How often do you think people composed lists of their interests before, oh, 1998? In their super-secret private diaries, perhaps? (But why?) Maybe for the occasional organizationally mandated exercise in reflection, a prelude to some serious team-building? Even the "computer dating" applications of earlier eras typically had users pick out their interests from predefined sets. But now, what with your profiles and your social medias, who hasn't had to slap an interest list together? You're probably slapping one together right now.
I wonder if it wouldn't be better if we had to completely delete and rewrite all our interest lists every year or so. If you had to do that, you'd automatically clear the detritus that tends to build up in these things ("Tamagotchis," "LOST") and be regularly imbued with some level revitalizing of "clean slate" feeling. It's of a piece with my other never-gonna-happen thought experiments about collections of books and music: what if you had to sell them every n years, then re-buy them from memory? How much and in what ways would they change, especially compared to how much and in what ways you've changed?
In this spirit, I've demolished and rebuilt, ground-up, the interest lists that Livejournal and Facebook make me make. Here's what's on the latest, all-new iteration:
Borderlands. Less actual disputed geographic zones — though those can be intriguing too — than the metaphorical unexplored regions lying between defined fields and concepts. Virtually everything that interests me happens in borderlands. The stated mandate of Soundforum, a radio show I occasionally do, is "exploring the borderlands between sound and music." Other promising borderlands include those between fiction and nonfiction, feature and documentary, novel and story collection, strangerhood and friendship, friendship and "relationship," job and hobby, reality and fantasy.
The union of form and substance. Boiled way down, this is about as much as I've yet managed to figure out about what makes wrought objects effective.
The combination of sound and image. I might have just said "cinema," but I'd rather get at the basic reasons I find cinema interesting. It shares the source of its interestingness with video art, certain stripes of particularly adventurous visual art, even television. The interactions and resonances between deliberately arranged seen and heard components strike me as inexhaustible.
Unanswerable questions. Speculating on them identifies most of the stars by which I steer. "Why do people voluntary abdicate their absolute freedom even on the levels where nobody else could take away?" "What is the optimal balance between what a creator can define about his vision and what an audience can define about their desires?" "How best to cultivate further equanimity?" "What makes certain texts addictive to read?" Or, quite possibly the ultimate of these from Jon Hassell by way of Brian Eno: "What do I like, and why do I like it?"
Sudden worldview alteration. Robin Hanson calls the best of these "viewquakes," and while I've only gotten a few of those — the value of the "Would I respect me?" test, the proportionality of risk and reward, the fact that all my pursuits are essentially acts of communication — I do enjoy (and don't quite do often enough) actions that dick around with my context so that I'm forced to Think Different™ and thus aftermarket-mod my worldview. It's why, with time, I find myself reading less and less of what I know in advance I'll probably agree with.
Conversational interviewing. This is exhaustively explained elsewhere.
Orientalism. Can I singlehandedly reclaim this title from Edward Said? I'd originally thought about putting down "East Asia," since the region interests me strongly — mainland China far less than the rest, admittedly, and that's the one we're supposed to be eyeballing like hawks — but with guys like Apichatpong Weerasethakul now on the world scene, I'm clearly going to have to widen it out. I understand large swathes of Western Europe have fallen to the level of bureaucratic museums, and that if you want to see real inventiveness, you go Asia, East, Southeast, wherever. So maybe I'll go there.
Comprehending foreign languages. I find the brain exercise inherent in this both terribly compelling and terribly rewarding. Backwardly, I'm better at learning to read foreign languages than learning to understand them spoken, and I'm better at understanding them spoken than speaking them. I guess shoring up those weak spots will require more, like, actual interaction with humanity. About which more later.
Decontextualization and recontextualization. I'm always more fascinated by something when I see it in a series of different frames, or from a series of different angles, or through a series of divergent opinions. There's so much to be learned from putting things where they, er, don't belong. You can even do it to your own neighborhood.
Connection. This is an essay unto itself, but my thought process is as follows: I know I like to make things. Would I like to make things if there was no audience to receive them? I would not. Would I like to make things if there was an audience to receive them, but I could never see nor hear nor in any way experience their reaction? I would not. (Learned that and then some from doing commercial radio.) Therefore, I like/should/need to make things not necessarily for the making itself but for the communicative act — and more to the point, the connective act — of releasing them.
Conceptual transposition. Some of the most interesting stuff I've made happen comes as a result of lifting out a concept from one domain, converting it into a metaphor, then applying that metaphor to another domain. A lot of the people I respect seem to find the same. I remember Tim Hecker saying that he often asks himself questions like, "Say, this Werner Herzog film... what do you suppose it would be in the world of music?"
Sound art. I could have written "music," but as with "cinema" above, it wouldn't really have struck at my meaning. While the best-known definition of music is, admittedly, "organized sound" and that definition covers the forms I think take this beyond the purely musical designation — field recordings, audio collage, experimental radio, etc. — I think I might even mean something higher-level than that. "Interesting things primarily composed of sound waves" might to the trick, if inelegantly. But I'm drawn by music that's purely music, too! As stated above, this is part of the map with many an exciting borderland.
Researching and developing addictive prose. This is huge. It deserves, and will shortly get, its very own post. Reading was the first receptive thing I was ever interested in doing, and writing was the first creative thing I was ever interested in doing. So for basically my entire life, one question has hung over my head, whether or not I've acknowledged it: what, exactly, makes good writing? What goes into the writing that makes you come back over and over again, to read and re-read and re-read? I've made some strides recently — I suspect it has to do with clarity, honesty and speaking directly to its reader as an individual rather than as one among a spectatorial mass — but there are infinity more to go.
Collaboration. One of the viewquakes I didn't bother mentioning above was the discovery that, as Errol Morris once put it, art is about laying down arbitrary rules and then following them slavishly. The advantage of collaboration is that multiple parties effectively apply rules to one another, and one collaborator's set of rules won't generally be predictable by another. And this might be too convoluted an idea to unpack here, but I suspect that collaboration is the most effective — indeed, the most respectable — form of promotion. When I interview someone, we're both, to some degree, promoted, and neither of us comes out looking like a sleaze. (In my case, no more than I usually do.)
Plus it's a source of that sweet, sweet randomness. Does all the best randomness come from interaction with other people? I suspect it might, which is why I'm also into...
Being less autistic. I realize that the genuinely autistic can't simply "be" less so. But then again, I'm not genuinely autistic; I'm just afflicted by a few of the sort of interior-bending compulsions that tend to keep people from realizing their potential because they can't operate in human society. Nobody succeeds in a vacuum, but that irritating voice keeps insisting that, hey, maybe you could be the first.
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