Maddenation
Liking Things You’re No Good At
I hate baseball. I played Little League when I was 9 and 10, or thereabouts, and I never got a hit in a game. In fact, I can only remember one time I ever even hit the ball in a game, one of my last games, and it was a line drive that almost made it past the short stop (one of the twins a year older than me whose name escapes me now), but was caught. My coach once told me to lean into the plate, in hopes I’d get hit by a pitch. I was relieved when, after two years playing, our sponsor, Two Guys, went out of business and our team was dissolved. Other players switched to other teams, but I just quit. By now I can cite lots of other reasons I hate baseball (it’s slow, it’s not very athletic, its players are overpaid, overblown egotistical maniacs, etc.) but, when I’m honest with myself, I know that the reason above all reasons is that I suck at it.
So what strange force drives other people to love things that they’re no good at? And I guess I don’t necessarily mean sports, because you can certainly like watching a sport you’re not good at (think: X-Games, especially skateboard half-pipe), and I’m no longer so terrible at baseball (now that I’ve outgrown my lanky uncoordinated stage). But what about crappy painters and musicians and writers? Web designers who have no eye for beauty? People who get paid to do things worse than I could?
I know what you’re thinking: this is typical Madden criticism and self-congratulation. But hear me out. When you get past the political correctness or “everybody has different talents” rhetoric, you’ll see that, even though you don’t want to say it to their face, some people are really terrible at what they do.
But as a teacher of writing and a reader for a literary magazine, I’ve seen enough writing to know good from bad, even if I can’t always qualify my reasons with data. Especially as a reader for the literary magazine: we’d get as submissions some of the worst drivel you’ve ever suffered through. What in the world made these writers, who must have some notion of what literary magazines publish, believe their writing was of the same quality as the writing we or others pubish? Maybe they really can’t tell? Like someone who is color blind or can’t carry a tune? Unless someone tells them they’re getting their colors wrong or don’t sing well, maybe they just don’t ever realize it. And the faults we don’t even know we have are the faults we perpetuate.
Or take, for instance, this web site, which includes paintings of landscapes and children and the Bee Gees. This woman says she’s sold some of her paintings, and she lists praise for her work and her site, but any fool can see it’s all garbage. Or, search Google for “web site design” and visit this sponsored link. Or, to bring some healthy self-criticism to bear, see the site I designed for Cyberdel and then ask if you’d pay that company to design your site (and remember that my original version of the site was quite different from what it became).
I want to recognize that art is slippery, and so is beauty, and maybe my own conceptions are culturally programmed and mutable, but I won’t let go completely of objectivity just because of some subjectivity. So where does that leave us? Maybe just sitting in a corner snickering at the efforts of others. But maybe also thinking about good and bad and talent and effort and a whole mess of other things that can help us strive to be better, if not more humble.
Patrick • Observations/Questions • 03/03/03 • 9 comments
Comments
Dad • 03/03/03 • 2:58 PM:I think liking something goes hand-in-hand with being good at it and vice versa. Sometimes other motives, like making money at it, or “being cool like others who do this,” or needing to get it over with to pass some other requirement, get in the way of this simple relationship.
For example, I believe recognising good art is a necessary condition for being a good artist. You still might not be able to create good art (alas, it’s a cruel world) but at least your esthetic sense can tell you when to stop (i.e. either the artwork or you career is finished.)
I suppose that doesn’t explain Yoko Ono, but maybe a few exceptions must be tollerated.
Dan • 03/03/03 • 5:22 PM:you think bee-gees lady is bad? how about the art majors who suck? now THAT’S annoying. it drives me nuts. there are people who just suck and they don’t know it. this one girl has been in two of my classes and she always has these ideas that she’s talking about with the prof and not only does she not know how to do what she wants to do (one is a multimedia class, the other was my bookmaking class) but the ideas are horrible in the first place. her final book (compare to MY final book, which pat hasn’t seen) was a 10 page night-before comic book called “dead girl,” illustrated by her (she wants to be an illustrator. too many people want to be illustrators in the first place, and 99% of them SUCK. i’ve seen ONE here that is competent) that used COMIC SANS and CHICAGO (one downright BAD font, the other NOT a font for this comic book). “dead girl.” that’s all i’m going say about that. and that she can’t draw.
(about my intro design courses) i remember thinking to myself and asking my more experienced designer friends if the suckmasters in the class would just drop out of design or what, or do they get better. my friends said that both happen.
(for our zoo project we had to outline an animal-head profile. only the head. just the head. that was the assignment. this wasn’t interpretive.) i remember one girl insisting on putting the fin of a manatee in the profile. she’d complain “but i liiiike it” and i would turn red and pray to God to not let me yell and start swinging fists. my professor wasn’t lucky enough to not have to say anything. he was nice about it, but we still joke about it to this day about how dumb that girl is. “no. you just can’t have the fin. cut it out you stupid person. i hate you.”
Dad • 03/04/03 • 10:58 PM:OK. Maybe THAT explains Yoko Ono.
Patrick • 03/04/03 • 11:38 PM:In thinking more about this, I wonder if (believe) our perception is skewed because we are talented in a number of areas (the jack-of-all-trades kind of thing, which, I’ve just rediscovered, can also be called, in noun form, a “polymath”). What about people who really aren’t that talented in anything? Kathleen would say everyone is talented at something (and I’d agree to a certain degree), but even Jesus, in his parable of the talents, talks about one getting 5 talents, one getting only one talent (which he buried, action which he was punished for). Maybe if you’re really not good at anything, you just latch on to something, anything. So maybe you blissfully don’t know what is good art, so you paint your own stuff, and you like it, and you have plastic flamingos in your yard and …
This makes me think, also, about beauty in people. When I was young, I believed that if you liked a girl, she automatically liked you back. Only later did I realize that there were beautiful people that everybody thought attractive, even the ugly people, and the beautiful people were not attracted to the ugly people. So, and I apologize for the adult content here, the pornography industry flourishes because if you’re an ugly man, you still are attracted to that classic idea of beauty, but you can’t marry it. So you marry a woman more or less like you, and, if you’ve got self-discipline and a respect for your wife or a fear of God, you stay away from that stuff, but if you’re not?
This line of thought brings me to another feeling: humility, thanks, pity. I feel blessed to be smart and talented and good looking enough to have attracted Karina, who is beautiful. I wonder how much different my life would be if I were lacking in those areas. How my motivations would change if I were stupid or ugly, those things no one can really change or control. Hmm.
David • 03/05/03 • 7:06 PM:I hope people read this,
I like Patrick’s latest comment the best. He is right, we are best served if we acknowledge our talents and are thankful for them. Right now during Lent this might be a good idea. I do agree that our family has much more talent than the average family (each person too). I often times struggle with this and the conceit that flows from it and the dangers that can get you into.
Realize that we are gigantically blessed. From our parents to our friends to our talents. Yes we are also mostly hard-working and diligent and all that, BUT most of what we have (for instance the ability to jump) is NOT of our own doing. Back to the jumping part - in how many families can all the boys dunk? Not many. And even fewer where two of them are 6’2” or below.
Just today some kids were mentioning how they heard I could dunk and all this stuff (some kids also saw me high jumping about 5’10” last week- not bad for a 9 year layoff). I was happy to hear the praise. But really, other than doing some plyos and jump rope and playing lots of stuff all the time, what have I done to get good leaping ability?
There is definitely a more philosophical aspect to this that would take too long to write about. Maybe the point, as Jesus said (and Patrick mentioned) is to use your talents well. And be thankful. I too often think they are something I deserve or earned. Nope, just a gift. What’s that other saying?
Your talents are God’s gift to you, what you do with them is your gift to God. Yup. I think we’re doing alright.
ps. Dan, your penance for going bananas in the earlier comment is to sing “Kum By Yah” eight times. Seriously, chill a little. That’s all.
Kathleen • 03/13/03 • 12:25 PM:do I have to write my email each time?
Where’s MY picture? I want to see it.
You guys still have so much time to do this. I’m in school and should be lesson planning or something, but I’ll do this instead.
I don’t know what to write, so I’ll save it for later.
Patrick • 03/13/03 • 4:54 PM:Kath,
1) Yes, you have to enter your email address for comments. Check with your browser though. You can make Internet Explorer enter it automatically.
2) Your picture shows up when you post an entry. But when your entry goes off the main page, after a week, your picture is gone. I will change this soon though. I don’t know why you didn’t see your picture, unless you never looked at your “kath in da house” entry after you posted it.
3) One doesn’t “have” time, one “makes” time!
Patrick • 06/14/03 • 10:00 AM:To revive this horse: I found recently an applicable quote from Pearl Buck, an American writer who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1938. She said: “The secret of joy in work is contained in one word—excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.”
Dan • 11/26/03 • 12:31 AM:Ahem. One time I asked my good friend Jon this question (I had discussed this Maddenation post a while before asking, and we visited the site while on my friend Matt’s computer in Alumni Hall):
What’s the worst work of art you’ve ever seen?
He replied:
Which picture is it? This one (actually titled, “Passion”).
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