The work of making this world resemble one that you would prefer to live in is a lunch pail [expletive] job, day in and day out, where thousands of committed, anonymous, smart and dedicated people bang on closed doors and pick up those that are fallen and grind away on issues until they get a positive result, and even then, have to stay on to make sure that result holds.
– Jon Stewart
X was a favorite band forty years ago. They’re on a farewell tour. (Their guitarist is 76. Good lord!) Stacy and I went to their Boston show a few weeks ago. They were really good.
Wild Gift is a great album. I’d forgotten how good it is. Give it a listen when you have a chance.
I first heard Michael Sacasas on a podcast several years ago. I was very taken with his observations on how technology can work as a “convivial tool” or against conviviality. Yesterday he posted an essay on the “labor of articulation”, Re-sourcing the mind. I’d never heard the term before and it is spot on. Articulating your thoughts is hard work! Here’s an excerpt:
Consider what is entailed in the labor of articulation… It is not simply the case that articulating ourselves in language is a matter of matching a set of words to a set of internal pre-existing feelings or inchoate impressions, as if the work of articulation left untouched and unchanged what it was we sought to articulate. Rather, the labor of articulation itself shapes what we think and feel. Articulation is not dictation, articulation constitutes our perception of the world.9 To search for a word is not merely to search for a label, the search is interwoven with the very capacity to perceive and understand the thing, idea, or feeling. It is, in fact, generative of thought and feeling, and, ultimately, of who we understand ourselves to be. To articulate is also to interpret, thus it also constitutes the experience of meaning. The labor of articulation binds us to our experience and in relationship with others.
I agree. I also think there’s much truth to this:
My contention… is that when we are confronted with the opportunity to outsource the labor of articulation, we will find that possibility more tempting to the degree that we experience a sense of incompetency and inadequacy, a sense which may have many sources, not least among which is the failure to stock our mind, heart, and imagination. There was, after all, a reason why memory was one of the five canons of classical rhetoric. It was not just a matter of committing to memory what you had planned to say. It was also a matter of having internal resources to draw on in order to say anything at all. Of course, very few of us have any reason to see ourselves as rhetoricians, except that there may simply be something deeply humane and satisfying about the ability to express oneself well.
Read the whole piece here. It’s very good.
That and Friedman has been written some pretty respectable columns over the same period.
It’s hard for me to articulate, but there’s a friend of mine, Peter Sotos, who’s written extensively about abuse and murder and things of that nature. A lot of his writing is extremely difficult to read. It’s repellent. You’re brought into the mind of a sadist, pretty convincingly. And I feel like that experience, reading that stuff, is shocking to your core in the way that the horrors of the reality of those things should be.
That was Big Black’s draw for me. Albini didn’t just sing about darkness and evil. As an artist, he threw himself into it. He articulated something that’s very hard to articulate. Their music captured what he describes in the paragraph above. He wrote unapologetically from the standpoint of a perpetrator who has utter contempt for his victims. I hadn’t heard anything similar before and anything similar since. There was a long time, 10-15 years, where I couldn’t listen to them. I listen some now but it’s still much harder to do so than when I was young.
Continue reading
Just a list this week, no excerpts and in no particular order:
I heard this the other day for the first in at least twenty years. I’d forgotten about it. Amazing song. I’m embarrassed that I did.
Chronological vs kairotic time: