On the subject of Jaron Lanier on ‘Persistent Somnolence’ there is an article in the NYT – Cutting and Pasting: A Senior Thesis by (Insert Name):
“If we look closely at plagiarism as practiced by youngsters, we can see that they have a different relationship to the printed word than did the generations before them. When many young people think of writing, they don’t think of fashioning original sentences into a sustained thought. They think of making something like a collage of found passages and ideas from the Internet.
They become like rap musicians who construct what they describe as new works by “sampling” (which is to say, cutting and pasting) beats and refrains from the works of others.
This habit of mind is already pervasive in the culture and will be difficult to roll back. But parents, teachers and policy makers need to understand that this is not just a matter of personal style or generational expression. It’s a question of whether we can preserve the methods through which education at its best teaches people to think critically and originally.”
One has to understand that the Jews or any doctrinal culture that relies on the tradition of mental molestation of helpless young minds have been doing this “sampling” for a few thousand years now. A page of Talmud is the perfect example of a mashup or to be more accurate a “collage”. A typical Rabbi is a rapper mouthing off a quote after quote to a well rehearsed beat. Just now the internet brought that “light” to the world and the general culture is finally catching up to the derivative Jewish hell.
I don’t do Twitter or Facebook anymore but I keep an eye on selected tweets. Here are some from Alain de Botton:
- “The dream of the modern individualist: to be famous. The dream of the pre-modern collectivist: to help sustain an institution.
- Society continuously introduces us to new works of art and in the process prevents any one of them from assuming due weight in our minds.
- A certain kind of intelligence may be nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.
- Office life would not be possible without the hard take-offs and landings effected by coffee and alcohol.
- There should be a special circle in hell reserved for ‘friends’ who from a love of ‘honesty’ report the mean words of others back to us.
- Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as those in food.
- Most of ‘wisdom’ boils down to the art of not letting things get to you.
- Few architectural works would benefit most cities more than contemporary versions of the Wailing Wall – the name alone is a relief.
- The book will be killed not directly by new technology but by the monkey mind it breeds. The issue is concentration, not royalties.
- Authors write things down so as to have to think of them less.
- Writing opens up the otherwise unusual prospect of being violently disliked by strangers & training oneself not to mind.
- Writers have to go on working despite the increasing likelihood that they have already written their most important book.
- Definition of a present: something you can’t get for yourself. As a child, that meant toys. In adulthood: reassurance, sympathy, forgiveness.
- We cannot help but exaggerate our parents: their goodness, evil, significance…
- To be flattered or insulted? ‘I enjoy your tweets much more than your books…”
And now few tweets from Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
- “You know you have influence when people start noticing your absence more than the presence of others.
- Ethical man accords his profession to his beliefs, instead of according his beliefs to his profession. Rarer and rarer since middle ages.
- If we are good, it is usually more from lack of opportunity for transgression than from intrinsic virtue.
- The things people apologize to us about are almost never those that have upset us.
- The attraction of the melancholic: sadness has created the room we’re going to take up in their lives.
- Most people write so they can remember things; I write so I can forget them.
- I wonder whether a bitter enemy would be jealous if he discovered that I hated someone else.
- What they call philosophy, I call literature; what they call literature I call journalism; and what they call journalism I call gossip.
- Academics are only useful when they try to be useless, and dangerous when they try to be useful.
- Success is to be in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood. The rest comes from loss of control.
- A good foe is far more loyal, far more predictable, and, to the clever, far more useful than any admirer.
- Most modern technologies are deferred punishment.
- Medieval man was a cog in a wheel he did not understand; modern man is a cog in a more complicated system he thinks he understands.
- They will envy you for your success, for your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status – but rarely for your wisdom.
- Modernity: We created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.
- In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.”
Those are all pretty good, I though so. But note the two quotes I highlighted, amazingly alike. There is something liberating about “the need to write”, it releases you from the ownership of an idea. A written thought becomes the foundation for the building above while it recedes underground (some call it unconscious). Contrast this with people who take copious notes. I think note taking is a tick, the condition comes from the fear that you don’t have the ownership of an idea and you must write it down to remember, to cage the fleeting bird. A writer moves in the opposite directions, his words are born to reveal the internalized expression, to un-cage the rhyme, and like a child it must find its own unattached path.
There is the famous quote from Marshall McLuhan: “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” Someone loaded on Google Video an hour long conversation between Marshall McLuhan and Normal Mailer recorded by CBC in 1968. I have always found the rear-view mirror metaphor fascinating. Here is how Marshall explained it to Norman Mailer (the quote via Bava Tuesdays):
“Every age creates as an Utopian image a nostalgic rear-view mirror image of itself, which puts it thoroughly out of touch with the present. The present is the enemy. The present is the—and this will delight you Norman—the present is only faced in any generation by the artist. The artist is prepared to study the present as his material because it is the area of challenge to the whole sensory life, and therefore it is anti-Utopian, it is a world of anti-values. And the artist who comes into contact with the present produces an avant-garde image that is terrifying to his contemporaries.”
A quote, a book, a reference, a law is a bullet proof protection from the sensory experience of the “now”. Seeing that the emperor has a nice suit is looking at the emperor through the reference point of the rear-view mirror, but the child has not developed that “skill” yet. That’s why people relate so strongly to children’s art, exuberant and unfiltered. An artist picks up that vibe and refines his palate, he touches the world directly, unburdened by the inter-mediating interpretations. He is the enemy of the state.
Illustration by Andrea Joseph
