Writers, like everyone else, relish feedback. But many will tell you that their art requires sequestration from feedback, for a time, to go into the creative wilds and let their minds roam freely — and then, when it’s time, return to the world and be judged. With no judgment at all, their art would die. But with always-on judgment, it may never reach the status of art.
— Anand Giridharadas - A New, Noisier Way of Writing (Oh, internet: you’re the cause of—and solution to—all of life’s problems…)
Mutantfrog - My Japanese sucks and always will
Just want to get something off my chest. I’ve been studying Japanese for almost 15 years, spent two of them studying abroad, lived in Tokyo for five years now, passed the JLPT 1 and the Securities Representative exam in Japanese, worked as a Japanese-English translator for around 7 years, and on and on. I’ve done a lot of stuff that would seemingly require near-native fluency, and yet…
My Japanese still sucks. I feel like no matter how much I study or live in the country I am always going to have a rough accent, a low working vocabulary, and generally limited fluency. My reading will always be much much slower than a native, and I will forever be looking up kanji on my iPhone even to write my own address half the time. My wife will be afraid to let me go to the doctor alone lest I misunderstand some important detail. I’ll never feel comfortable speaking in public or leading a group conversation among natives. If someone doesn’t feel like being patient with me there’s not a whole lot I can do to take control of the situation.
I can relate to this. I’ve published translations of Japanese, and when my former Japanese host family came over earlier this month, I had no trouble being their interpreter, but… I feel like I’m always going to be especially far behind because I don’t live in Japan, and I’m probably never going to live in Japan for more than a couple months at a time from now on out.
Related, a link from the archives.
Wonderful takedown of Lawrence Krauss, who, like Hawking before him, believes quantum physics has solved die Seinsfrage:
Krauss, mind you, has heard this kind of talk before, and it makes him crazy.
A century ago, it seems to him, nobody would have made so much as a peep about
referring to a stretch of space without any material particles in it as
“nothing.” And now that he and his colleagues think they have a way of showing
how everything there is could imaginably have emerged from a stretch of space
like that, the nut cases are moving the goal posts. He complains that “some
philosophers and many theologians define and redefine ‘nothing’ as not being
any of the versions of nothing that scientists currently describe,” and that
“now, I am told by religious critics that I cannot refer to empty space as
‘nothing,’ but rather as a ‘quantum vacuum,’ to distinguish it from the
philosopher’s or theologian’s idealized ‘nothing,’ ” and he does a good deal
of railing about “the intellectual bankruptcy of much of theology and some of
modern philosophy.” But all there is to say about this, as far as I can see,
is that Krauss is dead wrong and his religious and philosophical critics are
absolutely right. Who cares what we would or would not have made a peep about
a hundred years ago? We were wrong a hundred years ago. We know more now.
And if what we formerly took for nothing turns out, on closer examination, to
have the makings of protons and neutrons and tables and chairs and planets and
solar systems and galaxies and universes in it, then it wasn’t nothing, and
it couldn’t have been nothing, in the first place. And the history of
science — if we understand it correctly — gives us no hint of how it might be
possible to imagine otherwise.
It seems to me that if Krauss finds it so agreeable to knock down philosophers and theologians, he owes them the courtesy of finding the strongest members of their cohort. Shadowboxing against Robert Wright is just a form of bullying.
Via Egalicontrarian
Edit: See Useless Tree
SuperMutant Magic Academy - Context
I once wrote a paper where I classed theories of art into five main groups. Context is the fifth:
- Theories where the artist makes it art. (Ex. Duchamp is an artist, therefore the urinal is art.)
- Theories where the form of the art makes it art. (Ex. A history painting is more artistic than a landscape or vice versa.)
- Theories where the underlying material or particular event makes it art. (Ex. A Van Gogh is art; a perfect replica of a Van Gogh is not art.)
- Theories where the goal makes it art. (Ex. Videogames are not edifying about the human condition and so, not art.)
- Theories where the context makes it art. (Ex. The gallery makes it art.)
Of course, there’s always overlap between the families of theories.
The key mistake most people make when they look at Washington—and the key misconception that characters like Abramoff would lead you to—is seeing Washington as a cash economy. It’s a gift economy. That’s why firms divert money into paying lobbyists rather than spending every dollar on campaign contributions. Campaign contributions are part of the cash economy. Lobbyists are hired because they understand how to participate in the gift economy.
— Ezra Klein - Our Corrupt Politics (Gift economies are easy to romanticize, but cash economies won out in part because there’s a terrible clarity to them. You can tell whose on top of a cash economy by just looking at a balance sheet. All values are unified and quantified by a single, universal scale, accurate down to the penny. Judging a gift economy requires the skills of a sociologist, a psychologist, and a primatologist all in one.)
NYTimes - Kseniya Sobchak, Russia’s ‘It Girl,’ Dons Opposition Cloak
Interesting “only in Russia” story. Apparently, Sobchak is “Russia’s Paris Hilton” and had been close to the Putin regime and Putin personally, but has recently taken to speaking out.
Russia is so crazy, that I can almost believe that the whole thing is a fake out and really she’s a double agent working to discredit the opposition somehow… Heaven help Russia because no one else can.
