Exemplar of Intellectual Curiosity

As the "lamest of lame ducks" limps off stage-right (though, to his defense, his second term has been marked both by a tempered centrism and a lack of the type of scandals that usually plague second-term administrations), and everyone is enjoying taking pot shots at the utter lack of intellectualism and its dramatic, painful impacts on America (though I don't believe, at all, that the current economic crisis can be lumped into that pile), I encounter last night a paradigmatic example of intellectual curiosity at its best, from which I think there is what to learn.

This intellectual curiosity demonstrates the following characteristics: passion, playfulness, eclecticism, generative pairing of conceptual ideas, and the addition of knowledge (the theory being, perhaps, that the first three, in the right mind, produce the latter two).

Who? Where?

Terry Gross, interviewing Jenna Fischer from the office (and having me laugh-out-loud on a crowded Jerusalem bus) and then commemorating the life of Anne d'Harnoncourt, the visionary director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.


The latter interview is a discussion of the brilliant avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp, famous for "found art" (see above) was one of the few dadaists to break through into mainstream culture as both influential and successful.

The former interview is hilarious. Highlights include:

- the first acting job Fischer ever had (a sex education video for recently released mental patients from UCLA Medical Center)
- Fischer describing her personal fashion style as "mother of three kids without the kids"
- the funniest double entendre song from Walk Hard
- Fischer being cast in an "international version of the Spice Girls" which turns out to be a high-priced call-girl ring

Each interview is great, but their combination achieves something greater than the sum of its parts. Part of this, of course, is that The Office is an artistic descendant of Duchamp, but there's more than that. For Fischer, responding to Terry's questions, sounds as worldly (as "cultured") as d'Harnoncourt, and the listener gets to hear Terry's passion for the world, both in the heights of high culture (complicated by Duchamp's penchant for rejecting aestheticism and embracing the artist and, um, putting urinals on display) and the "depths" of low culture (complicated by the literary brilliance of Walk Hard and the sublime British-inheritance of The Office itself).