Archives for February 14, 2005

“Compared with the exclusive ideal of work as activity, leisure implies (in the first place) an attitude of non-activity, of inward calm, of silence; it means not being ‘busy,’ but letting things happen.

“Leisure is a form of silence, of that silence which is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality: only the silent hear and those who do not remain silent do not hear. Silence, as it is used in this context, does not mean ‘dumbness’ or ‘noiselessness’; it means more nearly that the soul’s power to ‘answer’ to the reality of the world is left undisturbed. For leisure is a receptive attitude of mind, a contemplative attitude, and it is not only the occasion but also the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation.”

Josef Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture (trans. Alexander Dru)

A couple of cynical ones that caught my eye:

– Gwenda Bond’s funny memories of a detractor:

In college, I wrote a column about how much I hated V-day. I turned it in late, as usual, handing it in to lay-out and going off to sleep a few hours. I walked in to my first class the next morning to the hush that can only be brought about by one’s editor putting one’s mug shot above a giant heart with a giant NO symbol across it.

– And the inimitable prose stylings of Mr. Outer Life, which it would be pointless to try to excerpt.

Last fall, a friend asked me to join his Pub Trivia team. This sort of thing is totally my cup of tea–you readers may think you already have a fair sense of the depths of my nerdiness, but you don’t know the half of it.

Little surprise, then, that the trivia took, and over the months I’ve learned–and imbibed–a lot. The team has even made a little money. But the single most important and immutable thing I have learned at Pub Trivia is this:

The answers you don’t know on Tuesday night will be dropped in your lap by a fickle fate on, roughly, Wednesday morning. Right after you don’t need them anymore. You can practically set your watch.

For example, in January we missed a question about something that happens in the first few pages of the Watchmen comic book. Later that week, one team member received from his brother, as a late Hanukkah gift, Watchmen. A quite late Hanukkah gift, I might add.

Then last week we were asked who wrote the song “Me and Bobby McGee,” and were stumped. We made a respectable if uninspired guess of Willie Nelson; the answer turned out to be Kris Kristofferson; we grumbled and sighed and hit each other upside the head, and eventually came in second.

Fast forward to last night. I’m working on the laptop with the Grammys on as background noise, glancing up only occasionally. Hey, who’s that strolling across the stage and into my living room? Oh, look at that, it’s Kris Kristofferson, introducing a Janis Joplin tribute. What’s that he’s saying? Oh, it’s “I wrote ‘Me and Bobby McGee,'” more or less. Oh, Kris Kristofferson! You sing, you write, you act, you probably dance and juggle, you’re a Rhodes Scholar, but oh, your execrable timing.