a sense of reality

Maybe it's just me but I think the 1980 version of 'fame' is much better in every respect than the 2009 version. It's more real, more raw, less polished. It's so much more convincing. Have standards fallen? I look at the trailer for the 2009 version and I just see actors playing parts, but I look at the trailer and the film itself of the 1980 version and I see real situations, real concerns, real drama. 

the girl who changed history

People become famous and influential by doing things that, in retrospect, seem simple and natural, like Hiromix taking photos of her everyday life. 

People think, oh, I can become famous by doing that or something like it, but no, you can't. You'll be just another person doing what everyone is doing, following the trend. 

How do people do something so simple yet so groundbreaking? 

that it is

What is Emily Bronte: Heretic by Stevie Davies? Is it literary criticism, biography, some kind of prose poem? It's all of those things and not strictly any of them. Like, it's so personal and poetic that it would be hard to use it in an essay, but it's essentially an academic book. 

identical

Just based on his artwork I imagined that Francis Bacon would be kind of brooding and neurotic, but recently I learnt that he was actually very sociable and outgoing, with a magnetic personality. 

frenetic samples

There are books from which you can pick random excerpts and read them, and each excerpt is like a segment of an orange. It's self contained. You get something complete from each bit that you read. Novels are never like that and we don't want them to be. 

reading and writing

For most of my primary/ elementary school years, I hated school. But then, as time went by, to some extend in 5th grade, and then especially in 6th grade, I started to like school a bit more, because I got to do things that I enjoyed and found interesting. I liked a subject called 'themes', which was kind of about being creative. It was like a cross between English, social studies and art. We had a book and you would read a passage from the book and then answer the questions, and it was this that I really took to, but for me it wasn't about writing. It was more about designing the page with lettering and colors and designs. So, I would write the answers and then color in the page. 

I also started to get more into reading around that time. 

Our teacher was radical. He had the idea that we would work on a contract basis. So, at the beginning of the week we would fill in the contract with what we were going to do for each of the different subjects, and then, at the end of the week we would meet with him and discuss how we went and get his input about what to work on for the future. For me, everything else except 'themes' became like a side-gig and themes was my full-time job. I didn't really care about anything else. 

serenidipity

In general, I don't see many possibilities for myself, but at times I realize that there's no reason why exciting things can't happen. I'm constantly thinking about why they can't happen, but that thinking is distorted and I think it's characteristic of my old self so it's a thing of the past. 

There's part of me that wants to make a whole life out of loss and lack, blinded to the possibility of anything good. 

voacation

The best teaching is a balance of preparation and spontaneity. 

corporeality

What I really liked about Tiphaine Samoyault's biography of Barthes is the way that she weaves together the story of Barthes's life and his intellectual work and life and his contribution to theory, all together into a single story. 

It's a bit like what you get when you read Sylvia Plath's journals and letters. You're getting her masterful writing, but also, each letter or journal entry has a context within her life, so there's the story of her life along with the story(s) she's telling in her writing. 

the reverse alchemy of reality

Books get a sense of identity from not being what people think they are. Frankenstein is a good example of this. It's ostensibly a story about a monster but I think it's really more about humanity. 

The real monster or villain in Frankenstein is neither Victor Frankenstein nor the being he creates. Through the novel’s nested narratives, the reader comes to sympathize and identify with both of the main characters. The sense conveyed is that the tragedy is not perpetrated by malevolent individuals but rather by reality itself, and the tragedy is rendered all the more profound because it seems to arise as a result of impulses and enterprises that are positive. Frankenstein desires to learn and to discover secrets that will be of great benefit to humanity. His is an intellectual quest to discover new realms of knowledge and his motivation is essentially altruistic or, at least, not malevolent. He sees himself as being on this great scientific quest right up until the moment that he creates life, and then it turns into a nightmare. 

I think one of the major issues represented in Frankenstein is the way that, fineness and goodness held in one's inner world, become monstrous and malevolent when we try to squeeze them into the 'real' world. Something happens to these ideal good things when they are realized - made real. Intelligence is an example of this. People with higher intelligence are at greater risk of suffering from mental illness, simply because there's so much going on in their mind, which in abstract and ideal terms is good, but when it comes into contact with the realities of this world, can be destructive. 

We see it in religion as well. During Jesus's life on earth, the people who were most serious about religion and righteousness were the pharisees, but they were the people who Jesus criticized and rebuked the most. He said that they were far from God. Ironically, that was because they were so serious about being close to God. They had good ideas and even good intentions, but when those ideas were translated into the real world, the result was something bad. 

more than cosmetic

Sometimes I have wondered why the Bible doesn't have pictures. The basic Bible I mean. I know that study Bibles and Bibles with extra resources have images, like maps and representations of things the Bible talks about. The basic text though, is text. Words. 

I'm glad about that. It's like that for a reason. We're meant to engage with the text as words and sentences, and that includes the whole thing. 

'The Readable Bible' tries to make reading the Bible easier (that's their claim) by reformatting the text more appropriately and adding in charts and images and maps. They say on their website: "Reading the Bible is hard. We fix that." I think that's highly problematic. First of all, difficulty is not the enemy. The Bible ought to be hard. Yes, we can use commentaries and paraphrases and teaching and diagrams and maps, etc. to help us understand the text, but interfering with the text to make it 'easier' is verging on (maybe more) blasphemy. 

Some more text from the website:

If you find the Bible hard to read, you're not alone. Many people wish they read it more often. But let's face it. With page after page of plain text, the Bible is hard to read.

Until now.

That's not a Christian view. That's saying that, while it's good to read the Bible, it's understandable if you don't, because it's hard. That's not what Christians believe. They believe that the Bible is the word of God and that it's our spiritual food - that it's the 'bread of life' that comes from heaven. That's also what the Bible teaches about itself. Reading it is not an option, it's indispensable. It's part of having a relationship with God. Also, it's not that difficult. If you can read, you can read it. Yes, as you go, you encounter difficult and challenging parts, but that's good. 

draught

I bought a secondhand copy of Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors for a couple of dollars. It's her second novel. The first was Cleopatra and Frankenstein, and the third, which comes out April, 2027, is Grenade.

Something that really impresses me is the aesthetic of these books. The covers I mean. It's one of the most effective designs I've ever seen. There's something very elegant and, at the same time, crafted and rustic about it. The second and third books, even though the colors and fonts are different, are in the same style as the first.  

substance and form

I first came across the work of Michel Foucault in a class about legal history. His subject was power, and I was really impressed by the truth of what he wrote. It was deep and profound. I can't remember the content. I just remember how compelling it was. 

clue

My overall impression of my art is that it doesn't look very good, but still, as I create it there's usually a feeling that I've captured something that I like. Occasionally, but rarely, I don't feel that, and I just put the image out there because, for better or worse, I've made it. 

I've noticed that there's a big discrepancy between what I think about the works and how they are received. Often when I think something's really good, I won't get much response, and vice versa - I won't think it's that good but people like it. 

a strange claim

In an ad for a business automation platform, the young guy in the ad says:

I literally owe everything I have to *******. If you take out *****, all of my dreams and my whole life disappears. 

The problem is that I don't even think it's possible to do anything close to that with this platform. What you can do with it is to automate tasks, more efficiently use data across different apps, and incorporate AI into processes. The only way I think it could encompass your whole life and all your goals is if it was your own business, and even then, you'd probably have other concerns and goals....like relationships and family, for example, or hobbies. Or, even if you were fully consumed with your career and your whole life was about that, a tool that is used to improve efficiency is not going to become the source of all your ambitions. You have to bring that yourself and you use tools to help you achieve them. 

from here

I was surprised to learn that, when it was a new development, impressionism was considered to be radical and transgressive. People wondered if it was even art, because it was so different from what was called art at that time. 

At first, I was surprised because, to my mind, impressionism is the epitome of fine art, but when I thought about it, it made sense. That's how art develops. 

exigency

When I'm feeling tired, there are two ways to wake myself up. I can either have a coffee or read Simone Weil. 

dark times

Years ago, I read Leon Uris's Mila 18, about one of the darkest periods in human history - a book about war, terror, depravity and triumph. There's a scene early in the book when one of the main characters pulls this book of poetry off his shelf and reads from it, seeking a kind of consolation. I remember that more clearly than anything else in the book, although, when I look for it, I can't find it. That's OK. The idea of it is probably better than the text. 

something made

To represent something in a book or a film, accurately, you have to distort it and craft it. Anything absolutely authentic would be unbelievable. 

moodible

The reason you have two ears is so that you can listen to two things at once. If you're just listening to one video or podcast at a time, you're missing out.