Ralph Williams who lectured on Shakespeare is one of the best-loved professors at Michigan. He has now retired but thankfully is still around in an emeritus capacity. Link to this short series of meditations on Shakespeare, passages and language.
LSA video: Part I
"We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true."
~Robert Wilensky
"The world is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing rocks!'Henri Cartier Bresson
"I still believe there is a real social significance in a rock - just as there is in a line of unemployed. For that opinion I am charged with inhumanity, unawareness."
"I agree with you that there is just as much 'social significance in a rock' as in 'a line of unemployed.' All depends on the seeing . . . If I have in some way awakened others to a broader conception of life - added significance and beauty to their lives - . . . then I have functioned, and am satisfied."
I might have been depressed as a teenager, but I wasn’t beyond enjoying some beautiful distractions. Since my father had parked a large part of his library in my bedroom, when I was bored with studying I would pick up a volume and flip through it until I came upon something that interested me. I ended up finding, more or less randomly, fascinating things while supposedly doing something else. Similarly, while listening to the radio, I became aware of artists and musicians I’d otherwise never have heard of. I had at least learned that if I couldn’t accept education from anyone else, I might just have to feed myself.But, I digress. Coming back to the subject of distraction, Kureishi at the end talks about the virtues of distraction. Like anything else, it's a fine line to draw the distinction between good and bad distractions:
From this point of view — that of drift and dream; of looking out for interest; of following this or that because it seems alive — Ritalin and other forms of enforcement and psychological policing are the contemporary equivalent of the old practice of tying up children’s hands in bed, so they won’t touch their genitals. The parent stupefies the child for the parent’s good. There is more to this than keeping out the interesting: there is the fantasy and terror that someone here will become pleasure’s victim, disappearing into a spiral of enjoyment from which he or she will not return.
It is said that distractions are too easy to come by now that most writers use computers, though it’s just as convenient to flee through the mind’s window into fantasy. In the end, a person requires a method. He must be able to distinguish between creative and destructive distractions by the sort of taste they leave, whether they feel depleting or fulfilling. And this can work only if he is, as much as possible, in good communication with himself — if he is, as it were, on his own side, caring for himself imaginatively, an artist of his own life.
A beautiful poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz:
Aashiqui
woh log bahut khushkismat the
jo ishq ko kaam samjhte the
ya kaam se aashiqi karte the
hum jeete ji mashroof rahe
kuch ishq kiya, kuch kaam kiya
kaam ishq ke aade aata raha
aur ishq se kaam uljhata raha
phir aakhir mein tang akar humne
dono ko adhoora chod diya…
(my translation)
Love
They were very fortunate
who thought love was their work
or who loved their work
While alive, I kept myself busy
I loved a bit, I worked a bit
work came in the way of love
and love in the way of work
and finally frustrated
I gave up, leaving both incomplete ...
See webpage linked for complete poem.You have the right to remain anything you can and will be. An attorney you cannot afford will be provided to you. You have silent will. You can be against law. You cannot afford one. You remain silent. Anything you say will be provided to you. ...
If you didn't catch this story on the radio, or live where you can't hear this live, you might want to take a look at This American Life: The apple factory. Especially, if you are an Apply fanboy, or any kind of nerd who likes technology, or any consumer in the First World who uses products that are Made in China. They are cheap, and you can hear why. The justification for the sweatshops above is standard economic theory: the rising tide of globalization lifts all boats, even little ones in far-off places. The alternatives are much worse. But, it helps to consider what the least of all evils is.
In my first few years in America, I wrote a whole bunch of handwritten letters to my parents. I also wrote long emails (which were easier to cc: to others) about my initial impressions, but the letters were longer, more reflective, and more personal. This was before I got sucked into that vortex of unlimited-all-the-time-access to the internet. The letter-writing petered out in a few years. I can't recall the last time I wrote someone a letter. Has technology made us lazy and sloppy? I think so. Punctuation and spelling, to speak much less about bad grammar, are now optional (author included) in electronic communication. Even emails are a level above tweets and text messages. Technology is disruptive, but does it need to be always be destructive? The oxymoronic Schumpeter-ism - 'creative destruction' leans heavily on the latter. In terms of the defending the ancient art of letter writing, I am an occasional and limited contributor. It is a bit of a cop-out, but I have been writing postcards pretty religiously for the last 6 years or so. Whenever I am out of town, I pick up a few postcards, hunt for stamps and as far as possible mail them from the location. One postcard is always sent home to my parents. The others are sent to a random assortment of friends. I must add that every single one of them was glad to receive the postcard but no one has written one to me. Karmic destiny may not work on human time-scale. Sigh! One of my New Year's Resolutions is to write at least 12 actual letters in the coming year, one for every month of the year. There was something satisfying in writing the letter, the sealing of the envelope, the licking of the stamp, and the walk to the postbox. The postbox gobbled the letter and then began the mystery of when it would exactly reach the addressee. Just as I was done composing my first draft of the first letter of the year, I came across this piece by Roger Angell who reports and laments the loss of confirmed next-day delivery by the United States Postal Service. What is exactly lost? that calls for this sort of nostalgic longing?
Losing the mixed pleasures of just arrived letters may not mean as much in the end as what we’re missing by not writing them. Writing regularly to several people—a parent, a friend who’s moved to another coast, a daughter or son away at college—requires one to keep separate mental ledgers, storing up the weather or the idle thoughts or the disasters we need to pass on. We’re always getting ready to write. The letters out and back become a correspondence, and mysteriously take on a tone of their own: some rambly and comfortably boring; others cool and funny; some financial; some confessional. They stick in the mind and seem worth the trouble....Old emails to my parents are now mostly lost - cremated electronically or permanently exiled and then forgotten in some folder. One doesn't feel their loss. Of course, my mother has saved every one of my letters and postcards in a special folder that is stored in her steel Godrej cupboard. Those real, actual letters will survive many years to be read again and again.
Letters aren’t exactly going away. Condolence letters can’t be sent out from our laptops, and maybe not love letters, either, because e-mail is so leaky. Secrets—an expected baby, a lowdown joke, a killer piece of gossip—require a stamp and a sealed flap, and perhaps apologies do as well (“I don’t know what came over me”). Not much else. E-mail is cheap, and the message is done and delivered almost as quickly as the thought of it.
Roger Angell on writing letters in the New Yorker
George Whitman, the legenday owner of the Shakespeare and Company, died last night at the age of 98. Among bookshop owners he was a bookshop owner's bookshop owner. There are bookstores and then there is his. As he said,
“I wanted a bookstore because the book business is the business of life.”In a sense it isn't much too look at. There is the famous front in green and yellow and the wishing well in the front. Inside it looks like any other used/rare bookstore - books mostly arranged in some fashion with piles of others in the aisles waiting to be organized. And yes! the library feel with dust on old hardbound books that seemed to have not moved in decades. NY Times: George Whitman. I won't repeat the biographical details, names and his connection with another legendary bookshop in San Franciso - City Lights Bookstore. It's all in the article. What seemed to me most important is that he wanted this bookshop to be a nursery for aspiring writers. A place where they could work and stay (for free). He gave them lodging upstairs. There are no baths and the aspiring writers used the public baths in the 5th/6th arrondisements. The lodgings were spare, but with a view.- it's within a stone's throw away from the dead center of Paris (the Notre Dame) and on the left bank of the Seine. Of the 40,000 or so people that Whitman gave shelter to, I have yet to read that anyone of them became particularly famous. That's not the point. The point is that his man loved books and supported the written word. As a failed novelist, he realised that hungry artists need a refuge. (Listen to interview on The World) A few months ago, Borders (a local Ann Arbor company) shut it doors. When the other leading light of Ann Arbor bookstores Shaman Drum closed a few years ago, some people blamed Borders. Actually, we did it. As far as I can recall, the last 20 books that I have purchases have been from Amazon. I also admit rather shamelessly that whilst a graduate student, I did browse books from Borders, but only 10% of the time I actually bought books there (I did buy some coffee). You, me and the rest of the world in wanting things cheaper and faster have caused newspapers and bookstores to fail. Our natural tendency is to find patterns or make much of mere coincidences. Ideas seem to sort of converge in time. I watched the documentary Page One on the New York Times on Tuesday night. It talks about the changing nature of media and the end of newspapers. There are very few blogs that actually generate original content. Everything (including this blog) is meta-commentary. The internet (Craigslist, Amazon, Zillow, company websites) killed the revenue streams for the newspaper. Also, the internet has fostered this mistaken idea that everything should be free. here has to be a new model. In the documentary which was largely sympathetic to the NYT and its survival did present the view as echoed by the editor of the Atlantic - 'there is critical difference between "it shouldn't fail and it can't fail".' The market will do as it must. Shaman Drum was supposed to be replaced with a non-profit community center for writers. In an ironic twist it's now Five Guys - a burger and fries joint - that now purveys real food. No more food for the mind. I say this half-facetiously, as there has been no real material loss. Its more than adequately made up by Amazon and other websites. You can still get books. It's completely true that the selection, cost, suggestions, reviews online are greatly better than trying to look for the same from a bookstore. At the same time, the cultural loss is quite great. I greatly miss the Borders on Liberty. I spent many a cold, wintry day browsing through the shelves, discovering new books and reading introductions and prefaces of books (that I didn't buy). Yet, it's now a big hole on that street. The great center of learning - Ann Arbor - now has one large bookstore - Barnes and Noble, far away from campus on Washtenaw Avenue. How soon that fold? The question asked at the end of the BBC World News report on George Whitman was, "Do you think anyone would want to open such a bookstore now?" One would like to believe "yes", but in reality, no one will. The old model is clearly outdated and won't survive except as a charity case. The only way that such 'institutions' (it's fair to call them that) will survive or revive is that they need to be managed more like National Parks. Public goods that need to preserved by those who need them the most - the public. Public goods that Adam Smith's invisible hand is always blind to.
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| Where is George? |
