No deus ex machina waits in the wings; no man behind the curtain. We have no Maxwell’s demon to help us filter and search. “We want the Demon, you see,” wrote Stanislaw Lem, “to extract from the dance of atoms only information that is genuine, like mathematical theorems, fashion magazines, blueprints, historical chronicles, or a recipe for ion crumpets, or how to clean and iron a suit of asbestos, and poetry too, and scientific advice, and almanacs, and calendars, and secret documents, and everything that ever appeared in any newspaper in the Universe, and telephone books of the future.” As ever, it is the choice that informs us (in the original sense of that word). Selecting the genuine takes work; then forgetting takes even more work. This is the curse of omniscience: the answer to any question may arrive at the fingertips — via Google or Wikipedia or IMDb or YouTube or Epicurious or the National DNA Database or any of their natural heirs and successors — and still we wonder what we know.
Fables de Florian, on Bibliodyssey
Partly, I use [the word beauty] politically because it’s a taboo word for architects – it makes them twitchy, and I quite enjoy that. I think they are unfairly nervous about it, but it eases right in with what ordinary people look for from architecture, and it’s a nicely homespun word that hits the target. I’m also attracted to the way it’s used particularly in Christian aesthetics, and the concept that beauty is a moral entity, but far from being a superficial luxury, is connected to goodness. Generally, that it is the material manifestation of goodness, so that a beautiful object, house, painting displays many of the same qualities you find in goodness in other areas, in other things.That seems really important and it can hit back against the postmodern idea that we don’t know what is beautiful, because people are much more able to say that we know what’s good than what’s beautiful. There’s a broad agreement about what is good: human rights, fairness, justice, community, friendship. Our society is chemically ill yet we disagree about beauty or aesthetics. So, connecting up aesthetics with beauty and then beauty with goodness seems a way out of a kind of postmodern morass, where essentially the free market ends up deciding and then you get horrific skylines, cities and developments.
The disaster unfolded slowly. The professors and students were diplomatic, but a pall of boredom fell over the seminar table when my work was under discussion. I could see everyone struggling to care. And then, trying feverishly to write something that would engage people, I got worse. First my writing became overthought, and then it went rank with the odor of desperation. It got to the point that every chapter, short story, every essay was trash.I could not imagine why; conditions were ideal. It took me a long time to realize that the utter domination of my consciousness by the desire to write well was itself the problem. Monomania, a 19th-century malady to which my 21st-century immune system had developed no defenses, had crept into my soul, like gout into a poet’s foot, and spoiled it by degrees.
When good writing was my only goal, I made the quality of my work the measure of my worth. For this reason, I wasn’t able to read my own writing well. I couldn’t tell whether something I had just written was good or bad, because I needed it to be good in order to feel sane. I lost the ability to cheerfully interrogate how much I liked what I had written, to see what was actually on the page rather than what I wanted to see or what I feared to see.
In this work, when it shall be found that much is omitted, let it not be forgotten that much likewise is performed; and though no book was ever spared out of tenderness to the authour, and the world is little solicitous to know whence proceeded the faults of that which it condemns; yet it may gratify curiosity to inform it, that the English Dictionary was written with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academick bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow: and it may repress the triumph of malignant criticism to observe, that if our language is not here fully displayed, I have only failed in an attempt which no human powers have hitherto completed. If the lexicons of ancient tongues, now immutably fixed, and comprised in a few volumes, be yet, after the toil of successive ages, inadequate and delusive; if the aggregated knowledge, and co-operating diligence of the Italian academicians, did not secure them from the censure of Beni; if the embodied criticks of France, when fifty years had been spent upon their work, were obliged to change its oeconomy, and give their second edition another form, I may surely be contented without the praise of perfection, which, if I could obtain, in this gloom of solitude, what would it avail me? I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please, have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.
We saw the Coronation on television. I thought it needed work and should have been fixed up in New Haven. They ought to have cut at least half an hour out of it and brought on the girls in the spot where the Archbishop did the extract from the Gospel.
Not the right place for it, but too good not to post somewhere - Red Plenty recreated by the fabulous Pulp-o-Mizer.
Red Plenty is an amazing book. BUY IT.
What I lack that the poets and novelists have, the really good ones, is not finally sight or insight, talent or memory—things you’re either born with or you’re not. What I lack is courage: the fortitude to look things in the face and tell the hardest truths—about yourself, about life. Think of Joan Didion, sending her dispatches from the shores of death. “The mind is full of what it doesn’t want to know,” wrote the critic Michael Wood in an essay on a book about Proust. For most of us, our psychic equilibrium depends on not letting in the kinds of recognitions that the writers make a dreadful daily business of pursuing.I cannot blame myself for not having talent, but courage is another matter. We like to throw around the word “heroes” these days, almost always in connection with people in uniform. But putting your body at risk, in the company of comrades, for a cause you believe in, is something very different from risking your soul, alone in your mind, by daring to discover things about yourself that cannot be forgotten or forgiven. Yet what a gift to others, if you make it back intact. The people who do that—those are my heroes.
Window-washers dress as superheroes as they work at a children’s hospital