Quickthink

Some Sunday fun - inspired by blogs that cleverly mix text and images. Enjoy!

The other day, a gentleman said to me that nearly all of the peoples in the world have lost their cultures. He meant it as a criticism, that these unfortunates have lost parts of themselves. That they are weakened by processes that they could not control.

What a depressing thought! Humanity is not just menaced by global warming, asteroids and other externalities. We may also be menaced by a weakness in ourselves! Is it so?

This was the great fear of T.S. Eliot when he wrote back in 1922

what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms

So Eliot accused 20th century mankind of betraying its inheritance. He complained of a profound debasement of spirit. Here is a fun image of our accuser  from an advertisement

Is it so? As we cannot go back in time and live in the past, we cannot know for sure if people back then were stronger and finer than we are now. Though some authors have made up stories as if we could. Like Mark Twain (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court). Twain thought modern (19th century) Americans would compare rather well. Here is Mark, looking (as he often did) rather dapper

But in the real world, we are stuck firmly in the present. And in the present we are limited in our ability to understand the peoples of the past. As much as we might worry that we are somehow debased, we cannot bring back what we fear might have been lost. Nor can we be sure that trying would make us even worse off. I would argue that to better understand ourselves, we can only ask in what direction we are going. Jules Verne’s fictional character Philias Fogg firmly kept his eye on this. Here he is

Which brings me to my rather humble point. We achieve this by being mindful of who we are speaking to. Are our words part of a larger story? Or are they a distraction from that story?

Interesting question.

“Words matter.” So says H. James Wilson at Harvard Business Review. And of course, he is right. Words shape the stories that we live. But there is a paradox here. We think that we create the lives that we live. But we do not create the words that we use to shape what we create. Our creativity, therefore is diminished.

And example? Wilson has one. The common usages is that we “live our lives”. Wilson suggests that a more useful construction would be that we “lead our lives”. See the difference? Leading puts us in the decision making and executing framework. Living does not.

So, do you lead your life?

Aaron Hamburger offers a nice piece of advice for writers - don’t outline. At least don’t do it before you start writing. Just go ahead and start getting words on the page. That is the main struggle and BTW, it is always a struggle.

So is great writing just great typing? Well, no. The quality comes out in the editing. And part of that editing is to check out the structure of what you wrote - to outline it.

BTW, that reminds me of a story. Truman Capote quipped that Jack Kerouac’s writing style was “… not writing, but typing.” Ouch! It was a comment that people repeated and repeated. And it is fair … to a point. Kerouac’s stories don’t have a traditional structure. Instead, they are meant to look like a stream of consciousness. But this was window dressing, Kerouac edited his stuff like crazy. As did Joyce. They did it to intensify the experience from reading. To make it feel like the real thing. But not to impose order. Unstructured structure? Whatever, but not unplanned.

I do not refer to Liz here. But to this quote (from a review of his diaries)

“I am as thrilled by the English language as I am by a lovely woman or dreams,” he writes, “green as dreams and deep as death.”

The reviewer, Dwight Garner, notes

That last clause is a reference — these diaries are wrinkled with such allusions — to a poem by Rupert Brooke.

How many people do you know that have this sort of passion for language?

The title of this post may sound a bit odd. After all, how can “the question” have a future? It does though. Just like any thing that we use. A car has a future use path. Same for a house. Same for language. And the question is a language tool. So it has a future.

Hmm … you might ask “isn’t the future for questioning the same as the present?” My guess is that most people assume this is true.  But consider that with internet, we are experiencing an explosion of information. As Sugata Mitra points out, living in a sea of information, we don’t really need to know anything. All we need to do is to ask the right questions.

And there you have it. In a world where “knowledge is obsolete” (see link above) the key skill is to know when and how to start a dialogue. And that is one of the functions of questioning. So we might say that the future of the question looks very bright. Errr … if we learn how to use questions better.

An example? Science asks questions in one way. And scientific questioning has proven to have great value.  But is that the only way to ask what happens in a forest? Dave Haskell thinks not.

Before talking about gilding, one must make a distinction. In attempting a good gilding, one must not asphyxiate. It is a tough lesson to learn. A desire to gild is hard to control. And if the gilder feels insecure, he or she might overdo it. Thus arrives the asphyxiation.

So what is gilding? According to the Free Dictionary

1. To cover with or as if with a thin layer of gold.
2.To give an often deceptively attractive or improved appearance to.
3. Archaic To smear with blood.

Right. So we frown on “gilding the lilies”. They arrive with sufficient gilding of their own sort. But dann it all! Life is not a stroll through a lily field! Sometimes we need a good gilding to give an experience that added jolt. So we eat spaghetti carbonara.  And now that we are on the subject of spaghetti carbonara, I can reveal how I got on this gilding jag in the first place. It was when I read the following in Saveur

The (carbonara) sauce should gild, not asphyxiate, the noodles. It can be enjoyed at any hour, but the ideal time is dawn, after a night of revelry. I’ve found that carbonara is also a foolproof way to a man’s heart—unless he’s watching his cholesterol. —Mei Chin, from “Roman Art” (March 2007)

Gild but not asphyxiate the noodles? Bravo! I would just say that after an enchanted evening turned pink with dawn’s light, those delectable, gilded noodles will tickle a man’s heart, even if he is watching his cholesterol.

From Roger Rosenblatt -   Auden about Yeats

Teach the free man how to praise.

And remember, in story telling anticipation is more valuable than surprise.

Hmmm … that is the ending phrase of Andy Martin’s article about Sartre and Camus in New York

… America is always balanced precariously, like a tight-rope walker, on the thread of a philosophical dialectic.

My question. Does anyone really remember much about Sartre or Camus? Did existentialism actually exist other than as a marketing tagline?

Johnson attacked Sartre and Camus for their disdain of reason in favor of the collective (Sartre) and the absurd (Camus). Johnson certainly had a point about Sartre. Re-reading him these days is a chore. As for the absurd, well … the proclamation that life is an absurd predicament was liberating back in the 1960’s. People tend to forget how heavy handed cultural norms were before “pop” popped out. I think this proclamation still has a liberating quality. That is, if it helps us laugh at ourselves a bit more easily.

I have been blogging long enough to know that writing a blog is very different than writing a letter or a memo. So the things that work in those formats sometimes don’t work as well here. One difference relates to linking. I blog to preserve and share links.

So far so good. But is there a best way to provide links? Apparently there is. UX Movement offers a few best practices.  Hmm … did I get that right?

This comment from an editorial by Dave Halperin caught my eye today

To inquire into melodrama, camp, irony, drag, bodybuilding or Art Deco as “gay” styles is to seek the content of gay culture in its practices — to describe the intervention gay culture makes in the world as it is given. Everything depends on the all-important and elusive meaning of style.

That very notion may seem paradoxical. “Style,” after all, is routinely opposed to “content.” And, indeed, style is not a sign or a representation of anything else. Rather, it is a thing in itself, whose meaning is right there on its surface but remains difficult to specify.

Unless we figure out how to specify that meaning, we will never understand gay male culture. We will never understand why it still survives, or why so many people, straight and gay, are so overeager to declare its death. And we will never understand the most essential thing about it: how gay culture continues to perform a sly and profound critique of what passes for normal.

Dave argues that the growing acceptance of gays in the US as mainstream ignores the importance of “gay culture” as a critique of “normal culture”. I think Dave’s argument goes a bit deeper than just gay culture versus straight culture. Dave is defending the value of “counter-culture”, a phenomenon that we usually associate with the 1960’s.

Back then, a lot of people argued that counter-cultural critique of society was essential both as a creative outlet for young people and as a way to keep values in perspective. There was a consensus among the young that older folks “didn’t get it”. Counter-culture was the way to “get it” and “live it” and “teach it”. It was a roaring embrace of being avant garde.

Has this been lost? People take counter-culture less seriously than they used to. I think it is because we have been so avant garded that shouting out our differences has gotten a bit tedious. Tedium aside, there is a practical problem with living with folks ferociously dedicated to being avant garde. With everyone expending such effort to shout out who they really are, it grows progressively more difficult to figure out who we are and where we are going. Paraphrasing a comment from a Russian colleague, one likes to visit the circus but it is not so much fun to have one performing non-stop in your living room.

So, to be honest, I am more comfortable where we are now that this fad has passed. Does that mean I am anti-style? Not at all. But style is for fun, not for serious communication.

FOLLOW -  After I wrote “style is for fun” I realized that this makes it sound trivial. Oops. That was not my intention. The capacity of a group to have fun is a good indicator of its health. In other words, having fun and appreciating fun are important. But mistaking having fun for being serious is nicht gut.