There Will Come a Soft Rain

Notes on things I've read and what I got out of them.
alexanderchee: What I think is interesting about the reaction to these is the assumption that Bush is creating some impossible perspective on the right. That he’s painting himself in the shower looking at himself. If you remove the impossible perspective idea, there’s every reason to believe the painting on the right is him painting another man in the shower with him, looking at himself. I love this alternative interpretation of the painting by 43. I think people are so quick to jump to the staring at himself in the shower hypothesis, is because that’s how they hope he is living after having done so much wrong in the world. In their view, 43 would be spending his post presidential years reflecting on what he has done, taking long contemplative walks, staring at himself in the shower wondering how it ended up so wrong. It is part of a narrative that fits in with their interpretation of his presidency. However, just as valid, is the idea that, without the constraints of media and politics, he can explore himself and the world, and perhaps return to his halcyon prep school days.

alexanderchee:

What I think is interesting about the reaction to these is the assumption that Bush is creating some impossible perspective on the right. That he’s painting himself in the shower looking at himself. If you remove the impossible perspective idea, there’s every reason to believe the painting on the right is him painting another man in the shower with him, looking at himself.

I love this alternative interpretation of the painting by 43. I think people are so quick to jump to the staring at himself in the shower hypothesis, is because that’s how they hope he is living after having done so much wrong in the world. In their view, 43 would be spending his post presidential years reflecting on what he has done, taking long contemplative walks, staring at himself in the shower wondering how it ended up so wrong. It is part of a narrative that fits in with their interpretation of his presidency. However, just as valid, is the idea that, without the constraints of media and politics, he can explore himself and the world, and perhaps return to his halcyon prep school days.

(Source: tomdefrance, via alexanderchee)

bookshelfporn:

Midtown Minimal Library

Photo by: T. G. Olcott

I love the idea of a back-lit bookshelf. It gives the books the luminosity they always have in my head. Like a celestial library. Maybe I should build Lucite backed bookshelves which have a secondary function as a light.

Courier Prime

y

A breakdown on the improvements made in Courier Prime, a rebooted version of the Courier typeface. I like the new “y” a lot better

A New Hampshire high school student reading an ancient Chinese poem and being moved-a theory of literature that cannot account for that commonplace miracle is worthless.

—Charles Simic

wehadfacesthen: The Three Kemmys, vaudeville performers, 1923, photo by Panajou Fres via vintagemarlene (digitalgallery.nypl.org) This photo is amazing. I want to learn everything there is to know about these three strangers, but according to internet searching, the world has recorded little of their exploits. A few mentions in a german paper or two is all I’ve found. Who are these mysterious vaudevillian gymnasts?

wehadfacesthen:

The Three Kemmys, vaudeville performers, 1923, photo by Panajou Fres

via vintagemarlene (digitalgallery.nypl.org)

This photo is amazing. I want to learn everything there is to know about these three strangers, but according to internet searching, the world has recorded little of their exploits. A few mentions in a german paper or two is all I’ve found. Who are these mysterious vaudevillian gymnasts?

Elisabeth and I were each one of 19 in a local election. Hooray democracy. elisabethdonnelly: Today I learned that my vote counted. Thumbs up to democracy!

Elisabeth and I were each one of 19 in a local election. Hooray democracy.

elisabethdonnelly:

Today I learned that my vote counted. Thumbs up to democracy!

W.G. Sebald’s Former Students Share His Writing Advice

nevver:

  • Read books that have nothing to do with literature.
  • Get off the main thoroughfares; you’ll see nothing there. For example, Kant’s Critique is a yawn but his incidental writings are fascinating.
  • There has to be a libidinous delight in finding things and stuffing them in your pockets.
  • You must get the servants to work for you. You mustn’t do all the work yourself. That is, you should ask other people for information, and steal ruthlessly from what they provide.
  • None of the things you make up will be as hair-raising as the things people tell you.
  • I can only encourage you to steal as much as you can. No one will ever notice. You should keep a notebook of tidbits, but don’t write down the attributions, and then after a couple of years you can come back to the notebook and treat the stuff as your own without guilt.
  • Don’t be afraid to bring in strange, eloquent quotations and graft them into your story. It enriches the prose. Quotations are like yeast or some ingredient one adds.
  • Look in older encyclopaedias. They have a different eye. They attempt to be complete and structured but in fact are completely random collected things that are supposed to represent our world.
  • It’s very good that you write through another text, a foil, so that you write out of it and make your work a palimpsest. You don’t have to declare it or tell where it’s from.
  • A tight structural form opens possibilities. Take a pattern, an established model or sub-genre, and write to it. In writing, limitation gives freedom.
  • If you look carefully you can find problems in all writers. And that should give you great hope. And the better you get at identifying these problems, the better you will be at avoiding them.

Django and the limits of appropriation

image

I have yet to see Django, and may wait until it comes out on video to catch it. I can’t really judge the film until I see it. I think it is terrible to critique art you have not experienced and does a disservice to the artist. So it may in fact be an excellent movie. However, I do have a fundamental problem with the film, which I think illuminates a much deeper problem with post-modern art and the limits of appropriation, which is: You can not take some groups tragedy and make it into your revenge fantasy. Some aspects of culture are not up for grabs. You can make films and write stories and create art about them, but there is an ethical obligation to the past to honor them. Iconoclasm only works if you build something to replace the smashed icons. Otherwise you just end up with a pile of rubble and have a few laughs. In a world where nothing is sacred nothing is profound.

I recognize the problems with this viewpoint. It limits art, limits exploration, limits peoples abilities to examine and recreate the world. It runs counted to the ethos of art and modernity. And yet, we have seen over the past ten years the problems of a limitless world. A world where everything is free. Artists who make their income of their art can no longer afford to be artists. Class structures become more stratified. The number of voice expands, but the number of voices one can hear becomes limit to the subset that can afford the larger microphones (which take time and money to build). A black director could not make Django, because they can’t get funding. No one will give them a microphone.