Amanda, on the lot
A Twitter shapshot:
MJ: @amae “please tell me you are getting around on that bike with the seat in the front. PLEASE tell me that you are on the phone and yelling.”
AM: @maryjeys “SHANNA, PEDAL FASTER!”
you cannot experience it all
Seriously, you can’t, it’s impossible, so just stop trying, and surrender to the goodness you do see:
Consider books alone. Let’s say you read two a week, and sometimes you take on a long one that takes you a whole week. That’s quite a brisk pace for the average person. That lets you finish, let’s say, 100 books a year. If we assume you start now, and you’re 15, and you are willing to continue at this pace until you’re 80. That’s 6,500 books, which really sounds like a lot.
Let’s do you another favor: Let’s further assume you limit yourself to books from the last, say, 250 years. Nothing before 1761. This cuts out giant, enormous swaths of literature, of course, but we’ll assume you’re willing to write off thousands of years of writing in an effort to be reasonably well-read.
Of course, by the time you’re 80, there will be 65 more years of new books, so by then, you’re dealing with 315 years of books, which allows you to read about 20 books from each year. You’ll have to break down your 20 books each year between fiction and nonfiction – you have to cover history, philosophy, essays, diaries, science, religion, science fiction, westerns, political theory … I hope you weren’t planning to go out very much.
the best photobook of the past 25 years
The British Journal of Photography recently asked a panel of experts, including photographer Chis Killip and the writer Gerry Badger, to select their best photobook of the past 25 years. Surpisingly, perhaps, Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency, from 1986, came a close second to a much less well-known book, Masahisa Fukase’s Karasu (Ravens), which was published the same year.
(thanks, Lucy)
Philosophy Referee Hand Signals
(via marginal revolution)
dear clusterflock
What’s your favorite brand and style of underwear?
My favorite are the unfortunately named Cocksox’s boxer briefs. They are made of a synthetic, wicking, quick-dry material called (get this) ‘Supplex®.’ If you’re a cyclist, you probably want these. Oh, and their website is hilarious(ly bad).
Beyonce’s Single Ladies, a lesson in degrees
Beyonce’s Single Ladies slowed down enough to walk the line between bonerific and horrific.
from the comments
I hope I’m not gonna get crucified for saying so, but the breadsticks are pretty mediocre.
from the spam
Freezing warts is cool, unless they are genital wars.
Beinecke MS 408 pt II
Further musings on Voynich, Serafini, Fibnoacci phyllotaxis, seed-hunting, the Rocket Man & a recipe for artichokes the Roman way.
quote out of context
ANYWAYS: An Antarctic Mystery, as far as I can tell, is based on the idea that The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is, in fact, completely true, and these later adventurers are going to follow up on his report. I am certain that I am failing to communicate how completely awesome this is, that Jules Verne is in some meta, wonderful way based an entire novel on the premise that the framing of yet another foundational adventure novel is in fact not a framing but a true thing. And he spends SIXTY PAGES setting this up.
Atlas Shrugged
Love this:
As you may have surmised from the occasionally snarky tone of what I have written thus far, I am not exactly a fan of Ayn Rand, though my objection to her is based less on her philosophy and more on the fact that her books are virtually unreadable garbage that feature narratives that play like bizarre fusions of a year’s subscription to “The American Spectator” and dime-store romance novels that are written with the kind of prose stylings rarely seen outside of meatpacking guides, hideously unlikable and unsympathetic characters and philosophical arguments so simplistic and silly that the B team of a typical high school debate club could easily poke enormous holes in it in only a few minutes.
Denial
Why scientific evidence is not always enough:
In the annals of denial, it doesn’t get much more extreme than the Seekers. They lost their jobs, the press mocked them, and there were efforts to keep them away from impressionable young minds. But while Martin’s space cult [e.g, the Seekers] might lie at on the far end of the spectrum of human self-delusion, there’s plenty to go around. And since Festinger’s day, an array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience has further demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions. This tendency toward so-called “motivated reasoning” helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal: climate change, vaccines, “death panels,” the birthplace and religion of the president (PDF), and much else. It would seem that expecting people to be convinced by the facts flies in the face of, you know, the facts.
I certainly do not agree with all of Francis Shaeffer’s ideas, but he was right when he said that in evangelizing you need to push a person to the brink, the darkest spot imaginable, before he will be substantively receptive to the gospel. Replace ‘gospel’ with any framework and the statement still holds up. In fact, I imagine that’s how the Seekers came to be Seekers.
Physics Of The Riderless Bike
via cyclelicious
quote out of context
Segovia and Velazquez, elderly keepers of a dying language, have declared it already dead, because, getting to the essence of being human, they don’t have anything they want to say to one another.
tweet of the day
meet the objectivists
Objectivism, in this context, is an alternative name for philosophical realism, the view that there is a reality, or ontological realm of objects and facts, that exists independent of the mind. Stronger versions of this claim hold that there is only one correct description of this reality. If it is true that reality is mind-independent, then reality might include objects that are unknown to consciousness and thus might include objects not the subject of intensionality. Objectivity in referring requires a definition of truth. According to metaphysical objectivists, an object may truthfully be said to have this or that attribute, as in the statement “This object exists,” whereas the statement “This object is true” or “false” is meaningless. For them, only propositions have truth values. Essentially, the terms “objectivity” and “objectivism” are not synonymous, with objectivism being an ontological theory that incorporates a commitment to the objectivity of objects.
Objectivism holds that reality exists independent of consciousness, that human beings have direct contact with reality through sense perception, that one can attain objective knowledge from perception through the process of concept formation and inductive and deductive logic, that the proper moral purpose of one’s life is the pursuit of one’s own happiness or rational self-interest, that the only social system consistent with this morality is full respect for individual rights, embodied in laissez faire capitalism, and that the role of art in human life is to transform man’s widest metaphysical ideas, by selective reproduction of reality, into a physical form—a work of art—that he can comprehend and to which he can respond emotionally.
The Objectivist poets were a loose-knit group of second-generation Modernists who emerged in the 1930s. They were mainly American and were influenced by, amongst others, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. The basic tenets of Objectivist poetics as defined by Louis Zukofsky were to treat the poem as an object, and to emphasise sincerity, intelligence, and the poet’s ability to look clearly at the world.
Tim Hunt’s Pacific Tattoo
A short film about tattoo artist Tim Hunt in Paekakariki, Aotearoa / New Zealand — his art and philosophy.
Quote out of context
A visitor to the exhibit had stuck a note next to the Gandhi quotation: “Reality check: He’s in hell.”
Sidney Lumet
From the NYT:
It is tempting, from the safe distance of our self-satisfied, smoke-free 21st century metropolis — where the crime rate is still down and property values and Wall Street profits are rising again — to impose a perverse, rosy halo on the bad old days. Among cinephiles, the habit of romanticizing the movies of the past is even more deeply ingrained. In both cases what has taken hold is a hazy myth of authenticity: especially in the ’70s, we like to imagine, the movies were more realistic, and New York City was more real.
No doubt Mr. Lumet, who died April 9, was a realist. The vigor of his best films and the hectic energy of the city they capture are undeniable. To watch those movies in sequence and with some sense of history — as opposed to an antiquarian, fetishistic attention to clothes and haircuts, cinematographic techniques and vanished neighborhood landmarks — is to encounter an episodic chronicle of societal unraveling. Some characters may cling to an idealized picture of the past, but they tend to do so out of fear and anxiety, as their hopes for the future fray and collapse along with the mores and values of the place they call home.
headline of the day
What Actually Goes On at Olive Garden’s ‘Culinary Institute’ in Tuscany?
from the comments
When I was a kid we had gardenias planted by our front door (Houston), and we had white marble bits around the base of them that washed off of the tar & white-marble-bits-roof. I remember squatting down in the shade there and smelling those blooms for what seemed like hours. I thought there couldn’t possibly be a flower that smelled better than that, and that feeling still comes back when I happen to smell them these days.
“The Good Book”
“When you contrast those philosophies with the great young religions — Judaism and Christianity date from only two and three thousand years ago — I saw the humanist-derived ethical outlooks tended to take their start from the most generous view of human nature, and the belief that human life is very short, and we must understand how to make good lives for ourselves,” he said in an interview. “Whereas religious systems premise themselves on relationships between man and deity.”
That focus on the deity, Mr. Grayling believes, distracts from seeking the good life in the short time we are allotted.
Amen.
spam name
Celesta Dorla.
Flower of the Deep South
This is a crimson red Camellia I planted last fall beside the front door. I have four in all with names like “Tom Knudsen” and “April Tryst.” They bloom in the cold/cool weather. The Camellia, the Alabama state flower, can be tricky to grow in northern climates. But I had to risk it. They remind me of home.
This is a response to the photo of Daryl’s beautiful Iris.
