Our Suspicions about Altruism

The existence of true altruism has become popular subject for debate in recent years: does anyone do good things out of purely selfless motives?  Even in the absence of material rewards, don't "altruists" get a rush of satisfaction or virtuous good feeling (in other words, an emotional reward) from their benevolent deeds?

There is a corollary, and a sad one, to this interesting debate: a widespread distrust of good deeds.  When someone we don't know tries to do something nice for us, our minds automatically skip to the catch.  What is in it for them?

Now of course, this skepticism is healthy when we apply it to, for instance, to promises of politicians and salesman.  But as the Secret Society for Creative Philanthropy found out, it makes it awfully hard to do a nice thing. 

The premise of the society is this: give micro-grants of $100 to a group of people, asking them only to do something nice for total strangers with it. 

The idea, says the founder, is to spark new thinking and dialogue about philanthropy and altruism:

"One hundred dollars is not going to change anyone's life," Martin said. "It's a small thing. The money is just a framework for people to use their imagination. It's like a kick in the ass."

What did people do with the money?  Many gave away umbrellas or dollar bills on the street.  Their attempts met with almost universal reluctance and rejection.  I think we can blame this on the cynical way "free gifts" are used in sales and proselytizing: we, like the Trojans after the horse, don't believe a gift is ever "free."

One of my favorite ideas was this:

Clark Kellogg deposited his $100 in a bank account and left written instructions for his great-granddaughter to withdraw the accumulated total in 100 years and give it away. With compound interest, he said, the total will be $2.1 million, which is enough for a lot of free umbrellas in the rainstorms of 2110. "I don't think I'll be around then," he said.

Perhaps I like it so much because it reminds me (utterly unreligious soul that I am) of the parable of the talents.

But of course this gets me thinking - what would I do?  How could I do the most good with $100?   

Sunday Salon: Literary Lighthouses

A couple of nights ago  I went to hear the renowned Cape Breton writer Alistair MacLeod do a reading in Halifax.  I have his book, Island: The Complete Stories, on my shelf, as of yet unread, but I was unprepared for the quasi-religious devotion with which crowds flocked to see him.  In fact, the auditorium was so full a half-hour before the reading was set to begin that scores of new chairs were produced to fill every nook and cranny of the room.  Twenty minutes into MacLeod's reading, two fire marshalls arrived, in full gear, and stood behind him, muttering ominously.  The reading was interrupted (at a particularly apropos moment: he was describing how alienated the people of the story felt from the RCMP - the Mounties - of their town, all of whom were "from away"): we were over capacity.  The aisles were filled with devoted MacLeodites: we would have to do a total reshuffling of the room.

MacLeod read a lyrical story about a Cape Breton miner, a man who chooses to fulfill the potential of his body through highly skilled labor over the pursuit of a university education in literature, and then urges his children to pursue the path not taken - urges, in a sense, his own obsolescence, the break in the chain of generations following one another into the family craft.  His hero is philosophical, nostalgic, longing, selfconcious, and yet sure of his own choices, which seem to us to be good ones.

After the reading, people all over the room could be heard murmuring to each other and to MacLeod of the deep satisfactions of his work: "They remind me of my father," twenty-something university students kept saying, over and over, with an emotional charge that said loudly that they understood the break they were making with the past.  Understood it, mourned it, made it consciously, undertook it with regret.

In the question and answer period, MacLeod talked about his curiosity about the way in which people are called to fulfill the promise of their bodies, and the assumption that those who work with their bodies are unthoughtful or unreflective.  He talked about hearing sports journalists ask athletes to verbalize their craft: "What are you thinking as you go up to the basket?  What is the strategy?".  "Look," says the player, "I just put the ball in the basket."  The clash of verbal and kinesthetic worlds.

During the discussion period, a member of the audience asked a question that is equally excellent and ubiquitous in this sort of event: "I am interesting in the pragmatics of writing.  What do you do when you sit down and write?  What is your process?"

MacLeod responded with an ambiguous murmur, a verbal shrug.  ("Look," I thought sympathetically, "I just put the ball in the basket.")

Eventually he did say this, however: "When I am halfway though [a story], I write the last line.  That becomes a sort of lighthouse for me."

Lovely, in this land of lighthouses.

*     *     *

What have I been up to this week?

I missed the last Sunday Salon because I was (I can barely report it, so exciting it was) at the curling.  The Wimbledon of curling (the Brier, the Canadian men's championship) is in Halifax, and, as I had friends visiting from Chicago, I whisked them off to see this quintessence of Canadianness. It was sublime.   We were sitting in the second row, among (it turned out) the friends and families of the various curlers, and the air was filled with the distinctive thwacking sound of large pieces of granite sliding into one another.  There is not time to do justice to it here: a later post might very well be called for.

It is cold but spring-like here in Nova Scotia, and the classes continue apace.  I have been doing a bit of blogging as I get back into the swing of the semester:

• In Desert Island Books, I reflect on the literary and LOST.
• I joined the Book Blogger Hop.
• On the Web Comic - in which I ponder why I haven't become immersed in this serial genre before.  Do you have a favorite web comic?
• Eccentric Ell, eh? - in which I lay out the highlights of my own personal Los Angeles.  Head over and give me your advice for favorite eccentric activities in SoCal.

What have I read?

• David Edgar's drama of globalization Pentecost 
• Joan Wolf's A London Season (which I had heard nothing but raves about, but - after great efforts to get my hands on a cursedly out-of-print copy - I found underwhelming)
• Sabriel by Garth Nix - a slow start for me, but a satisfying conclusion.  I was eager to take up the next volume, only to discover that I own the first and third volumes, but not the centrepiece of the triptych.  Sigh.
• A Gypsy at Almack's by Chloe Cheshire.  This debut novel had one of the most delightful final pages of any love story I have read in quite some time.
• And, yesterday, What I Saw And How I Lied, which I devoured in a single day and very nearly a single sitting.

This sets me a-thinkin' about what I will get up to this fine Sunday.  Here are my goals:

• Go to the gym for the first time all semester.  It's time. Let's seize a-hold of our future before I drift any further into Jabba the Hutt territory.
• Finish Betty Sharpe's novella Like a Thief in the Night, about futuristic super-assassins.  And, of course, their amour. Is it possible to have super-assassins without desire?
• Watch Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn so that I can return it to Zip.ca before it crumbles away to dust from having sat on my shelf for so many months.
• Finish rereading Fuenteovejuna and Copenhagen for classes this week.
• Continue to scale Mt. Grademore.
• Traipse about in my Google Reader, catching up with everyone.
• Get further into Mistress of the Art of Death - I have only read about a chapter and a half of this novel about a medieval murder investigation.  It has put me in a Chaucerian sort of mood. And that is one of my favorite moods to be in.
• Start a new novel.  I am thinking of Eva Ibbotson's A Countess Below Stairs; I am trying to catch up on my YA challenge.

Happy Saloning, everyone.

Eccentric Ell, eh?

My friend J is heading off to LA at the beginning of next week, and that has set me a-ponderin'.  What would I recommend, from my years of visiting that city (where D has been living while working behind-the-scenes on a variety of TV shows), to a visitor who doesn't want to do the typical touristy rounds?

It has to be said that LA does resist the "typical tourism"  that can envelop cities like NY and DC - largely because it is not a city in which one sets out to "do" things in any sort of strict, culture-vulturey way.  Instead it is a city of peregrination* and of consumption. In LA, one eats, one shops**, one wanders.  It is (with some notable exceptions, like the Hollywood sign) a city of experiences rather than of sights.

So what I recommend below are my favorite LA experiences, hoping to err neither on the side of the hopelessly touristy and mainstream, nor on the side of the truly avant-garde and hipster.  So here you have it, not the Miracle Mile, but the Eccentric Ell:

• Traipse through the canals of Venice (left).  The beach community of Venice, CA - before it became the home of Muscle Beach, cutting-edge skateboarding, and experimental art galleries - was laid out as a miniature version of its Mediterranean namesake.  All the houses faced not roads but canals, and you could paddle to your neighbor's house to borrow a cup of sugar.  Many of the canals have, I believe, been filled in now, but the watery blocks that remain are some of the most coveted property in the city.  Some maintain their original small, beachy flavor; other plots have been bought by artists and architects and renovated in innovative and distinctive ways.
• While you are in Venice, nip over to Abbot Kinney (named after the visionary who created the original "Venice of America") for some intensely Californian window shopping.  Sit at Jin Patisserie and partake in painfully exquisite tea and cakes.
• Blow your mind at The Museum of Jurassic Technology - I am reluctant to say too much about this experience, which will either thrust you into a state of the most profound rage or leave you with a feeling of quasi-religious mental displacement.  Suffice it to say that 1) no, there is no such thing as Jurassic Technology, and 2) this shrine to eccentricity won its creator the MacArthur "Genius" Award.  OK, that will not quite suffice, so let me say this: when you emerge out of the Cavalcade of Oddities that are the exhibits, and the Exercise in Productive (?) Bafflement that is the movie screening, and you move zombie-like into the Russian Tea-Room of Awkward Conversation, there to drink tea from the samovar and eat dry biscuits with your shell-shocked fellow travelers (er, museum-goers), you will finally understand, as my friend DD said in a swivet of ill-contained fury, that you are the primary exhibit in the MJT.  If you must know more about this zen koan of an experience, visit this link or this one.
• Eat huge feasts incorporating many kinds of tiny foods for shockingly affordable prices.  All my favorite foodstuffs in LA come in this form: dim sum, tapas, rijsttaffel.  One type of feast is the exception to the affordability rule, but still well worth the attempt: Korean barbecue.  Yum.
• See a film at Grauman's Chinese Theatre - If you choose one stereotypical tourist activity to engage in, I would make it this one.  The one time I went to Grauman's Chinese, it was to see the execrable  Be Cool, in which the characters lurk about Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Oh, the meta-piphany that was.  See, Grauman's can make even Be Cool delightful.  Almost. [The one alternative I would suggest for "stereotypical tourist activity" is one I have never myself experienced - a trip to the Observatory in Griffith Park to reenact Rebel without a Cause.  It was closed for renovations the last time I was in the neighborhood.]
• Have the caprese at Pizzeria Mozza.  Yes, that's a picture of it on the front page of the website: the most flavorful, on-the-vine tomatoes you have ever tasted, placed on top of a mozzarella burrata that can only be described as epiphanic. Try to ignore the twenty-something guys with expense accounts at the table next to you, ordering dozens of pizzas, taking a piece of each, and then leaving the rest to be thrown away.  There is a special place in Dante's hell waiting for them.  Its theme is the completion of tasks begun and the proper appreciation of good food.  It is populated by grotesque creatures whose eyes are exactly the size of their enormous stomachs.
• See a show or a workshop at the Kirk Douglas. The most active (although by no means the only - this is a show business town, after all) theatre organization in LA is the Center Theatre Group, which runs the Mark Taper Forum, the Ahmanson, and the Kirk Douglas.  Its shows and its ambiance can definitely tend toward the corporate, but its smallest theatre, the Kirk Douglas, is both the most cutting edge and the most romantic (it has renovated an old-fashioned marquis cinema in the middle of the charmingly pedestrian-friendly old Hollywood studio town of Culver City).  You are most likely to see new work here, even work that is in the midst of being workshopped, giving you the opportunity to give playwrights, actors and directors your feedback.  You can also catch established avant-garde theatre groups here (as paradoxical as that description may seem).  It is our favorite of the LA theatre companies that D and I have sampled so far, and not just because it is a lovely evening walk from D's house.
• Drop by the Huntington in Pasadena.  After strolling about in the gardens (stunning - there is nothing like seeing hummingbirds feed in the Shakespearean Garden in January), nip into the Library proper to see the Ellesmere Manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, complete with illuminated portraits of each of the pilgrims (including Geoffrey himself).

 Ah, I have made myself nostalgic (and hungry.  Very hungry.) just by writing this list.  Luckily I am going to SoCal week after next for my regular burrata fix.  (Oh, and also to see D.  That's right.)

So I put it to you: does anyone have other LA eccentricities to recommend?




* See how I did that: from vultures to falcons?  That's right: I work with words for a living. (Although, strictly speaking, peregrination implies pedestrian movement, while LA is - in Reyner Banham's words - an autopia. You can see his brilliantly English lovesick ode to LA below.)

** And LA shopping doesn't necessarily have the grimly corporate, acquisitive tinge that I generally associate with the activity, in part because - although it is a city entirely composed of strip malls - these strip malls are filled with independent businesses, unique boutiques, mom-and-pop endeavors, and restaurants offering up obscure national cuisines.  There is more individuality in an LA strip-mall than I have encountered most other places.