The Data-ing Game
I bear no ill will to Arthur Brooks. In fact, I’m kind of a fan. I've been regularly reading his Atlantic magazine column, "How to Build a Life" for a while now and have appreciated his intelligent advice about how to get through the days with a modicum of good feeling and a sense of purpose.
"How to Build a Life" goes beyond the frequent pablum that dominates the "self-help" genre. He celebrates the human, drawing on folks like Bertrand Russell, Rumi, Emily Brontë, and Aristotle (My Man!) to support his practical suggestions about how we might be happy, fulfilled, engaged.
Arthur Brooks
But being a 21st-century guy, Brooks feels these august sages need some help. He is, after all, the "Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Nonprofit and Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and a Professor of Management Practice at the Harvard Business School." So his insights rarely stop at mere nuggets of wisdom or world-wise cautions. Like so many folks these days—offering a variety of “common-sense” opinions about everything from dieting and saving the planet—he needs to Show Us The Data!
Not that there’s anything wrong with that—in some spheres, anyway. Global temperature trends, Covid statistics, unemployment rates—good things to know! But Brooks and his ilk want to spread the statistical wealth. They want to data-drive our lives.
So when Brooks wants to encourage us to nurture our hearts on Valentine’s day, he doesn’t just quote a few choice quatrains. Instead, he writes:
As researchers reported in 2017 in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, poetry can stimulate your brain's nucleus accumbens, which is associated with getting the chills--which you tend to get with sudden pleasurable emotions.
How do I love thee, let me show you the ways. Just take a look at this “fMRI and notice how Regional Homogeneity of the left dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) was significantly increased.” (Yes, that's part of an actual abstract from "Love-related changes in the brain: a resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging study,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Feb. 13, 2015.)
I believe in the academy and its work. Science has enough loony naysayers these days and I have no intention of piling on. But I also believe in the power of reason, rhetoric and persuasion. The kind of communication between humans that thrives on congeniality and sympathy and, dare I say it, the "wisdom of the ages."
If you're looking for self-help, consulting "the best that has been thought and said" from the past few millennia seems like a good place to start--adjusted, of course, through investigation, contemplation and debate.
Big Data is big enough as it is, don't you think? Artificial Intelligence is already nipping at our humanist heels. But if we just turn ourselves into computer facsimiles, it seems like it’s already Skynet 1, Humanity 0.
Pick a Lane
Anthony Lane
Speaking of piling on, the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane has weighed in on our Mr. Brooks and it ain’t pretty. Lane reviews Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier, a How-To book based on his columns that looks to be a sure-fire holiday blockbuster (the “co-authorship” of Oprah Winfrey doesn’t hurt).
Offering a generous soupçon of snark, Lane zeroes in on the absurdity of taking the power of science too far. He writes,
“Moreover, according to a study cited by Brooks, ‘The research found that among great composers like Beethoven, a 37 percent increase in sadness led to, on average, one extra major composition.’ That sentence makes me twenty-four per cent less sad, and eighty-one per cent more inclined to giggle, than anything I have read this year.”
Astutely, Lane zeroes in on the business-speak roots of Brooks’s analysis and suggestions. Build the Life You Want is strong on what The Organization Men and Women call “action items,” stressing the imperative tense throughout. “Treat your walks, prayer time, and gym sessions as if they were meetings with the President,” Brooks writes, among other things on your “get happy” checklist. Ultimately, he argues, Brooks goes full-Wall-Street: “Remember: You are your own CEO.” To which Lane offers a suitable parry. “Do I have to wear a suit to brush my teeth? Is my dog a shareholder? Were last year’s migraines tax-deductible? Can I be fired by me?”
This is Louis, Dolly
Louis and Lucille at home in 1970.
To get to the Louis Amstrong House Museum you hop on the #7 subway to the stop called 130th Street-Corona Plaza. On the half-mile walk from the station, you’ll pass by neat, side-by-side houses with elaborate fences and grates. You’ll pass Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church, where Louis’s wife, Lucille, attended mass, and you’re likely see food trucks selling soups and stews, some with small tables set up right on the sidewalk.
Satchmo on his front stoop in Queens. Photo by Chris Barham.
Armstrong was a reluctant homesteader. Touring for much of the year, he preferred to live day-to-day in hotel rooms. Tired of that life, Lucille bought the house in 1943, paying the mortgage in secret for nearly a year before she told her husband about it. He lived there until he died in 1971, and he loved the neighborhood, particularly its kids. He hung out with them on his front stoop, invited them over to the house for ice cream, invited them to ride in his limosine. Today, the house is preserved as it was when Lucille died in 1983, complete with shiny silver wallpaper in the large bathroom and boxes of reel-to-reel tapes in Louis's study.
Armstrong spent time in his study recording hundreds of tapes and decorating the boxes with photos and news clippings. The tapes are exhaustive, containing conversations with jazz legends, master takes from recent recording proects, and spoken reflections that amount to a sort of audio diary. He’d occasionally put on an old disc and record himself playing along. (He also created a huge montage of memorabilia on the wall, which unfortunately has not been preserved.) If you visit the museum, you can listen to excerpts in a beautiful museum display (curated and designed by jazz artist Jason Moran). But the museum has several virtual exhibits you can access from anywhere, filled with photos, reminiscences and audio clips. There are detailed descriptions of the tapes, including images of Armstrong’s handwritten indexes and descriptions of the contents.
Black & Blue
Before you digitally meander around the Louis Armstrong Museum exhibits, you might look at a couple of great introductions to his life and work. Gary Giddens’s Satchmo has just been reissued in a paperback edition, but if your library has a copy of the original hardcover, which is chock full of great photographs, it’s worth a drive across town. Giddens is one of the great jazz writers, and his affectionate and astute tribute is filled with anecdotes and perceptive examinations of Armstrong’s music and his impact on American culture.
Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues, Sacha Jenkins’s documentary streaming on Apple TV+, uses archival footage and recorded interviews with jazz legends to look at Armstrong’s legacy. Beginning with his impoverished New Orleans childhood, it follows his life and music through his 71 years, and examines the criticism that Armstrong’s ebullient personality made him a classic “Uncle Tom” figure. Testimony from other artists and recordings from Armstrong’s own tape library refute that long-held sentiment.
Jason Moran
Jason Moran.
One of the most interesting artists in the world of jazz, Jason Moran just isn’t satisfied with writing and playing his own music. A MacArthur Genius fellow and Artistic Director of Jazz at Washington’s Kennedy Center, he curated the Louis Armstrong Museum exhibit devoted to his life in and out of music. In a recent episode of Fresh Air with Terry Gross, he talked about one of Armstrong’s best-known recordings, “What a Wonderful World.”
Jason Moran: You know? And there's something about the way Louis Armstrong sang that song. He sang two versions of it. And the second version is more - he addresses - there's a little bit of ambivalence about singing a song called "What A Wonderful World" in the late '60s and early '70s in America. I started playing the song during the pandemic and really meditating on that moment when he says, “when I think to myself.”
After playing a solo piano version of the song, the interview continues.
Terry Gross: You do find the reflection and a certain sadness or sense of loss in it.
Jason Moran: I want to say that I do have optimism, I do. But sometimes when I play, I find something else and the optimism fades. And it's something a little more humble than optimism (laughter). And for me, when I play it, I feel like, can I just sink inside the song and fold the song over me? And can't I be the polar bear on the iceberg, floating out to sea, not really sure about where this is all going in this heated summer? And the piano, you know, it likes to spend time in that solitude, too. And so, sometimes when I play that song, all of that is wrapped in there.
Have a good week!