Alan Jacobs

[gallery] pleasecometotheshow:

From a note in the MoMA artist file of James Lee Byars, “This biographical statement was distributed for the Byar’s performance which took place in Nov. of 1967 for the opening of the “Made with Paper” exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts. The performance consisted of large stripes of water soluble paper being laid down on West 53rd St. (between 5th and 6th Ave; requiring the block to be closed off) in the form of a man. To conclude the performance two NYC sanitation trucks drove over the paper man turning it into foamy suds.” -ds

some images of the event here 

We have suffered a general loss of concepts, the loss of a moral and political vocabulary. We no longer use a spread-out substantial picture of the manifold virtues of man and society… . [W]hat we require is a renewed sense of the difficulty and complexity of the moral life and the opacity of persons. We need more concepts in terms of which to picture the substance of our being; it is through an enriching and deepening of concepts that moral progress takes place.

The individual fairy tale is not itself a myth, but it presupposes a mythic framework of surprise, dependence or vulnerability, the balancing of anxiety with expectation: a thumbnail sketch of human experience in a bewildering natural and emotional environment.

Perhaps the problem with specific fairy tales becoming our shared myths, in the sense Warner suggests, is that they turn so easily these days into dramas of the individual psyche with supernatural special effects: either leaving us in a world of paralysing moral ambiguity or (in the Disneyfied version) offering salvation through the discovery of unsuspected inner resources (we can all be what we most want to be). Against this, both the original fairy tales and the chaotic romance of the Arabic wonder stories present a world of sharper edges, larger shocks, and possibilities of unmerited help, as well as danger, from outside. And that, in one form or another, may turn out to be more like the mythology we really need.

[gallery] wesleyhill:

Sr. Grace Remington, OCSO, “Mary and Eve” (2005) (h/t Elizabeth Scalia)

So I’m fine with AI, because I don’t believe in it in the usual way it is interpreted, as machine consciousness. I don’t think that will happen, because brains and machines are very different things, and will end up always doing different things. The tendency to regard the brain as a machine should be easy to dodge by considering how we have successively considered it as a clock, a steam engine, a hologram, and now a computer; none of them are good analogies, not even our current favorites.

So “artificial intelligence” really will come down to machine algorithms designed for human uses, and when we understand AI as that, we can begin to think about the algorithms and the uses, without getting into anything more metaphysical or fantastical. We will certain project personalities onto machines, we already do that, but it is a projection and we have to keep that in mind.

In my free time, I enjoy making things with rocks, doing patio jigsaw patterns in quartzite around my house (I have one patio where three stones that made an excellent map of California are in the middle of the patio, and have rays of rock extending out from it; and another that is a kind of rock whirlpool around a Japanese maple); I also am stacking and re-stacking a drywall lake front at my wife’s family place in Maine, made of glacial cobble so that every winter the bad work I do slumps back into the lake, while the good work holds longer.

All this rock work, I realized, is like doing novels that I can actually see, which is why they give me such pleasure. My conclusion is that everyone should make things for the fun of it.

[gallery] architectural-review:

Edward Crooks: The Theatre of Progress

See the full project on the AR’s revolutionary new digital magazine at www.architectural-review.com/educationissue

Teenagers can feel religious longings just as powerfully as they do romantic ones. There is nothing sinister in teens talking in the language of faith. Quite likely Koenig once had similar thoughts—about personal integrity, moral seriousness, responsibility in relationships—just in more abstract and secular (and I would say, less exact) terms.

It’s hard to remember just how hysterical our teenage selves could sound. I realized this a few years back when I stumbled upon an old diary in which I talked about, yes, my faith and relationships. I hardly recognized the voice in those pages, but I also didn’t want to dismiss it. There was something in the passion of my teenage self that I needed to relearn.

Adnan may well be a murderer (the series leaves this fact unresolved). Whether or not he is, there is nothing murderous in his expression of the universal tension between old loyalties and new loves. Serial’s suggestion that talk of sin and the devil might be homicidal is pure prejudice.

There can be no doubt that all the great errors which have overtaken the preaching and theology of the community in the course of its history have had their true origin, not so much in the studies of the well-known errorists and heretics who have merely blabbed them out, but rather in the secret inattention and neglect, the private drowsing and wandering and erring, of innumerable nameless Christians who were not prepared to regard the listening of the community to the Word as their own concern, who wanted privacy in their thinking, and who thus created the atmosphere in which heresy and error became possible and even inevitable in the community. Conversely, there can be no doubt that the revivals and quickenings continually granted to the preaching and theology of the community have had their basis, not so much in the bearers of the great names which have come down to us in Church history as representatives of these movements, but effectively, if secretly, in the community from which they sprang, by which they were surrounded and as the mouthpiece of which they spoke, and therefore again in the innumerable nameless Christians for whom the question of correct doctrine was a burning one which they tried to address to the right quarter, and who then quietly if inarticulately found and espoused the relevant new and better answers until someone was found to bring them to expression.

Is it true, this talk of a loving and good God, who is more than one of the friendly idols whose rise is so easy to account for, and whose dominion is so brief? What the people want to find out and thoroughly understand is, Is it true?