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Happiness may seem like a pretty nebulous concept, but psychologists like Martin Seligman have been doing their best to study it scientifically. This field is called Positive Psychology, and over the past few decades its practitioners have come up with some interesting results.
"Contrary to everything you might think, 'in the long run, it doesn't much matter what happens to you,' [Jonathan] Haidt writes.... 'It's better to win the lottery than to break your neck, but not by as much as you'd think.... Within a year, lottery winners and paraplegics have both (on average) returned most of the way to their baseline levels of happiness.'

"The study showed that people were most content when they were experiencing... 'the state of total immersion in a task that is challenging yet closely matched to one's abilities.' We are at our happiest when we are absorbed in what we are doing.... [Happiness is] 'a by-product of absorption.'

"A person in good health in a Western liberal democracy is, in terms of his objective circumstances, one of the most fortunate human beings ever to have walked the surface of the earth. [People in the past] would have regarded our easy, long, riskless lives with incredulous envy. They would have regarded us as so lucky that questions about our state of mind wouldn't be worth asking. It is a perverse consequence of our fortunate condition that the question of our happiness, or lack of it, presses unhappily hard on us." (John Lanchester, "Pursuing Happiness")In short, your attitude has a much stronger effect on your happiness than any external event does. If you want to be happy, do something you're good at. And even the people who have the most to be happy about can find reasons to be unhappy.

If you were to ask an art historian about landscape painters, two names that would probably come up are Constable (above) and Ruisdael (below). John Constable was an English painter born in 1776, the year of the American Revolution. Jacob van Ruisdael was a Dutch painter who lived a century before him. They had some similar ideas about how to paint a landscape. For instance, they both considered the sky a matter of maximum importance; they thought of it as a dome of light that controlled the appearance of every other part of the painting. But in one important way, they were diametrically opposed. Ruisdael felt free to paint from his imagination and "improve" on reality. Constable felt that imagination could never surpass reality. For him, the highest goal of a landscape painter was to observe and understand nature.

Should art try to be better than life? Or is that merely self-delusion? Both sides have a point, but I'm a fan of better-than-life. Sure Constable is the purer artist, sticking to his principles... but his pictures don't make me long for another time and place, the way Ruisdael's do. What's wrong with a little outrageous invention if it produces pleasure? For me, enjoyment is everything; artistic principles are nothing.

Speaking of landscapes giving pleasure, my friend ShirlT made and sent me a beautiful painting for my birthday. Deepest thanks, Shirl! Her paintings can be viewed online here.


(The first painting is John Constable's Stour Valley and Dedham Church. The second is Jacob van Ruisdael's Bentheim Castle.)

I saw Day Watch last weekend with my sister and her husband. We talked about it afterwards, and I was surprised by how much they liked it. I mean, I didn't hate it, but it had such obvious flaws, I thought they would find it as empty as I did. My beef with it was that it didn't make enough sense. It's set in an alternate reality with some supernatural phenomena, but the phenomena seem to have been pulled out of a hat, without rhyme or reason. There's a magical piece of chalk, but it has nothing to do with the magic wad of aluminum foil. And the magic aluminum foil has nothing to do with the magical otherworld known as the Gloom. And of course the Gloom has nothing to do with the chalk. Somehow, this didn't bother my sister or her husband. They simply felt that a movie like this didn't have to have any overall structure or meaning. So what if the different elements were unconnected and inconsistent? That didn't dull the sweetness of the eye candy for them one bit.

Perhaps I wanted Day Watch to be something it wasn't trying to be. But wasn't it trying to tell a story? And isn't a story just better if it makes some kind of sense? It doesn't have be a traditional, realist kind of sense, but I enjoy a story more when all its parts work together. For example, compare Day Watch with another fantasy about a demimonde of the undead, Interview with the Vampire. Whatever you may feel about the absurdity of blood-sucking in general, you have to admit that Anne Rice's story is driven by a certain logic. The story and its phenomena seem to flow naturally from her basic premise about the nature of vampirism. It's possible that Timur Bekmambetov wasn't trying for that kind of narrative logic. It's possible he actually intended to make a movie in which the main premises are incoherent and arbitrary, in which the rules are just made up as it goes along. But if those are the terms on which the movie demands to be accepted, we may as well accept that Bekmambetov simply intended to make an empty, mediocre movie. And succeeded.

Thumbs-up on this site.
But be warned: too much time here
Will make you talk weird.

"I confess, without shame, that I am sick and tired of fighting--its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands, and fathers.... it is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated... that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation." (General William T. Sherman, 1865)


When he was proposed as a candidate for President, Sherman replied, "If nominated I will not run; if elected I will not serve."