And that's why I'm up doing bullshit at 2 a.m.

It was highly distracting — You can speed date and read Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb 800 times a week? Like, how? — until I finally gave in and figured that there's probably some boarding school somewhere that accepts 18-month-olds. That and I got totally sucked into Gottlieb's pitch-perfect self-deprecating style, which evokes much less scorn than straight-up pity and really does work as a tale that cautions.

The genius thing about its utility as a cautionary tale, for guys at least, is how much dudes (and bros and, yes, even jabrones) can root for this lady to tell these bitches what we've been trying to say for years, which is that they're sure as shit not gonna get any prettier, which will only make it that much harder to check out of that miserable relationship with that dickhead financial services scum once she discovers he's been cheating on her for, like, the eighth time or whatever, which is why she should lock up a good thing now — i.e., this — and give the bald, the poor, the fuzzy asses a chance — one, lousy, goddam chance — with a beautiful baby for once, Jesus H. Christ and Harry S. Truman's Syphilitic Son.

The message for the intended audience is I guess a little different, which is roughly something along the lines of when high-achieving children have been groomed to expect only the best in their education or careers, it is only natural for her to expect "the best" in her relationships as well, which is why women carry around a giant laundry list of necessary characteristics for a mate, a list comprehensive enough to ensure that no man could possibly work, or if one does, he has approximately 48 million potential women to choose from. And so women spend their optimal mating years either ignoring basically good solid men or (and) going after men who aren't good matches for them and then all of the sudden the 32-year-old who gets asked out more times each week than there are days in the week becomes the 38-year-old who guys — i.e., the solid, upstanding marrying kind of guys — wouldn't ever want to bother with.

It's common sense, but like so many self-help or self-helpful books show, there is a big market to be reminded about common sense. I should add, though, that part of the book's power is that it's — I think at least — calling out common sense that people with sense don't want to hear or think it's bad to mention, which probably accounts for much of the negative reaction to the book (or at least the provocative title). I didn't read the negative reaction because a) I don't really give a fuck what some no-sex-having bitches think when they're confronted by the truth and b) I actually don't think the book is saying what people think it's saying (though the provocative title of that and the original article don't help assuage people's skepticism).

There is a funny point in Marry Him where Gottlieb interviews some of the men in her life who probably were "good enough" but who she never ended up with. One in particular — who she was friendly with and who she says she probably should have ended up with — talks about his "settling" in ways that seem a little depressing. Maybe that's a gender thing? It's noticeable that the book's female examples generally describe feeling a stronger and stronger connection with the schlubby men they settle for but this guy — who marries a "bland" lady — simply starts focusing on other qualities: "'She's bland in ways that aren't important int he big picture,' he said. 'I'm a talker, and I love the banter, and I'm intense about things, and she's just not. It mattered more when we were dating. It still would be nice to have in a spouse, but it has so little to do with the day-to-day of marriage that it matters very little now.'" I hope this guy is a composite because his wife should be pissed the way she's described in the book.

Another small thing that you start to notice after a while is how Gottlieb is usually very careful to note that there is always "physical chemistry" in whatever settled couple she uses as an example. It's noticeable because she sort of seems to add it in as a parenthetical a lot, which makes you question how often it's actually there. You know, like, if you keep having to mention it, etc. . . . At the very least I wondered if it's not maybe always there and doesn't it sort of undercut the argument? Those are unknown unknowns though.

Ultimately, Marry Him succeeds in two ways: One, it's a huge literary feat that you, the reader, somehow by the end of the book start to feel your heart hurt for this person who is not such a huge jackass that she didn't understand that having a child via sperm donor in her late 30s wouldn't lead to dimmed dating prospects but that she — like all of us — kept holding on to this idea that she could still feel a spark with someone who was the love of her life. You feel for her. And then she admits that she is turned off by a match she is presented with because he went to San Diego State. And you're, like, wow, you're kind of an idiot, because while I'm sure the California public higher education system is under great financial stress right now, the difference between SDSU and UC-Berkeley is not that great that you shouldn't be able to just suck it the fuck up. I mean, Jesus H. Christ and Harry S. Truman's Syphilitic Son you come off like a hose beast. To continue One (above), you read this selp-helpful book thinking she's going to triumph at the end with a real nice guy and then when she doesn't it's such a huge muted-trumpet moment that you almost — not quite! — feel teary-eyed when you hear that the Mr. "Good Enough" she finally found, after hundreds of pages of trials and travails and child-neglect, was forced to move away for the good of his family. It's written very smartly that way.

Two (I nearly forgot what "Two" was) — and this is a message that Atlantic editors probably care like not at all to emphasize, which is why Gottlieb is somehow vilified — is that ultimately Marry Him is about being kind. In this case, to dumpy men with limited financial prospects but who will help out around the house and take their sons to soccer practice. On behalf of dumpy men with limited financial prospects but who will help out around the house, I want to personally thank Gottlieb for encouraging hot young chicks to get real about some of these dandies they insist on bringing home and instead indulge in the dark arts of the League of Bald-Headed Men. Thanks bro! We owe you (a bunch)! She's like a more useful Foundation For A Better Life, in that with FFABL, all I get is some jock to pick up the books I dropped in the hallway; with Gottlieb, at least I get some yoni out of the deal, you know? Seriously men, she's doing some Yeoman's work up in this heeze.