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Fall/Winter 2010 : Ha!
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Ha!
Oregon Humanities: Fall/Winter 2010
Letter from the Editor
The Long Look Back
A few months ago, several of my friends posted Facebook links to a New York magazine article by Jennifer Senior called “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting.” As the mother of two young children who was soon to edit a magazine issue on happiness and humor, I clicked through and read the piece with interest, nodding in agreement at some points, grimacing at others, chortling throughout. Then, in a true mark of approval in this digital age, I posted the link on my Facebook page so that others might read the piece. I included a comment, describing the article as “intriguing and often hilarious,” to which one friend remarked, “Interesting. I’m not getting ‘hilarious’ from this, though.”
Writing
Pursuing the Science of Happiness
In the complicated quest for bliss, the search is the thing
“I just want to be happy.”
It sounds like such a simple, noble goal. When I overhear it in discussions by the generally earnest and well-meaning college students I teach, my first reaction is to think that worries about rampant materialism among today’s youth are vastly overstated. But my second, more considered reaction is to wonder what they mean. Being happy, I want to tell them, is much more complicated than it sounds.
Love Thy Neighbor (Sometimes)
A close-knit neighborhood can make us happy, but it can also add to the busy-ness of daily life
Two springs ago, my family and I—like thousands of other homeowners marching to the beat of a homemade Michael Pollan-drum—dug up the lawn in our front yard and planted a vegetable garden.
A Nation of Can-Do Optimists
A brief history of American cheerfulness
When I traveled through Asia and Europe as a teenager, I had a hard time convincing the people I met that I was American. Locals and fellow travelers took me for Canadian, Middle Eastern, southern European. They took me for Mexican, South American, Russian. They took me for anything but what I am: U.S. North American—at least three generations on each side.
How Courtenay Got Her Funny Back
Sexy has no place in the kill-or-die world of comedy
I was funny in the beginning. I remember him laughing. His bright blue eyes would sparkle, his nose would crinkle up and he’d bare his teeth, like a wolf dressed in a shirt and tie. But they always laugh in the beginning, don’t they?
This was my first grownup romantic relationship, and I didn’t know it at the time, but I was about to break the record for Number of Mistakes Made in a Single Adult Liaison, Civilian Division. (I’ve been far surpassed by Hollywood types whose mistakes are splashed all over the tabloids, but celebrities are in their own league with a completely different scoring system.) The principal mistake being that I lost the single, defining characteristic that most people knew and loved about me.
Laughing Into the Abyss
The existential howl of Jewish American humor
My parents went out of their way to warn me about A Serious Man, the most recent film by Joel and Ethan Coen. They’d seen it with several friends from their gated golf community in West Palm Beach, and because they know I’m a Coen brothers fan, called especially to tell me they’d found it offensive and mean-spirited, an unsympathetic, even nasty, portrayal of Judaism. “It’s not even worth renting,” my father said.
Funny Is All I Got
The shocking true story of a lifelong humor abuser and the trail of thoughtless amusement left in his wake
This is serious: if it weren’t for funny, I’d have nothing. Funny is all I got. Everything good that has ever happened to me, from my emergence as, you know, a sentient being up until right now, is the result of two cosmic forces of limitless power: dumb luck and funny. And, really, it’s just dumb luck that I’m funny.
Bright Idea
Sharing Meals, Sharing Faith
An interfaith women’s group seeks to inspire understanding, one potluck dish at a time.
A pecan apple salad can’t save the world, but a group of Portland-area women are exploring how a shared meal might bring about more understanding among three great religions.
Between Women, a monthly potluck gathering of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish women in Portland, was inspired in part by the interfaith peacemaking groups Jan Elfers observed on a trip with fellow activists to Israel and Palestine in 2006. Back in Portland, Elfers, of the Christian organization Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon, teamed with Sherry Fishman of the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland and Sanaa Sammour of the Muslim Educational Trust (MET) to begin a potluck group, which now has about a dozen members.
Field work
A Fuller Picture
Mercy Corps Action Center's Tuesday University brings the world to Portland
What is the history of Muslims in America? Hint: it goes back a bit farther than 2001. A Muslim slave named Job Ben Solomon, known to have written three Korans from memory, lived in Maryland as early as 1731.
The RIPPLE effect
A conference for bloggers sparks ideas and builds connections around rural issues
For some rural Oregonians, blogs have become like a good pair of boots—basic equipment. On RIPPLE, a website run by the nonprofit Rural Development Initiatives, Northwest bloggers and their readers discuss rural issues. In May, the RIPPLE crowd convened in Hood River for a weekend of face time and learned the site had won a 2010 Webvisionary Award.
Thinking in Public
Oregon Humanities’ Think & Drink features provocative conversations fit for public consumption.
Picture a conversation that could have turned into a verbal boxing match, with religiosity and secularism in opposite corners. Instead, civility reigned. Good thing, because civil discourse about provocative topics is one of the goals of Oregon Humanities’ Think & Drink, a quarterly happy-hour conversation series that, since its inception in 2008, has taken place at Rontoms restaurant and bar in Portland.
For the Love of Ideas
A Portland couple gives to Oregon Humanities so that everyone can have access to ideas.
Jennifer Schuberth and her husband, John Urang, live in a house infused with the humanities. Both are college professors—she teaches religious studies at Portland State University, and he focuses on East German literature at Reed College—with book projects in the works.
Profile
Standing Up for the Land
An Oregon couple builds a community that understands and invests in healthy forests.
Peter and Pam Hayes care for three working forests in the Oregon Coast Range that comprise Hyla Woods. They have a theory that over the last one hundred years, there have been five evolving philosophies about how to manage forestland in America—from phase one, in which the forest is a problem and land should be cleared for other uses, to phase five, in which the forest has multiple values and reserves, and should have multiple revenue streams.
What I Think
I'll Be There for You
Friendship, Facebook, and the quest for virtue
667? 667! That’s the average number of “friends” my students this term have on Facebook. And that average may be on the low side: Facebook doesn’t require culling your friends until you reach the five thousand-friend threshold. My students assure me that they know all these people through some medium or another, even if it’s a friend of a friend. They do not, they insist, send out friend requests to strangers.
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Staff, advisors, etc.
- Kathleen Holt
- Editor
- McGuire Barber Design
- Graphic design
- Eloise Holland
- Communications Coordinator
- Allison Dubinsky
- Copy editor
- Editorial Advisory Board
- Tom Booth
- Brian Doyle
- Debra Gwartney
- Julia Heydon
- Guy Maynard
- Win McCormack
- Kathleen Dean Moore
- Camela Raymond
- Kate Sage
- Rich Wandschneider
- Dave Weich
Oregon Humanities magazine examines topics of broad public interest from a variety of perspectives and approaches. Recent issues of this publication have focused on stuff, nostalgia, and civility. Through good and thoughtful writing, Oregon Humanities magazine enriches our understanding of important subjects and stimulates conversation and reflection among readers, their friends, families, colleagues, and neighbors.
Contributors
Andrew Guest
Andrew Guest is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Portland. When not watching, playing, coaching or writing about soccer, he does research on youth developmental and educational experiences through sports, arts, and service activities.
Ariel Gore
Ariel Gore is the author of seven books including Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), from which this selection is excerpted. She is also the founding editor of Hip Mama, and editor of the Lambda-award-winning anthology Portland Queer. She teaches creating writing online at the University of New Mexico and The Attic in Portland.
Courtenay Hameister
Courtenay Hameister is the host and head writer of LiveWire Radio, the co-creator of “Road House: The Play!,” a screenwriter and filmmaker. In her spare time, she likes to imagine what it would be like to have more spare time.
Courtney S. Campbell
Courtney S. Campbell is the Hundere Professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon State University. You can try friending him through his Facebook page.
Jamie Passaro
Jamie Passaro lives in Eugene, where she is a freelance writer and an editor for Northwest Book Lovers, a blog produced by the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. Her last essay for Oregon Humanities was “Driving Mrs. Spacely” (Summer 2008).
Kristin Kaye
Kristin Kaye is a Portland-based writer. Her book, Iron Maidens, was an Oregon Book Awards finalist. She has recently completed her novel To Catch What Falls.
Scott Nadelson
Scott Nadelson’s most recent book is The Cantor’s Daughter. A new collection of his short fiction, Aftermath, is forthcoming from Hawthorne Books in Fall 2011. He teachers creative writing at Willamette University. His latest essay for Oregon Humanities was “Go Ahead and Look” (Spring 2010)
Todd Schwartz
Todd Schwartz is in reality a very serious and reserved person who divides his time between being a Calvinist minister and a funeral home director. Wait…wait! A funeral home director and a Calvinist minister walk into a bar…