November 2008
8 posts
Negative Capability on the Imaginary Axis
One of the deepest observations in Seven Days comes not from any of the renowned artists or brooding academics Thornton has spoken to but from the collector who, when asked if he likes work by young artists, says, “I don’t necessarily like it, but I buy it.” It’s a joke, but it’s serious, and from the viewpoint of collecting it represents an advanced stage of...
Alone with a monster in a chasm with perpendicular...
A particularly diabolical feature of Alzheimer’s is that, while all else has washed away, “emotional memory” is retained, so that the patient finds himself in a prison of feeling without context. A friend has told me of his normally mild-mannered father who, enraged at being unable to figure out how to insert his key into his locked car, hacked the door off with an axe that he...
To the last syllable of recorded time
Go back to the late 17th century. Isaac Newton and Gottfreid Leibniz have both discovered calculus and classical physics. In between bickering over who deserved credit, they also spend hours disagreeing about the metaphysical nature of time itself. Newton argued that space and time were real and independent from each other. No, replied Leibniz, time and space are just two interrelated ways of...
Why Procrastinate
Well, there goes that rationalization:
A third oft-cited explanation for unreasonable delay is arousal. The “arousal procrastinator” swears that he works best under pressure, loving—perhaps needing—the rush of a last-minute deadline to get started. Such a person believes procrastinating affords a “peak” or “flow” experience, defined by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi of the Drucker School...
Cruel Fights Well Pictured
Come, let me write. And to what end? To ease A burthened heart. How can words ease, which are The glasses of thy daily vexing care? Oft cruel fights well pictured forth do please. Art not ashamed to publish thy disease? Nay, that may breed my fame, it is so rare. But will not wise men think thy words fond ware? Then be they close, and so none shall displease. What idler thing than...
Things Recollected After 15 Bleary-Eyed Hours At...
Strange, but I was thinking just now about this ultra-dudely Boston housemate I lived with back in 2004, Adam. One Friday night, at around three a.m., after we’d been out for hours of brutal carousing and potentially deadly careening through the streets in his Acura and even the theft of a parking sign wrenched out of the sidewalk (which we dropped clanking on the kitchen floor), he sprawled...
Election Night
Oh, I don’t know if I have terribly sophisticated thoughts right now. Politics is a funny thing. On most days it’s a tedious anti-drama, but occasionally it rises up into something wondrous.
To wit: Tonight, election night, around 9 p.m., shortly after a murmur started rippling through the streets that Ohio had been called for Barack Obama, crowds of people began spilling out onto...
