Bearing the Load

Those who care about their work, and make every effort to do it well, usually bear the load of at least one or two, and sometimes a great many others, who do not.
N.N. Scott

A Supplication for Foriveness

To feel distress over one's inadequacy, without taking some kind of action to make up the deficiency, accomplishes no more than a supplication for forgiveness addressed to a nonentity.
N.N. Scott

What Work We are Doing

Most of us would agree that it is better to do our work well, than poorly -- but most of us actually know little about what work we are actually doing.
N.N. Scott

The Contented

The contented are most often ignorant of their incapacity.
N.N. Scott

Joy and Woe are Woven Fine

Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine;
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.
It is right it should be so;
Man was made for joy and woe;
And, when this we rightly know,
Safely through the world we go.
William Blake, Auguries of Innocence (circa 1793)

Panpsychism

"Over the course of universal evolution, how and when did mind come to be? It seems clear that either mind in the most general sense has always been present in the universe or else it came into being (suddenly or gradually). The first view is panpsychism; the second is emergentism. Nearly all present-day philosophers of mind are emergentists, who assume that mind emerged at some point in evolution. Usually, however, they do not address the question of how such emergence is conceivable, and they do not acknowledge that one need not assume this.... They seem to know that a clear and comprehensible theory of emergence is extremely problematic, but they cannot bring themselves to adopt the only viable alternative."
-- David Skrbina

Bug and Winter Leaves

A bug enjoys the evening. Hope y'all are well!

Old Confederate Home

The apartments occupy the former grounds of the old Confederate Home, a late 19th century care center for "aged and indigent" venterans of the Civil War.


A few traces remain. This photo shows terraces behind the building. The property just north of here, now occupied by a community service center, also bears remains:


This old wall now runs from nowhere to nowhere in the depths of a waterlogged forest.

Some Graffiti I Found under a Bridge

Photos taken in mid-August, 2005.

An Unrequited Eschatological Hope

"An unrequited eschatological hope has always fueled the engines of accumulation."

Eugene McCarraher

Laughter in a Sex Scene

"Pornographers will tell you that laughter in a sex scene is like a pistol shot at a concert. It ruptures the fantasy. In their guidelines for aspiring writers of eroticism, the publishers of Black Lace warn specifically against comedy. What they do not go on to say is that laughter is the operation of intelligence, an act of criticism, and the moment you subject porn, soft or hard, to intelligence, it comes apart like a mummified artefact exposed to light. Ditto The Da Vinci Code. Ditto the modern novel of highly responsible ideological intent."

Howard Jacobson, the Guardian newspaper, 2005

Creationism

"The real heart of creationism is existential dread."
-- Ronald Bailey

Sartre's cigarette

[A] good many of those who do not love Sartre are now willing to pay him due respect. Posters all over Paris advertise a grand, and perhaps excessively solemn, exhibition devoted to him at the Bibliothèque Nationale. ... Sartre's cigarette has been carefully airbrushed from the image, so that he looks as if he is about to make a rude gesture.
-- Prospect Magazine

The Silence of Things

Somewhere in the Industrial Age, objects shut up because their creation had become so remote and intricate a process that it was no longer readily knowable.

Or they were silenced, because the pleasures of abundance that all the cheap goods offered were only available if those goods were mute about the scarcity and loss that lay behind their creation.

Modern advertising -- notably for Nike -- constitutes an aggressive attempt to displace the meaning of the commodity from its makers, as though you enter into relationship with very tall athletes rather than, say, very thin Vietnamese teenagers when you buy their shoes.

It is a stretch to think about Mexican prison labor while contemplating Victoria's Secret lavender lace boycut panties.

The objects are pretty; their stories are hideous,

So you get to choose between an alienated and ultimately meaningless world and one that makes terrible demands on you.

Most consumers prefer meaningless over complicated, and therefore prefer that objects remain silent.

To tell their tales is to be the bearer of bad news ... against shrimp, against strawberries, against gold, and on and on.

It's what makes radicals and environmentalists seem so grumpy.

Rebecca Solnit, Alternet, 21 July 2003

Chuck Jones

A certain perversity attended the birth of many Chuck Jones cartoons.

He concocted the hilarious “Bully for Bugs” because a Warner Brothers executive stated that there was nothing funny about a bullfight.

He created Pepé [Le Pew] because no one thought of a skunk as the least bit amorous.

And he encouraged Mel Blanc to imitate a mogul’s lisp for the voice of Daffy Duck. Fortunately Leon Schlesinger was deaf to his own speech defect. Watching the rushes for the first time he exclaimed, “Jeethuth Chritht, that’th a funny voithe! Where’d you get that voithe?”

This whimsical attitude influenced Jones’s finest efforts.

What’s Opera, Doc? simultaneously parodies Wagner’s Ring cycle and Disney’s Fantasia.

"After all, when a major figure is being satirized, he demands an outsize lampoon.”

Stefan Kanfer, City Journal, Spring 2003