“It would seem that fiction writing is trying to satisfy two needs that are at loggerheads: to tell and not tell.”
—Tim Parks, Where I’m Reading From; out of context the quote seems almost nonsensical, but in context it is brilliant. The book itself is brilliant too, and I may write a longer post covering it, if I can get past how much I have to say about it.
Art is filled with weird paradoxes and contradictions, which is one reason it’s so hard to talk meaningfully about it.
“I may think socializing is a way to waste time,” Zhang says. “Also, maybe I’m a little shy.” [. . .]
Seven days a week, he arrives at his office around eight or nine and stays until six or seven. The longest he has taken off from thinking is two weeks. Sometimes he wakes in the morning thinking of a math problem he had been considering when he fell asleep. Outside his office is a long corridor that he likes to walk up and down. Otherwise, he walks outside.
“What is the purpose of life” is a question everyone answers with their life.
The blockquote is from “The Pursuit of Beauty: Yitang Zhang solves a pure-math mystery,” and the article is itself beautiful and brilliant. Edward Frenkel gets name checked, and his book Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality could be profitably read in tandem.
Sometimes when I read articles about income distribution and fights over slicing up the massive economic pie I think of articles like “The Pursuit of Beauty.” What would a world in which people signaled less and did more look like? But the preceding sentence is itself signaling, so I’m part of the problem by saying so.
“‘Heroes are much better suited for the movies,’ Alan Ball said. ‘I’m more interested in real people. And real people are fucked up.'”
—Brett Martin, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad. The book is recommended.
P.S. A friend asked why I’m reading today of all days, and I replied that every day is a good day to read.
“In adult film, there is only one kind of nurse, but in real life, there are two, though they both come in the same range of shapes, sizes, and colors. The first remembers what it is like to be weak and frightened and tries to tell sick people the kinds of things they wish they had been told when they were weak and frightened. They make you realize that nursing is one of those professions that maybe some people were actually, biochemically, born to do. The second type have the malevolent, sated languor of tropical predators and have never won an argument with a grown-up in their entire lives and feel anodyne throbs of reptilian anticipation at the thought of finally being placed in a situation where they know slightly more than another person.”
Zak Smith, We Did Porn: Memoir and Drawing, which is more humane than expected but does not have linear narrative coherence. Whether the latter is a virtue or drawback I leave to readers. I lean towards “drawback.”
How could the quoted paragraph apply too to teachers?
“One day the whole world was going to look like Los Angeles, he decided, not a city, nor the absence of a city, just ruined countryside, with houses squeezed between highways which never tired of whispering the lie that it was more interesting to go somewhere than to be here. The entire westward drive of American history seemed to have piled up on the beach, and the descendants of wagon-crazed pioneers, refusing to accept completely the restraint of the world’s widest ocean, frantically patrolled the edge of the West, like lemmings in therapy.”
—Edward St. Aubyn, On the Edge, which is good but still only a lead up to Bad News.
As for Los Angeles in specific and the California temperament in general, “Refusing to accept restraint” is a good thing: it drives technology, progress, and the whole human enterprise. No wonder Silicon Valley is in Silicon Valley and not somewhere else, somewhere where restraints are accepted rather than challenged.
Unfortunately in many domains California is now quite willing to accept restraint, to the detriment of everyone.
“Their protest often reduces salvation to the idle contemplation of one’s own inner void; to them, even the merest search for a remedy is a form of complicity with the alienating situation. On the contrary, the only possible salvation demands an active and practical involvement with the situation. Man works, produces a world of objects, and inevitably alienates himself to them. But then he rids himself of his alienation by accepting those objects, by committing himself to them, and, instead of annihilating them, by negating them in the name of transformation, aware that at every transformation he will again find himself confronting the same dialectic situation. . .
If he chooses instead to withdraw into himself and to cultivate his own purity and spiritual independence, he will find not salvation but annihilation. He cannot transcend alienation by refusing to compromise himself in the objective situation that emerges out of his work.”
—Umberto Eco, The Open Work
The history of innovation is replete with stories of good ideas that occurred to people while they were out on a stroll. (A similar phenomenon occurs with long showers or soaks in a tub; in fact, the original ‘eureka’ moment—Archimedes hitting upon a way of measuring the volume of irregular shapes—occurred in a bathtub.) The shower or stroll removes you from the task-based focus of modern life—paying bills, answering e-mail, helping kids with homework—and deposits you in a more associative state. Given enough time, your mind will often stumble across some old connection that it had long overlooked, and you experience that delightful feeling of private serendipity: Why didn’t I think of that before.
—Steven Berlin Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From
One danger of cell phones might be the way they keep you immersed in “the task-based focus of modern life,” at least if you let them; Johnson wrote Where Good Ideas Come From in 2010, and at the time smartphones weren’t ubiquitous.
“Political power is very much like market power in that it permits the powerholder to indulge either his brutality or his flaccidity.”
—Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States
“The audience only has one way of expressing its interest—by watching. They might watch because they love you. They might watch because they hate you. They might watch because they’re sick. Doesn’t matter. Is that good or bad? The question doesn’t make any sense. Good is whatever the audience watches.”
—Christopher Beha, Arts & Entertainments, which is surprisingly taut and clever. The book is also a defense of privacy and an exploration of what the self might be.
One could write a surprisingly interesting comparison and contrast between Arts & Entertainments and F. H. Sandbach’s The Stoics.
A longer post will follow.
“‘What rules the world is ideas,’ Kristol once wrote, ‘because ideas define the way reality is perceived.'”
—Quoted in “Can the G.O.P. Be a Party of Ideas?” This is sort of true, but, alternately, idea producers and disseminators may want this to be true because it flatters them and raises their own status.
Kristol’s view is plausible but I remain unconvinced.
The Story's Story 