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What Is Art For? - Lewis Hyde - Profile - NYTimes.com
Tags: art, creativity, society, copy_left, culture, literature, poetry, education, school, anthropology, creative_commons, shakespeare, emerson on 2008-11-17 -All Annotations (10) -About
more fromwww.nytimes.com
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For the Copy Left, as for Hyde, the last 20 years have witnessed a corporate “land grab” of information — often in the guise of protecting the work of individual artists — that has put a stranglehold on creativity, in increasingly bizarre ways.
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Illich, an Austrian priest-cum-social-critic who drew wide public attention for his book “Deschooling Society” (1971) — a polemic against modern public education.
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Gift economies, as Mauss defines them, are marked by circulation and connectivity: goods have value only insofar as they are treated as gifts, and gifts can remain gifts only if they are continually given away. This results in a kind of engine of community cohesion, in which objects create social, psychological, emotional and spiritual bonds as they pass from hand to hand.
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For centuries people have been speaking of talent and inspiration as gifts; Hyde’s basic argument was that this language must extend to the products of talent and inspiration too. Unlike a commodity, whose value begins to decline the moment it changes hands, an artwork gains in value from the act of being circulated—published, shown, written about, passed from generation to generation — from being, at its core, an offering.
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C.T.E.A. was not only unfortunate but also unconstitutional. For Hyde, as for many legal and political scholars, the C.T.E.A. (the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” to its detractors) represents a blatant abrogation of the purpose of intellectual-property law. As he sets out to show in his book, copyright was enshrined in the Constitution for civic rather than commercial purposes. For the founders, intellectual property was a great privilege; copyrights and patents were primarily meant to serve, in Madison’s words, as “encouragements to literary works and ingenious discoveries.” By extending copyright retroactively, Hyde told me, the C.T.E.A. negated the logic of incentive: Mickey Mouse can’t be invented twice.
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“All of the C.C. licenses use the lever of the law,” he said. “They have the assumption of private ownership behind them. So Lessig, in a certain sense, is confining himself to one slice of this stuff, which is not as capacious as a true commons would be.”
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“Shakespeare’s plays,” he writes, “will never collapse, no matter how many people read them — and such commons therefore serve as a kind of limiting case for the argument that the market will serve us well in every sphere of life.”
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There’s a line of Emerson’s from ‘Self-Reliance,’ ” Hyde told me one day in his office, “where he says of Benjamin Franklin: ‘Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin? Every great man is a unique.’ Well, it’s crazy! There’s a long list of masters who taught Franklin! And yet the Emersonian song is the one that sticks in everyone’s head.”
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The point of all this is not to prove that Franklin wasn’t a genius but to show that his genius didn’t burst out of thin air. “It takes a capacious mind to play host to … others and to find new ways to combine what they have to offer,” Hyde writes, “but not a mind for whom there are no masters, not a ‘unique.’ Quite the opposite — this is a mind willing to be taught, willing to be inhabited, willing to labor in the cultural commons.”
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In other words, “Walden,” the premier document of American individualism, was in a sense born out of the generosity of the American prophet of self-reliance.
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WNYC - The Leonard Lopate Show: Please Explain: Jealousy (October 24, 2008)
@18:30: difference between jealousy and envy, envy is "[diadic &] so dark", "jealousy is [triadic & not]";
Tags: audio, psychology, emotion, jealousy, children, mental_health, shakespeare, morality, religion, linguistics on 2008-10-30 -All Annotations (1) -About
more fromwww.wnyc.org
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Dr. Maria Legerstee is Professor of Psychology at York University; Dr. Gordon Clanton is Sociology Professor at San Diego State University
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if:book: Greenblatt on human agency and New Historicism
Tags: fiction, literature, history, new_historicism, stephen_greenblatt, lit_crit, shakespeare on 2008-10-22 -All Annotations (5) -About
more fromwww.futureofthebook.org
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Greenblatt has the power of reading closely, even if he doesn't read closely in the same way his mentors did; he still reads with "the rigor and excitement of the old New Critics." Henderson added that this historical moment is an excellent time for criticism, since "attention to detail and method is very important with a glut of information."
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the importance of thinking inside a text, rather than removing the text from its context (as in New Criticism).
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referring to the difference between New Historicism (a term Greenblatt himself coined for examining a text within the framework of history, culture, and sociology) and Cultural Materialism, a term for a branch of literary criticism stemming from Marxism that looks at a text not as an object, but as a process that is both politicized and historigraphical.
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Henderson added that the great question, then, was how to use history to tell a story. At the moment that New Historicism emerged, it put the individual back into the system (as opposed to high theory and Cultural Materialism). It was about America in individual lives.
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As a scholar, Greenblatt advised, decide when you have to cut yourself off; later you may know more but won't end up saying much more. You have to know when to stop. He said he had to learn for himself and his students to be responsible, but not to be so obsessive or so frightened. You must shape around the idea that you have a story to tell, for yourself and your readers.
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Cultural Olympiad plans unveiled
A William Shakespeare festival and 12 new public works of art will form part of a 'Cultural Olympiad' planned for the run-up to the 2012 London games.
Tags: england, olympics, 2012, athletics, art, shakespeare on 2008-09-04 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromnews.bbc.co.uk
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Blake Morrison on the healing power of reading | Books | The Guardian
too damn long
Tags: reading, literature, mental_health, shakespeare, poetry on 2008-08-31 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.guardian.co.uk
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an attempt to see whether reading can alleviate pain or mental distress
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Crochet or bridge might serve equally well if it were merely a matter of being in a group
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"People who don't respond to conventional therapy, or don't have access to it, can externalise their feelings by engaging with a fictional character, or be stimulated by the rhythms of poetry."
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Plato said that the muses gave us the arts not for "mindless pleasure" but "as an aid to bringing our soul-circuit, when it has got out of tune, into order and harmony with itself"
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just as homeopathy is regarded with suspicion in conventional medicine, so bibliotherapy is bound to strike sceptics as a form of quack medicine. But considerable research has been carried out over the past 20 years which seeks to prove the healing capacity of the arts in general and literature in particular
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reading might be therapeutic in a variety of ways, not least in easing depression: "the pleasure of escape into a parallel world; the sense of control one has as a reader; and the ability to distance one's self from one's own circumstances by seeing them from without, suffered by someone else and gathered up into a nicely worked-out plot
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Is The Wire Too Cynical
Tags: tv, david_simon, the_wire, baltimore, poverty, shakespeare, public, education on 2008-08-28 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromdissentmagazine.org
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Anyone who’s worked or lived in America’s inner-city neighborhoods could recognize the reality of the show’s characters and the issues of crime, poverty, drugs, and family stress presented with a combination of sympathy and outrage. But the show’s version of reality was only partly right. The Wire reinforced white middle-class stereotypes of inner-city life. The show’s writers, producers, and directors portray most of the characters—clergy and cops, teachers and principals, reporters and editors, union members and leaders, politicians and city employees—as corrupt, cynical, and ineffective. Viewers may have thought they were seeing the whole picture, but the show’s unrelentingly bleak portrayal missed what’s hopeful in Baltimore and, indeed, in other major American cities. In that way, it did the opposite of what its creator, David Simon, said he wanted the show to do: spur our country to end the plight of the poor and minorities who live in America’s inner-cities.
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Baltimore passed the nation’s first living-wage ordinance in 1994. The current rate is $9.62. (Last year, about thirteen years after the campaign began, Maryland became the first state in the country to enact a state living-wage law.)
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“The Wire ignore[d] all the good work the faith community had done,” he complained.
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JUST AS the show found no room for grassroots heroes like Bell and Miles, so too it overlooked the efforts of other community groups involved in successful organizing efforts.
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offended by its bad language but also by its unrealistic depiction of the Baltimore he’s lived in his entire life. “It’s more negative than positive,” he observed. “The people on the show don’t have anything to live for. The young people have no vision. If you want change, you have to believe things can change.”
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Shakespeare was not wrong because he didn’t write about the good kings. Dante was not wrong because he wrote about hell. Simon’s characters are fascinating individuals who reflect a broad array of human emotions and conflicts. The workplaces, neighborhoods, language, and events portrayed in The Wire have the kind of verisimilitude that justifies the torrent of praise.
The problem is that The Wire won’t encourage America to care about change. Instead, Simon’s portrayal of Baltimore buttresses the myth that the poor, especially the black poor in the city’s ghettos, are drug dealers or users, eternally helpless victims, unable to engage in collective self-help and dependent on government largesse, or crime, to survive. Week in and week out, the stories were so relentlessly hopeless that Slate’s Jacob Weisberg felt buoyant because the show “is filled with characters who should quit but don’t, not only the boys themselves but teachers, cops, ex-cops, and ex-cons. . . . This refusal to give up in the face of defeat is the reality of ghetto life as well. Feel me: It’s what The Wire is all about.” -
Simon’s worldview is hardly radical. He generally views the poor as helpless victims rather than as people with the capacity to act on their own behalf to bring about change. He may think he’s the crusading journalist exposing injustice, but he’s really a cynic who takes pity on the poor, yet can’t imagine a world where things could be different.
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The Speech Progressives Have Been Waiting For? | The American Prospect
Tags: paul_waldman, progressive, democrat, convention, obama, shakespeare, history, government on 2008-08-27 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.prospect.org
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there's something else worth hoping for in Obama's speech, something that has been glimpsed only occasionally in his presidential campaign: a full-throated defense not just of his candidacy or of the vague ideas of change and progress but of progressivism as an ideology. And while he's at it, he could offer an attack not just on the actual failures of George W. Bush or the potential failures of John McCain but on the failure that is conservatism.
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What's so compelling about Obama's best speeches is that they make you feel as though you are actually a part of history. Older generations didn't doubt that they were: they or their loved ones fought in wars, they suffered through the Depression, and they generally felt as though the momentous events of their time were things everyone experienced together.
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what did the people who were actually in lower Manhattan on September 11 say? Over and over, they told journalists, "It was like something out of a movie." They could only relate it to their experience as spectators.
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Obama delivered a commencement address at Knox College in Illinois. The speech stands as one of the strongest affirmations of progressivism in recent history.
At Knox, Obama told the story of American history as an ongoing progressive triumph over conservatism.
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it's been government research and investment that made the railways possible and the internet possible. It's been the creation of a massive middle class, through decent wages and benefits and public schools that allowed us all to prosper. Our economic dependence depended on individual initiative. It depended on a belief in the free market; but it has also depended on our sense of mutual regard for each other, the idea that everybody has a stake in the country
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The Hangover That Lasts - New York Times
The more we have binged — and the younger we have started to binge — the more we experience significant, though often subtle, effects on the brain and cognition.
Tags: alcohol, brain, exercise, learning, new_year, personality, rehabilitation, shakespeare, year_end on 2008-04-14 and saved by4 people -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.nytimes.com
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after a longstanding abstinence following heavy binge-drinking, adult rats can learn effectively — but they cannot relearn.
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The rats without previous exposure to alcohol, after some brief circling, were able to find the new location. The former binge-drinking rats, however, were unable to find the new platform; they became confused and kept circling the site of the old platform.
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Even after longstanding sobriety this inflammatory response translates into a tendency to stay the course, a diminished capacity for relearning and maladaptive decision-making.Add Sticky Note
- W.posted by taryn930 on 2008-04-14
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binge drinking clearly damages the adolescent brain more than the adult brain. The forebrain — specifically the orbitofrontal cortex, which uses associative information to envision future outcomes — can be significantly damaged by binge drinking. Indeed, heavy drinking in early or middle adolescence, with this consequent cortical damage, can lead to diminished control over cravings for alcohol and to poor decision-making. One can easily fail to recognize the ultimate consequences of one’s actions.
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cingulate cortex in the human brain shows signs of neuroinflammation after repeated alcohol binges
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we are programmed as a species for accelerated learning in adolescence and young adulthood
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exercise has been shown to stimulate the regrowth and development of normal neural tissue in former alcohol-drinking mice. In fact, this neurogenesis was greater in the exercising former drinking mice than that induced by exercise in the control group that had never been exposed to alcohol.Add Sticky Note
- now this sounds like an elaborate ruse put in play by the fitness industry. i wonder who this guy works for...posted by taryn930 on 2007-12-30
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Writing as Performance - Revealing "the calculation that underlies the appearance of effortlessness"
Tags: lit_crit, new_historicism, shakespeare, stephen_greenblatt, writing, baseball on 2007-09-07 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.harvardmagazine.com
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After the speeches, I joined the line waiting to shake the president’s hand. When my turn came, a strange impulse came over me that I cannot adequately explain and certainly cannot justify. This was a moment when rumors of the Lewinsky affair were circulating, but before the whole thing had blown up into the grotesque national circus that it soon became. “Mr. President,” I said, sticking out my hand, “Don’t you think that Macbeth is a great play about an immensely ambitious man who feels compelled to do things that he knows are politically and morally disastrous?” Clinton looked at me for a moment, still holding my hand, and said, “I think Macbeth is a great play about someone whose immense ambition has an ethically inadequate object.”
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The president’s comment, fascinating as it is, does not in fact work as an overarching interpretive insight for Shakespeare; it belongs instead to a much later world, the world of Immanuel Kant or John Rawls, not the world of Machiavelli and Montaigne.
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serves to situate and greatly to intensify the phrases “by any means necessary” and “information vital for national security.” It enables me to stay entirely within the text of King Lear, patiently explicating its horrific representation of torture, and at the same time, without any explicit reference, to evoke that text’s uncanny relevance to the current national and world crisis.
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I do not at all think that everything one writes should have an immediate bearing on the present. On the contrary, one of the crucial achievements in a liberal education is the understanding of worlds far removed from our own. That understanding is never complete, any more than one can escape entirely from one’s own body or one’s own culture. But the ability to suspend the craving for immediate relevance and to project oneself at least part way into difference and otherness is an invaluable resource. But that projection depends not upon neutrality or indifference but rather upon carrying one’s passionate energies into an alien world. That is, you should write about the other as if your life depended on it. My indirect invocation of the current crisis—specifically, of the debate about the legitimacy of torture—is intended at least as much to illuminate King Lear as it is intended to bring Shakespeare’s wisdom to bear on our own dilemmas.
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Writing as Performance - Revealing "the calculation that underlies the appearance of effortlessness"
Tags: lit_crit, new_historicism, shakespeare, stephen_greenblatt, writing on 2007-09-07 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.harvardmagazine.com
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I was in fact trying to describe what was, to that point in my life, my most intense aesthetic experience. But I did not have the language for it; indeed, I did not know that I had had an aesthetic experience. If only I had had the German word for composure, Gelassenheit, I could have conveyed about Ted Williams what Gumbrecht calls the athlete’s “peculiar quietness,” his “capacity of letting be.” If only I had had Gumbrecht’s account of a beautiful play as “an epiphany of form,” “the sudden, surprising convergence of several athletes’ bodies in time and space”; if only I had had his observation that “at decisive moments in a competition, the flux of time seems to be suspended”; if only I had had his description of the way that rapt fans “immerse themselves in the realm of presence”; if I only had had at my command the words of the Olympic gold medalist Pablo Morales that Gumbrecht richly analyzes—“lost in focused intensity”
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The analysis has to enter—like a deus ex machina
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simple, humorous, and above all localized and concrete, in order to highlight the contrast with the largely abstract, theoretical terms that Gumbrecht employs.
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theoretical terms seem reasonably transparent and effective
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the allusion is (or hopes to be) at once sophisticated and self-mocking.
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you plunge the reader into a story that has already begun, and you create—or at least try to create—the desire to know more
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