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The Epistemology of Elitism - PostClassic
Lists some of the virtues of music/art: innovation, craftsmanship, emotional truth, sensuousness, clarity, simplicity, intellectualism, memorability, physicality, theoretical rigor...
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So all these bloggers who reel on endlessly about the pop/classical problem, and how we have to protect classical music in a pop-oriented world: I simply will not partake. I believe in genres defined by specific, pin-pointable qualities, from reggae to heavy metal to totalism to postminimalism to impressionism to spectralism to to space-age bachelor pad music to bluegrass, but "classical" and "pop" are industry-created categories, economic categories, and they leave no traces for me in the music. Whether I'm listening to a song by Loudon Wainwright III or Brian Eno or Charles Ives or Sir William Walton, I want the relation of melody and accompaniment to words elegantly and creatively handled.
Notes From The Geek Show: Bukiet on Brooklyn Books
Hal Duncan discusses a review by Melvin Bukiet of the Brooklyn Books of Wonder - the current literary trend to use elements of the fantastic to avoid acknowledging suffering - and concludes that it's a silly objection.
The Valve - A Literary Organ | Moral Tourism
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The aesthetics-of-suffering issue is not uncommon (Holocaust literature seems the obvious example) and has certainly been analyzed and theorized--I’ve looked into this a little as part of preparation for teaching Elie Wiesel’s Night, for instance. There’s something a bit different about the recent wave of high-profile titles about the Middle East or the Arab or Islamic world, though, including Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, Mahbod Seraji’s Rooftops of Tehran, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Yasmina Khadra’s The Swallows of Kabul and The Attack, to name a very few--and that’s not even touching on the many non-fiction titles, from memoirs to histories to political analyses.
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And yet at the same time, fiction is not (quite) fact; anecdote, especially imagined anecdote, is not a reliable substitute for aggregate data and rigorous contextualization; impressions, however beautiful, are not analysis; and, finally, contemplation is not action, and actions must sometimes be reductive--nuance and complexity are, perhaps, luxuries permitted to those who need not make decisions. In Saturday, Ian McEwan actually makes a similar point about ambivalence, depicting it (or so I read the novel) as a luxury, even a self-indulgence, when decisive action is required; in the more theoretical realm, Geoffrey Harpham notes that “without action, ethics is condemned to dithering,” and perhaps novels feel ethically more satisfactory sometimes than real life precisely because they need not take a singular position. Ethical critics have often pointed to this “negative capability” as a strength of the novel form, but it is also a crucial aspect of its artifice.
While I was thinking these things I came across an phrase in an essay by K. Anthony Appiah that struck me as suggestive in this context. In the essay, “Cosmopolitan Reading,” Appiah is discussing Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions; he is thinking about the question of the novel’s implied audience, “the ‘you’ addressed in the first paragraph of the novel”:The usual answer, of course, is that the postcolonial African novel is addressed to a Western reader. Here, that is, according to the usual narrative, is a safari moment: an Africa constructed exactly for the moral tourist.
When Falls the Coliseum » Stone age memes: Google my codex
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As far as I’m concerned, bibliophilia is idol-worship, but I’ve been having a lot of fun with the book memes on the Internet. T
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A great many scholars are bibliophiles, but not me. While I love to read, I don’t actually care much about the medium. The thing we call a book, or codex, is a recent invention and before that people read books on long scrolls, or wrote them down on wax or clay tablets. Machine readable is just the latest medium to me, and I could care less about reading books on paper.
I’ve always thought everything should have an index, not just reference books. I like to think back on different ideas as I read and I’m not that happy searching through the paper thing for what I want.
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How to Save the World - Living in the Here and Now
When we are not living in the Now, our minds take us to one of four 'places': the past (where we recall stories of what happened, that we may feel guilt, nostalgia or regret about); the future (where we dream of an idyllic future, or worry about a catastrophic one); to judgements about ourselves (who we think we 'are' and should be, perhaps grandiosely or depressingly); or to judgements about others and the external environment (who/what we think they 'are' or should be, perhaps jealously, angrily or bitterly). When we are in these fictitious 'places' we are not ourselves. What we must do is learn to be aware of our lack of presence when we are in these other 'places', and how to bring ourselves back to the Now, so that we are continually 'starting over', beginning again and afresh, with none of the 'gunk' that is not us, being present Here and Now.
Emotional Cartography - Edited by Christian Nold
Emotional Cartography is a collection of essays from artists, designers, psychogeographers,
cultural researchers, futurologists and neuroscientists, brought together by Christian Nold, to
explore the political, social and cultural implications of visualising intimate biometric data and
emotional experiences using technology.
Joe Bageant: Abiders and leavers
Part of an ongoing series of letters about staying and leaving, abiding and going.
Joe Bageant: In firelight and in darkness
Part of ongoing series about abiding and leaving.
Joe Bageant: Spake the geezer to the stripling youth
This letter from a reader is in response to Joe's short essay "On Native Ground".
Joe Bageant: On Native Ground
essay on staying put where you grew up
OnTheCommons.org » No Time to Think
Digital media are overwhelming our consciousness and eclipsing our capacity for reflection.
OnFiction: “Characters for Life”: Why Carolyn See’s Advice for Developing Fictional Characters May Just Work
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In the past decade or so, empirical research in the psychology of creative writing is finding that it is often the case that writers do not go searching for characters to populate their fictional worlds; the characters come to them. As discussed in an earlier piece on this blog (August 12, 2008), the psychologist Marjorie Taylor and colleagues have found evidence that adult fiction writers experience what she calls the “illusion of independent agency,” in which writers experience their characters as “having their own thoughts, feelings, and actions” (Taylor, Hodges, & Kohányi, 2002/2003, p. 366). A whopping 92% of her sample of 50 experienced this phenomenon.
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Evolutionary biologist Robin Dunbar notes that when people are asked to write down the names of people whose death tomorrow would devastate them (called their “sympathy group”), the average lies between 11 and 12; similarly, when people must name persons whom they contact at least once a month, the number lies between 10 and 15 (Dunbar, 1996/2004, p. 76). He notes further, “It is striking that groups of this size are common in situations where very close co-ordination of behaviour is required: juries, the inner cabinets of many governments, the number of apostles, the size of most sports teams” (ibid), and “these groups are limited by the way in which you relate emotionally to people” (p. 77). Very close co-ordination of behavior of characters would seem also to be required for the writer creating and concatenating a series of discrete emotional episodes that will move the reader. Those 10-16 people on “the list” are likely the most, in their guise as characters, with whom the writer could maintain an intimate imaginary emotional life for a sustained period of time. Of course, not all characters would have to show up in every fictional narrative, but their presence in the imagination of the writer is likely limited by this range.
Scientists Know Better Than You--Even When They're Wrong: Scientific American
How do you distinguish the people who can and can't contribute to a specialized field?
The key to the whole thing is whether people have had access to the tacit knowledge of an esoteric area—tacit knowledge is know-how that you can't express in words.
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