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Doh!
Of course they'd rather sit back with Plato's Symposium or Frege's theorem, but intellectuals have some less elevated tastes, too - cable TV wrestling or rap, anyone? Philip Oltermann confers with some great brains about their guilty pleasures
Saturday February 3, 2007
The Guardian
James Wood, literary critic, Harvard professor
Car magazines
I'm very fond of car magazines. Whenever I am over in Britain, I pick up the best one, which is, appropriately enough, just called Car. A typical feature in Car seems to involve taking a BMW, a Mercedes and a Jaguar for a triumphantly gratuitous spree across France, Switzerland and Italy. There is much talk of hairpin bends and switchback Alpine roads, and slight but manageable understeer. The writing is perky, sybaritic, deliciously technical. I moon over the lavish shots of the car interiors - the excitement of all those dials, which stare back like multiplied images of one's own excited face. I become a child again. I was one of those children who hoarded facts, and few facts delighted me as much as those about cars. At 13 I could tell you the 0-60 times, the top speeds, the cubic capacity, the brake horsepower of all the fastest and most exciting cars. I still can. As a child, when I couldn't get to sleep, I used to roll my head from left to right on the pillow, and imagine taking a long journey in a fast car - a Jensen Interceptor, a Triumph Stag, a BMW 735i, an MGB V8, a Jag XJS. At 40, I still sometimes do that, though to less effect, alas. But do you know what I drive? A VW Passat estate, with a 1.8-litre engine and a piddling 170bhp. It won't do; I must change my life.
Antony Beevor, historian
Blind Date 
Arthur Koestler's satire of academic conferences, The Call Girls (1973), included an extreme leftwing French professor whose secret comfort was to lock his door and retire to bed to read The Three Musketeers while eating chocolate truffles. I sometimes thought of him when I indulged in my own curious vice, which was to watch Blind Date when working out on the rowing machine. This prototype for many far worse versions of humiliation television took my mind off the hamster-wheel boredom of static, indoor exercise. In fact its true awfulness and the glimpses of young macho-macha life in this country proved utterly gripping. The girls were often the crueller, when putting down their artificially selected partners, and it was hard not to feel sorry for the inarticulate and pathetically boastful young males. They could not see how things had changed and how they had become potentially redundant in the brave new world of mass communication to which they had exposed their own pitiful inadequacies.
Anthony Giddens, sociologist
Wrestling        
I'm a fan of a very disreputable sports programme, one that I like because of its absurdist nature. It is a cable TV offering, featuring American professional wrestling. Watching it is certainly a guilty pleasure because the programme is politically incorrect in more or less every way one could think of. It is Americana at its most extreme, although put on in a knowing way and with a definite element of self-parody. I can't really work out what is going on, which is part of the reason it's addictive. Wrestling isn't a real sport and the contests are in some large part staged. On the other hand, the wrestlers sometimes do serious damage to one another and the losers surely can't always agree beforehand to lose. Do they hate one another as much as they seem to, or are they buddies behind the scenes? I don't know. Even more ridiculous, when there is a commercial break, the programme solemnly informs the viewer, "Whatever you do, don't try this at home." Do they seriously think people would?
Simon Singh, science writer
Deal Or No Deal    
Between the guilty pleasures of Countdown and Richard & Judy is the guiltiest pleasure of all - Deal Or No Deal. It is a beautifully simple game which touches on areas of mathematics such as probability and game theory. Indeed, it has much in common with an ancient American TV show called Let's Make A Deal, hosted by Monty Hall, which resulted in the Monty Hall paradox, one of the most famous problems in probability theory.
In addition to the maths, there is a huge dollop of psychology, which leads to players making sub-optimal decisions. The notorious Dealer makes stingy offers, particularly early on in the show, to encourage contestants to continue playing, so mathematically there would be no reason to deal. However, the desire for security means that contestants settle for measly deals - on average players in the first series won ?6,000, whereas they would have won an average of over ?0,000 if they had refused the Dealer's offers and stuck with their original box. Noel Edmonds's idiot belief in cosmic ordering seems to conspire against his contestants. So far the UK has been spared the delight of watching psychics playing the game. When this happened in an Australian edition in 2004, a "gifted" player walked away with just 20% of what dumb luck would typically achieve.
Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist, author
Computer programming      
I have now kicked the habit, but every so often the craving returns and I must thrust it down and away. But whence the guilt? Isn't programming useful? In the right hands, yes. But my projects (inventing a word processor, machine translation from one programming language to another, inventing a programming language of my own) could all be done better (and were) by professionals. It was a classic addiction: prolonged frustration, occasionally rewarded by a briefly glowing fix of achievement. It was that pernicious "just one more push to see what's over the next mountain and then I'll call it a day" syndrome. It was a lonely vice, interfering with sleeping, eating, useful work and healthy human intercourse. I'm glad it's over and I won't start up again. Except ... perhaps one day, just a little ...
Marcus du Sautoy, mathematician
Football shirts 
My guilty pleasure: my number 17 Recreativo Hackney Football Shirt. Every footballer cares about the number shirt they play in. When you get an autograph from Thierry Henry, you'll find he's worked the number 14 into his signature. Beckham has 7 in Roman numerals tattooed on his arm. His move to Real Madrid almost collapsed when Raul said he wasn't going to relinquish his number 7. Arsenal retired the number 8 shirt after the great Ian Wright, Wright, Wright retired.
So when the shirts of Recreativo Hackney get pulled out of the kitbag on a Sunday morning, I wait patiently until the 17 shirt appears, then grab it possessively. As a mathematician, each number has its own special character for me. 17 is a prime number, an indivisible number. The Ancient Chinese thought numbers had sexuality and primes for them were the macho numbers, essential for surviving Recreativo's battles on the Hackney Marshes. Primes are also key to the evolutionary survival of a curious species of cicada that lives in the forests of North America. The cicada exploits a 17-year life cycle to keep out of the way of a predator that stalks. So I take a secret pleasure in the power of 17 to protect me on the pitch.
I know that my obsession with my shirt number is no more than superstitious nonsense and goes against the analytic rational mind that I use the rest of the week. But when my team were languishing at the bottom of the Super Sunday League Division 2, I persuaded them to change our kit and we all now play in prime numbers, from 2 to 43. The next season we got promoted into the first division. That's proof enough for me of the power of number.
John Carey, literary critic, English professor
Nice cup of tea and a sit down  
Until a few years ago, re-reading Sherlock Holmes stories was my favourite relaxation. I do it less often now because I know them too well, so there's no surprise. A book I've got fond of recently and often dip into last thing at night is called Nicey & Wifey's Nice Cup Of Tea And A Sit Down, which is helpfully subtitled A Book About Having A Sit Down, A Biscuit And A Nice Cup Of Tea. Its pseudonymous authors are actually Stuart and Jenny Payne, and it is really about biscuits - their varieties, history and characteristics, from Rich Teas and custard creams to Choco Leibnizes and Jaffa Cakes (which qualify as biscuits only disputably). It is funny and, like its subject, undeviatingly cosy and comforting.
Stanley Fish, literary theorist, legal scholar
Country music 
Every time I return to it after an absence, I am struck again by the power and integrity of country music. In part it is the lyrics, self-consciously clever ("If I said you have a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?"), alert to and accepting of contradictions ("She's a Saturday night out on the town/Church on Sunday girl"), precise in their observation of small detail ("She left the suds in the bucket and the clothes hanging out on the line"). In part it is the structuring of a narrative (usually unabashedly maudlin) by a line that gradually changes meaning, as when George Jones sings, "He stopped loving her today", and reveals in the last verse that he has stopped only because he is dead. In part it is the affirmation and exploration of a raunchy Christianity that holds drinking, cheating, criminality and Jesus in a volatile and energising mix. In part it is the extraordinary musicianship of pianists, fiddlers and guitarists who bear comparison to members of any symphony orchestra. And most of all it is the fact that when I'm in the car searching for something to listen to, the sound of country music, even in just a few notes, is unmistakable. Country music knows what it is.
Antonia Fraser, historian, biographer
Film stars' autographs 
The first one I had was of Gary Cooper in the 40s and I had to cut it out of a fan magazine. My best friend Lucy and I, pouring over Picturegoer - was it? - had agreed to share him as there was a lot of him to share. But I got the photo, and faked a signature "For Toinette". Somehow I didn't think he'd go the full mile of Antonia Pakenham. We loved Gary to distraction and when there was an ugly rumour that he was actually dumb, were both correspondingly depressed. Luckily he soon made a fine statement to Picturegoer about remaining so long at the top of his profession: "People with big feet is hard to move." Call that man dumb!
Many photos later, all treasured and pinned up (sometimes the star even signed it himself, making the Toinette ploy unnecessary), I was interviewed for Life magazine by James Salter. He had just written the screenplay of Downhill Racer for Robert Redford. Now that was a wonderful photograph that followed! RR smiled at me from the wall, all blond hair and merriment for many years.
I move on to Placido Domingo who signed my programme in a restaurant near Covent Garden just above his own photograph, "To Lady Phraser: we like your books". And recently a French friend got me an enormous photograph of the great man, silver-haired now, dedicated to me personally and singing to me out of the frame.
What next? I saw Juan Diego Fl?ez in The Barber Of Seville last week. I'm on the trail ...
AC Grayling, philosopher
Boxing    
Boxing should be banned, of course: it causes brain damage, and there is something questionable about the pleasure taken by spectators in watching men hitting one another. And yet... there is also something noble about boxing. In the past it was mainly an aristocratic pursuit. In the Regency period, blue-blooded enthusiasts gathered at Gentleman Jackson's gym in London to learn the art of pugilism inherited from ancient Greece. (Pugilism is boxing without gloves.) Just as Homer celebrated the bare-knuckled contest between Epeus (the builder of the Wooden Horse) and Euryalus on the plain before Troy, and Virgil wrote of Entellus accepting the challenge of Dares by tossing his "brain and blood bespattered cestus" into the ring (a cestus was a fist-strap), so the great William Hazlitt wrote perhaps the finest ever account of a contest in the ring, The Fight.
The solitude of the boxer before his opponent, the stripped-down, unfurnished, essential nature of man pitted against man, in a bare space roped off from the rest of the world, sums up everything about courage. In its way boxing recapitulates something ancient, almost primordial, about human striving, with a rough beauty all its own.
It should, though, be banned.
John Berger, writer and artist
Biking     
 
   
Because you are on two wheels and not four, you are much closer to the ground. By closer I mean more intimate with. Take the surface of the road. You are conscious of all its possible variations, whether it offers a grip or is smooth, whether it's new or used, wet, damp or dry, where there's mud or gravel, where ruts are being worn - all the while you are aware of the hold of the tyres or their lack of it on the varying surfaces, and you drive accordingly.
Bends produce another intimate effect. If you enter one properly, it holds you in its arms, just as a hill points you to the sky and a descent receives you. And speed is of the essence. By this I do not necessarily mean the speed at which you are travelling. The reading on the speedometer is a small part of the story.
The fastness that counts most is that between decision and consequence, between an action and its effect - changing direction, braking or accelerating. Other vehicles may in fact react as quickly or more quickly than a motorbike, but a jet plane, a highly tuned car, a speedboat are not as physically close to your body, and none of them leaves your body so exposed. From this comes the sensation that the bike is responding as immediately as one of your own limbs - yet without your own physical energy being tapped. And this effortless immediacy bestows a sense of freedom.
Denis Healey, politician
French cabaret music
Edith Piaf, of course, is the queen of the genre, but there are others: Yves Montand, Jean Sablon. The only one that came close to it in England is Vera Lynn. My favourite number is a Jacques Pr?ert song performed by Montand called Barbara. "Rappelle-toi Barbara/N'oublie pas/Cette pluie sur la mer/Sur ton visage heureux." I heard it for the first time at the end of the war - I used to go to the cabaret cafes in Montmartre a lot back then. It's a song about the war, or about the emotions that people used to feel during the war: it's about being in love with someone you haven't even met. Songs like these are important: they keep you in touch with life. There is nothing remotely like it nowadays.
Naomi Wolf, writer
Star
My guilty pleasure would definitely be Star. This is a tabloid - a cross between Hello! and the National Enquirer, that is, more malicious than the former but, unlike the latter, features no half-bat children or sightings of Elvis. It is real if trashy journalism. Even though it is 90% escapism for me, I do tell myself it shines a light on what the id of the culture is obsessing about: why Paris Hilton, right now? What does it mean that Brad Pitt redeemed himself so quickly once he provided a father figure to that adorable multiracial brood? Why are shoulder pads back on the starlets on the red carpet? What does it say about the American pulse that the Dixie Chicks (who attacked President Bush) are back in vogue? You can predict election outcomes this way, but it is also just pure sleazy fun.
Elaine Showalter, feminist literary critic
Trinny & Susannah 
It's easier to find profound meanings in masculine guilty pleasures such as football or Mastermind, which have grand elements of contestation, than in feminine guilty pleasures, such as shopping or makeovers, which all seem to be about consumerism and vanity. Although women's indulgences may produce more guilt than pleasure, I'll always treasure What Not To Wear with Trinny and Susannah. Unlike other makeover gurus, Trinny and Susannah never demanded extreme weight loss, extensive cosmetic surgery, expensive dentistry, uncomfortable hair extensions or couture wardrobes from the women they instructed. Their advice involved accessible and affordable high-street shops, and the subjects were encouraged to ignore any flaw and focus on every asset. Despite their posh accents, brusque manner and seemingly effortless elegance, Trinny and Susannah had an overall respect and affection for other women that transcended class, age and occupation. And they were willing to expose their own flaws, too, pulling up their tops or tugging down their trousers before the infamous 360-degree mirror to reveal bulges or droops.
Bernard-Henri Levy, philosopher-author
SAS spy novels  
I read my first book in G?ard de Villiers' SAS series when I was 16 or 17 years old. His hero is a special agent who for the last 40 years has been going from mission to mission - in Afghanistan, in Libya, in Chechnya - without ageing in the slightest. SAS novels are always built on the same pattern: you can predict the first torture scene down to the page, and you always know that there will be one female character who betrays the protagonist and one who saves him. Most intellectuals in France despise de Villiers - and yet to me this guy is the best journalist around. His reports from areas of political conflict - such as his account of the non-capture of Karadzic in one of his last novels - are more detailed and precise than what I read in the newspapers.
Catharine A MacKinnon, lawyer, writer, feminist activist
Nothing 
Ever since a British journalist wrote that I confessed to the guilty pleasure of reading People magazine, I've been trying to figure out what I stood convicted of. Reading, thinking, and writing for a living makes one in need of humanising in some quarters, meaning bringing down. Feeling bad about what you feel good about, or good because you feel bad - a coy wink indicating addiction or lack of intent to stop - fills the bill. Apparently we don't enjoy what we do when we are being intellectual, high thought being one thing, low culture another. Intellectuals' guilty pleasures thus must be low-brow indulgences.
While much scholarship badly needs grounding, and a lot of mental life ignores the body and is decidedly uncreative, mine has participated in creating its own field, centred concretely on relations between women and men, focusing on sexual abuse, often representing the violated. People magazine, for that matter, is also sensitive to ordinary life and class politics, unobtrusively but solidly anti-racist, and pursues animal rights. Pleasure here means having nothing to be guilty about. When what you do is unearned, or others are hurt by it - pornography use, for example, or invasion of celebrities' privacy - pleasure becomes guilty. You rightly dislike yourself for what you like. Some intellectuals have had to fight hard for our work, learn what we know from life as well as books, confront power, and find what we do energising and meaningful. Neither elevated nor predatory, human already, its pleasures are not guilty.
Homi K Bhabha, cultural theorist
Project Runway 
There is everything to be learned from your bright and beautiful 18-year-old so long as you can cope with the "likes" that litter her speech, and keep up with the A (Abercrombie & Fitch) to Z (Zara) of high street fashion. All wound up with worries about grades and university applications, Leah relaxed instantly as she watched Bravo network's designer game-show Project Runway: a dozen wannabe Marc Jacobs and Stella McCartneys compete to create a collection for a celebrated label. Yards of silk and taffeta lie wasted on the cutting room floor, but something - perhaps just one thing - witty and lovely emerges. The cut-and-paste technique is as true of working with textiles as it is of writing literary criticism.
Leah's refuge has become my weekly fix. There is life beyond "cords" and cardigans - like hip-hugging Diesel jeans, like Kenzo's slim-waisted Nehru jacket, like Vivienne Westwood's double-breasted pinstripe ... "Dad, you look freaky ... like just stop sucking in!" A little sucking in, a little tuck and nip, a little camouflage provides a whole new persona in academic life. While moderating a panel on "the Metaphysics of Metaphor" in Milan, make sure that you cut short the question period to allow you to wander through the via Monte Napoleone; if you are caught up in a contentious argument on global media in Bombay, concede the point gracefully and dash off to Ensemble; "Baudrillard in New York" at NYU should never keep you from Barneys of New York. Manners makyth a man; clothes complete the process.
Roger Scruton, philosopher, journalist
Elvis    
Although I argue vehemently against modern pop music, on grounds of its musical incompetence, verbal impoverishment and general morbidity, narcissism and salaciousness; although I fiercely object to disco dancing as a sacrilege against the human form and a collective rejection of civilised courtship; although I defend reels, minuets, galliards, sarabands and (as limiting cases) waltzes and polkas as the only ways in which ordinary humanity should dare to put its sexual nature on festive display, and although I regard the 12-bar blues and the flattened subdominant seventh as the lowest forms of vulgarity in music, I find rock'n'roll in general, and Elvis in particular, irresistible, and would happily dance away the night to it. I cannot explain the thrill of delight with which I hear the first bars of Jailhouse Rock or the eagerness with which I at once search the vicinity for a partner: but there it is, appalling proof that, despite all my efforts, I am human.
Martha Nussbaum, philosopher
Baseball  
When the Chicago White Sox won the World Series in 2005, I was in Japan, lecturing on justice for all the world's people. But all the while, my heart was with my team, my boys: with the heroic strength of Paulie, the heart of Bad Bobby (even larger than his 270lb body) and, not least, the in-your-face manner and indomitable spirit of AJ. I felt it was unfair that I was in Japan talking about justice, rather than at home, where I could be near them. I expressed my annoyance by wearing Sox T-shirts throughout the conference. Their all-black elegance fitted well with the rest of my wardrobe.
I have been a baseball fan since childhood, when my father took me to Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia to show me examples of will, excellence and joy. I associate baseball with those values, and with my delight at going to a special event with my father. My father was a working-class man, yet I was brought up in a snooty aristocratic milieu, because that was what he had made his way into. But he secretly communicated disdain for its airs and graces, showing me that the real world was the ballpark, not the Junior Dance Assembly. I love the fact that the White Sox are Chicago's working-class team.
Marcus Aurelius said that the first lesson in ethical impartiality was to learn not to be a sports fan, and I have not learned that lesson, nor do I want to learn it. Pondering that apparent contradiction helps me think better about how we can build a world where we support the urgent needs of people everywhere, while still having something improbably wonderful to love.
Christopher Hitchens, journalist
The Simpsons 
I threw out the TV for practical purposes many years ago, and barely ever go to the movies. I do know (slightly) and very much like Matt Groening, and did get my children a tour of the Simpsons set a few years back, but have not seen many episodes. Same with South Park - people say, hey look, they attack the Pope and the Mormons and the Islamists, and I say, "Tell me about it." I do this myself in real time: don't need the vicarious living that seems so central to all this stuff.
Steven Pinker, psychologist
Rock lyrics    
Just let me hear some of that rock and roll music, any old way you choose it, it's got a back beat, you can't lose it, any old time you use it. I know that classical music is more sophisticated, but - I feel like I'm confessing to a murder - I just don't listen to it. The 1,900 songs on my iPod include jazz, blues, soul, klezmer and country, but the largest single category (49.4%) is rock. In my books, I've analysed rock lyrics for their relevance to linguistics: Bob Dylan's "God said to Abraham, kill me a son" is a perfect example of a benefactive double-object dative construction; Paul McCartney's "She could steal but she could not rob" illustrates a subtle contrast in lexical semantics. I've also used them to exemplify features of human nature: Jim Croce's "You don't mess around with Jim" explains the psychology of reputation; John Lennon's "I want you so bad it's driving me mad", though hardly the most poetic expression of endearment, encapsulates the logic of paradoxical tactics in courtship and similar problems of binding one's implicit promises. Still, I can't say that my musical tastes are driven by my scholarly passions. In the words of a certain poet and philosopher: it's only rock'n'roll, but I like it.
Tariq Ramadan, theologian
Rap
It was originally my 20-year-old daughter who got me into rap music. Now I listen to it at home and when I drive to or from work. I like American rap, but I particularly love the French rappers MAdina and IAM's Philippe Fragione aka Chill Phil aka Akhenaton. Their music is very socially engaged: they criticise injustice, war and racism within European society. Their voice is that of revolt and resistance.
During my work at grassroots level, I have met a lot of young people in the suburbs of France who connect strongly with the message of legitimate violence in rap lyrics. Music allows them to express sentiments that would otherwise erupt in actions. Of course, as in any genre, there are heroes and villains in rap music: a lot of it is just about fashion and mindlessly violent machoism.
I have never been to a rap concert, and I have never rapped myself, but as Picasso said, it takes a long time to become young.
Lewis Wolpert, biologist, author
Cartoons     
I await each week for the pleasure that the arrival of my New Yorker magazine will give me. I rarely read it - it is the cartoons that I love. The cartoons in this magazine provide a special view of the world, and often it is my special world. One of my favourites is of someone like me, a bit elderly, going into a room and saying, "Oh dear, grown ups." And on my kitchen wall over the title "Low Self-esteem" is a man writing, "Dear diary, sorry to bother you again."
Frank Kermode, literary critic
Cribbage 
My father taught me to play cribbage when I was a child. But it wasn't until the six years I spent in the navy that I started to play cribbage obsessively. I remember being on a ship that was meandering aimlessly around the Pacific for several weeks. The dentist and I had a lot of time on our hands and passed it with games of cribbage. I won most of the time. I now have a cribbage game on the PC in my office, which has proved an excellent means for putting off work. Unlike the dentist, the computer wins most of the time. I suspect it's cheating.
Edward O Wilson, naturalist, scientific theorist
Horror movies     
I like science fiction horror movies, especially those involving alien invaders. I am a big fan of the classics - War Of The Worlds, the original Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, and Forbidden Planet - but I also like more recent films, such as Independence Day, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, or even the recent remake of War Of The Worlds. At the top of my list, however, is the second film in the Alien series, the best sci-fi horror of all time.
These films play on basic archetypes of the human psyche (predators out there in the dark, and invaders of our territory, etc), so it's OK intellectually to like these movies (I tell myself). There. Now that I've publicly confessed, I feel better.
Steve Jones, evolutionary biologist
Estate agents   
I have a voyeuristic interest in estate agents. From window to website, in many parts of the world, I dream about houses that I could never afford to buy. A French castle or a Manhattan loft: a Greek island or an Anatolian estate; an Islington Georgian or something futuristic near Aberystwyth - all have the charm of being mere fantasies and at least they comfort me when I get home to Camden Town and find that I have been burgled yet again.
Slavoj Zizek, Slovenian sociologist, cultural critic
Military PC games       
     
 
I play them compulsively, enjoying the freedom to dwell in the virtual space where I can do with impunity all the horrible things I was always dreaming of - killing innocent civilians, burning churches and houses, betraying allies... Plato was right: there are only two kinds of people on this earth, those who dream about doing horrible things and those who actually do them.
My favourite game? Stalin Subway, a Russian one: Moscow 1952, the player is a KGB investigator, called by Stalin Himself to unearth the plot to kill Stalin and other members of the Politburo. One can arrest and kill suspects at one's will. If one wins, one gets a medal from Stalin and Beria! What more can one expect in this miserable life?
헉헉 괜히 알라딘 상품 넣기를 하기로 해갖고...;; 하여튼 존 버거랑 슬라보예 지젝은 정말 많이 뜨는군요-_-;;
영국신문이라 그런지 그쪽 사람들이 많은 듯 하고 특히 진화생물학, 사회생물학 분야 인물들이 눈에 띄네요.
대학중앙도서관홈페이지랑 알라딘 상품넣기 검색을 둘 다 해봤는데 가끔씩은 알라딘 것이 더 검색되네요...;;
앤서니 기든스,안토니아 프레이저(헤롤드 핀터의 아내라네요..),호미 바바, 크리스토퍼 히친스, 로저 스크루턴,
에드워드 윌슨, 슬라보예 지젝 등의 취미가 재밌군요. 특히 지젝은 왠지 정말 지젝스러운 ㅋㅋ
사실 무엇보다 친애하는 천 모군이 Tariq Ramadan의 취미를 보아주었으면 좋겠군요..
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