Lawrence

That’s the ideal, right? How come so many artists do the same thing over and over, though, and are praised for it? Bodies of work like On Kawara’s really frustrate me. I’d like to see an artist reinvent their own *need to make art in their medium* with every work. I don’t know if it’s possible.

Headline of an article by Ted Gioia from February 25th titled “The New Aesthetics of Slop: Or What Happens When Vulgar Technocrats Control the Arts”, with a banner picture containing an image of Gioia and the text, “Ted Gioia: The Honest Broker”

Headline of an article by Gareth Watkins from February 9th titled “AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism” with the summary “It’s embarrassing, destructive and looks like shit: AI-generated art is the perfect aesthetic form for the far right,” also saying it’s a 15-minute read.

I mean, case in point re: the frustration, right here

Not that it’s not laudable to take a stand against AI art, but…

My middle-of-the-night post about Joanna Newsom from a couple weeks ago I now think was paranoid, sexist and worlds too dismissive of a musical and lyrical genius/prophet, but at the same time, exonerating the entire Californian Newsom clan is going to take more work than I believe I’m capable of

On the other hand, Bishop Berkeley did apparently say, about hell, “A man who believes in no future state would act a foolish part in being honest. For what reason is there why such a one would postpone his own private interest or pleasure to the doing his duty?” Is that so far from Musk?

Yesterday, I came up with a plot to steal the hyphen from New-York Historical Society to create (as seemed to make more intuitive sense to me) Daylight-Saving Time. I found out today though that as of last October it’s now just New York Historical…!

I don’t really know who needs to hear this but @tedgioia.bsky.social’s writing is so inspiring and frustrating at the same time

I guess this is where things like snark have to come in and prove their value. That and taking advantage of the idea that if a portion of the right even nominally still follows Christian beliefs, they may retain the ability to be morally horrified by actually vastly immoral things. Maybe.

I literally cannot find words to adequately express how bad Musk is being. “Sociopath” doesn’t begin to cut it, and is an ableist insult anyway. “Evil” seems to have a baked-in unbelievability to it but at least goes more to the core of the issue. Even this post’s first sentence seems understated.

ALMANAC of MANCALA
HEPTAGON shaped PATHOGEN
COMPILE your POLEMIC…

I want somebody (me?) to come out and say, “One of my favorite philosophers is someone with whom I agree on almost nothing”

It’s also not compartmentalization, which is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at *different* times. What Fitzgerald wants, I think, is to cure a compulsion I at least suffer from a lot: to fit everything into one system. He wants contradictions to stop being emotionally unbearable.

“Corsons Inlet” by A.R. Ammons also must be one of my favorite poems by this point:

“I will try
to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening
scope, but enjoying the freedom that
Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,
that I have perceived nothing completely…”

Breathe in, breathe out, and repeat after F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."

This is not doublethink. This is a testament to the universe being unsolved.

Descartes at least had the decency to admit that what rationalism ultimately led him to was God

If you’re a rationalist and racial equality (among other things) isn’t among your *axioms*, then you need to seriously rethink your axioms. If you can’t do that, then you need to seriously rethink *having axioms* in the first place.

Wow, is there any kind of rationalism that isn’t shit

In 2010, Newsom released “Go Long”, a song that utterly, and justifiably, mocks the patriarchy (as well as, almost incidentally, the Bob Dylan of “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”).

Grimes “kind of like[s] the patriarchy.”

Please make this make sense!

(The 80-year gap between Mallarmé and Babitz being emblematic of the long, long commandeering of decadence by dudes, I suppose)

cc: @rachellllyon.bsky.social

Reminds me of Mallarmé: “A pale sky, above the world that is ending through decrepitude, going perhaps to pass away with the clouds; shreds of worn-out purple of the sunsets wash off their colour in a river sleeping on the horizon, submerged with rays and water.”

cc: @rachellllyon.bsky.social

“I was impatient with ordinary sunsets…” Wow, @rachellllyon.bsky.social!

as a Joanna Newsom fan since 2006, what do I do now I’ve discovered the Newsom-Grimes connection? Newsom stated her admiration for Grimes in 2015; they were in a photo shoot together in 2018. can someone please do a deep dive?

I’ve already had to give up my Van Morrison fandom in disgust.

I thought at first that this was talking about Warren Ellis from Nick Cave’s band and that I could use it for the salubrious effect of further invalidating Cave’s choices

(No shade on Nick Cave the visual artist intended)

Frank Zappa was a deeply problematic musician, but his “Information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, wisdom is not truth, truth is not beauty, beauty is not love” still resonates.

Who would have thought that nowadays it would be prudent to preface it with “Data is not information”?

Inspired by @possibleconnie.bsky.social, a recapitulation of something I posted once somewhere else:

What are you more concerned about?

- things you post on the Internet vanishing
- things you post on the Internet never vanishing

A quote by David Turnbull: “Rationality is a deeply problematic concept. It is profoundly embedded in the hidden assumptions of late twentieth century occidentalism about what it is to be a knowing, moral, sane individual. Indeed it is so embedded that to be anything other than rational is to be ignorant, immoral, insane, or a member of an undifferentiated herd. Hence rationality cannot be treated as simply an epistemological concept about the conditions under which one can know something; it also carries ideological overtones, privileging certain ways of knowing over others. Rationality is a constitutive element in the moral economy. ”Yet despite, or perhaps because of, this central role of rationality, there are no fully articulated rules or criteria for being rational in the acceptance of beliefs or in the pursuit of knowledge, nor is there a single type of rationality. As with all concepts, when the epistemological is overemphasised at the expense of the practical, rationality has a degree of incoherence which seems to reach total intransigence in the recognition that ultimately there can be no rational (as opposed to aesthetic, moral or social) justification for being rational or choosing between types of rationality.”

“Rationality is a deeply problematic concept.” From Mathematics Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Mathematics, edited by Helaine Selin.

I was looking at the Google Books preview of this book, about a subject I desperately need to know more about, and just stumbled across this!

@eruditorumpress.com I’m just now reading your and Jack Graham’s Austrian School essay in Neoreaction a Basilisk (forgive me, I’m slow) and HOLY SHIT WOW

@tedgioia.bsky.social I read and liked your essay on Google and the East India Company! I think it even helped inspire my first post here.

But the idea that Pichai’s presence at the inauguration could help confer “a veneer of respectability and legitimacy” to Google… seems kind of laughable to me.

… oh, wait, is this thing on? let’s try this again.

Anagrammatical Concepts Roll Call:

RECLAIM the MIRACLE
PRAISED for DESPAIR
TIDYING with DIGNITY
PUNCHIEST of CHIPTUNES
PURITANS for RASPUTIN…

okay followers, there are a few of you now, here’s my first silly post

so what day will it be a month before a month from today?