Friday, July 17, 2009 - Posts
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L’Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Vatican, has redeemed two cultural sinners this week: Harry Potter and Oscar Wilde. Only days after deciding that the Chosen One of Hogwarts is indeed an exemplar of “the values of friendship, altruism, loyalty and self-giving” (rather than “a wrong and malicious image of the hero,” as the same publication declared last year), L’Osservatore ran a review of a new Italian book on Wilde that goes out of its way to praise the Irish author. According to the reviewer, Andrea Monda, Wilde “was a man constantly looking for the beautiful and the good, but also for a God that he never challenged, respected and who he fully embraced after his dramatic experience of jail, concluding with his communion in the Catholic church.”
Wilde’s deathbed conversion in Paris, where he spent the last three years of his life after serving a two-year prison term for sodomy offenses, is a much-debated aspect of his biography: Was it the last-ditch gesture of a sick and broken man, or the culmination of a lifelong fascination with Church ritual? (This testimonial from the priest who administered his last rites suggests that Wilde’s turn to Catholicism was a conscious and deliberate, if hasty, act.) But the fact that Wilde may have embraced the Church in his last moments doesn’t make it any less odd that, 109 years later, the Church should suddenly decide to embrace him. As long as Pope Benedict XVI continues to label gay marriage "pseudo-matrimony" and same-sex desire a “disordered sexual inclination which is essentially self-indulgent,” the Vatican’s eagerness to welcome Wilde into the flock rings hollow at best. There’s a Wilde epigram for every occasion; the one this news item brings to mind is, “One can survive everything nowadays except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.”
Photograph of Oscar Wilde courtesy of Wikipedia.
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I'll say this for the excerpt from Frank Bruni's memoir that appears in this weekend's New York Times Magazine: Never before has a story of bulimia made me so desperately hungry. "Macaroni and cheese. There was macaroni and cheese. It looked sort of congealed and stiff at the edges. I love it when it's sort of congealed and stiff at the edges." Yes, yes—me, too!
It's a wonderful piece, but I'm a little bothered by what it says, or implies, about our relationship with food. Bruni makes it sound as if he's been endlessly skirting between the Scylla of overeating and the Charybdis of bulimia. (According to Michael Pollan's blurb for the book, he's "plumbing the depths of our personal and collective eating disorders.") Yet there's no real evidence that the author was ever fat to begin with. Sure, he may have been chubby as a kid, but according to the memoir, he was 5-foot-10 in high school, and about 180 pounds. That translates to a body mass index of 25.8, or just barely "overweight," according to the standard cutoffs.
If anything, Bruni seems to have been much healthier than most Americans. Studies have repeatedly found that those who register as slightly overweight (on body mass index) live longer than people in the "normal" range. Bruni's a clear example of why that might be the case: As the star of his high-school swim team, he spent hours in the pool every day—a practice that surely contributed more muscle mass, and an inflated BMI. (At the time, writes Bruni, his doctor recommended that he lose "5 to 10 pounds." That was bad advice.)
Another clue emerges when Bruni shows up for his freshman year at UNC-Chapel Hill. He signs up for a fitness class, but at the first meeting "the teacher talked about something called a body-fat index, then produced a contraption with pinchers to grab and measure any folds of fat around our waists ... I registered a higher body fat index than half of the other students. And dropped the class later that same day." But if he was fatter that half of the other students, that means he was thinner than half of them, too. Young Bruni was exactly average.
It's fine with me if Frank Bruni wants to be skinny for aesthetic reasons. (In the Times piece, at least, he never claims another motivation for his diets and purges.) But let's be careful about what we call overeating. If he wasn't putting his body at risk, then why make it sound like a problem?
Crusty Mac 'n Cheese photograph courtesy of Spike Mafford/Getty Images.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 10 a.m.)
No. 25: "Obama NAACP Speech Video." Googlers were eager to watch and read Barack Obama's speech at the 100th annual NAACP Convention. Obama spoke on the themes of responsibility and individual achievement, telling his audience that there were "no excuses" for failure. Addressing black parents, he said he wanted to see more children aspiring to be doctors or Supreme Court justices because "our kids can't all aspire to be the next LeBron or Lil Wayne."
No. 74: "Billie Holiday." Billie Holiday died 50 years ago today. To commemorate the anniversary of her untimely death, WNYC's Leonard Lopate show interviewed jazz historian Dan Morgenstern on her legacy, and Baltimore sculptor James Earl Reid reinserted panels referring to Jim Crow into a Billie Holiday statue. (The panels had been removed by city officials in 1985, right before the dedication.) Watch rare footage of the lady singing the blues here.
No. 94: "Jumbo Squid." San Diego residents no longer need to go to the zoo to see mysterious creatures: Flying jumbo squid have invaded the shoreline in recent days. Known as Humbolt squid, marine bioligists have been trying to figure out what is causing the invasion—theories range from a recent earthquake to global warming. Watch a video of a dazed squid on the National Geographic Web site.
Jumbo squid photograph courtesy David McNew/Getty Images.