Latest Posts by dclcq - Page 2
Janis Goodman（British）
Wild in the City 2012 Etching / Engraving on Paper 30 x 40cm via
You can’t ever be really free if you admire somebody too much.
Tove Jansson
I frequently hear the same yearning expressed in my consulting room – the wish for the world to disappear, for a cessation of any feelings, whether positive or negative, that intrude on the patient’s peace, alongside the painful awareness that the world’s demands are waiting on the way out. You feel burnout when you’ve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless. Life becomes something that won’t stop bothering you. Among its most frequent and oppressive symptoms is chronic indecision, as though all the possibilities and choices life confronts you with cancel each other out, leaving only an irritable stasis.
Josh Cohen
YAMAMOTO Keisuke（山本桂右 Japanese, b.1961）
1. Light Time Silence #30 2. Light Time Silence #31 3. Light Time Silence #32 Lithograph via more
I’m not so worried about the dangers of mental junk food. No, my worry is that you won’t put enough really excellent stuff into your brain. I’m talking about what you might call the “theory of maximum taste.” This theory is based on the idea that exposure to genius has the power to expand your consciousness. The theory of maximum taste says that each person’s mind is defined by its upper limit—the best that it habitually consumes and is capable of consuming. ... Our maximum taste shrinks. Have you ever noticed that 70 percent of the people you know are more boring at 30 than they were at 20? I’m worried about the future of your maximum taste. People in my and earlier generations, at least those lucky enough to get a college education, got some exposure to the classics, which lit a fire that gets rekindled every time we sit down to read something really excellent. I worry that it’s possible to grow up now not even aware that those upper registers of human feeling and thought exist.
David Brooks
Leave the dishes. Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor. Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster. Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup. Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins. Don’t even sew on a button. Let the wind have its way, then the earth that invades as dust and then the dead foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch. Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome. Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry who uses whose toothbrush or if anything matches, at all. Except one word to another. Or a thought. Pursue the authentic — decide first what is authentic, then go after it with all your heart. Your heart, that place you don’t even think of cleaning out. That closet stuffed with savage mementos. Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever, or weep over anything at all that breaks. Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life and talk to the dead who drift in though the screened windows, who collect patiently on the tops of food jars and books. Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything except what destroys the insulation between yourself and your experience or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters this ruse you call necessity.
Louise Erdrich, Original Fire: Advice To Myself
Wooded valley, probably Bolton Woods Lovers in a woodland clearing a pair, John Atkinson Grimshaw
What I really object to... is that there is a rhetoric out there of trying to convince people that they’re insufficient and that everything should be the private property of a small number of people for this reason when in fact, if it was really the case that those few people were so important, and great, and powerful, they wouldn’t need to have all this rhetoric to convince other people of it. People would just see it, they would get it. If there were really a few X-Men floating around, it would be manifest to everyone. In fact, those X-Men wouldn’t even need everyone else. They would do the Atlas Shrugged thing like go off, do whatever you want, and have no connection to the outside world. If you’re really that great, just do it, and stop bitching, and trying to convince everybody else that they’re inadequate, and stupid, and useless, and that you’re the elite. Fine. That doesn’t bother anyone if you want to go do that, but don’t take as private property all the stuff that was produced in this society that we created. Go off on your own with nothing into the forest and build this great Atlantis that you’re capable of doing, and that no one else can do. Great. Honestly, if there were a bunch of X-Men, they would do that. They wouldn’t bother with everyone else. They’d just go off into outer space and do their own thing. That’s not what’s actually going on. What’s actually going on is that there’s this elite of people who’s trying to use rhetoric to dominate others, and to take the collective work that others have done, and expropriate it to themselves. I think that’s nonsense.
Glen Weyl Radical Institutional Rerforms Podcast on 80,000 Hours
I am proposing something more like a founding myth for an aspect of the way our minds are set up. I am sitting in a coffee shop full of predators. They eat animal flesh, they have the binocular vision typical of animals that need to focus on and assess prey from afar, from a still vantage point. They manipulate one another expertly - they manipulate millions, organizing each other into tribes, cities, armies, nations. They use each other. They might have any of a thousand reasons for saying something, other than the truth. And yet, they are the most compassionate animals ever seen. One reason for an animal to evolve a capacity to think about other animals is in order to benefit from cooperation within a herd. There is (also) a very different reason evolution would favor a faculty for understanding other animals: to prey on them. If you want to hunt and eat other agents, it helps to be able to predict their behavior - so you model it. Humans are... an animal with these twin drives. The ability to receive signals from a member of the herd empathetically, and the ability to model the behavior of another agent predatorily. Being modeled explicitly as a system with inputs, outputs, and predictable behavior can creep people out. This contributes to the strong negative responses to attempts to learn social skills by building an explicit model of social interactions. Acting, not quickly and spontaneously, but slowly, deliberately, thinking about a problem for a long time before making a move. It seems like the sort of thing a person would do - not to someone they wanted to cooperate with - but someone they wanted to eat. It feels like having a single set of eyes, close together with binocular predator vision, silently watching you. A solo predator and a herd animal, inextricably connected together, in our more reflective moments not always sure we can trust ourselves even to be good to our friends, not sure we can trust others to be what they say they are, and yet, something in this unusual combination lets us fake it, lets us approximate what it might be, to be a mind that truly loves another.
Benjamin R. Hoffman ‘The Predator in the Herd’
So, back in April the Shakespeare Association of America conference offered morning “Shakespeare Yoga” sessions. This basically meant regular yoga with a Shakespeare-inspired soundtrack, but I thought it would be fun to codify some classic Shakespearean yoga poses.
Consulting pocket dramaturg: Kate Pitt, as usual.
If you can think of a Shakespeare equivalent for ‘chaturanga dandasana’, leave me a comment below. I’ve spent way too much time thinking about it.
“Estonians have decided to translate AI as 'kratt', after a mythological creature.
A kratt is a creature crafted by humans, brought to life with just a little help from the devil, and it can fulfil any task you give it. Now, if you're real smart - a kratt will make you rich and successful. It will do your work, and create for you the life you always dreamed of. But if you give it the wrong task - you're definitely fucked.”
Daddy never believed in closure. He said it was a false psychological concept. Something invented by therapists to assuage white Western guilt. In all his years of study and practice, he’d never heard a patient of color talk of needing “closure.” They needed revenge. They needed distance. Forgiveness and a good lawyer maybe, but never closure. He said people mistake suicide, murder, lap band surgery, interracial marriage, and overtipping for closure, when in reality what they’ve achieved is erasure. The problem with closure is that once you have a taste of it, you want it in every little aspect of your life. Especially when you’re bleeding to death, and your slave, who is in full rebellion, is screaming,... you attempt to stanch the bleeding with a waterlogged copy of Vibe magazine someone has left in the gutter. Kanye West has announced, “I am rap!” Jay-Z thinks he’s Picasso. And life is fucking fleeting.
Paul Beaty The Sellout
Power makes you lazy. While those in situations of power and privilege often feel it as a terrible burden of responsibility, in most ways, most of the time, power is all about what you don't have to worry about, what you don't have to know about, what you don't have to do.
David Graeber
![Leo Piron (Belgian, 1899-1962), Paysage Hivernal Avec Moulin [Winter Landscape With Windmill]. Canvas,](https://64.media.tumblr.com/ea2e196ccbb165206e46b303c084fc89/tumblr_nwurmsCJFx1u6x3h6o1_500.jpg)
Leo Piron (Belgian, 1899-1962), Paysage hivernal avec moulin [Winter landscape with windmill]. Canvas, 41 x 50 cm.
They failed, because as the blogger Epicurean Dealmaker pointed out on Twitter, “Markets distill the biases, opinions, & convictions of elites,” which makes them “Structurally less able to predict populist movements.” The inability of those elites to grapple with the rich world’s populist moment was in full display on social media last night. Journalists and academics seemed to feel that they had not made it sufficiently clear that people who oppose open borders are a bunch of racist rubes who couldn’t count to 20 with their shoes on, and hence will believe any daft thing they’re told. A lot of my professional colleagues seemed to, and the dominant tone framed this as a blow against the enlightened “us” and the beautiful world we are building, struck by a plague of morlocks who had crawled out of their hellish subterranean world to attack our impending utopia. Surrendering traditional powers and liberties to a distant state is a lot easier if you think of that state as run by “people like me,” not “strangers from another place,” and particularly if that surrender is done in the name of empowering “people who are like me” in our collective dealings with other, farther “strangers who aren’t.” These sorts of tribal affiliations cause problems, obviously, which is why elites were so eager to tamp them down. Unfortunately, they are also what glues polities together, and makes people willing to sacrifice for them. Elites missed this because they're the exception -- the one group that has a transnational identity.
Megan McArdle “'Citizens of the World'? Nice Thought, But ...”
Original shot was made with Pentax MG manual camera, kodak 400tx
Madonna Kolhbenschlag, in Kiss Sleeping Beauty Goodbye, however, pleased me very much when she explained that in the original version of the Frog Prince story, the frog was transformed not by a kiss but only when the princess acknowledged her disgust, picked him up, and threw him in the fire. I have seen more men changed, I think, when their wives stopped putting up with their chauvinism than through their acceptance of it. I have seen children change when their parents thought enough of them to demand that they act in keeping with their inner wisdom, or at least common sense. I think love, wise love, sometimes demands a transformative toss into the fire, rather than the reinforcement of beastliness or froggishness in people.
Carol S. Pearson
Braavo! Braavo! Kuula, Arkadi… just niiviisi peavad tänapäeva noormehed väljenduma! Ime oleks, kui teil jüngreid poleks! Varemalt tuli noormeestel mõndagi õppida, ei tahetud ju nõmedusega kuulsaks saada, tahes-tahtmata tehti tööd. Aga nüüd tarvitseb neil vaid öelda, et kõik maailmas on rämps, - ja asi kombes. Noortel hea meel. Ja tõepoolest - enne olid nad lihtsalt tobud, nüüd aga on neist järsku saanud nihilistid.
Ivan Turgenev “Isad ja pojad” (1862)