Colin Marshall

Lines of the Day

And the multi-award goes to A.C. Grayling, who has quite a salvo in the Guardian:

I used to be a terrible hypochondriac when I was young and a great reader of medical dictionaries. One day I realised that I was not actually frightened of terminal illness but of not getting done the things I wanted to get done.

I myself have started to come to terms with the fact that any fear of or obsession over illness, incapacity and death I might experience is actually just anxiety about doing stuff before the clock's gears grind to a halt. If I've learned anything from unreflective Aussie hyper-travelers, it's that you can stave off unproductive mortality-related hand-wringing by doing as much as possible as often as possible — because you might not have the chance later.

Science is the outcome of being prepared to live without certainty and therefore a mark of maturity. It embraces doubt and loose ends.

Science, and even most evidence-based thinking in general, gets a bad rap from people disinclined to appreciate it. They'll claim that science is hubristic about its absolute possession of the cold, hard facts of the universe, when its appeal in fact lies in its willingness to separate what's known from what isn't, and to know how known these alleged cold, hard facts really are. (Not to mention that they can be overturned with the right demonstration.) If it's hubris you're looking for, talk to those who unwaveringly chalk everything up to deities, Great Magnets and/or "energy."

Life is all about relationships. By all means sit cross-legged on top of a mountain occasionally. But don't do it for very long.

Granted, "The world's nothin' but people" and its ilk are stupid aphorisms, but there is little of interest to be found only within the I. I've been recently thinking out the idea that one of interaction's richest joys is the observation of and attempt to understand minds other one's own. Could it be one of existence's greatest joys?

No good

I hereby refrain from applying the words good or bad to any work. Specifically, I mean the usages of these words not in the moral sense — I've not yet made the long, icky slide into relativism — but in the qualitative one. I have come to terms with the fact that sentences like "That movie is good" or "The book was bad" convey next to no information, and, worse, what information they do convey isn't quite what they appear to; the claims pretend to be about a qualitity of a subject, but they're actually a binary categorization of one's own feelings. "That movie is good" means "I experience an pleasing reaction to that movie"; "The book was bad" means "I experienced a displeasing reaction to the book." The meanings of these statements don't quite align with the words used, and even once translated they're not worth saying.

"Hey now," you might object, "you're the one always wasting so many words documenting your reactions to stuff!" And so I am. But bear in mind: I'm not arguing that all criticism isn't worth the effort it takes to express; I'm arguing that simply slapping the good or bad labels — or, worse, the ehh or blah or meh ones — is the folly. Criticism is most enjoyable, to my mind, when it documents the subjective mind-object transaction with as much clarity as possible. I couldn't care less whether I agree or disagree with a critic; how intelligently and precisely they express their reaction is all. It just so happens that I've noticed that the likes of Wesley Morris, Manohla Dargis, J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, to name four shining examples from the film reviewverse, well... they ain't throwin' around the goods and the bads, if you know what I mean. Examples:

• An unthinking me, reacting to Old Joy: "Good!"
• Dargis reacting to Old Joy: "A triumph of modesty and of seriousness that also happens to be one of the finest American films of the year."
• An unthinking me, reacting to Let the Right One In: "Good!"
• Morris reacting to Let the Right One In: "The beauty resides in the way the horror remains grounded in a tragic kind of love."
• An unthinking me, reacting to Silent Light: "Good!"
• Hoberman reacting to Silent Light: "Everything in this relatively chaste production is monumentally deliberate, from the human interactions to the stolidly bucolic representation of Mennonite domesticity to the extraordinary, wide-screen landscape shots that bracket the action with four or five minutes of pantheist ecstasy."

Stark, huh?

In yet another desperate bid to uphold my duty as a human being to communicate effectively, I thus update the list of descriptors not to use I originally posted back in November: joining (in)authentic, boring, depressing, disturbing, pretentious, pointless and soulful/less are good and bad. (But it's worth noting that, with some thought, I've realized how a work can be depressing. Though this is perhaps another few posts' worth of material, it all comes down to the creator-audience relationship: if you, experiencing a work, find that you're being talked down to or held in low intellectual esteem, that's depressing.)

This isn't that

Quoth Mark Twain,

Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.

One lesson I've learned in the last couple of years is that epiphanies are nice (and damn useful) to have, and, additionally, that one can actively pursue them instead of kicking back and (vainly) awaiting them. (Though I suppose it's less about pursuit than about putting yourself in places where epiphanies are likely to occur.) The obvious epiphanic high comes in the form of that "Hey, from now on, I'm probably going to do better" feeling, but there's a downside, too, because every change for the better reveals that, for the entire time preceding the epiphany, you've been DOING IT WRONG.

I recently had to admit over twenty straight years of doing it wrong. Like, really wrong. So wrong that it quashed most of my potentially notable accomplishments before I could take a full step toward realizing them. Aborted, much-fantasized-about projects litter my childhood and adolescence. I'd admire a comic — a Tintin adventure, a Calvin & Hobbes Sunday strip — and, unable to replicate it, would abandon my own drawing. I'd admire a game — any of the PC graphic adventures I'd burn through on a weekly basis, or maybe one of the more elaborate Phantasy Star installments, — and, unable to replicate it, would distract myself with a different, equally ill-thought-out project. I'd admire a piece of music — something from Steely Dan, to name a particularly advanced range of examples, or even tracks by far more pedestrian artists — and, unable to replicate it, put the instrument down and call it a day. "This isn't that," I'd think, and then throw in the towel.

However different these pursuits, my approach never varied:

1. Enjoy something, envision self creating something very similar
2. ?
3. Profit

I was, in other words, locked into what I've previously called a "director" as opposed to "conceiver" mindset. Instead of asking myself, "What's cool about that, and how can I implement that kind of coolness in my own context?", I asked myself, "How can I make that?" I pictured what I wanted to make and then attempted to make it exactly. Such an aim is destined for defeat, since (a) to replicate something, I'd need exactly the same resources, tools and thoughts as the original creator had and (b) even if I could replicate it, my version would be redundant and unnecessary by its very nature. There is much wisdom in, as Paul Graham puts it, copying what you like, but I took it to a paralyzing extreme, trying and failing not just to copy what I liked about what I liked but the things themselves that I liked.

My realization that that the relevant ability of creation is not to faithfully replicate but to harness accident is certainly welcome, but I wish it'd come a tad earlier. Who knows where I'd be now if I'd figured it out before? And I guarantee that I wasn't the only one afflicted by the inability to do the small and kind of lame — or at least to do it with commitment — because I hadn't realized that I could iterate it toward something bigger and better; hundreds of aspiring writers are no doubt staring at a Word document even now, comparing it to The Catcher in the Rye or The Great Gatsby or Sweet Valley High: Wrong Kind of Girl, thinking, "This isn't that," and twitching toward the old upper-right X.

The solution seems to require no less than a teardown/rebuild of one's own view of stuff-doing: the goals, the expectations, the metaphors, all that nonsense. There are worse starting points than Twain's premise. Making profitable use of accident — which I mean more in the sense of unpredicted input and restriction than of, say, auto pileups — won't get you the very same work that spurred on to create something yourself, but, used well, it can put you on your way to quality equivalence. Perhaps the core of the issue is that it's easier on our weak human brains to think in terms of how best to react to developments rather than to go nuts focusing on the countless points at which our projects, in their incomplete states, fail to mirror their idealized inspirations. If this is true, I suppose it's another vindication of the Organic, Iterative Creative Processes^TM of which I've been so enamored lately.

Time I'll never get back

In discussing the morally and intellectually bankrupt doctrine of Colin Exceptionalism, paradoxdruid got me thinking:

My conversations regarding film taste with you have made me reasonably believe that I could stand firmly on solid empirical foundation beyond some of my "Colin does x, but most people not x" statements.

What's funny about this is that, not long ago, I was the undiscriminating, borderline-insensate "most people" film-viewing caricature that doesn't really exist but to whom the invoker nonetheless feels superior. Though I wasn't totally and utterly without the ability to find decent viewing material — I was into Dr. Strangelove, for example, from the get-go — I wasted a hell of a lot of time getting where I am today. When I think of my fifteen- and even sixteen-year-old self, I recall grim cinematic habits indeed.

Is it a movie? I'll see it! Perhaps this is natural for someone still seeking the lay of the filmic land, but my seleciton standards of viewing were low to nonexistent. It took very little to get me out to the Woodinville Loews 12, the Redmond Bella Bottega 11 or the Loews Redmond Town Center 8 to take in the flix — any flix. I remember watching the following films theatrically, of my own volition:

• Supernova
• End of Days
• Behind Enemy Lines
• The Sixth Day
• Lethal Weapon IV
• Austin Powers 2: The Spy Who Shagged Me
• Battlefield: Earth
• Scream 3
• The Art of War
• Death to Smoochy (which is actually decently idiosyncratic, but still)

The worst part is that I lived right across the bridge from Seattle, home to a bunch of Landmark theaters! Though I now feel that I didn't wring half the enjoyment I could've out of the city, I got with the program eventually. But just think of all that lost time.

Not only that, but I paid my own money to rent such films as the following:

• Saving Silverman
• Joe Dirt
• Shallow Hal
• American Ninja
• Cobra
• Lost and Found
• Top Gun
• Kevin Smith's entire oeuvre

That's not even to mention my much-played VHS copies of Heavyweights and Tommy Boy. Not commercially purchased tapes, mind you; tapes recorded off of HBO free-preview weeks, a white-trash format if there ever was one, though it outclasses my old habit of staring at sliced-up, panned-and-scanned movies on basic cable that weren't engaging to begin with. Moving Violations on Comedy Central at 8am? Transylvania 6-5000 afterward? You mean I have to choose between Beverly Hills Cop 3 on TBS and Hard to Kill on TNT tonight? Why not just oscillate between both? After all, life goes on forever! Forever! Forever! Forever...

Kevin Smith? God! Okay, that's an exaggeration, but there was a time when I considered him to be all that and a bag of chips, cinematically speaking. Taken with the story of the convenience-store-working, semi-obscure-recent-culture-referencing schlub from Jersey's rise to filmmaking fame on the back of a credit-card-financed $27,000 black-and-white ode to slackerdom. It took years of assumed fandom and repeated viewings of Clerks through Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back to realize that, damn, Smith's picures are deeply shoddy, all tone and attitude, bereft of content. Yet — and this is what's so frustrating — he's clearly not dumb! Every time I hear or read about a speaking appearance of his, I get a little sad and think to myself, "Man, if only this guy was better at making movies."

Best genre? Action comedy! Evidently I was operating from the theory that, if you combine two creatively barren genres — and I still considered genres themselves viable back then — you get pure gold. This may have had something to do with my then-strong appreciation for Robert Rodriguez, avowed fan and pusher both of the action comedy, whose Rebel Without a Crew I read five times, mostly in the ninth grade. While it didn't take long for this preference to seem ridiculous even to the younger me, I look back in shame. (I do, however, retain my esteem for Ghostbusters, which some would argue fits the parameters of action comedy and whose special-edition DVD I once biked for an hour in the summer heat just to buy. I may also have picked up a slurpee.)

Bad movie? I'll see it! Failures can be even more edifying than successes, sure, but I used to watch failures out of what I suppose was a misplaced amusement by failure itself. (Note, to produce but three examples, the appearances of Cobra, Battlefield: Earth and Hard to Kill under the points above.) Though never one of those teenagers who believe themselves to be invincible, I must have thought myself immortal; nothing else could explain why I would have actively wasted time like that. To quote Dave Erdman, "The sad fact is, I can't get excited by anything unless I actually, without irony, enjoy it. How lame is that?"

At this point, you're probably about to ask if I used to be retarded. The answer, my friends, is yes. Yes I was. To eventually break my self-imposed cinematic prison would be the fruits of the seed of discontent mentally planted by early viewings of pictures like Rushmore, American Movie, Hana-Bi and Run Lola Run. But the chilling thought remains: what if I'd died in a freak accident or something before the false ceiling shattered and I discovered that movies can be, like, good? I'd have seen Final Destination but not Maborosi, RocketMan but not Solaris, Dante's Peak but not Treeless Mountain. Never would I so much as hear of the work of Yasujirō Ozu, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Werner Herzog or Chris Marker. The mere notion is too tragic for decent contemplation.

Together forever, and never to part

I've long enjoyed Sandra Tsing Loh's writing, which is why I'm all the more disappointed that she comes off flighty and self-serving in the new, much-passed-around Atlantic article on her divorce (nice try at JavaScripting me out of linking straight to the printer-friendly version):

I am a 47-year-old woman whose commitment to monogamy, at the very end, came unglued. This turn of events was a surprise. I don’t generally even enjoy men; I had an entirely manageable life and planned to go to my grave taking with me, as I do most nights to my bed, a glass of merlot and a good book. Cataclysmically changed, I disclosed everything. We cried, we rent our hair, we bewailed the fate of our children. And yet at the end of the day — literally during a five o’clock counseling appointment, as the golden late-afternoon sunlight spilled over the wall of Balinese masks — when given the final choice by our longtime family therapist, who stands in as our shaman, mother, or priest, I realized... no. Heart-shattering as this moment was — a gravestone sunk down on two decades of history — I would not be able to replace the romantic memory of my fellow transgressor with the more suitable image of my husband, which is what it would take in modern-therapy terms to knit our family’s domestic construct back together. In women’s-magazine parlance, I did not have the strength to “work on” falling in love again in my marriage.

Loh slides her own story into what's become an expected speculation in like trend pieces: "now that we have white-collar work and washing machines, and our life expectancy has shot from 47 to 77, isn’t the idea of lifelong marriage obsolete?" A fair point, I suppose, and one to which I would have to be especially receptive given that it dovetails with my crackpot notions about not defining aims too rigidly or at too far a distance. But as a mere 24-year-old, I'm prohibited from holding negative opinions on the institution of marriage, or at least from credibly expressing them. They, like so many potentially valid points, can be torpedoed by even the most logic-impaired older interlocutor: "Sure, you may think that now, but just wait until you're my age." Argument? None.

I will say, though, that the mere idea of formal marriage, which seemed reasonably appealing to me as a teenager, has grown less so (and more bewildering) with each passing year. The fears are manifold, but these are the ones I can most readily identify and for which the alleged obsolescence of the institution would act as a convenient shield:

• Near-pathological protectiveness of my own funds. I remember watching an episode of Bobby's World long ago in which Bobby's uncle explains to him that, when you get marrieed, the girl owns half your stuff. Bobby proceeds to envision everything in his room — toys, stuffed animals, the nightstand — individually bisected, leaving him buried under a heap of useless halves. While I don't see it exactly this way, I can't say the image has vanished from my mind. I do wonder what it'll take to make the words "joint checking account" not read as a patent absurdity, though.
  
• Unwillingness to give John Law yet another avenue into my life. Call me a libertarian, but these sorts of relationships are the last party to which I'd invite the legal system. And yeah, I realize there's some sort of tax break accompanying marriage in certain cases, but sheezus, talk about your Pyrrhic victories. (Let's not forget the vestigial religious element, either, which still creeps me out.)
  
• The weight of the expectation of eternality. Having come to find that deciding on and declaring a specific end state for a project carries quite a good chance indeed of (a) hindering the realization of superior outcomes and (b) hindering the realization of even the stated outcome, it's tough for me to believe that the same doesn't apply to the project of marriage, or even of sexual partnerships in general. Think back to high school: how many of those partnerships suffocate under all that together-forever talk? I have trouble grasping how this kind of pressure is supposed to help, especially when the relationship and its participants must to some extent be let off the performance hook due to the impression of having been "locked in." (Though, given the usual "50% and counting" quoted rate of marriage failure and the near-100% rate I've personally observed, an impression is exactly what it is.) How well did, say, Soviet bureaucrats do the jobs they'd been guaranteed for life?
  
• Grim examples. As a kid, I operated for years and years under the assumption that spouses were assigned by the Steady Hand of the Benevolent State, and dreaded the oncoming day I'd be forced into my own bland, spiteful union; I was nearly in junior high before I consciously comprehended that the married have, at least to some degree, chosen their partners. Despite my currently advanced understanding of the principle, I can't say as I've seen any marriages past their 10-year mark and thought, "Hey, I want that," nor am I deluded enough to believe, without good reason, that I'd be the exception.
  
  This may be an each-to-their-own situation, though the image of the slovenly, aspirationless middle-aged man in his fifteenth year of a loveless union and broken down in dozens of little ways — a commonplace character, and one I meet on a daily basis — is less easily waved away. (And odds are he thought he was getting a good deal going in.) Even the best-case scenarios disappoint, inspiring as they do those tiresome, flaccid paeans to how one partner is at such ease with the other that they can just sit around and not talk. (The line between maturity and the abandonment of expectations turns out to be both thin and fuzzy.) Then again, the young marriages among my peers seem to be, aside from the grotesquely dysfunctional ones, pretty damn healthy, so who knows.
  
• Suspiciously weak pitches. When someone expresses surprise at my ambivalence toward marriage, I ask them to go ahead and sell me on it. The pitches they give — when they can summon the will to give them at all — usually involve a caliber of insubstantial hand-waving that would put a professor of critical gender sustainability studies to shame. Bear in mind that I'm not grilling them; I simply want to learn what I stand to gain from holy matrimony, and nobody seems to be able to enlighten me clearly and succinctly. This inability raises an eyebrow. Would-be explainers sometimes make gestures toward reproduction, conceding that marriage is mostly "for the kids" — in a way, a simple modification of the standard won't-somebody-think-of-the-children? rhetorical shenanigan, which is often coupled with the aforementioned if-only-you-had-my-inexpressible-wisdom cop-out — though what the bulk of my age cohort have gained from our own parents' marriages is anybody's guess. A superior understanding of alimony calculation?

This may all reduce to a simple neurobiological difference, of course. As with religious people, I find myself looking at married people and saying to myself, "That must be nice. Too bad my firmware is incompatible." Or I may simply be a total S.O.B. But I try my best!

Catching the Big Fish (Lynch, 2006) and The War of Art (Pressfield, 2002)

I recently read, by accident rather than design, two books of similar form and intent whose authors' sensibilities could scarcely differ more. Both volumes are, broadly speaking, thinnish tracts on overcoming the difficulties of the creative process. Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity is penned by David Lynch, director of such beloved films as Eraserhead, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Dr.; The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle comes from Steven Pressfield, author of The Legend of Bagger Vance and a bunch of books where dudes battle it out in antiquity but use modern swears. For the malady of creative blockage, Lynch prescribes transcendental meditation (which is more often written as "Transcendental Meditation", but I don't quite understand the rationale for the capitalization). Pressfield's solution leans toward metaphorical and/or literal gods, angels and muses.

Perhaps the richest similarity between the books is how they both inspired and weirded me out in equal measure, by different means. The most striking resemblance appears in their formats: both are more or less assemblies of single pages topped with a semi-grand subject heading and middled-to-bottomed with a related rumination. Here's the text of an entire page, randomly selected, from Lynch's book:

DESIRE

Desire is like bait. When you're fishing, you have to have patience. You bait your hook, and then you wait. The desire is the bait that pulls those fish in — those ideas.

The beautiful thing is that when you catch one fish that you love, even if it's a little fish — a fragment of an idea — that fish will draw in other fish, and they'll hook onto it. Then you're on your way. Soon there are more and more and more fragments, and the whole thing emerges. But it starts with desire.

(Echoes of Werner Herzog's "fires start other fires" and "one dwarf knows another" there.)

Now a page from Pressfield's:

RESISTANCE IS INSIDIOUS

Resistance will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work. It will perjure, fabricate, falsify; seduce, bully, cajole. Resistance is protean, It will assume any form, if that's what it takes to deceive you. It will reason with you like a lawyer or jam a nine-millimeter in your face like a stickup man. Resistance has no conscience. It will pledge anything to get a deal, then double-cross you as soon as your back is turned. If you take Resistance at its word, you deserve everything you get. Resistance is always lying and always full of shit.

Thus, by the accretion of such musings, do the books make their cases. These summaries are perhaps rough, but Lynch seems to argue that creative failures stem from consciousnesses insufficiently expanded and thus unable to reach the depth where the really good ideas — the "big fish" — swim. His recommendation — to his mind, the only possible cure — is a good daily session or two of T to the M. (He's opted, for the past 35 years, for twenty minutes in the morning and twenty in the evening.) Pressfield pins the would-be creator's failure to create on capital-R "Resistance", a banner he hangs over nearly all instances of human fear and indolence. He suggests — nay, demands — that the reluctant doer confront Resistance for what it is and recognize the higher purpose he was meant to fulfill. And then fulfill it.

Both are composed in prose one might call "straightforward," but we're talking about two very aesthetically different ideas of straightforwardness. Lynch, well known for the contrast between his personal gee-whiz plainspokenness — so normal that it almost comes around the other side to weird again — and the bizarre, haunting abstractions of his oeuvre, goes long on sincerity and, possibly as a result, short on polish. "I love dream logic; I just like the way dreams go," he writes. "But I have hardly ever gotten ideas from dreams. I get more ideas from music, or from just walking around." Clunky, maybe, but not without its charm. "Sitting in front of a fire," he writes, "is mesmerizing. It's magical. I feel the same way about electricity. And smoke. And flickering lights." Here he is on his city of residence:

I love Los Angeles. I know a lot of people go there and they see just a huge sprawl of sameness. But when you're there for a while, you realize that each section has its own mood. The golden age of cinema is still alive there, in the smell of jasmine at night and the beautiful weather. And the light is inspiring and energizing. Even with smog, there's something about that light that's not harsh, but bright and smooth. It fills me with the feeling that all possibilities are available. I don't know why. It's different from the light in other places. The light in Philadelphia, even in the summer, is not nearly as bright. It was the light that brought everybody to L.A. to make films in the early days. It's still a beautiful place.

Though it provides a similarly uncomplicated reading experience, Pressfield's tone evinces much harder labor, oscillating between blunted I'm-tellin'-it-like-it-is harshness and grand, high-flown proclamations about humanity's majesty, between base colloquialisms, goofy dad humor and paeans to the sweeping vistas of potential human accomplishment. This sounds sort of awful and prospects aren't exactly improved by such unpromising packaging elements as a ridiculous metallic cover and an introduction by Robert McKee, but the book proves palatable enough in the event. Here's a taste of Pressfield on Resistance in the everyday guise of procrastination:

Procrastination is the most common manifestation of Resistance because it's the easiest to rationalize. We don't tell ourselves, "I'm never going to write that symphony." Instead we say, "I am going to write my symphony; I'm just going to start tomorrow."

[ ... ]

The most pernicious aspect of procrastination is that it can become a habit. We don't just put off our lives today; we put them off till our deathbed.

Never forget: This very moment, we can change our lives. There never was a moment, and never will be, when we are without the power to alter our destiny. This second, we can turn the tables on Resistance.

This second, we can sit down and do our work.

There's another multi-layered similarity here: I think both Lynch and Pressfield are essentially correct, though the manner in which they express their ultimately sound positions carries, at least for me, an odd aftertaste. Despite his insistence that his words are intended for the religious and secular alike, Pressfield's repeated invocation of the godstuff and ultimate point about how humans must defeat Resistance in order to achieve what the entity that created them intended. (He accompanies one of his salvos of religious terminology with the squirm-inducing single-sentence-paragraph aside, "Does that make you uncomfortable?") For Lynch, transcendental meditation is the solution, and I'm no happier with his talk about "vedic science" than I am with Pressfield's angels and god-given missions, and the sprawling TM organization — hence, I guess, those caps — bears that distinctly culty combination of implausibly big promises and a need for your money.

But. Generalize their messages up a level or two, abstract away their most specific, unsettling oddities and you get what I would call a worthwhile, even necessary recommendations. Clear your mind of unnecessary junk. Widen your awareness to capture the most and best raw idea material. Cultivate a habit that inculcates self-discipline. Make your mind a nice place to be, so that the external world will seem less threatening. Fear is the strongest barrier to success, but it can be brute-forced through. That fear, as well as all the other, lesser enemies standing between creator and creation, lies within. Your creative work can't be relegated to secondary status; you've got to treat it like a job. Solid stuff; solid enough to transcend the weird ways in which it's couched.

Most people are great

Perhaps thanks to my interest in improving my writing and speaking abilities, I'm sometimes assumed to be a grammar, spelling and/or usage wonk, someone who goes around insufferably correcting split infinitives, whos for whoms and grocer's apostrophes. Turns out I can't stand those sub-Lynne Truss types, who I feel miss the forest for the trees; I do bear a major beef, however, with those who use words without regard to their meanings. This is actually more common as it sounds; some seem even to repudiate the notion of meaning in their speech, taking a degree of offense to the suggestion that words don't mean whatever the user wants them to. (Shades of Humpty Dumpty and his linguistic bribery.)

Many words, terms and phrases get debased this way, and I make an effort to excise from my speech whichever ones I realize are beyond help. The most obvious example is great. Were I to cast my vote for the least meaningful word in the English language, great would be the no-brainer choice. Maybe the situation's different in other Anglophone countries, but here in the States, great is pretty much a red-headed stepchild. The amount of abuse it endures, even at the hands of those otherwise mindful about communication, is astonishing when you listen for it. "That floral centerpiece is just great!" "Is still think that Transformers movie was pretty great." "If you could pass the guacamole, that would be great." Really? Out of all the qualities these things could possess, greatness is the one you identify? (This sort of thing isn't limited to one word, either; amazing is similarly thrown around by art wonks, though it's a bit more of a euphemism to describe a work without much articulable merit but which the describer nonetheless fears dismissing or even refraining from expressing an opinion on. An eccentric blue-haired slam poet who melts toy soldiers in a frying pan during his performance is already thin gruel, but if I hear a pack of nervous poseurs whip out amazing and apply it to him, I'll keep my distance and then some.)

I will also henceforth refrain from making statements about "most people." I've written before about wrongheaded invocation of supposedly "average people," but claims about "most people" actually seem to be much more common, more exaggerated, and thus more pernicious. In practice, I hear "most people" used to not to mean "the majority of humanity" but "a construction to whom I feel superior." The weird part is that I hardly ever see anyone call bullshit on this. Bold claims like "Most people just want Costco hot dogs," "Most people are depressed" or "Most people are sheep willingly led to their cultural and intellectual graves by the unholy alliance of the media and the military-industrial complex" do not receive empiricism's smackdowns — as they deserve — but solemn right-on-man-right-on nods. (And don't even get me started on the worst "most people" claims I personally hear, which tend to take the form "Colin, maybe you x, but most people not x," which, as I have demonstrated over and over again, furthers the morally and intellectually bankrupt dogma of Colin Exceptionalism.)

Neurocartography

Though it's aesthetically horrendous, as all PowerPoint presentations are, there's something terrifically valuable to be taken from Liron Shapira's "You Are a Brain". The slides point the way to a more elegant restatement of what I said in a past post to which I often refer: roughly, that you shouldn't confuse your imagination's information-starved projections for reality. Shapira displays a map within a brain and states that understanding consists in "having an accurate map of the territory inside you. Yes, physically inside you." That our brains operate from something like a map of reality comes as no surprise, but the upshot a few slides later is what struck me as so incisive: "You can only see your map. But you feel like your map of reality is reality. This is what it feels like to be a brain."

I'm no big transhumanist; I assume none of us will live to see our own mental capacity jacked up to the degree that our brain's maps can enter shouting distance of a resemblance to reality. The only hope I can see is to recognize, recognize hard and never for one second forget that the world in all its intricate, variegated complexity is always and everywhere mediated by our own shoddily-constructed inner representation of it. We can try to compensate for our biases and actively seek information to incorporate into our maps, but the first and most necessary step would seem to be conceding their inherent sketchiness. Think of the junior high kids whose maps display little more than school, home and the mall. No wonder each and every bit of miniscule nonsense that goes on in their classrooms, families or tiny social circles resonates so earthshakingly with them; the maps lack a realistic scale. (Hell, think of the salarymen of every nationality whose inner worlds comprise home, the office, the commute and the mistress' apartment. Same deal.)

Your own mental map, no matter how detailed, fails to capture a literally unimaginable amount of stuff. It doesn't even comprehend the sheer variety of the stuff it's missing. It can't even grok the second-order variety, the variety of the variety of the stuff outside its range. A environment — natural, architectural, social, or some combination thereof — spectacularly conducive to your current manner of thought and living in which you could perform your most interesting, unexpected work exists somewhere off your map. A book that, read, will substantially and irrevocably alter your mindset for the better sits on a shelf somewhere off your map. The models you can observe and combine to create a unique career and/or life of which you don't yet have the slightest inkling is possible live somewhere off your map. A work of art that, viewed, will forever expand your idea of the possibilities of its medium and the possibilities of all other media to which its concepts are transposed is on display somewhere off your map. A foreign culture that reboots the components of your brain that have lain dormant due to the deadening, by-now-even-undetected repetition of the norms, mores and clichés of the one you happen to have been born in is native to a land somewhere off your map. Music that thrills you both aesthetically and intellectually, stoking within your own insatiable drive to create, is somewhere off your map. For that matter, a person who thrills you both aesthetically and intellectually, stoking within you an entirely different sort of drive, is somewhere off your map. And if you already have any of the foregoing, they were once off your map, so imagine what else lies out there in terra incognita.

The map, as we live in perpetual danger of forgetting — if indeed we ever realized it — is not the land. Perhaps you can't much increase its resolution, but you can expand it to cover more territory. Why reach the end of your life with vast swathes of it left blank but for the dire words "Here be dragons"?

Cheaper

My instinct has recently bent toward cheapness. This isn't so much a move born of semi-typical 24-year-old's destitution — which is not to say that I'm T-Pain or nothin' — but of a line of aesthetic thinking down which I've traveled for what turns out to have been years. Perhaps we can call it an "ascetic aesthetic"; simply put, I've found that I'm more fascinated by stuff that happens to be cheap. What this doesn't mean: things that are chintzy/tacky/kitschy/otherwise, things that are so mass-market that they're simply inexpensive at the point of purchase or things hobbled by a lack of resources.

I'm talking about works whose creators didn't, because they couldn't, vainly attempt to wash away their problems and beat back tough decisions with what Robert Rodriguez calls "the money hose." I'm coming to believe that no interesting creative move was ever made by dropping big bucks, not least due to the realization that many of my favorites were crafted under thin financial conditions. Werner Herzog describes his pillar of cinema Aguirre, the Wrath of God as a "child of poverty," a project with so little funding that filmmaker and company had to deal improvisationally with the unexpected, such as flooding jungles and deadly arrows flying in from nowhere. Some truly delicious dishes comprise startlingly inexpensive ingredients: red beans and rice, for example. (Not that I've achieved any competence yet making it myself, but with iteration comes mastery.) I'm convinced that, using the most impoverished technical materials ever — a rickety old no-sound 16mm Bolex camera and a consumer cassette recorder — Chris Marker somehow committed alchemy in the making of Sans Soleil. Brian Eno and Robert Fripp's (No Pussyfooting) was recorded for £12, the cost of tape, which even in the early 1970s was, by music industry standards, zero. It's no accident that podcasters in their basements are putting out more compelling audio content for a marginal cost equal to pocket change than large public radio outfits do burning through hundreds of dollars per minute. The most innovative tech startups, such as the ones funded by Paul Graham's Y Combinator, operate on little more than the cost of dorm beds, ramen bricks and a net hookup. Shane Carruth completed Primer, the finest time travel picture ever made — and time travel narratives are a total third rail — for $7,000.

I don't have a super-solid hypothesis about why the better stuff tends to be the cheaper stuff, though perhaps economy of means forces creators to — brace yourself for grotesque management-speak — "think outside the box," to find clever workarounds and unexpected solutions to situations usually resolved with pricier clichés. My own recurring question has become, "How can I do this cheaper, quicker, more creatively?" As I've written before, if you want something good, you go where the money isn't.

2 interesting 2 B 4 gotten

Ben Casnocha linked to a post by Russell Davies about "how to be interesting." I will now craft that most essential of all pieces of net content, the repost of a repost of a post that's almost three years old to begin with, thus taking an important step in this journal's quest to become a shovelblog.

While Davies recommends a number of concrete actions to achieve interestinghood, they strike me as either too vague ("Collect something," "Make something") or too specific (Post [pictures] to flickr," "Read Understanding Comics"). (Not that I don't recommend The Visual Display of Quantitative Information myself as a solution to just about everything.) The assumptions on which he premises these, however, are str8 money. Premise the first:

The way to be interesting is to be interested. You’ve got to find what’s interesting in everything, you’ve got to be good at noticing things, you’ve got to be good at listening. If you find people (and things) interesting, they’ll find you interesting.

Like "Only the boring or bored," "Be interested ro be interesting" is one of those maxims that sounds dumb and needlepoint sampler-y but, on closer inspection, is actually underestimated at one's peril. Think of the dullest people you know; now name as many of their interests as you can. Do the same for the most interesting people you know. Study in contrast, right? It's even more so if you multiply the number of their interests by their enthusiasm for them. Now ponder the group into which you yourself fall.

An easy mistake is to assume that if you've got, like, five interests, you're covered. That's a fraction of what you need, and no, it won't help if you count each John from They Might Be Giants or every individual Doctor Who Doctor as separate interest. Another wide-open pitfall is to discount the importance of not just the quantity and depth of your interests, but your willingness to get interested in things. I failed to grasp this as a kid and have probably paid dearly for it along the line, but I now realize that there's no greater intellectual turn-off than to pre-declare a lack of interest. As nyuanshin once wisely wrote, "The judgment that you 'don't like' something is usually self-fulfilling." Despite hypervigilance about this, I'm sure I still slip occasionally.

Premise the second:

Interesting people are good at sharing. You can’t be interested in someone who won’t tell you anything. Being good at sharing is not the same as talking and talking and talking. It means you share your ideas, you let people play with them and you’re good at talking about them without having to talk about yourself.

The salient point here is somewhat buried: it means being good about talking about your ideas without talking about yourself. Some people initially seem all for sharing and discussing ideas but ultimately reveal that it's not about the ideas, it's about them, about what it supposedly signals that they hold certain ideas, certain opinions. I would argue that one quality absolutely necessary to being truly interesting is the ability to disengage your ideas, opinions, judgments and the like from your identity, and then be willing to toss them around freely and unprotectively in conversation. This capacity remains strangely rare, but it repays the search necessary to find it in a friend.

I don't think we can overstate the value of being interesting. This seems an appropriate time — though I'd seize even the inappropriate one — to reference, from H.L. Mencken, my favorite quotation of all time:

It is, indeed, one of the capital tragedies of youth — and youth is the time of real tragedy — that the young are thrown mainly with adults they do not quite respect. The average boy of my time, if he had had his free choice, would have put in his days with Amos Rusie or Jim Corbett; a bit later he would have chosen Roosevelt. But a boy sees such heroes only from afar. His actual companions, forced upon him by the inexorable decrees of a soulless and irrational state, are schoolma'ams, male and female, which is to say, persons of trivial and unromantic achievement, and no more capable of inspiring emulation in a healthy boy than so many midwives or dog-catchers.