Okay, I haven't been very active on the blog the past few days because I'm on vacation - hopefully, an artistic vacation, during which I will actually paint something. To motivate me to paint that something, I commit to you, readers, that I will have some art product, however sketchy, to post in the next few days. If I do not, mock me mercilessly in the comment section. I have so far framed two pieces for a local group show I'm doing in a few weeks, and that's a good start, right?
I also plan to plow through the giant pile of blog fodder which is slowly devouring my computer desk - news clippings, postcards, dog-eared books, etc. I got a start yesterday by reorganizing my blogroll, deleting some nonfunctional links and sorting it by category, which should help to make it more useful to you. I'll be adding a few more links over the next few days as I sync it with my RSS feeds.
In the meantime, I leave you with this teasing-yet-serious editorial by David Brooks, from the August 7 NYT:
All my life I've been a successful pseudo-intellectual, sprinkling quotations from Kafka, Epictetus and Derrida into my conversations, impressing dates and making my friends feel mentally inferior. But over the last few years, it's stopped working. People just look at me blankly. My artificially inflated self-esteem is on the wane. What happened?
--Existential in Exeter
David Brooks' answer? The iPhone, natch! And it's true - I no longer have to make conversation at cocktail parties, I just pass my iPhone around. I did it on Friday at Happy Hour. Let's be honest, people would rather play Crash Bandicoot and look at satellite maps than talk stuffily about culture. Is that a good thing, or a bad thing? Discuss amongst yourselves! Meanwhile, I'll be over here in the corner battling artists' block. . .
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I sometimes wonder (and Harper's had a recent article about this) if we've gotten a little lax because we know that if we really wanted to know, we'd Google it. So why not play Crash Bandicoot and get that immediate gratification? If someone asks for a quote, it's just a few clicks away.
I don't know if it's good or bad. I'm reminded of a botany class where they discussed root systems. Some plants have big honking tap roots that go way down to tap into water. Others have lots of shallow roots that spread way out but don't go very deep. Both are good strategies, depending on the weather.
BTW, I love the content of this blog. The interface of science/culture/art is so darn interesting and relevant. Anything that bridges the gap is good stuff indeed.
David Brooks, eh? There's basically two kinds of people in the world -- David Brooks, and people worth paying attention to.
Romare Beardon once said that an artist has to be like a whale swimming with his mouth open until he finds what he needs. David Brooks is the plastic bottle of esthetic plankton.
My advice: Screw David Brooks, and screw his hideous intellectual strawman. Remember what turned you on when you were six years old. Paint that.
Brooks is a sick-fuck right-wing wackaloon asshole. And he writes like total fucking shit.
I thought the Brooks column was funny, but regardless, NO, CLEANING YOUR ROOM is not art, young lady. It is one of the cleverer temptations -- 'I should do something worthy and then I will be in a better place to do art.' You should smell brimstone (or possibly Lemon Pledge). No. You will be allowed to clean for a little while if you put at least three or four times that long into making something.
I have no objections to crocheted reef creatures (cf. gooseflesh at bloglines.com)or refrigerator poetry. But nothing of which the main result is tidiness. It's nice, but you don't have time for that.
I am busy putting off doing a freehand embroidered teacosy and I know a lot about temporizing.
How interesting to elicit such vehement reactions to David Brooks! I don't read him routinely, but I didn't find anything objectionable about this column. I thought it was funny. It's perhaps slightly bitter when it ought to be indulgent, but this doesn't bother me. In my experience, people who are genuinely interesting and have interesting ideas to discuss are very easily sifted out from faux intellectual posers. And if Brooks really can't tell/won't admit the difference between the two groups, I'm sad for him, not angry. His cocktail parties must be boring.
LauraJ: thanks for your concern, but I'm not cleaning my apartment, I'm decleaning it - spreading out my piles of ideas and covering every surface with crafty stuff. I did go buy light bulbs, and paid my bills, but that was just so I would have light to paint by. :)
Oh, and LindaCO - thanks for the compliment! We had a big discussion about that Atlantic article earlier, and I tend to agree with you. I also really like the taproot/shallow root analogy! It makes it clear that there is nothing "wrong" with either strategy - each is adaptive under certain circumstances. But if we are indeed shifting from a taproot model of learning to a more shallow model, it will have implications for our culture.
Brooks is a despicable war-enabling right-wing tool of the corporate oligarchy. Everything he says is in service to his corporatist masters. If it sounds on some particular occasion like he is making sense, you can rest assured that it is only because it happens to be furthering his sick-fuck right-wing ends. Brooks is a fucking liar, and his "failing to understand the difference" schtick is just another one of his lies.
Brooks was one of the deranged wackaloon assholes who predicted that Iraqis would greet us as "liberators" when we invaded and occupied Iraq. He is basically always wrong about everything in the world that is constrained by objective reality. After it became clear that he was as wrong as it was possible to be about Iraq, he "tempered his views"--i.e., engaged in a specific plan to try to create cover for himself and his pre-war deranged drum-beating.
Hey Jess -- hope you have a great vacation and produce art to satisfy your viscera. I know I would love to see some more of your work.