November 2011
36 posts
“The greatest symbol of what writing is about is the full text version of the Oxford English Dictionary. The CD-ROM version is nice, but the physical enormity of the printed text gives a writer a sense of humility (if that is still possible), because the mountain to be scaled is the language. Auden used to sit on the first volume while at the dinner table, the better to stay even with language and with dinner. Any good teacher I’ve ever had—and the best was John McPhee—stressed the enormity of choice English provides, its capacity for clarity and ambiguity, dullness and thrill. It is the greatest invention ever devised (and re-devised). And, of course, the only way to get anywhere as a writer is to have read ceaselessly and then read some more. Pound (that rat) says somewhere that it is incredible to him that so many “poets” simply pick up a pen and start writing verse and call it poetry, while a would-be pianist knows full well how necessary it is to master scales and thousands of exercises before making music worthy of the name. Playing scales, for a writer, means reading. Is there any real writing that has no reading behind it? I don’t think so.”
—DAVID REMNICK
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People pay to see others believe in themselves.
” —Kim Gordon (via magnificentruin)
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“It’s worth returning, for a moment, to the idea of trending topics algorithms, which reward discrete events over ongoing movements, favoring spikes over steadiness, effectively punishing trends that build, gradually, over time. (Which is to say: effectively punishing the notion of a “movement” itself.)”
—Image as interest: How the Pepper Spray Cop could change the trajectory of Occupy Wall Street
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
—Kurt Vonnegut
“I think some artists don’t get the best out of Twitter or other social media because they mostly write about their own work. I talk about everything – art and science, sure, but also football, music, politics, kids, cats, whatever. If you think of it as a great free-flowing conversation that you can jump into any time, and you both listen and respond, then it’s amazing. If you just talk about yourself, then you’re that guy at the party that just talks about himself, and you’re not going to be very popular.”
—The single best piece of advice on how artists can make the most of Twitter, courtesy of artist Michele Banks in an interview on Scientific American. Her biological watercolors are a gem.
“Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science — by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans — teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us.”
—Carl Sagan on science vs. certainty in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (via)
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High school and college students may be ‘digital natives,’ but they’re wretched at searching… In 1955, we wondered why Johnny can’t read. Today the question is, why can’t Johnny search?
Who’s to blame? Not the students. If they’re naive at Googling, it’s because the ability to judge information is almost never taught in school. Under 2001’s No Child Left Behind Act, elementary and high schools focus on prepping their pupils for reading and math exams. And by the time kids get to college, professors assume they already have this skill. The buck stops nowhere. This situation is surpassingly ironic, because not only is intelligent search a key to everyday problem-solving, it also offers a golden opportunity to train kids in critical thinking.
” —Clive Thompson on why kids can’t search and the importance of educating against the filter bubble
“[Mad Men] is nothing more than a soap opera set in a glamorous office where stylish fools hump their appreciative, coiffured secretaries, suck up martinis and smoke themselves to death as they produce dumb, lifeless advertising – oblivious to the inspiring civil rights movement, the burgeoning women’s lib movement, the evil Vietnam war and other seismic events of the turbulent, roller-coaster 1960s that altered America forever. The heroic movers and shakers of the Creative Revolution…bear no resemblance to the cast of characters on Mad Men. The more I think and write about Mad Men, the more I take the show as a personal insult. So f*ck you, Mad Men, you phony gray-flannel-suit, male-chauvinist, no-talent, WASP, white-shirted, racist, anti-Semitic Republican SOBs!”
—Iconic real-life ad man and professional curmudgeon George Lois closes his keynote at the DesignThinkers conference with a rant originally published in Playboy (via)
The medieval adumbration of science fiction.
Susan Carter, in Willing Shape-Shifters:
Fairy tales adumbrate science fiction in their provision of an alternate venue in which earthly issues might be creatively examined, if not resolved. The fact that fairyland is a space where the female is no more sexually restrained than the male shows medieval interest in this possibility.
