Reflections on Playboy: Monday morning autodidact report 2

July 21, 2008

Monday morning autodidact report 2

I’m not the most self-disciplined guy in the world. But when I move gradually towards better study habits, I call it success. It has been a successful week.

So far, Helen Gurley Brown’s 1962 classic Sex and the Single Girl has been easy for me to understand and appreciate as a man who reads Playboy. Three years after this book, Brown would take the reins of then-ailing Cosmopolitan magazine and turn it into the guidebook for liberated women that Playboy already was for liberated men. Much like Hugh Hefner’s, Brown’s appreciation of the opposite sex is aesthetic and sybaritic but always honorable and trustworthy.

I haven’t made any progress this past week with Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. This book still fascinates me as much as ever, but I’ll need plenty of time to teach myself how to teach myself its contents effectively. Differing types of books, such as Sex and the Single Girl versus The Art of War, will naturally require different approaches by a student.

In a screenplay like Juno or a memoir like Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper, Diablo Cody makes her distinct voice heard. It’s probably healthy for me, with my Camille Paglia–esque tendency to regard exotic dance with pagan religious piety, to listen to someone like Cody describe it in a more cynical way. It’s good intellectual balance.

A similar quest for intellectual balance has drawn my attention to the Analects of Confucius. Here I find a radically different guide to human relationships than I get from the libertarian individualism of Playboy and Reason magazines. But in their most sophisticated forms, various philosophical systems have a funny way of coming to resemble each other in practical application. I shouldn’t be surprised if Confucianism turns out to be fairly “libertarian” in optimal practice. So far, as a Westerner dipping my feet into another civilization’s manner of thinking, I’ve been taking my time with the introductory notes by translator Arthur Waley.

After I get around to watching Y tu mamá también, I’ll retire Spanish-language cinema as a study category. But with Netflix and theatergoing, I’ll continue to keep up with cinema in general. A few weeks ago, in my blog sidebar, I declared Hollywood my spiritual hometown, and I have no cause to regret it!

Español es una lengua hermosa, y me gusta estudiarla. Quiero tener un vocabulario más grande y saber conjugar todos los verbos.

Good books are fun, but they don’t inspire physical self-confidence the way musical instruments do. On my electronic keyboard, I’ve been doing extensive chord drills and working my way through two pieces: an adagio in D minor by Italian Baroque composer Alessandro Scarlatti, and the classic rock tune “Locomotive Breath” by Jethro Tull. This past week, after a long absence, I got back to studying the Aboriginal Australian wind instrument known as the didgeridoo with help from an instructional CD by Ash Dargan.

With all due modesty, I think I’m starting to kick ass with my self-study projects. (I don’t want any grief about the afternoon timestamp of this post, either. I started composing it in the morning and followed my standard procedure of editing the timestamp to reflect the actual time of publication. So there.)

Labels: Educ, PJ

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 12:37 PM

July 21, 2008

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