ambition

Something that I think is key to understanding Warhol's Campbell's soup can paintings - maybe the most important thing, even though it's easy to overlook - is the intense personal associations that Campbell's soup had for him. It wasn't just some mass-produced item, to him. 

That's what I notice about his art and films - what matters about them is what he thinks and feels. He doesn't cater to an audience in an obvious way. Like, with the Empire State Building film....it's just a shot of the Empire State Building that goes for 8 hours and 5 minutes. The only observable change is when it gets dark and the lights come on. He said himself that it was probably better to think about the film than to watch it. But he was making something that was interesting to him. 

It's not like he didn't care how his work was received, though. He really wanted to succeed at art and he did everything with that in mind. 

burn

It's discouraging to lose people - like, when people who were part of your life are no longer - but there's a positive way to look at it. You're becoming your true self, and those people know the old you. You've grown out of them. 

I can think of lots of ways that things could have worked out better. If I was normal, things would be very different. I always interpret that movement away from others as a fault of mine. I don't measure up. 

But maybe it's not that there's something wrong with me. It's like the tale of the ugly duckling, who was neither ugly nor a duckling, but something else entirely. 

Una nuova vita

It's a mystery how you can truly begin living a new life even while your old life continues. In a way, the new life isn't even real, but the truth is that it's your old life - which seems so real and substantial - that isn't real. 

of arms and the man

There's a whole series of battles that each of us fight that no one really ever talks about. It's probably the most challenging and noble endeavor that you are involved in, but it apparently doesn't rise to the level of content. 

we need another Byronic hero

I'm enjoying watching Riverdale, but I don't think Jughead should be dating Betty. Cole Sprouse is great as the moody, enigmatic, intelligent, rebellious, angry young man. He's so good as that. But then they're trying to make him soft and sensitive, and I don't think it works very well. 

brick by brick

I so much prefer the RSV translation of Proverbs 14:1, to pretty much all the other translations. 

The RSV reads:

Wisdom builds her house, but folly with her own hands tears it down.

Every single one of the other translations - without exception, that I could find - refer to a wise woman or women, and I think that loses something because the verse is not about a woman or women, it's about wisdom. It is interesting that wisdom is designated as female, here and elsewhere, and that's something to really think about, but to make the verse about wise women vs foolish women - I think that misses the point. 

What brought this verse to mind was that I was watching a video about our current political moment, and the discussion centered on the way that humanity's baser tendencies, which seem to be winning out at the moment, are self-defeating. They tear themselves down. 

aimë

You have to make a whole new world, but it's not as hard as it sounds. It's really just a matter of going outside, and the world is all there. Where you are now is not the real world. You're living in a mansion you built to save yourself. 

universally acknowledged

You don't realize until you travel how inordinately strange the world is. Things you have always taken for granted, such as, not allowing animals to drive and not wearing a heavy coat in summer, are not universal. 

an example of the golden rule

When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God. 

                                        - Leviticus 19: 33 - 34

great American writers

William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Ernest Hemingway, were all around the same age - all born within a few years of the turn of the century. They also died around the same age - in the 1960's, when Faulkner was 64, Hemingway 61, and Steinbeck 66. 

Something else they had in common is that they all won both the Pullitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature. 

mediation

When we read books about history, we want an objective recounting of the relevant facts and developments. That's kind of what we expect - something bloodless and impartial, but interesting at the same time. History is interesting because of the facts and developments that make it up. 

The problem is that that idea - that a text can be absolutely transparent, a lens through which we can view the past or whatever is the subject of the text - is an illusion. To be effective - like, for example, to tell us about history - a text has to have a thesis. It has to be animated by some kind of argument or point - something the composer is trying to express. 

writing back

When we were colonized, our language was not the official language of the country we live in. Any kind of creative expression was unthinkable. In time, a hybrid language developed, and that became our means of creative expression. 

expurgation

Doris Lessing writes in the preface to The Golden Notebook:

This theme of 'breakdown', that sometimes when people 'crack up' it is a way of self-healing, of the inner self's dismissing false dichotomies and divisions, has of course been written about by other people, as well as by me, since then. But this is where, apart from the odd short story, I first wrote about it. 

It's interesting....The Golden Notebook is famous as a feminist book, but Lessing points out that, when the book was published, no one saw what she identified above as the central theme that it is, because reviewers - both positive and negative - jumped to the conclusion that it was about the war between the sexes. 

rules

Imagine if we tried to teach kids to walk and talk in the same way we teach older kids to read and write....creating lesson plans and a syllabus and working systematically through the subject with learning activities to really embed the skills and knowledge.

There's got to be a lesson here for education - that kids learn perfectly well without all the structure and regimentation. 

wings

I read Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift when I was about 9. It was hard. I grew to hate it. But I was aware that it expanded my vocabulary like nothing else ever has. It had strange words that I know now but at the time didn't even know how to sound out in my head - words like 'whereas'. 

I also had no appreciation for its satire. I just read it as a fantasy story. But it's a brilliant piece of political satire. For example, Gulliver recounts that, in one of the lands he visits, there was a war between those who crack their soft-boiled eggs at the narrow end and those who cracked the wide end. 

I don't know why we feel like we have to adhere to one side or the other. 

or

Although the ultimate goals of alchemy - like, the elixir of life and turning other metals to gold - turned out to be chimerical, some very useful developments came from it. It led to the invention, in the early 18th century, of European porcelain, which, in many ways, was as good as making gold. Until then, the only place to get porcelain was from China. It was so valuable it was even called 'white gold'. 

social media

I don’t check who’s watched my story, liked my content or stalk those I shouldn’t for the same reason I don’t slash myself with paper cuts before dipping my body, sensually, into a clawfoot bathtub full of vinegar....

And I finally know that the most useful, fulfilling thing for my mental health is definitively not Tik Tok or Instagram or X. It’s Pinterest.

- Delaney Rowe, 'In defense of weaning yourself off social media' in Harpers Bazaar

in oars plak

Classic works of philosophy are endlessly surprising. Hobbes begins Leviathan by likening the human body to a machine:

For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts; but so many Wheeles...

Descartes too discusses the mechanics of the body and how blood flows through it, at length in his writing. 

I always enjoy these diversions and detours because they reflect the profound difference in worldview between the modern world and previous periods in history. 

possession

It's interesting to think about the way our impressions of the books we've read change with time. It's kind of like the way our memories and impressions of our own lives changes with time, but the beauty with books is that you can reread them and see what they actually say. 

Guerre et Paix

War and Peace is surprisingly readable but also authentically majestic. Tolstoy really does manage to capture the world and drama of the individual - the vicissitudes of personal life - and at the same time, sweeping historical themes. 

Has any writer done that as well as or better than Tolstoy? Maybe Shakespeare. Tolstoy famously hated Shakespeare - not him personally, but his work. He wrote an essay about it, and he focused on King Lear, as being Shakespeare's best work according to the leading critics. Tolstoy described Lear as "a very bad, carelessly composed production, which, if it could have been of interest to a certain public at a certain time, can not evoke among us anything but aversion and weariness."

What's going on here? How can this be possible? Harold Bloom's explanation is that it's an example of his anxiety of influence. That actually makes some sense. 

new interest

I'm interested in applying the ideas from literary theory, which I know something about, to art theory, which I'm just starting to learn about. There are so many common threads, which makes it truly fascinating. It's like exploring a whole new world but I understand some of its features because of my exploration of this other world. 

I think if I had had to study English, art and history in late high school, I wouldn't have been interested in them later. I did do English but only a bare minimum. I mainly did science and maths type subjects and after high school I didn't use any of it, ever. 

Only now, very recently, have I started to get interested in the theoretical aspect of art. 

3 Australian novels

The Vivisector by Patrick White 

Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey

Such is Life by Joseph Furphy 

spiritual food

Be careful to follow every command I am giving you today, so that you may live and increase and may enter and possess the land the Lord promised on oath to your ancestors. Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. Your clothes did not wear out and your feet did not swell during these forty years. Know then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, so the Lord your God disciplines you.

                                                                      - Deuteronomy 8:1 - 5

This is God speaking to the Israelites but also speaking to us. Consider how God has led you through the vicissitudes of life. He leads us through challenges to humble and test us - to purify and refine us - to make us grow. He humbles us and causes us to hunger. 

For the Israelites, the passage is talking about literal hunger and how God fed them with manna, which was a kind of bread which came from the sky at night and they gathered each morning. But for us, it's talking about spiritual hunger, and the bread from heaven - as the Bible makes clear in other passages - represents Jesus and also the word of God - the Bible. In the New Testament, Jesus is referred to as both the bread from heaven, and the word of God. So, through challenges, God causes us to hunger and then he feeds us with his word. 

before you accuse

fiction as a barrier between yourself and lies

fiction is the grime removed from the non-existent lens of the soul

the remainder after you rightly divided the word of God

rep || resent

Andy Warhol said that every artist just paints the same picture over and over. 

Every writer writes the same composition over and over. The books can seem very different, but they're about the same things - representations of the same world. 

driven to abstraction

on the one hand....

Abstraction is elucidation not obfuscation. One way to raise the level of abstraction of a computer program would be to make it more elaborate - add in more steps, for example - so that the operation of the program becomes clearer to the user. 

So, maybe you could say that python is more abstract than C++. Or maybe, if abstraction is adding more and longer steps, you could say that Java is more abstract than JavaScript. But which is more abstract out of Java and Python? 

on the other hand....

Forgetting about abstraction being about more steps and elaboration, just intuitively, I would say that functional programming languages - like Haskell - have to be more abstract than object-oriented languages or programming styles. That's purely based on my sense of what abstraction is, and the mysteriousness of languages like Haskell. It seems like you have to be very smart to get Haskell. 

so...

abstraction needs reality. The two complete each other. 

on creation

If you're not intent on succeeding at all costs, you can't possibly sell-out, because there's nothing to receive in exchange. So, why not do anything you want to, anyway you want to? So we had the freedom that most bands deny themselves, because they're trying to make it; they're trying to 'do something'. We were trying to do something too, but we didn't care if it never got out of the four walls that we were in.

 - Sterling Morrison, on the Velvet Underground

inky

Around the time I was born, Joan Didion 'began to doubt the premises of all the stories [she] had ever told [her]self.'

you complete me

I was reading Andrea Wulf's Magnificent Rebels (2022) which is about the first Romantics, who gathered around Jena in Germany in the late 18th, early nineteenth century - including, the Schellings (husband and wife), Fichte, Goethe, Hegel, Alexander Humboldt, August Wilhelm Humboldt, Caroline Humboldt, Novalis, Schiller, the Schlegel brothers. These preceded and inspired the English Romantics. 

Fichte talked about how, after reading Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, he had been 'living in a new world'. He decided to go and meet Kant but he didn't want to just turn up empty handed without any recommendation or evidence of his intellectual abilities. So, in 5 weeks, he wrote a book! His treatise was about religion, which is the question that Kant hadn't addressed in his three Critiques. 

Fichte sent the manuscript to Kant, and then went to meet him in person a while after, and Kant said the book was really good and he should publish it. Kant said that his own publisher would publish it. So, it got published, and there was a bit of a mix-up. Fichte's name was missing from a lot of the printed copies. The copies to be circulated locally had Fichte's name on them but those sent further afield didn't. This may have been strategic on the part of the publisher....a new book comes out that basically completes Kant's work, published by his publisher....it was probably written by Kant, right? 

Then it was so good that everybody was convinced that Kant wrote it. The great man graciously stepped forward and informed the world that Fichte wrote it, which established Fichte as the next great philosopher. 

a kind of tension

There are 2 or 3 poems that I like, that spoke to me when I first read them. One of them is In the Waiting Room by Elizabeth Bishop. When I read it I was struck by how very strange and yet how very familiar and understandable it was. 

the difficulty of being a true believer

Beliefs and enthusiasms become constraints. 

It's difficult to write because there are qualifications about everything. No principle is absolutely true. As soon as I think of a truth to write, I start thinking about all the ways in which it isn't true. 

We come up with ideas and we are influenced in opposition to the conditions we find ourselves in, and those ideas and influences free us from those conditions. So, once that is done, those ideas are not relevant anymore. 

Good ideas change things, but we can't just hold onto those same ideas once things have changed. 

recalling yesterday on your 18th birthday

As an adult, you can never really recapture or re-member how you thought as a child, because your view of it will always be through the lens of adulthood. It's like trying to remember what it was like to see written words before you could read - what it's like to look at writing with incomprehension. 

On the one hand, it wouldn't mean anything. It would be like looking at trees or rocks or whatever. It's only an adult (and one who can read) who can have the thought - I wonder what it would be like to look at words without understanding them. So, it's an adult thought and you are already defeated. 

On the other hand, it doesn't matter. The same principle applies to any two points in your life, so don't worry. There are things that you don't even see now that will be revealed later - amazing things. 

anty angelic

What do you think it would be like to encounter an angel? 

It's terrifying to encounter an angel.

If you encounter an angel, mace won't help you. 

It's one of those things that, in your mind, you can imagine it, but the reality of it is something else. 

hits

Why do we use the same word - 'myth' - for stories that aren't true, but also for stories that, while not literally true, carry a lot of moral truth. 

metanarrative

E L Doctorow said that whatever a writer says about their own novel, is just part of the fiction and not to be trusted.

This applies in an interesting way to Mary Shelley's introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein because, firstly, there are reasons to doubt the veracity of the story that Mary tells, but also, it's the perfect story told with all the verve and wit of the novelist that Mary Shelley is. 

Like Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein's structure is one of nested narratives - a story within a story within a story - and in a way, Mary Shelley's introduction is like the perfect packaging - a perfect outer narrative for the novel/ a perfect introduction/ a great story. 

She needed to answer the question that was frequently put to her - “How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?” - with a story, and that's what she provided. 

science fiction, a poem

remember when pinterest used to have pages

you would say i'm just going to scroll to the end of this page

now you can't do that any more

but does that make you scroll less or more

when you're always at the beginning of an endless scroll as opposed to being at some point in a finite page

¿¿¿

first ever

In 1659, Christiaan Huygens used his homemade telescope to become the first person ever to observe and document the surface features of Mars. 

lit

Good literary criticism is not purely systematic and analytical. It's not like science. It's like poetry. 

structure

I think being creative is not about being able to come up with lots of different ideas. It's more about developing a process and you do the same process over and over and over, but experiment within the parameters of the process. 

just tell me what to do

Can an ideology be imposed systemically? Like, is it possible to be a true believer by following a set of rules or principles? 

I said to Minh once that I wish the Bible just told us explicitly what we need to do....like a checklist. And his response was 'no you don't'. He said that not so much because it's a bad idea, but because he knew I would hate that, but it is a bad idea. 

letting go

I like the idea that 'success is the best revenge'. Sometimes there's a choice between righting perceived wrongs and moving on and pursuing something else. I think it's always best to pursue worthwhile goals rather than trying to bring the people that hurt you to justice and making them pay. 

I suppose the two things sometimes go together. In some cases, it's important to assert your rights and bring people to justice, but it's a choice. If pursuing your freedom and empowerment involves setting things straight in that way, good, but it may not. I would rather get on with living my life and pursuing my goals - going where I haven't been before - than harnessing all my passion and drive to something that happened in the past. 

staying home

Growing up, America never really interested me. Asia did...especially China and Japan. It seemed to me that those Asian countries were both very alien and very familiar, whereas America was too much like Australia, where I'm from. Like, why go there if there isn't going to be anything strange about it?

anacrostic

Unless it's strange and unexpected, it ain't true. 

prose ache

It's really interesting when you read books that are made up of interviews or transcriptions of people speaking about some topic or person, because the syntax of speech is so very different to that of written texts. It's more like a kind of poetry. You can be so much more expressive in fewer words when you speak, but I guess part of that is due to tone of voice and other non-verbal language, which sometimes makes transcriptions of spoken word difficult to understand. 

But overall, I think direct transcriptions of spoken language are understandable and more evocative than prose. 

art and artifice

Susan Sontag did one of Andy Warhol's 'screen tests', which weren't screen tests in the normal sense, but just the subject being filmed for 3 minutes doing nothing or whatever they wanted. Here's a video about it: SSscreenttest. 

What I find fascinating about this short video is how naturally Warhol and Sontag interacted. I imagined that would be the case. In most interviews I've seen, Warhol comes across as kind of affected, as if he's playing a role or wearing a mask, but here he's very natural and very funny. 

blanks and spaces

Some of the best classics are Science Fiction books - Neuromancer, Stranger in a Strange Land. Even Frankenstein is sometimes characterized as Science Fiction.