Song of a Reformed Headhunter

All four essays originated as lectures. Morris gives a clear and eloquent explanation of his Socialism in the essays "Useful Work versus Useless Toil" and "How I Became a Socialist." The former lays interesting stress on the wastefulness of Capitalism, a useful counterpoint to how capitalist production is often seen as as the most efficient use of resources. The essay also links the hopes of labor to the hope for a Socialist future in a rhetorically useful move.  "What is the nature of the hope which, when it is present in work, makes it worth doing?  "It is threefold, I think—hope of rest, hope of product, hope of pleasure in the work itself; and hope of these also in some abundance and of good quality; rest enough and good enough to be worth having; product worth having by one who is neither a fool nor an ascetic; pleasure enough for all of us to be conscious of it while we are at work; not a mere habit, the loss of which we shall feel as a fidgety man ...

 From "A Morality Based on Misfortune: The Plague " (1947): Camus's example shows how one may start out from a revolt-based morality and slide back quickly into a depressed one. This is because a morality founded upon passion, upon an irreducible part of ourselves, is often accompanied by bad conscience: how are we to avoid feeling guilty, certain as we are that we are concealing the face of Caligula within ourselves? No one is in any doubt, the power associated with the unleashing of passion is a fearsome danger for possible life . What is ordinarily missed is that the even is not then the product of passion, but of power. Even in Caligula one could not say that the evil was profound, since his capricious acts rapidly destroy his power—and he knows it. Evil is what is done by the SS in the concentration camps; it is what acquires power by killing and, by killing, increases the power of the regime it serves. One cannot even say exactly that evil lies in power (otherwise t...

As the subtitle "The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding" suggests, Tyler Cowen defends the decentralized approach to arts funding adopted by the USA against the more centralized approach of the European states. The defense is, to my mind, thoughtful and thorough. Thoughtful because it takes into account both aesthetic and political claims, not over-stating either, but exposing excessiveness where he sees it. Thorough because it examines the long history and the contemporary context of American arts funding. The only caveat here is that the book was published in 2006, and so its data and findings need updating. The update is unlikely to overturn the book's conclusion. The decentralization argument, or the use of indirect subsidies instead of direct subsidies, is the core of Cowen's thesis. It helps to answer not only the demand for more arts funding coming from the arts community, but also the demand for less funding, arising from Christian critics of immora...

I'm flying to Singapore tomorrow, so have no time to do more than log in the books read. Vikram Chandra's Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty started slowly but increased in interest as I read on. The chapters on Indian aesthetics are particularly interesting, the chapters on computer history less so. Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North : I don't see what's the fuss about this book. It was awarded the Man Booker Prize, but it seemed a rather conventional POW book to me. I may be influenced by having just reading Roberto Bolano's astounding 2666. Another prize-winner, Jean Echenoz's I 'm Gone won the Prix Goncourt. It's very ironic, very cool, very French. I don't like it much. I much prefer Michel Houellebecq, who has been described as a poisoned cherry.

The New Yorker , Feb 2, 2015 from Alec Wilkinson's profile of Yitang Zhang "The Pursuit of Beauty": The British mathematician G. H. Hardy wrote in 1940 that mathematics is, of "all the arts and sciences, the most austere and the most remote." Bertrand Russell called it a refuge from "the dreary exile of the actual world." Hardy believed emphatically in the precise essence of math. A mathematical proof, such as Zhang produced, "should resemble a simple and clear-cut constellation," he wrote, "not a scattered cluster in the Milky Way."   * The books on his shelves have titles such as "An Introduction to Hilbert Space" and "Elliptical Curves, Modular Forms, and Fermat's Last Theorem." There are also books on modern history and on Napoleon, who fascinates him, and copies of Shakespeare, which he reads in Chinese, because it's easier than Elizabethan English. *  "Bounded Gaps Between Primes...

I'm still thinking about Zen Landscapes by Allen S. Weiss. The unity of Zen aesthetics in landscaping, flower-arrangement, ceramics and poetry, all ultimately informed by the tea ceremony. A stone on a bed of gravel may constitute a garden worthy of contemplation. Raked to represent waves, the gravel is thus both fixed and moving, permanent and transient. Flaws are part of the beauty of the contemplated object. I don't think W. H. Auden was into Zen, but he captured the sentiment in "And the crack in the tea-cup opens / A lane to the land of the dead." again I passed the garden without looking, some snow, a stone

I found François Jullien's In Praise of Blandness last summer in the great architecture and design bookstore in Bras Basah Complex, where I brought GH to buy art supplies. I have read Jullien's The Impossible Nude years ago with a great deal of interest while I was working on the poems for The Book of the Body . In Praise of Blandness examines not just Chinese art, but also Chinese philosophy, ethics, music and poetry for a common denominator called dan , which Jullien translates as fadeur , and his English translator Paula M. Varsano translates as blandness. In his Prologue, after acknowledging the difficulty, in fact, the undesirability, of defining blandness, Jullien describes the word thus, at the same time summarizing the movement of thought in the book: Blandness: that phase when different flavors no longer stand in opposition to each other, but, rather, abide within plenitude. It provides access to the undifferentiated foundation of all things and so is valu...

Toward a psychology of the artist . If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy. Frenzy must first have enhanced the excitability of the whole machine; else there is no art. All kinds of frenzy, however diversely conditioned, have the strength to accomplish this" above all, the frenzy of sexual excitement, this most ancient and original form of frenzy. Also the frenzy that follows all great cravings, all strong affects; the frenzy of feasts, contests, feats of daring, victory, all extreme movement; the frenzy of cruelty; the frenzy in destruction; the frenzy under certain meteorological influences, as for example the frenzy of spring; or under the influence of narcotics; and finally the frenzy of will, the frenzy of an overcharged and swollen will. What is essential in such frenzy is the feeling of increased strength and fullness. Out of this feeling one lends to things, one forces them to accept fr...

The novel is a brutal indictment of slavery. Its protagonist, Sethe, a runaway slave, tries to kill her children when their owner catches up with them, and she succeeds in killing a daughter. Beloved haunts Sethe's house 124, first as a ghost, and then, when Paul D, Sethe's fellow slave at Sweet Home, chases it out, returns in person. And so the plot itself embodies the novel's truth: slavery is not over even when it is over. Its horrific effects continue to lash the freed, who will never be free. The novel moves by visiting and revisiting the past, as one character, and then another, recalls ("rememories") their enslaved life at Sweet Home, their escape, their attempt to live as freed slaves (to lay down the sword and shield, as the novel puts it). Common memories, of great pain and sorrow, bind those who share them, and exclude those who don't. Different memories delineate the different experiences of men and women, and so encompass different kinds of savage...