take-root

Alone Together

What is so seductive about texting, about keeping that phone on, about that little red light on the BlackBerry, is you want to know who wants you.

…

It used to be that people had a way of dealing with the world that was basically, ‘I have a feeling, I want to make a call.’ Now I would capture a way of dealing with the world, which is: ‘I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text.’ That is, with this immediate ability to connect and almost pressure to … because you’re holding your phone, you’re constantly with your phone, it’s almost like you don’t know your thoughts and feelings until you connect.

Distressing thoughts from MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle, who wrote Alone Together: Why We Expect More fromTechnology and Less from Each Other. More here.

6th Dec 2012 | 1 note

Two things I discovered while going through my old grad school notebooks yesterday:

The designer’s task is to urge a central location for structures of communal celebration and to design the structures so that they inspire a sense of orientation and festivity in the participants rather than reduce the celebration to a commodity and the attendants to mere consumers. Albert Borgmann, The Depth of Design

AND

I’ve discovered that the most amazing things happen to you when you are standing around sharpening a pencil or doing something equally mundane, thinking absolutely nothing exciting is ever going to happen. Jean Van Leeuwen

4th Dec 2012 | 18 notes

The aesthetic life

“The aesthetic life is immediately lived—a life lived for ‘the moment.’ It is the lifestyle in which people are absorbed in satisfying their ‘natural’ desires and impulses, whether physical, emotional. or intellectual. These people are solely concerned with their own happiness and believe that the key to happiness is found in externals—who they know, what they do, the roles they play, what they possess, where they live, and so on. They live for enjoyment, on the surface of life. They are observers, spectators, tasters, but not serious participants. They have no real inner life, no real self to offer to others. Their well-being is determined by the choices or moods of others and by forces that extend beyond their control. When they make decisions, they are not internalized. Thus, when things go wrong, aesthetic persons never accept responsibility or blame. Such people are apathetic, indifferent, and unintegrated. They are unable to commit themselves to any one thing. Something better might always come along, and so they split their energies in different directions.”

-Charles Moore

Woe to me if I should ever live merely the aesthetic life.

1st Dec 2012 | 4 notes

Saturday

Two thoughts:

If you want to be loathsome to God, just run with the crowd. s.k.

I finished reading The History of Love today. I mourned its ending because I wanted to keep feeling the way I felt while reading it, which is difficult to maintain once you reach the last page and then can never read the book for the first time again.

30th Nov 2012 | 4 notes

Winter listlessness

26th Nov 2012 | 11 notes

I was reading this article on living without irony this week, which led me to this bit by David Foster Wallace, writing about a movement called New Sincerity:

Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.

What would my life look like if I had the courage to risk disapproval more often?

19th Nov 2012 | 2 notes

Most systematizers stand in the same relation to their systems as the man who builds a great castle and lives in an adjoining shack; they do not live in their great systematic structure…Metaphorically speaking, a person’s ideas must be the building he lives in—otherwise there is something terribly wrong.

S.K.