i don't like liking it
the other people i like are the ones who are being driven to find a tune that has been troubling them, distracting them, a tune that they can hear in their breath when they run for a bus, or in the rhythm of their windshield wipers when they’re driving home from work. sometimes something banal and obvious is responsible for the distraction: they have heard it on the radio, or at a club. but sometimes it has come to them as if by magic. sometimes it has come to them because the sun was out, and they saw someone who looked nice, and they suddenly found themselves humming a snatch of a song they haven’t heard for fifteen or twenty years; once, a guy came in because he had dreamed a record, the whole thing, melody, title, and artist. and when i found it form (it was an old reggae thing, "happy go lucky girl" by the paragons), and it was more or less exactly as it had appeared to him in his sleep, the look on his face made me feel as though i was not a man who ran a record shop, but a midwife, or a painter, someone whose life is routinely transcendental ...
maybe i missed somebody traveling on a bus or tube or cab, going out of her way, to meet me, maybe dressed up a little, maybe wearing more makeup than usual, maybe even slightly nervous; when i was younger, the knowledge that i was responsible for any of this, even the bus ride, made me pathetically grateful. when you’re with someone permanently, you don’t get that: if laura wanted to see me, she only had to turn her head, or walk from the bathroom to the bedroom, and she never bothered to dress up for the trip. and when she came home, she came home because she lived in my flat, not because we were lovers, and when we went out, she sometimes dressed up and sometimes didn’t, depending on where we were going, but again, it was nothing whatsoever to do with me ...
"you’re just saying that to make me look stupid."
"no, i’m not. i enjoy my work. it’s stimulating, i like the people i work with, i’ve got used to the money … but i don’t like liking it. it confuses me. i’m not who i wanted to be when i grew up."
"who did you want to be?"
"not some woman in a suit, with a secretary and half an eye on a partnership. i wanted to be a legal-aid lawyer with a dj boyfriend, and it’s all going wrong."
"so find yourself a dj. what do you want me to do about it?"
"i don’t want you to do anything about it. i just want you to see that i’m not entirely defined by my relationship with you. i want you to see that just because we’re getting sorted out, it doesn’t mean that i’m getting sorted out ..."
- nick hornby, high fidelity
posted September 27, 2003 in music, printi was right. it worked.
art chantry: i truly believe that in the very best design the hand and mind of the designer is utterly invisible. by this very standard, the extreme stylism of my work is a contradiction to 'quality' design. however, i chose this path very consciously back in the early 1980's, when i first saw what computers were capable of. i quickly realized that if i continued on a true design path, i would be put out of work by a computer program. i figured that in ten to twenty years there would be only, say, 10% of what i was trained to think of as 'graphic designers' left still practicing. these would be the idea people that everybody else would 'emulate'. this is where i wanted to be positioned. the rest of the pack would be 'graphic technicians' or 'graphic decorators' whose job it would be to make things look nice for businessmen. i was right. it worked.
- christopher may, "interview with art chantry," speak up november 18, 2002
posted September 27, 2003 in art, print, speechthe more encumbered our judgment, the better.
the idea of writing about his dilemma came to him in 1980, when as a senior at cornell university, he helped organize a protest at a nuclear reactor in seabrook, n.h.
the protest failed—the plant stayed open—but it caused [william] vollmann to reconsider his position on violence. "i started thinking: if this nuclear plant was as serious a risk to the environment as people claim, would violence have been worthwhile? i started wondering how you would determine that. if you could be pretty sure that this nuclear plant was going to have a meltdown at some point and kill 20,000 people, would you be justified in killing 15,000 people to prevent it? if not, why not?" ...
at the end of the book, he compiles his findings. a 78-page synopsis, dense with disclaimers, caveats, clauses and subclauses, this is mr. vollmann's moral calculus. and in instructing readers how to use it, he reveals just how unwieldy, subjective and conditional a tool it is.
"the best way to apply this calculus to a particular act is to examine the rules for every sort of justification which might possibly be applicable to it," he explains, offering this example: "what claim to righteousness might a palestinian suicide bomber possess? to evaluate that claim, one could apply the calculus to him—and to his enemies—regarding (1) the justifications concerning (a) homeland (b) creed (c) war aims (not neglecting proportionality and discrimination), (d) ground (e) honor and (f) authority; (2) the policies of (a) deterrence, (b) retaliation and (c) punishment, and (3) the fate-invocation of inevitability."
never mind that two people consulting the calculus might well arrive at different conclusions. or that it fails to deliver a definitive answer to the quandary—killing in the name of preventing nuclear holocaust—that prompted the book in the first place. users are apt to get lost just trying to navigate the thicket of categories and subcategories.
"this whole moral calculus is of course insanely impractical," mr. vollmann conceded.
nevertheless, he said, the exercise has value if it gets people to think before they act. "the more encumbered our judgment, the better," he said.
- emily eakin, "novelist's new math: a calculus of violence," new york times september 27, 2003
posted September 27, 2003 in politics, print