Until you have done something for humanity, you should be ashamed to die.
— Horace Mann
If we have a million photos, we tend to value each one less than if we only had ten. The internet forces a general devaluation of the written word: a global deflation in the average word’s value on many axes. As each word tends to get less reading-time and attention and to be worth less money at the consumer end, it naturally tends to absorb less writing-time and editorial attention on the production side. Gradually, as the time invested by the average writer and the average reader in the average sentence falls, society’s ability to communicate in writing decays.
An ad that pretends to be art is — at absolute best — like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what’s sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill’s real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.
— David Foster Wallace
E. L. Doctorow once said that ‘writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’ You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.
— Anne Lamott - Bird by Bird
(Source: Yahoo!)
The act of forgetting crafts and hones data in the brain as if carving a statue from a block of marble. It enables us to make sense of the world by clearing a path to the thoughts that are truly valuable. It also aids emotional recovery. …In short, memory — and forgetting — can shape your personality.
— The Importance of Forgetting - Delancey Place
(Source: Yahoo!)
Modernism made a more prolific consumer by making sense of and often glorifying the shift from production to consumption. It created a more discriminating one by distinguishing serious art, or “high modernism,” from mass culture and mechanized entertainment. This may be the readiest association that most of us have with literary high modernism: Joyce, Faulkner, Eliot, Dos Passos, et al are good because they’re difficult. We are taught it takes an entire liberal arts education just to learn to appreciate and discuss them—that is, to consume them correctly. In the twenties and thirties, the modernists began to think of movies, magazines, cheap paperbacks, and other forms of automated and mass-produced amusements as cultural equivalents to another developing consumable that was cheap, easy, standardized, and bad for the masses consuming it: fast food.
— Paris Review – Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control: Modernists Go Off-Menu
Sex is not fundamentally democratic or kind. It refuses to sit neatly on top of love.
Nate and Tim and that other dude and that one girl have a quandary. How much of a shit do they give? How much of a fuck? Let’s say Tim snaps an E string. Does he stop everything to restring the son of a bitch while Nate tries his best to make lame jokes, or does Tim just keep playing without an E string? If he goes the rest of the set without an E string, does that indicate he does not give a fuck or does not give a shit? What if he breaks all the rest of the strings too, and strips down and dances around with the mic stuck down his sweaty briefs, coming dangerously close to electrocuting himself in the dick? Fuck, right? That’s not giving a fuck. That’s probably not giving TWO fucks. While also not giving a shit. But: what’s the difference and how are the two related?
The ‘zone of proximal development’ is the idea that learning works best when the student tackles something that is just beyond his or her current reach, neither too hard nor too easy. In classroom situations, for example, one team of researchers estimated that its’ best to arrange things so that children succeed roughly 80 percent of the time; more than that, and kids tend to get bored; less, and they tend to get frustrated. The same is surely true of adults, too, which is why video game manufacturers have been known to invest millions in play testing to make sure that the level of challenge always lies in that sweet spot of neither too easy nor too hard.
— Guitar Zero - Gary Marcus
