Quotes #9: Art

"A painting has to be the experience, instead of pointing to it. I want to have and to give access to feeling. That is the riskiest and only important way to connect art to the world - to make it alive."
David Salle in a letter to Janet Malcolm in her article and book Forty-One False Starts

"I can remember, for instance, waiting for a performance by Toscanini of the Eroica, say, and not being able to stop trembling while waiting for it, I mean trembling with nervous excitement, with pleasure, with what I think can only be described as a kind of sexual pleasure, though it's not directly that. And if you're interested in having experiences which will last you for a lifetime in the arts, you've got to do your damnedest to find your way to that kind of experience. How you do it I do not know."
Marvin Mudrick, Mudrick Transcribed, as quoted in James Wolcott's Critical Mass

Quotes #8: Humour(lessness)

But then, the defining characteristic of self-styled “voices of the people” is their total and utter humourlessness, which has its roots in a terror of being undermined.
Marina Hyde in the Guardian, writing about lowest-common-denominator populism

During the civil war people complained about Lincoln's funny stories. Perhaps he sensed that strict seriousness was far more dangerous than any joke.
Ravelstein, Saul Bellow

Quotes #7: the volume of liberal humanism

“I’ve always said to my kids, the hardest thing to listen to – your instincts, your human personal intuition – always whispers; it never shouts. Very hard to hear.”

Steven Spielberg as interviewed by Tom Shone for the Guardian

What do people do all day? #2

 “Rather than make friends, then go off down to the soda fountain or go to where the kids would hang out, I would just go home and write my scripts and cut my films. I was pretty much isolated, but I had a hobby that I was obsessed by. I would come home from school and I would not go to friends’ houses to play. I would go to my bedroom and I would sit with my little editing machine.”

Steven Spielberg as interviewed by Tom Shone for the Guardian

Quotes #6: Life

"One day, toward the end of a conversation I was having with the painter David Salle in his studio, on White Street, he looked at me and said, "Has this ever happened to you? Have you ever thought that your real life hasn't begun yet?"
"I think I know what you mean."
"You know - soon. Soon you'll start your real life."
Forty-One False Starts, Janet Malcolm

"Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans."
Cartoonist Allen Saunders

"This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time."
Fight Club

A new existentialism

Images returned to Earth by the Saturn probe Cassini have been reminding people, before they scroll on to the next tweet, how amazing our universe is.

#SaturnSaturday ICYMI: Saturn's shadow on the rings shortens as its season reaches northern summer. https://t.co/IhOz9Mcj5V pic.twitter.com/xl9EbT76kV

— CassiniSaturn (@CassiniSaturn) May 20, 2017

Saturn amazes us because of its beautiful rings, its size relative to us and its distance from us. But Saturn isn't even all that special: there are billions upon billions of other planets out there. It's the infrequency with which we think about Saturn, and the universe in general, that makes it amazing to us.

Things we encounter every day don't amaze us. Apples, for example, don't amaze us. Why? Their colours are beautiful, their shapes pleasing, their structure in some respects more interesting than a planet's, and their origins and functions certainly so.

Apples don't amaze us because we encounter them all the time: they "grow on trees" as the English phrase for something common and largely worthless goes. "Familiarity breeds contempt", as another saying puts it.

Fruits' sizes are less worthy of note to us, but that's only because fruits co-evolved with the animals that ate them (and thereby helped to spread their seeds): to something the size of a bacterium, an apple is as vast and unfathomable as Saturn is for us. An electron micrograph of an apple's surface is every bit as contoured, ridged and fascinating as a satellite image of a planet's surface:

JohnWolfPup.com

For further inspiration, I've written before about how Tom Walker's Still Life With Exploding Glass takes a collection of familiar still-life objects, including an apple, and transforms them into something celestial:

Mall Galleries

My point of course has nothing to do with apples. It's that the existence of anything at all is amazing, but we forget because we're too busy trying to pay rent, get laid and stuff experiences into our mouths and eyes.

Well, we're in need of an ideology powerful and convincing enough to stop us trashing the planet, killing each other and ourselves, and going crazy with boredom once we've covered our basic needs to feed and fuck. Maybe wide-eyed awe at sheer existence would be a good one?

A hierarchy of ideologies

I wrote previously about how I think developing a hierarchy of ideologies could help me decide what to do with my life. Here's a first effort at such a hierarchy:

Fundamental:

• If you really want it, go for it
• Do what's best for the environment
• Be excellent to each other

If they don't help:

• If you haven't tried it before, try it
• Do what would be most interesting

If still undecided:

• Do whatever, but do something
• Do whatever's cheapest

Hmm. I don't feel very inspired or empowered. Should I go for that promotion to a better paid, less fun job or stick with my current job, for example? 

None of the top three ideologies helps here. Of the second tier ideologies, the first suggests I should go for the job, but I suspect my current job is more interesting, which puts the second ideology in opposition with the first.

Both of the third-tier ideologies imply I should go for the promotion, but they hardly seem convincing. Why?

Reflection tells me I'm missing an ideology somewhere:

• If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Here's that hierarchy, version 2.0:

Fundamental:

• If you really want it, go for it
• Do what's best for the environment
• Be excellent to each other
• If it ain't broke, don't fix it

If they don't help:

• If you haven't tried it before, try it
• Do what would be most interesting

If still undecided:

• Do whatever, but do something
• Do whatever's cheapest / most profitable

Fundamentals 1 and 4 are in opposition: I don't really want the promotion but I do quite want a better salary and a new challenge; however, I also quite like my current job.

If you add in the lowest-tier ideologies, going for it slightly edges it over not bothering. That's probably why I've applied for the promotion.

This hierarchy seems to work better than the first: it explains my recent behaviour (I applied for the promotion). But I still don't feel very inspired...

Maybe I'm missing something else:

• If you're not excited, keep looking

Hierarchy 3.0:

Fundamental:

• If you really want it, go for it
• Do what's best for the environment
• Be excellent to each other
• If it ain't broke, don't fix it
• If you're not excited, keep looking

If they don't help:

• If you haven't tried it before, try it
• Do what would be most interesting

If still undecided:

• Do whatever, but do something
• Do whatever's cheapest / most profitable

What does this mean for my career? Accepting the promotion while not being excited about it would mean I'd have to keep looking for other opportunities, according to the above. But taking another job soon after the one I've applied for would mess my company around and therefore violate "Be excellent to each other". So I'd have to decide which I cared more about: excitement or being excellent. Which would depend on exactly how excited I was by this hypothetical as-yet-known opportunity...

So does hierarchy 3.0 work well in general? Have I cracked life? Watch this space...

Book review: Fucked Up Reader, 2017, Bryan Ray Turcotte

Forty years after the punk phenomenon, people still ask exactly what punk was and whether it died. They should stop, cos it really isn't all that complicated, the Fucked Up Reader shows.

The book contains some 300-or-so reminiscences from people who were right there at the heart of the scene - mostly in the US; a few in the UK.

So what was punk? It was a reaction to the bland, overblown, inaccessible music of the 70s, driven by kids with independence of thought and jumped on by kids who liked the aggression, adrenaline and escape. At its best it was DIY, exploratory, and challenging. At its worst it was derivative and dumb.

Is it dead? In itself, yes. But as an ideology, no. Punk was merely the latest new thing to challenge rigid old forms - it's just that it wore that challenge more explicitly than any new trend before or since. Pretty quickly punk itself became formulaic and got co-opted by the mainstream, but the punk ideology - which predated punk music - got taken up in diluted form by post-punk, hip-hop, grunge, garage, dubstep, grime, and whatever comes next.

For as long as there's something new and different left to be created, and someone out there fed up enough and bored enough and brave enough to explore it, punk survives.

Punk is dead. Long live punk.

Why want anything?

I'm in the process of trying to decide what I want from life, as I've written about previously.

I think it's an important thing for people to do, if the answer isn't readily apparent to them. But it occurs to me that maybe I also haven't given enough thought to the question of why I want to want anything at all.

I wrote in the post I linked to above that "I want to deeply want something." And obviously I want this enough to have spent a lot of time thinking about it and to have written about it at length. But why?

I think it must come down to my being a product of a liberal humanist culture, as I also wrote about, and to my still residing in such a culture. Early novels don't seem to indicate that this endless self-examination and search for fulfilment has been the prevailing condition for very long, for example. Nor does what I've seen of other cultures outside the liberal west.

Evolutionarily, there's no good reason for us to want things other than the essentials for survival and for being a functioning member of a society - people being social animals, who therefore (generally) have strong genetic and psychological motivations to be sociable.

Perhaps our biology does contribute: I've also written before about Christopher Lasch's assertion that people are anxious because we desperately want to recapture the blissful satisfaction of the womb. But this seems to be undermined by the seeming fact that other cultures aren't so relentlessly desirous, and Lasch also suggests that it's advertising and bureaucracy that keep us from being satisfied.

So it does seem that it's the culture I was raised in that is the reason I'm so keen on wanting something. A culture that asserts that to discover what's right we should search within ourselves for what we feel is right. A culture that endlessly seeks to drive us to desire things we can purchase. A culture in which everyone seems to like people "who know what they want from life".

That doesn't mean that wanting is bad: maybe liberalism is right to encourage desires. There are lots of things to like about liberal western culture, after all, like craft beer and the variety of books on offer.

And yet here I am, wondering what's wrong with me because I don't seem to want things as strongly as I should, and paralysed by uncertainty, while the planet overheats, empties of variety and fills up with waste owing to our relentless, unthinking consumption.

I suspect the answer, as with so much, will be: everything in moderation, including moderation.

Take my reading habits, for example. Books are probably my most conspicuous item of consumption after alcohol. I've written previously about how my love affair with books took a hit last year, and yet now I'm back reading almost as much as I used to. Why?

Well, I'm reading differently. Fewer novels, more journalism, more "self-help". I'm reading more discerningly. And reading is a sign of a curious mind, which surely has an evolutionary advantage (albeit perhaps only at the species level, since curiosity kills cats) and therefore an evolutionary drive.

And while I'm not saying we should necessarily always follow our urges (it's ill-advised with food, for example), doing so much of the time seems a reasonable way of avoiding frustration and dissatisfaction.

So reading gets a pass (mostly). But other things society wants me to want might not...