September 2012
“Like most Americans, I live in a world that cannot see the point in work that doesn’t bring in money or instant prestige. I myself can’t see the point in work that doesn’t bring money or prestige, yet I keep doing it, day after day, year after year. At a place like Bread Loaf, I can see up close that people not all that different than me have turned this queer habit of mine into a job that gives them money and prestige. But — and this is the great secret — I also meet hundreds of other people just like me, who will never make money as writers, who will never win a Pulitzer Prize or be the poet laureate, but keep on writing because they love it. And, seeing them, I know I am not alone.”
—
Keeping the Faith – The Millions’ Michael Bourne goes to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and leaves with a reaffirmed sense of purpose.
Also see Paul Graham on the false allure of prestige and Ray Bradbury on doing what you love.
(via explore-blog)
August 2012
“The relationship to handcraft is a beautiful one… You pit your faculties against concrete problems. The victories are concrete, definable, touchable.”
—Anaïs Nin on the magic of letterpress and the joy of handcraft – beautiful meditation penned in 1942, but timelier than ever. (via explore-blog)
Les Petits Mouchoirs! It has some hilarious scenes. Check out Jeux d'Enfants too starring Canet and Cotillard.
Will do! Thank you for the recommendation!
“
Instead of trying to directly challenge American colleges—a daunting proposition, given the political power and public subsidies they possess—the new breed of tech start-ups will likely start by working in the unregulated private sector, where they’ll build what amounts to a parallel higher education universe. A few weeks after returning from the West Coast, I watched Eren Bali spend two hours in a Washington, D.C.-area conference room listening to government officials, regulators, and representatives of for-profit higher education corporations discuss the morass of accreditation rules and federal regulations that make it hard for entrepreneurs to compete directly with traditional schools. Finally, Bali raised his hand and politely said, in effect, I don’t understand why any of this matters. I can go online right now and get everything I need to learn—courses, textbooks, videos, other students to study with—for free. And if I need to know what someone else has learned, I can look at their Linked-In profile or their blog to find out.
At a certain point, probably before this decade is out, that parallel universe will reach a point of sophistication and credibility where the degrees—or whatever new word is invented to mean “evidence of your skills and knowledge”—it grants are taken seriously by employers.
” —The Siege of Academe – Kevin Carey on breaching the walls of higher education (via explore-blog)
“What is a publisher anymore, anyway? A blog is a magazine. A magazine a blog. A newspaper a WordPress install. A Twitter account a journalist.”
—Craig Mod, Our New Shrines (via explore-blog)
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
—Leo Tolstoy (via sorakeem)
“I love unmade beds. I love when people are drunk and crying and cannot be anything but honest in that moment. I love the look in people’s eyes when they realize they’re in love. I love the way people look when they first wake up and they’ve forgotten their surroundings. I love the gasp people take when their favorite character dies. I love when people close their eyes and drift to somewhere in the clouds. I fall in love with people and their honest moments all the time. I fall in love with their breakdowns and their smeared makeup and their daydreams. Honesty is just too beautiful to ever put into words.”
—Unknown (via sorakeem)
Better Times
Beach House
Better Times - Beach House
“I’m afraid of time… I mean, I’m afraid of not having enough time. Not enough time to understand people, how they really are, or to be understood myself. I’m afraid of the quick judgements or mistakes everybody makes. You can’t fix them without time.”
—Ann Brashares (via sorakeem)
“A scientist is never certain. … We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and there is no learning.”
—Richard Feynman (via explore-blog)
“Three be the things I shall never attain:
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.” —Dorothy Parker (via voxsart)
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.” —Dorothy Parker (via voxsart)
On Empathy and Apathy: Two Case Studies by Whitney Hess →
whitneyhess.com
- The suffix -pathy means “feeling” or “suffering”
- The prefix em- means “within” or “inside”
- The prefix a- means “not” or “without”
By definition, empathy is the opposite of apathy.
Empathy is defined as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another” —within + feeling or inside + suffering.
Apathy is defined as “a lack of interest, enthusiasm, or concern” — not + feeling orwithout + suffering.
[…]
I believe it is the empathy-apathy disposition spectrum that is, at the very core, responsible for creating organizational and communal culture. And it only takes one person to plant the seed.
Rituals of Preparation →
melissaeastondesign.com
A word to the wise: Don’t watch these videos if you are in the least bit hungry. The mastery of these food preparations earns my great admiration and respect. I am also fascinated by how ingrained and fluid the actions are. I remember not that long ago watching a bricklayer build a wall and was completely hypnotized by the motion. Equally so for the women across the street from us, when we lived in Chinatown, who used make dumplings.
“To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.”
—Happy birthday, Hegel! Quote from Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 1820. More than a century later, Jack Kerouac echoed the sentiment. (via explore-blog)
On greatness and killing your ego.
How do I accept that I won’t ever be great or outstanding? I always thought I had talent, and maybe I’m not bad, but a great many people are far better. I can’t stop thinking this and it’s causing me great anxiety.
Kill your ego, because nothing you do will ever matter. That’s okay, though. It’s not just you. It’s all of us. It’s taken 100,000 years for our species to hump and grunt its way into momentary dominance on this pale blue dot, but nothing we’ve accomplished is all that outstanding when you consider that a Mall of America-sized asteroid is all it would take to turn humanity into the next thin layer of fossil fuels.Greatness is nothing but the surface tension on the spit bubble of human endeavor. On a geological time scale, our measurable effect on the planet is a greasy burp. We are seven billion tiny flecks of talking meat stuck to an unremarkable mud ball hurtling through space in an unimaginably vast universe for no particular reason. There is no difference between kings and cripples, my friend. We’re all the same hodgepodge of primordial goo, and the pursuit of greatness is a fool’s errand.
Pursue happiness instead. Find peace in your insignificance, and just let your anxiety go. Learn to savor the likely truth that the sum total of human achievement won’t even register in the grand scheme, so you might as well just enjoy whatever talents you have. Use them to make yourself and others happy, and set aside any desire to be great or outstanding.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t do your best. You should. If you’re talented, by all means, exploit that talent to the fullest extent possible. Just don’t do it for the sake of greatness. Do it for the sake of happiness. If the distinction is a little hazy, that’s because your ego is doing its best to get in the way. Your ego wants to put you on a pedestal at the center of the universe. It wants to convince you of silly things like jealous gods and life after death. Your ego would never allow you to believe that you are anything other than a special snowflake, which is why you have to kill it.
Annihilating your ego is the quickest way to happiness. Embracing your insignificance will make your anxiety suddenly seem ridiculous. You’ll recognize petty emotions like schadenfreude and envy for the childish tantrums that they are. You’ll stop comparing your talents to others, and you’ll be able to enjoy being good at something without the need to be great.
BRILLIANT.
On sounding like an elite liberal.
How do you know so much about what happens after death? You sound like an elite liberal who knows everything whether they do or not.
Take a deep breath. Relax. This is not a fight. I am not a threat to you.I get it. You’re terrified of death, and like most people, you have a core belief system of antiquated myths you’ve carried with you your entire life as a defense mechanism against that final and horrifying inevitability.
It’s perfectly understandable, as is your reaction to someone like me.
My world view is different than yours. You want to stick me in a little box labeled “wrong,” and so you call me “an elite liberal,” because that’s what Fox News has trained you to call me.
It doesn’t matter whether I’m elite or liberal. That label doesn’t have any actual meaning to you. It’s just a thought terminating cliché that you use to summarily dismiss anything that might threaten your belief system.
So once again, let me be clear. I am not a threat to you. I don’t know any more about what happens after death than you do. That would be impossible.
There’s no need to worry, because you are absolutely, positively, without-a-doubt convinced that there is a god in a heaven where you will spend an everlasting life, right?
Of course, you’re sure of it. You have to be sure of it. Otherwise, your whole identity would be shattered, and that’s a fate worse than death.
So take another deep breath. Relax. I promise, by the time you start your work week, those little pangs of existential angst you felt while reading my column will have faded away.
Because this is not a fight, and I am not a threat to you.
I’m in love with Coquette.
Hold On When You Get Love And Let Go When You Give It
Stars
Hold On When You Get Love And Let Go When You Give It - Stars
Lots of cool shit is happening right now.
“Since the nineteen-sixties, U.S. immigration policy has been designed to encourage the immigration of family members rather than of skilled workers. In 1990, the number of employment-based permanent visas was capped at a hundred and forty thousand a year. Astonishingly, that number hasn’t changed since, even though the U.S. economy is now sixty-six per cent bigger, and, with the rise of India and China, the supply of global talent has grown sharply. We also cap the visa allocation for each country, regardless of size, at seven per cent of the total number of visas, so only a fraction of the applications from China and India get approved. (The number of temporary work visas is also capped, at eighty-five thousand a year.) As of 2006, according to one study, more than half a million highly skilled immigrants were waiting for permanent visas, and the backlog in some visa categories was decades long. Other countries, meanwhile, have positioned themselves to benefit from the talent we’re turning away. Australia allows in almost as many skilled workers annually as the U.S., despite having a fraction of the population, and Canada has aggressively courted the highly skilled, nearly quadrupling the percentage of permanent visas it grants for employment.”
—The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki makes the painfully needed case for talent-focused immigration. (via explore-blog)
“We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.”
—Legendary literary critic Harold Bloom in How to Read and Why, a fine addition to these 9 books to help you read and write better. (via explore-blog)
“Finally, here is a “guaranteed” way to lengthen your life. Childhood holidays seem to last forever, but as you grow older time seems to accelerate. “Time” is related to how much information you are taking in – information stretches time. A child’s day from 9am to 3.30pm is like a 20-hour day for an adult. Children experience many new things every day and time passes slowly, but as people get older they have fewer new experiences and time is less stretched by information. So, you can “lengthen” your life by minimising routine and making sure your life is full of new active experiences – travel to new places, take on new interests, and spend more time living in the present – see Making Time by Steve Taylor.”
—Why the return journey feels quicker – a fascinating read on our perception of the passage of time. (via explore-blog)
