Alan Jacobs

So why am I recommending the word [naches] to my gentile brethren? Because we’re all Jews now, in that respect. There are no hereditary places anymore. Meritocracy decrees that everybody must achieve, achieve, achieve. Status derives from the college you attend and the other institutions to which you are able to attach yourself, then later, the ones your children do. (When I got a job at Yale, my father practically printed up cards to hand out at shul.) Naches-mongering is what they do in Greenwich now, as well, and on Park Avenue and Beacon Hill, not to mention every upscale neighborhood or suburb in the country, the West, the world.

I asked a couple of East Asian friends whether there is an analogous word in Chinese or Korean. They both said no; the operative concept there is filial piety, a bedrock Confucian virtue. We speculated about this. Filial piety is certainly a value in Jewish culture—it’s the Fifth Commandment, after all—and the notion of parental pride, my Korean friend remarked, is “almost too deep a concept to even be reflected in language,” and yet there is that difference in relative emphasis. It seems to come down to anxiety. East Asian parents do not typically worry that the child will fail to do his duty. But naches is forever shadowed by the fear of its absence. Filial rebellion and parental disappointment are major themes in the Jewish imagination, often figured (think of the Golden Calf) through the vexed relationship between the Children of Israel and God Our Father. These kids—such tzuris!

Wealthy musician Amanda Palmer, who last year raised $1.2 million on Kickstarter to produce and release a record, recently used a TED talk to expand on the idea that artists should be willing to work for free. After relaying a story about how she used to be a street performer, Palmer, who is married to a very successful author named Neil Gaiman, told an audience of people who’d paid $7,500 apiece to be there that musicians shouldn’t “make” people pay for their work, but rather “let” people pay for their work. She also explained that she found it virtuous when a family of undocumented immigrants huddled together on their couch for a night so that she and her band could have their beds, because her music and presence was a fair exchange for the family’s comfort. After about 13 minutes of explaining why she is content with people giving her things, Palmer received a standing ovation.

newhousebooks:

Lights on for safety. From Seven Is Magic, 1969

philamuseum:

Great and Mighty Artist of the Day:

Bruno Del Favero

Born Princeton, Michigan, 1910; died Greenwich, Conneticut, 1995

Bruno Del Favero moved from Michigan to northern Italy with his parents at age five, returning in 1928 and settling in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he married and remained for the rest of his days. He made his living as a mason, chauffeur, and landscape gardener. It is not known exactly when or why he began to paint his delicate and mysterious landscapes, but he was exhibiting in local art shows by the early 1970s and took himself seriously enough as an artist to join the Greenwich Art Society. He maintained a studio in the basement of his home, but never shared his art with his wife and five children. After the artist’s death his family introduced his work to New York dealers Shari Cavin and Randall Morris in the late 1990s. Del Favero’s first one-man show outside Greenwich was held at the Cavin-Morris Gallery in 1998.

See his work in Great and Mighty Things: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection, open now through June 9 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

preciseandtowering:

allthingseurope:

The Dark Hedges, Northern Ireland (by  Maximilian Pilz)

[vimeo 57525543 w=250 h=141]

The future of bookstores

Another comment from the same thread:

Mike, thanks for the thoughtful reply! I continue to think, contra mundum, that both Nathan and Nick are making valuable points, but I don’t think Nick makes his case best by appealing to an ultimately unsustainable distinction between the mediated and the unmediated. And I think that the mediations of the sensorium are relevant because they can be altered, either for the better by practice or for the worse by neglect.

So what I’m pressing for is an enhanced vocabulary of both description and practices that would allow us to discriminate among the various mediations possible to us, not as a way of saying that it doesn’t matter whether we’re online or offline, but to say that those categories are just too crude.

You write, “I suppose I must grant that ‘it is at least possible’ that some technologies might help win that struggle, but I’m having a hard time imagining which those might be.” Well, consider the arts, all or almost all of which are technologically enabled. (A capella singing might be an exception, depending on how you define “technology.”) I’ve taken a lot of photographs over the years of the natural world, and I think the disciplines of composition, establishment of depth-of-field, and choices of coloration (in the old days achieved primarily by choice of film) have helped me to see that world better. The photographs and paintings of others have done the same. It’s possible that someone’s experience of seeing the Grand Canyon could be enhanced by listening to Ferde Grofé’s “Grand Canyon Suite.” I have walked a good deal in the Lake District of England, and I believe that the beautifully illustrated and hand-lettered guidebooks of A. Wainwright have greatly improved my ability to see and appreciate that landscape.

None of this erases the distinction between the human-made world and the world we did not and cannot make; but it does I think show that we don’t wisely pursue an encounter with what I would call Creation by seeking to remove or avoid mediation. To repeat myself, what we need instead are far better ways of describing the manifold varieties of mediation and better accounts of the practices of mediation.

Here’s part of one of my comments on a debate between Nathan Jurgenson and Nick Carr, here:

I would say that all our experience is indeed mediated, but mediated in a wide range of ways. Perception itself, neural activity itself, is a mediating activity. I often think of this passage from Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

Peeping through my keyhole I see within the range of only about thirty percent of the light that comes from the sun; the rest is infrared and some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to many animals, but invisible to me. A nightmare network of ganglia, charged and firing without my knowledge, cuts and splices what I do see, editing it for my brain. Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: “This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.”

So we really don’t have a choice between mediated and unmediated experience. The choices are always among various forms of mediation. I don’t think Heidegger fully realized this, which is why he could speak of writing with a pen as something you do with your hand but typewriting as something alienated from the hand — never acknowledging that we type with our hands too.

Now, if someone wants to argue that the mediation of the pen involves our body in more intimate ways than the mediation of the typewriter, in that (for instance) in writing with a pen we shape the individual letters instead of just striking keys with a uniform motion, I’m ready to listen — as long as it’s okay to point out that writing with my finger on an iPad screen is more intimate still!

Analogically, consider Walker Percy’s great essay “The Loss of the Creature,” in which he points out that our cultural formation makes it impossible for anyone actually to see the Grand Canyon: only some immense dislocation of our expectations can make is truly visible to us. It is at least possible that some technological mediations could help us achieve that valuable dislocation.

In short, we need fewer binary distinctions and more attention to the detailed phenomenology of particular technologies and their interactions with the mediating powers of our perceptual apparatus.

Nobody loves snow as much as Malcolm loves snow.

It is surely no accident that the idea of sincerity, of the own self and the difficulty of knowing and showing it, should have arisen to vex men’s minds in the epoch that saw the sudden efflorescence of the theatre. A well-known contemporary work of sociology bears the title, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life — we can suppose that the Hamlet of our day says: ‘I have that within which passeth presentation.’ In this enterprise of presenting the self, of putting ourselves on the social stage, sincerity itself plays a curiously compromised part. Society requires of us that we present ourselves as being sincere, and the most efficacious way of satisfying this demand is to see to it that we really are sincere, that we actually are what we want our community to know we are. In short, we play the role of being ourselves, we cincerely act the part of the sincere person, with the result that a judgment may be passed upon our sincerity that it is not authentic.