Tending Joy

"Don't think about it too much. List fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. Don't take more than fifteen minutes to make your list."

I read this invitation over at notjustaboutcancer.blogspot.com and I was hooked. Had to see which of the books I really remember well would pop up. And what about their authors? can I get the titles right? or only 'approximately' right?

Here are the fifteen that popped up in five minutes. Before I'd finished looking up their exact titles and authors I could have named two dozen more.

Little Lord Fauntleroy (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
Stranger in a Strange Land (Robert Heinlein)
Proposition 31 (Robert Rimmer)
The Meno Dialog (Plato)
Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle)
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Heinlein again)
Baldur's Gate [not the game, but a 1960s novel I can't find now]
Table for Five (Susan Wiggs)
The Stone Diaries (Carol Shield)
The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
The Color Purple (Alice Walker)
Possessing the Secret of Joy (Walker again)
Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe)
Brothers and Sisters (Bebe Moore Campbell)
The Judgment (D.W. Boffa)

Others that clamor for acknowledgment:

Spiral Dance (Starhawk)
The World Without Us (Alan Weisman)
You Just Don't Understand (Deborah Tannen)
Anita Shreve
Ursula K. LeGuin

... but I think I'll stop there.

Anybody else want to play?

This started as a comment on a post by bellamagic ...

... and I'm grateful for the thought-process that showed up in response to what she said.

My Beloved Husband likes to have talking-heads TV on in the background whenever he's doing something by himself -- cooking, carpentry, whatever. If he's driving he'll choose talk radio for the same reason -- voices he can listen to or not, words in a row. He listens equally often to Rush Limbaugh and to NPR.

Some of the folks like Chris Matthews or Bill Buckley I've always taken for right-wing social conservatives (at least, except when Buckley was writing about sailing, which was lovely stuff and entirely apolitical). But lately it looks to me like they're simply complaining, being the narrowest kind of 'reactionary.'

Here in rural Guatemala where the only Anglophone TV is Fox & Friends, their criticism of Washington under Bush and under Obama ... has hardly changed at all!

The overriding tone of their remarks is always 'Eeek, eek, look what they did, oooh it's awful, what do you think it means in the worst-case scenario ... who will be hurt ... what do you think will be the most awful outcome ... and let's please all think the worst of the folks who did it.'

Where is the question 'How will this improve matters? What do you think this could mean in the best-case scenario?

Never mind what we used to think of as dispassionate, rational, objective and neutral analysis? (which may no longer exist on the airwaves).

I think the national media have chosen to exist to scare us.

Myself I think this may go back to a 1960s (or earlier?) observation among the psychologists who study advertising: that the best way to sell something is to "discover" a problem that your prospect has (or might have, or might be persuaded they risk having in the future) and then explain why the product you happen to be selling is the perfect solution.

You can't get people to buy deodorant until you've persuaded them that they stink.

I think the stories we tell ourselves matter -- and the stories we let the media tell us matter, too. When the story is "we see a solution, we're making progress toward getting there, we will get through this intact" our bodies, our emotions, and our mental processes are stronger, more effective, more clear. When the story is "we can't do it, it's not working, what if it all goes wrong" our bodies, our emotions, and our thoughts are weaker, more muddy, far less effective in bringing forward what we choose to have in our lives.

Me, I want to listen to a 'good news' station -- where the top-of-the-hour story (instead of "if it bleeds, it leads") is about, say, the business person who visited a 1st grade for career day, listened to the kids talk about their lives and expectations, and made a commitment to pay for college for every one of those kids if they'd work hard and graduate ... and visited them more than once a year to offer encouragement and answer questions.

... or the three Mayan women I met last month who formed a collective to sell their weavings direct to the tourist, thereby offering better prices and more choices to the tourists and increasing their own income at the same time.

... or anything the Dalai Lama said today

... or a yoga demonstration in Times Square

... or something our government has done / is doing that looks hopeful, with commentary on why it could work and how it could improve matters.

Hmm. Something to chew on.