Colin Marshall

I have met my enemy, and his name is Timmy

Well, not really. It's short for "Timidity". He just finds his given name a bit too fancy to use. He fears embarrassment, or, worse, getting pounded into the wood chips for his lunch money. Timmy fears a wide range of things, real and imagined, and knowing him, he wouldn't put up a fight against any of them. I can say this because, despite his being the greatest living impediment to my progress, I'm actually on fairly intimate terms with him. Timmy, you see, lives inside my brain.

You might assume there's an easy fix: get Timmy to step outside for a moment, say, then lock the door behind him. The problem is that Timmy is a total and utter homebody. He never leaves. He doesn't go outside, he doesn't talk to anyone, he doesn't visit new places, he doesn't do new things. Timmy's ideal evening is to hunker down with a thick-crust Hawaiian pizza, play old video games on emulators and hope his phone doesn't ring.

Oh, Timmy loves him some hunkering down — believe that. It's his response to everything. Wow, look at that turbulent economy. "Perfect time to hunker down!" Hey, going to this party might be interesting. "Wouldn't you rather hunker down?" How about a run? "Oh, let's hunker down instead." There's a lot to do today, so I'd better get out of bed early! "But it's a lot more comfortable hunkering down under these covers!" Timmy doesn't realize that, in the entirety of recorded human history, "hunkering down" has never lead to success, but man, does he lobby for it.

The fact that Timmy hates humanity is part of this. Well, hate probably makes for an overstatement; it's more like he feels infinitely superior to the rest of humanity, yet also deeply fears it. He's absolutely convinced that most other people are primed and ready to laugh at him — he fears embarrassment more than a bullet — and he's pretty sure that the ones who won't are morons, proselytizing cultists or slicksters with something to sell.

Timmy's animus toward humanity is as mine toward him, but unlike his, mine is well-earned. I don't know how or why he moved into my brain in the first place, but he's been there since day one, moping around and blubbering his endless, ever sadder litany of discouragements, excuses and cop-outs. There is one activity — one activity — Timmy is good at, just one area where he exercises any imagination whatsoever: producing nervous cornucopias of reasons why things won't work.

I've come to understand that Timmy can't function without ironclad certainty. He knows it will always "work" to lay in bed, to flip through magazines, to scarf down cereal, to aimlessly wander the internet, so he's always game to do that sort of stuff. Timmy's only happy — as happy as he ever gets, which still seems kind of depressed — when there is no chance of failure, which also means there is no chance of meaningful success. (But he tries not to think about that last part.)

But dare I propose a task that might not go as planned, that loathsome sad-sack voice always chimes right in. "But Colin, if you shoot a movie, you have to find actors! What if you can't find actors?" "But Colin, if you start that writing project, it might take a long time! What if there's a more comfortable use of that time?" "But Colin, if you go to that interesting part of the world, you won't know anyone there! What if you need goods or services?" Solo endeavors Timmy finds dicey enough, but when other people are involved, he simply assigns catastrophic failure a P of 1.

Intellectually, I know there is no failure except failing yourself. And I believe it. But tell that to Timmy! See, this is precisely why I envy people who don't have to share their brains with any whiny freeloaders, any pathetic intracranial hikikomoris like mine. It goes without saying that he'll never, ever relocate of his own volition, since the kingdom of nature knows no grip as tenacious as Timmy's on the nearest, easiest sources of food, shelter and satisfaction, no matter how meager the streams of all three. I truly believe his highest aspiration is to nothing more than a painless life, prolonged as far as possible, followed by a swift, merciful death. (But then, why delay the death?)

Though Timmy would never actually try to make anything — too much risk — he does seem to enjoy dreaming about making things. He's basically lost in reverie all day; you might say that he exists, biologically speaking, as nothing more than a reverie support system. This is the perfect "experience" for him, since he gets all the imagined glory in scenarios that admit no deviation from his plan. Oh, the great works he's made in these dreams. Oh, the accolades he's received.

The only real thing Timmy has ever built — and it's a hell of a stretch even to call it real — is a protective structure of B.S. around himself. Each block of this B.S. is different, and differently self-aggrandizing: "Timmy is smart." "Timmy is creative." "Timmy is funny." "Timmy is well-liked." But these cannot be put to the test; were any part of this shield to come into contact with reality, the whole thing would shatter like sugar glass. (And what is embarrassment, Timmy's most feared of all conditions, but a blow on one's self-built, self-regarding B.S. wall?) Hence Timmy's avoidance of as much of the world as possible, any element of which could potentially harm the trumped-up personal identity that buoys his fantasies. This enables him to do what is obviously just replicating the condition of the womb, where no action is necessary, no interaction is necessary and no is reaction necessary — a state of pure receptivity — while believing that he isn't.

Timmy and I used to get along a lot better when I was a kid, perhaps because he's so deeply childish himself. Whether it was the sneaky effectiveness of peer pressure or just the pure credulity of youth, I often took his mewling words as gospel. Could it even be possible to tally all he convinced me not to do? "Don't write that, young Colin. It could turn out to be embarrassing. Don't talk to that person. What if it's embarrassing? Don't go there; you could get embarrassed. Ah, jeez, don't even think about attempting to play that instrument or learn than language or associate with those people or do that sport. Consider the potential embarrassment! Just get yourself a cheese dog, play some computer games and try your best to hide."

I know others who have one of Timmy's relatives — and he comes from a teeming brood of them — clinging for dear life to a long-term least on a corner of their minds. To a homunculus, these brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins are just as dour, just as pessimistic, just as frightened, just as mediocre as Timmy. Some of the hosts are just as irritated as I am. Some are right now potting ways to kill their unwanted tenant. (Some seem to have already pulled off the job, though, for obvious reasons, they won't tell me if or exactly how they did it.) But you know what's the saddest part of all this? Some people have made peace with their own Timmy equivalents. You know what they call them? "Sensible." "Practical." "Prudent." "The voice of reason."

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 35. Cory Arcangel's Mario Movie (2005)

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Mario Movie. 14:58 min., color, silent, 2005. By Cory Arcangel and Paper Rad. Ubuweb's description:

A 15-minute movie made on a Super Mario Brothers cartridge.

This is a fitting cap for Cory Arcangel's segment of my Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: it's his longest piece on the site, the only narrative one, and it draws on techniques and images from the others. You might object that, given the limited audiovisual repertoire of eight-bit game reprogramming as an art form, yeah, it's going to recall the others, just as any six lines of Japanese poetry will, of necessity, rhyme. But whatever the technnology-imposed similarities, Mario Movie has in bulk what I've come to think of as the Arcangel feel.

He apparently didn't achieve that feel alone, though. This is a collaboration with Paper Rad, a collective that, according to their own Ubuweb page, "has bubbled under the elastic waistline of the world's slacks for over a decade, tickling its privates and filling its diapers." (I'd have said "triple-pleated slacks" in my own declaration, but hey.) I'd dell you more information is available on Paper Rad's own incomprehensible web site, but... I'm not sure. It's tough to say which duties fell to Arcangel and which fell to however many Paper Radders there happen to be, but the project is elaborate enough that I doubt I'd have wanted to handle it all by myself.

The narrative nature of Mario Movie means that, unlike Ubuweb's other archived Arcangel material, it actually makes some sense to watch it as a streaming video. It could be an installation running off an actual NES, sure — there's a freaky custom cartridge and everything — but you'd be watching the same beginning, middle and end either way. These can be summarized thus: Mario, twitching side-to-side stands on a block suspended in an open sky. The sky changes colors, the block deteriorates, and scrolling clouds (straight out of Clouds!) appear. Mario slips and falls, falls, falls. Like the background in F2, this world's keeps flipping between color schemes. When he finally lands hand headbutts a block — as Marios do — the screen turns all glitchy, like in Video Ravingz. Our hero then wanders through field after field of glitches, happening upon a sphinx, a pyramid, a squat anthropomorphic mushroom and a evil-looking castle. Inside the forbidding structure, however, there's a rave goin' on. THE END.

Between these scenes appear screens of what I can only call poetry, rendered in the kind of classic white-capitals-on-black text that's even now firing up my jones to bust out my NES and game all day. The first few frame what's going on:

AS A VIDEO GAME
GROWS OLD
ITS CONTENT AND
INTERNAL LOGIC
DETERIORATE

FOR A CHARACTER
CAUGHT IN THIS
BREAKDOWN
PROBLEMS AFFECT
EVERY AREA OF LIFE

I'll check my electronics textbooks, but I'm not sure that's true. I suppose it depends on the medium; all my NES cartridges, no matter how old — then again, I can't speak for the old and re-soldered — play as well as they did on day one, but I doubt my TI-99/4A games on cassette tapes will spring to life as they would have — relatively speaking — in 1981. So as Mario roams, tumbles and fidgets his way through this hacked world, both his surroundings and the interstitial titles degrade and degrade. Here's a late-stage sample:

THIS WORLD IS STROB
ING ME OUT SOMETHIN
GS HAPPENING IN MY B
RAIN IM HAVING A
AX MANXANXXXX

YES YOUR POETRY HA
S PREPARED YOU WELL

THIS IS YOUR E YOU
ARE CONFRONTING YOU
R ENERGY

THE DATS ITS
S DFSDFSDFSDFSD TH
E DATA ITS
S DFSDFSDFSDFSD THE
DATS ITS S

DANCINGFANCINGFANCIN
GDANCINGDANCINGDANCI
NGDANCINGDANCINGCANC

... and it just kind of keeps going on like that. Nearly the whole time I watched, I was scanning my vocabulary for, but could not find, a word for the behavior of the colors onscreen. But when those last couple blocks of disintegrating text came along, I was able to pick out the word I was looking for: strobing. That's what Arcangel loves to have stuff do.

Opiates

I once tweeted a suspicion that feels, in its intuitive correct-soundingness, awfully grim: to the extent that something is a distraction, is it also popular? New or old; viewable, listenable, edible, touchable or snortable; "moral" or "immoral"; corporal or ephemeral — if it yanks our attention away from life itself, it's probably more widely and enthusiastically used than it otherwise would have been. I've come to cluster all these thing under the heading of "opiates," making periodic good-faith effort to steer clear of them.

What, specifically, counts as an opiate? Well, opiates, to start: your pills, your powders, your smokables, your drinkables. But also candy. Video games. Viral videos. Value meals. Taco Bell. Self-Googling. Random Wikipedia walks. Cat photos, LOL and otherwise. Rom-coms. CSI. Shiny gadgetry. Inbox reloads. Flash games. Chatroulette. Compulsive skimming. Social media. (Hell, more of the internet than I want to admit.) Shopping. Masturbation of either the intellectual or "classic" variety. Blockbusters. Ironic tees. Chocolate croissants. Trashy novels. Trashy magazines. Self-aware commercials. Opinion columns. Morning zoos. Celebrity gossip. Regular gossip. Office politics. Politics. Religion (re: "the masses"). Neurotic relationship engineering. Ironic arena rock. The "stupid, but fun!" in all its forms. Snacks. Spectacles. Fantasies. "Entertainment." Daydreams. Escapism. Cultural detritus. Bacon.

It sounds as if I'm calling moralism, but I'm really the last person to do that. Nor, I should add, do I claim not to partake of these opiates my own self. What grips me with increasing tightness is the simple fear that they do what they're meant to. Opiates dull pain. Lacking companionship, social, sexual or otherwise? Firing up 4chan ought to take your mind off it. Boring, onerous job to do? A nice chocolate-chip muffin ought to take your mind off it. Directionless life? Check e-mail; check Facebook; check Twitter; check Foursquare (can you "check" Foursquare?); that ought to take your mind off it. Caught a glimpse of the abyss? Buying that funny shirt ought to take your mind off it. But to the extent that I don't feel pain, I'm not going to address its underlying cause.

One of the main themes to emerge in my twenties so far is a crushing fear of deluding, entertaining, dreaming or otherwise distracting myself to the point where I wake up, 70 years old, having created nothing: "OH SHI-" I thus have an increasingly difficult time abiding opiates in my own life. This is especially true in the case of art. Much of the problem's surface area came to light when I interviewed Reality Hunger author David Shields (transcript):

Could we break artworks, irrespective of form — books, films, anything — into two categories: those that distract us from life, those that turn us away from life, and those that focus us on it, those that turn us toward life?

I think that's not bad. I quoted that Samuel Johnson earlier, which goes pretty close to what you're saying, Colin. The Samuel Johnson line was, "A book should either allow us to escape existence or teach us how to endure it." That's a pretty close approximation of what you said, unless I'm mishearing you or misreading the Samuel Johnson.

That sounds similar to me. I'm glad I have a forebear as illustrious as that.

Exactly. I think that's pretty good. You can see how people would push back against what I'm saying, or what you're saying, or what Samuel Johnson's saying, which is basically that I'm seeming to ask for something that's too naked, too raw, too unfiltered. Their whole point is, "Why couldn't a story, told well, explore something very deep about life through implication?" Of course, for many readers it can and does. I'm just trying to argue a minority opinion: for me, given how simulated and artificial and mediated our culture is, I find for myself and for many of my fellow travelers, that more mediation, more dream world, more bubble wrap — it just doesn't get me anywhere. Kafka said, "A book should be the axe to break the frozen sea within us."

But isn't this true not just for art, but for stuff in general? Are we not always in a position to choose between that which distracts us from from life, often in a painkilling fashion, and that which focuses us on it, with much more complex effects? The more time passes — and yes, I know how young I am, but we've none of us got much time on Earth — the less of it I feel I can afford to burn away under cultural anesthetic. (What kind of art, after all, is an-esthetic?) The problem, of course, is how shockingly available, and in how countlessly many forms, anesthetic turns out to be.

When you have nothing interesting to work on

Preparing to interview filmmaker Andrew Bujalski, I watched his three movies, Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation and Beeswax. Bujalski's work is the vanguard of what has been dubbed the "mumblecore" movement, which the Wikipedia says is "characterized by ultra-low budget production (often employing digital video cameras), focus on personal relationships between twenty-somethings, improvised scripts, and non-professional actors."

However weary I'm getting of hearing the word "mumblecore," Bujalski is infinity times wearier. But without exception, I've enjoyed the films that public opinion has shoved into the mumblecore stable, just as I've enjoyed works in any medium that are subject to about a thousand tight constraints at once. The aforementioned "focus on personal relationships between twenty-somethings" makes them sound insufferable, I know, but nowhere have Roger Ebert's words turned out to be wiser: "It's not what a movie is about, but how it is about it."

Non-audiovisual objections about these pictures seem to boil down to, "What do I care about the love lives of directionless 24-year-olds?" I'm not equipped to comment on that, since it's a whole class of complaint I've heard about films of all kinds — "What do I care about Portland skateboarders?" "What do I care about a couple middle-aged guys who like to drink wine?" "What do I care about dwarfs in an insane asylum?" — but have never come close to understanding. What, so I gotta care about everybody in a film now to appreciate it? Sheez, enough already.

So while it would be a stretch to say I "care" about the various couplings and decouplings of the average mumblecore dramatis personæ, I'm still game to watch them play out in the hands of an interesting enough director. Hell, I'm game to watch anything — or nothing — play out in the hands of an interesting enough director. Even these kids' hand-wringing, vacillation, stuttering and squirreling about who they're with, who they've been with and who they could be with isn't the stuff of classical cinema, it certainly seems to be the stuff of life. Or at least the stuff of some lives, lives that I observe and that confuse me.

Don't these people, fictitious or real, twentysomething or whateverdecadesomething, have anything better to do? "I was watching Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? this past weekend, which has a bunch of marital/relationship-based fights that get really messy," Andy McKenzie e-mailed me. "All I could think about was that this is all people have to entertain themselves when they are not intellectual and curious. It really must be a hard life."

A New Yorker article on marriage therapy had gotten me thinking about the staggering amounts of time, money, energy and all-around opportunity cost we humans pour into our sexual pair-bonding. I don't think I'm too daring in claiming that much of this labor is for naught. My mind naturally went to a classic Onion opinion piece:

A good 75 percent of my "job" is listening as some miserable husband-and-wife team drones on about their problems. Every once in a while, you say something like, "Well, what are some things Don could do to make you feel like he appreciates you?" Or, "Don, did you even know Wendy felt this way?" The rest of the time, it's just keep the eyes open, nod, and cash the checks.

Last week alone, my haul was a cool $4,500, and I made it just sitting on my ass. Check this out: These couples pay me $200 an hour, and I get paid whether I solve their problems or not. If they leave crying their eyes out, I get paid. If they end up getting divorced... paid!

My working theory is similar to Andy's. We've all got energy to burn, and if your energy isn't going toward creating anything, learning about anything or pursuing any goals not directly related to the reproductive instinct, it all gets squandered on fine-tuning, dicking with, "exploring" the particulars of your configuration of marriages, cohabitations, courtships, "relationships," engagements, engagements to engagements, engagements to engagements to engagements, boyfriendhoods, girlfriendhoods, boyfriend-girlfriendhoods, civil unions, spiritual unions, aspiritual unions, affairs, "arrangements," dalliances, line marriages, love triangles, ménages à trois, triads, quadrads, pentads, splits, "breaks," trial separations, separations, divorces, dissolutions, separate vacations, reunions, remarriages and retreats(, couples'). And with what, pray tell, to show for it?

Can anybody fall into this vortex of meaninglessness who has Great American Novel to write? Who longs to comprehend the behavior of the quark? Who has feverish visions — even of these very mating difficulties — that scream to be committed to celluloid? Who burns with the desire to add yet another layer to his atonal symphony? Who refuses to pass a day where brush does not touch canvas? Who does not build thinking robots so that he may live, but lives so that he may build thinking robots? Evolutionary psychology might say that all these pursuits are but sublimations of the reproductive instinct, and I can buy it. Nevertheless, it feels about as relevant to this discussion as pointing out that the computer on which I compose this post is but a shuffler-around of electrons, or that the sentences I type are but strings of made-up symbols.

Can those already in deep thrall to an endless loop of time-wasting relationship engineering do anything about it? "I don't think it's anything profound to prefer interesting things, really," Andy wrote. "It just requires a reprogramming of your reward system, to prefer pieces of information that iterate upon or demand an alteration of your current models of the world. Relationship-based therapy, fights, etc., don't offer this kind of novel info. Usually they're just a rehashing of old, poorly generalizing (read: trivial) events."

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 34. Cory Arcangel's F2/F1 Racer Mod/Japanese Driving Game (2005)

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F2 (or F1 Racer Mod or Japanese Driving Game). 2:46 min., color, silent, 2005. By Cory Arcangel. Ubuweb's description:

This is a simple mod Cory did of the old Japanese Famicom driving game F1 Racer. Basically the cars, etc., were removed from the game and all that was left was the road.

Procedurally, this is a close cousin to Clouds, the older game modification where Arcangel hacked everything but the clouds out of Super Mario Bros. Now all we've got left from this driving game is the scenery and the scrolling road. Getting what I've come to think of as the Standard Cory Arcangel Ubuwebified Work Disclaimer, this (probably) really isn't meant to be viewed as a clip but as a continuously running cartridge in a gin-u-wine NES console. Or in this specific case, I suppose, a Famicom console, which is the NES' Japanese equivalent. Or an NES with some sort of converter, though I remember from my heavy NES-collecting days that those were tricky to come by. (But you know what? Given the ingenuity I've seen from Arcangel thus far, I wouldn't be surprised if he somehow just willed one into existence.)

I may well be of the last sub-generation to get nostalgic for driving games like the one Arcangel has here stripped of its cars. These were the games from before moving cameras, before infinite draw distances, before real-time 3D rendering. It was all scaled sprites and alternating strips of color to make sure you knew the road was supposed to be passing. This particular game just uses a stream of center lines to evoke that, but the result is basically the same. (This stuff is close to my heart; OutRun was my first-ever computer game, and boy, did I play the hell out of it, never well.) And now that I think about it, I'm not sure "nostalgia" is the right term; do I simply long for the days of these prepolygonal racers, or do I genuinely prefer the games themselves? I can't speak for the 25-year-olds buying Bob-omb shirts from Urban Outfitters, but I think my enthusiasm comes from a place of honest, "objective" enjoyment. I liked games made before 1995-ish even in 1996, and I like them now.

Memento @$$i

In a situation that comes up more often than you'd think, I needed an image of a bespectacled Asian girl to illustrate a point. So I keyed the phrase into Google Images and, one roundabout net.route later, landed on the blog of Edmund "Swifty" Yeo, a bespectacled Asian dude. So close, yet so far, right?

But he's not just any bespectacled Asian dude; he's a Malaysian-born, Australia-educated, Japan-based cinéaste, photographer and filmmaker responsible for a bunch of admirable shorts. His blog chronicles his travels around the Australasia-ish area and elsewhere, making his movies, working on others', attending film festivals, studying the craft at Tokyo's Waseda University and meeting more or less all the greatest living masters of Cinema. Evidently he studied marketing in Perth — there's an appealing combo — but took a post-graduate year in film. It doesn't seem like he's looking back.

One other quality that resonates is his being less than a year older than me, though that resonates in a way that just makes me tug at my collar. What's the term for a memento mori, except that it reminds you not that you're gonna die but that you're sittin' on your @$$ scrollin' blogs when someone else, who's logged roughly the same Earth-hours, is even now jetting around from Asakusa to Bratislava to Kuala Lumpur to the Pusan International Film Festival to Cannes, adapting Yasunari Kawabata stories and paying homage to Sans Soleil? "Memento @$$i?"

I wouldn't care about any of this, of course, if Yeo's films weren't any good, but all signs point to them being really cool. Here's the introduction to his new short Kingyo, one of those Kawabata adaptations. I'm quite impressed by the results he gets with the split-screen visuals, which I believe run through the whole film:


This is the trailer for Fleeting Images, the (what simply must be a) Sans Soleil homage:


You can watch the full ten-minute movie on the site of the online film festival whose grand prize it won, although you've got to do the whole free-registration thing first. I'd say it's worth it.

My other favorite in the Yeo oeuvre is the thirteen-minute Love Suicides, which his blog implies that Brazil's Fluxus Film Festival will only be hosting on the net temporarily, so you'd better watch while that watchin's good.

In the Museum-of-First-Drafts spirit, you might consider Forced Labour, a flashy, unlit, camcorder-shot thug battle from Yeo's earliest filmmaking days. He seems to cringe today about its "amateurish" qualities, and I suppose it is pretty goofy, but there's a certain enthusiasm to it of which I can't help but approve:


What drives Edmund Yeo? One of his posts puts it in a way that, for whatever reason, rings strongly on my frequency:

"You know," I said to Maiko, Iyo and Ai while I was eating. "All these I'm doing, this dream I'm chasing, my determination to never give up, it's really about revenge."

I am a very resentful person. In the second last paragraph of my previous post, I mentioned that I usually fuel my motivation with this perverse pleasure of proving doubters wrong. These doubters could be real, could be imaginary. I just needed this sort of fire.

And that's why I'm such a resentful person, and so incapable of accepting mediocrity or conformity.

Here he is with Abbas Kiarostami:


In conclusion, WHY IS THIS MY LIFE

What my life's "really" "about"

You are what you do. It follows that, if you want to know what you are, look at where your time goes. Wherever it happens to be, that's you. For few of us is this a very pretty picture, but like many non-pretty pictures, I'd say it's also a necessary one — "sobering" might be the term. I hit occasional stretches of "Hey, something's not quite right" feeling — a harsher variant being the "WHY IS THIS MY LIFE" feeling — and nothing ever improves unless I look my own crappy decisions straight in their crappy decision-eyes. Provocations like the one at the head of this paragraph prompt me to do that.

In my case — and, from what I can tell, in many others too — this malaise arises out of cognitive dissonance. That is to say, there's some bothersome mismatch between how things are and how I'm thinking about them. My crude hypothesis is that, if your conception of your life and the ways you actually use your time drift too far out of line, you basically just hear the Emergency Broadcast System crunch in 3D Sensurround^TM over and over again until you either fall in line or crawl under some form of opiate.

"He's not a bad guy," I've heard girls repeatedly insist about their boyfriend-shaped disasters, "not on the inside. He just does bad things." But are the two separable? What imaginable argument could make the actions not just distinct from but non-identical to the person? What or where, exactly, is the "inside"? We all see right through this when someone else spouts it in what seems like a trivial context. Your mileage may vary, but when it comes to a topic like what my very life is about, the blinders are a tad harder to get off.

It's pretty easy to produce a hand-wavey explanation of why your life is "about" something other than what you actually spend it on every day. It hastens a hoped-for subject change in conversation, perhaps, but it does nothing to close the gap between your real life and your declared one. Clichéd example: the barista who claims to "really" be a novelist. Let's say he spends eight hours a day pouring macchiatos. If he is, indeed, really a novelist, he must spend more than eight hours a day writing novels, and his time behind the latte bar is secondary in quantity as well as secondary in perception. If he spends more time pouring macchiatos than anything else, well, he's really a barista.

There's nothing the matter with really being a barista. I tend to agree with observers who are weirded out by that fact that so few service workers they meet seem to genuinely inhabit their jobs. (Then again, I'm even more weirded out when I meet a service worker who does genuinely inhabit their job.) The wrongness comes, again, when words and thought clash with reality. This is the wince you see when you ask a new friend what they do and they say, "Well, I play music, but..." or "I'm a filmmaker, except that right now..." This is the wince you let out when, as the new friend, you say this stuff yourself.

Maybe you wouldn't wince if you said, "I'm a temp, but I mostly browse Wikipedia, Reddit and 4chan. I spend a few hours every week envisioning different scenarios of putting a band together, and sometimes I listen to my favorite songs and think about what it would be like if I had recorded them." Or if you said, "I'm a sales associate at Kinko's, but on my days off I re-read Jane Austen novels and think about how I could write them under different conditions, post the occasional fanfic and half-fill grad school applications every few years." Okay, you'd probably still wince, but it'd at least be a different wince; it wouldn't be the acidic wince of dishonesty.

To the extent that your time gets consumed by writing, and only to that extent, you're a writer. The same goes for time spent rapping and being a rapper, time spent training and being physically fit, time spent watching RSS feeds and being a reader of RSS feeds. This might sound agonizingly self-evident, but it's shockingly easy to forget in the course of day-to-day existence.

You can consider what your life is about to be what you've already accomplished or what you imagine yourself accomplishing in the future, but I find those ways lie madness. What life's about is whatever it's being burnt on, which, in turn, is what you are. A sometimes unpleasant way of framing, perhaps, but it frames clearly and guides you toward more interesting uses of your time. I never could improve myself without clarity.

Only connect (if possible)

There are a bunch of videos of (former Marketplace of Ideas guest) Richard Nash available on the net, but this one from Booknet Canada offers the finest introduction to his ideas about publishing, writing and uniting producers with audiences, which are smarter than all the other ideas:



If you watched that, you'll understand why Chris "Free" Anderson twote that it's the "best speech on the future of books & publishing" he's ever seen, one with "every sentence quotable." Part of the reason, I would submit, is that Nash's points extend well beyond the realm of books. They extend — get ready for this — to all worthwhile forms of culture.

Like all good things, Nash's speech is difficult to boil down in any faithful way, but here's an important thread: the publishing industry has, after decades upon decades upon decades of applying ink to pulped trees and gluing the whole mess into cardboard, forgotten the core of its mission. It's understandable that the long-standing primacy of all this physical infrastructure makes it seem like publishing is about casting texts into physical form and scattering them o'er the land, but isn't that messy business actually in service of another, deeper goal?

Nash talks about being asked by frustrated writers how to get published. The answer tends to boil down to "Participate in your community," ostensibly to increase the chances of being discovered by a major player or big outfit but really, Nash says he eventually realized, for the happiness inherent in that participation. He discusses the "postpartum depression" of authors whose books sit out there on Barnes & Noble's shelves at this very moment, yet that fact itself hasn't transformed their lives. "They're not happy being 'published,'" he says. "They want to connect."

He puts up a Powerpoint slide of the "only connect" bit from Howards End, which I somehow never before realized was enormously relevant to life:

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

"We've allowed outselves to believe that publishing is the end," Nash says. "It is the means to an end, the end being happiness, the end being connection. We're in the writer-reader connection business." And indeed, I'd say that, whatever you're making, your desired result is almost certainly connection with the rest of humanity. As someone who writes but has never cared much about being "published," per se, I can't help but agree with this. Take away the element of connection, and I wouldn't have much interest left in doing films, videos, sounds or broadcasts, either.

The other side of this is that, just as connection is the end, connection in also, in a way, the means. Who really succeeds in anything without first forging links aplenty with many, many others? Each and every project that captures significant "mindshare" (a term Nash brings out once or twice in his speech), even theoretical one-man shows like novels, is ultimately a collaboration. This is what spiteful types seem to be grumbling about when they say that "it's all who you know," but I'm not at all sure that's a bad thing.

Yet forging connections seems to be one of the things I have the most trouble doing. (Or at least it's the latest in a long line of whipping boys I punish for my relative lack of renown.) It soars right up there with budgeting sufficient time to complete tasks properly and not fantasizing elaborate disaster scenarios. If all projects are collaborative and this pre-emptively puts me off collaborative projects — which it clearly does — the implications are doubleplus ungood. I understand well the necessity of the randomness, hybridity and pooled expertise brought by connection, yet I possess the superpower of knowing what I need to change without actually changing a damn thing. It's a really crappy superpower.

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 33. Cory Arcangel's Naptime (2002)

If you can't see the above media player, either click the icon in its empty place or this post's permalink

Naptime. 1:25 min., color, sound, 2002. By Cory Arcangel. Ubuweb's description:

The visuals were made first, and then the music added at the end by Paul B. Davis.

I'm not sure where the image of Mario sleeping comes from — it doesn't quite have the "actual Nintendo-sanctioned game" look — but he's dreaming a load of glitchiness not far from Arcangel's Video Ravingz. Unlike that reprogrammed game, though this one — if it is indeed a reprogrammed game, since Arcangel's site lacks a page about it — the soundtrack doesn't seem to be a beloved 80s hit. Beyond that, ain't much to say.

Organ markets, correct interestingness and self-delusion: a talk with Meteuphoric's Katja Grace

Katja Grace's Meteuphoric is one of the more consistently interesting blogs to pop up in the past few years, and I find it all the more so because I haven't quite been able to get a handle on its terrain. She uses it to observe and reason aloud about topics that involve philosophy, economics, psychology, rationality, cognitive science and the like, but you wouldn't really say the blog is necessarily about those things. There's a variety — as of this writing, its front page covers an intellectual span from paying drug addicts not to pop out kids, the connection between bad teaching and certification and the social signaling of Mother's Day — but it also feels as if there's a definite focus. Hence my inclination to shoot her an e-mail and have a conversation about what, exactly, Meteuphoric is. Here's the result.

* * *

Colin Marshall: Having come across your blog via a link from Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen, I was delighted to find you'd already written two archives of posts on compelling subjects — compelling to my mind, at least. I'm still wondering how I might characterize the entire project, and rest assured I've plenty of questions to ask about that, but let me start with this: do you really think about the ins-and-outs of organ sales as often as I imagine you do? Having read through all your posts, I can't help but feel it's been something of a leitmotif. Does that subject happen to stand at the overlap of a few of your interests, or am I imagining things?
 

Katja Grace: Yes, organ markets are at the intersection of a few interesting things — psychology, ethics, institution design, arguing into the night. They are also one of the small number of things that make me slightly cross. I'll tell you why they are interesting for psychology and ethics.

I like things that allow a glimpse at how tenuous the connection is between reality and how we see it, and I think organ markets are one. Many of us feel instantly certain that organ markets should be prevented, and that it's for the sake of potential traders. Yet there seems no easy reason that organ markets should be worse than other exchanges. Some people argue for hours on this one, without any clear argument and a changing collection of unclear ones. Once someone read me a poem to try to get across the incommunicable wrongness I was missing, in vain. It's interesting to ask what about the situation is really so repellent, and why we are so sure our aversion is altruistic.

This leads to the general topic of the difference between being ethical and feeling ethical. Much of what our moral intuitions tell us is in contradiction with what we think are worthy principles. We like to think life is worth a lot for instance, yet in practice life more than a few miles away is worth nothing unless we are personally acquainted with the potentially deceased. Even if we calculate that organ markets would benefit users, many of us feel bad about them. What do you do when feeling virtuous comes into conflict with doing good? Most people go with their feelings.

This is what makes me slightly cross; we have reasons to believe some of our mental faculties should have evolved to be truthful, such as aspects of vision, but there is no reason our moral feelings should have evolved to make us benefit others consistently, so it is dishonest of us to pretend that following them somehow will. That people put their own comfort ahead of others receiving life saving organs while pretending it is for the good of traders irks me. As a friend pointed out, I am hypocritically motivated by disgust at others’ hypocritical motivation by disgust.
 

Colin Marshall: Ah, the old "refutation by poem." I presume that the person who tried that on you didn't know you all that well?

Even beyond the muddy thinking one finds about organ markets, the gap between attitudes as reflected in peoples' speech and attitudes as reflected in their actions seems, in my reading, to have become a larger theme in your writing with time. There's an interest there in your earliest posts, sure, but there's more of one now. How did you come to be intrigued specifically by the points where "feeling" a certain way and "being" a certain way diverge? Do you see this brand of hypocrisy everywhere, or is it confined only to certain sectors of life?

Katja Grace: There's more than one way to know someone well; for instance you can be very familiar with a person's peculiarities without the slightest clue what thoughts could prompt them.

I became interested when I was thirteen and I heard that ABBA — my favorite band at the time — had refused to go on a reunion tour despite a billion dollars' offer. My mother said this was awful of them, as they could fix a small third-world country for a few weeks' singing, saving many lives. This point didn't seem that specific to a billion dollars, though. Any smaller proportion of lives for a smaller proportion of money had to be as good a deal. So, not wanting to murder anyone, I determined not to misuse a cent while such problems lasted and I could help.

It seemed odd that I hadn't thought of this before, but I didn't dwell on it. I figured other people would be interested to hear this great plan, as they valued human life so much. However whenever I explained to anyone they thought of some dubious sounding reason they couldn't be sure they could do anything or that their usual ethics shouldn't apply there. I didn't want to believe that everyone around me was evil, so I cheatingly decided they were probably delusional instead, and took an interest in what was going on.

How broadly does hypocrisy apply? Not sure, but here are some hints. It looks bad to overtly seek things like sex, status, and admiration. Even to admit that such things motivate you to otherwise admirable activities will likely lose you sex, status and admiration. It also appears that we want and benefit evolutionarily from these sorts of things a lot. So if seeking them overtly is condemnable, it would seem strange if we didn't seek them under the guise of other goals if we could. This could be at an evolutionary level or unconsciously, though, rather than through our own minds consciously planning any hypocrisy. We may just find that our genuine desire to help others is somehow sapped when nobody will see.

I suspect most hypocrisy is somewhat like this; we act on what seems right to us and don't notice this is inconsistent and altered by situational factors we wouldn't consciously support. Verifying that your behavior isn't unconsciously bent toward hypocrisy isn't generally considered necessary for answering the question "Am I a hypocrite?", so any related knowledge can happily remain just close enough to consciousness to remind one not to look there.


Colin Marshall: Here we see a bit of overlap with the ground Robin Hanson covers in his rationality-themed blog Overcoming Bias. Reading your posts, it's easy to see that you're a fan of his, and reading the comments below your posts, it's easy to see that he's a fan of yours — his face, at least in icon form, has become a fixture around Meteuphoric.

But he's not the only influence you cite in your writing. Others named in posts include Thomas Schelling, La Rochefoucauld, Paul Gowder and Steven Pinker. Who else's work do you look to as catalysts for your own thought? Who or what, aside from the ABBA-driven curiosity you just described provided the entrée — or "pushed the gateway drug," if you prefer — into reading the sort of thinkers that you do?


Katja Grace: I like interesting ideas and don't mind who writes them, so I look for topics more than authors. I often can't even remember who writes things I like — it took a lot of liking Overcoming Bias before I noticed who wrote it at all, and more to realize Robin and Eliezer weren't both women's names.

I like most topics that can be analyzed with neat principles. Vagueness, unorganizable detail and narratives bother me, so I'm yet to find a workable way to know about history. I try to read famous things; I figure they are likely better and others can discuss them readily. I don't read the news much; I find newspapers hard to get through, and if anything happens that I'm in a position to influence, someone will probably tell me.

I like thinking more than reading (a potentially dangerous characteristic) so I try to read things that will be fun or productive to think about, or that I already think something about and want to hear the arguments against. I'm not sure about a particular entree — Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder was influential. It contained an amazing lot of interesting ideas for someone who was used to reading fiction about pre-teen girls.


Colin Marshall: I can't resist probing that bit about the potential dangers of thinking more than you read. What do you think are the problems lurking around corners for those who spend more time internally processing, modifying, testing and reflecting upon ideas than receiving intellectual input? Where do you think you currently fall on the spectrum that runs from those who only read to those who only think? Can you conceive of an ideal place to reside on that spectrum, or is it more of a matter of trial and error?


Katja Grace: The extreme of thinking with no intellectual input gets you as far as a thoughtful caveman. The other extreme is zero improvement on what exists around you. I'm not sure what the optimal compromise is, and it would depend on the topic, but I suspect I am biased in favor of thinking. It's more effort to think correct interesting things than interesting things, and hard for uninvolved listeners to tell the difference, or for that matter for you to. So if you pride yourself at all on having interesting ideas, there's an incentive to think too much.

This probably isn't a major effect in society; more people seem toward the reading end of your spectrum and like a lot of detailed knowledge, keeping up with everything that happens without trying to add much to it. These "biased" positions are not necessarily errors, but merely the results of people's goals not being to produce good insights efficiently. I'm not sure how productive a world with some people focussed on thinking and some on reading is compared to one where most people take the best personal compromise. I mostly feel like I don't read enough personally because reading seems so slow compared to thinking, but I suppose if I really cared I would have learned to speed read by now.


Colin Marshall: Which brings me to the range of topics you discuss on Meteuphoric. You've written an about page which says the blog "is about ideas that apply to lots of things for long enough to be interesting." A wide-open field, as you'd no doubt agree. As a reader, it seems to me that you write about whatever holds enough personal interest for you to compose a post about. This is super-reductive, yes, but is it actually incorrect?

And whether or not that's a perfectly suitable description, yours does strike me as an unusually successful effort — in terms of visible reader engagements, high-profile links to it elsewhere, etc. — given the broadness of its subject matter. It seems to me that 90 percent the blogosphere's population writes about whatever happens to interest them — and their words go unread. What, in your handling of a somewhat similar blogging principle, do you think attracts a readership of your readership's quality? Is it perhaps to do with the aforementioned focus on the ideas that underpin the things on whose surfaces another blogger might linger?


Katja Grace: It's true my claimed theme is a guess at what bounds my interests more than a constraint. There are more criteria though: I try to only post on things where I have a single specific insight that I haven't heard before. That cuts out rants, winding streams of thought and other broad overviews, as well as most reposting of others' ideas. I actually have about three times as many unpublished drafts as posts, mostly because there are issues I've thought a bit about, but don't have a neat single insight I'm confident in to contribute.

I'm not sure why my blog is successful. I don't try to appeal much beyond what personal aesthetics dictates, apart from some extra effort toward clear explanation. A difference from many other blogs is that I try to write dispassionately when talking about people, who are usually generic, and rarely talk about myself or my personal preferences or prejudices. I'm not sure these things help popularity — if the rest of the media is anything to go by, people like emotion, taking sides, and knowing about specific people more than ideas.


Colin Marshall: And finally, I must ask: how does the thinking and writing you do on Meteuphoric reflect back on your everyday life? An unsettling percentage of the people I know who spend sizable chunks of their time pondering and communicating, on the net or otherwise, about issues of rationality, intelligence, human behavior and how things really are versus how they seem don't seem to incorporate their own findings into their operative worldview. How much do you notice that the questions you raise and conclusions at which you arrive on the blog feed back into and shape how you live, and how much is all this stuff compartmentalized off by itself?


Katja Grace: I have to say I'm a hypocrite here to be consistent; either I apply what I write to my life, and thus interpret my behaviour as often hypocritical, or I'm hypocritical for not applying it. It's probably a mix. It's easier to tell yourself that you are delusional about your real motives than it is for that thought to seriously compete with the feeling that you aren't.

Most interesting thoughts are wrong, and normal behaviour presumably embodies a lot of previous thought and experimentation, so trying to implement everything you think of in your life can go badly. Which is a good reason to work out why people do or believe things before you write them off. I spent a lot of my childhood rescuing snails from sidewalks because I couldn't think of any good argument for their experience being less vivid than mine, and before that my imaginary friends used to "Pascal's mug" me because I couldn't prove they didn't exist, and they could threaten me with anything, being imaginary. In those cases going with popular opinion might have been better.

These days my most unusual practical application of thinking is to try to save most of my money to give to the most worthy cause I can find. It used to be all of it — my mother thought this so silly she responded by giving me an "entertainment allowance" which I was forbidden to spend on anything "worthwhile."  My honours year project is about anthropic reasoning, which I blog about a bit, and my opinions on political and social things reflect what I write, though those things hardly count as practical applications.

In other ways I think there's a disconnect. It can be hard to apply abstract bits and pieces of understanding to messy reality to find better courses of action than popular opinion could give you. Also thinking about abstract things directly diverts attention from things like remembering to eat breakfast, so reduces practical competence that way. I'm at the end of undergraduate uni, so will soon get to more important decisions that I nervously hope thinking will influence to good effect.