Friday Feed

Some suggestions to satisfy your reading, viewing and listening appetite throughout the weekend…

CONFERRING ADVICE | Throughout the last few weeks, the fake controversies surrounding President Obama’s commencement addresses have become the media’s latest obsession. During Wednesday night’s speech at Arizona State University, Obama not only joked about Arizona State’s decision not to bestow him with an honorary degree but also used it to advance his main theme. Now the focus has shifted to the faux outrage among a minority of Catholics, because of his pro-choice stance, regarding Obama’s commencement address at Notre Dame on Sunday. Where was all the fury and protests in the lead-up to George W. Bush’s graduation speech at the Catholic university in 2001? He is, after all, the president who used the death penalty (as governor of Texas) more than anyone else who has ever occupied the Oval Office. That’s rarely been brought up during the debate. But isn’t Bush’s pro-execution policy equally an affront to the “pro-life” values of the Catholic Church, which is just as much anti-death penalty as it is anti-abortion? Perhaps, the university’s admissions policy will also be altered to deny pro-choice and non-Catholics. The “protest” is transparently political, not rooted truly in religious or moral grounds. OK, enough of the ranting. With all the talk about commencement addresses (Obama gets a passing grade for his ASU speech), and since it is that time of year, here’s a Web site featuring the best of the lot: Graduation Wisdom. Cristina Negrut combed through about 700 commencement speeches, finding that only one in 20 can actually be deemed “inspiring”:

Garry Trudeau once said that ‘commencement speeches were invented largely in the belief that outgoing college students should never be released into the world until they have been properly sedated.’ The speeches and quotes on GRADUATION WISDOM are the exception to this rule.

Check out her top 10, which ranges from Steve Jobs to Woody Hayes, and the archive. The site features excerpts, quotes and links to full text versions of the speeches.

LIFE IS ON THE WIRE | I would have to agree that commencement addresses rarely rise to the level of inspirational—and are almost never worth revisiting. But one that I discovered a couple of years ago exceeds even the loftiest standards, so good, so powerful, so exactly right that it really requires repeated and regular listening. Aaron Brown (the former CNN anchor of NewsNight whose firing was the “Jump the Shark” moment for the once venerable cable news network and the reason I no longer tune in to the channel I once looked forward to watching every night at 10 p.m.—but I’ll save those grievances for another post), speaking to Macalester College’s Class of 2006 in his first commencement address, nailed it: bits of good humor, a thoroughly genuine tone, wise—and perhaps unconventional—advice that truly inspires, and every other quality such a speech should contain. Just listen, again and again, and remember, “Life is on the wire”:

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TRUE GENIUS | Staying with the topic of today’s feed, Elizabeth Gilbert—known for her best-selling memoir, Eat Pray Love, but also deserving of recognition for previous works of journalism, including The Last American Man—offers some of the best advice for writers I’ve ever read (along with Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life) in an essay on her site titled, simply, “Some Thoughts on Writing”. Here’s a few noteworthy excerpts, a few bits of sage advice, from her essay:

• “I believe that – if you are serious about a life of writing, or indeed about any creative form of expression – that you should take on this work like a holy calling.”
• “Send your work off to editors and agents as much as possible, show it to your neighbors, plaster it on the walls of the bus stops – just don’t sit on your work and suffocate it. At least try. And when the powers-that-be send you back your manuscript (and they will), take a deep breath and try again.”
• “As for discipline – it’s important, but sort of over-rated. The more important virtue for a writer, I believe, is self-forgiveness. Because your writing will always disappoint you. Your laziness will always disappoint you.”
• “The other thing to realize is that all writers think they suck….The point I realized was this – I never promised the universe that I would write brilliantly; I only promised the universe that I would write.”
• “Nobody can tell you how to succeed at writing (even if they write a book called ‘How To Succeed At Writing’) because there is no WAY; there are, instead, many ways.”
• “Please try, also, not to go totally freaking insane in the process. Insanity is a very tempting path for artists, but we don’t need any more of that in the world at the moment, so please resist your call to insanity.”

On that note—trying not to lose your mind, to remain sane despite the often torturous nature of being an artist—Gilbert offers an inspired approach to the creative process in her lecture for TED Talks, rethinking the notion of genius, offering a way to survive the anguish and despair we all experience during the midst of a project. “Don’t be afraid; don’t be daunted,” she says. “Just do your job. Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be.” Olé, indeed.