[pause]

Salon: You’ve also referred to your beat as the “Death of the American Dream.” That was the ostensible subject of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Has it just sort of been on its deathbed since 1968?

HST: I think that’s right.

Salon: A lot of people would argue with you about that anyway, and believe that the American Dream is alive and well.

HST: They need to take a better look around.

Salon: But in a way, haven’t you lived the American Dream?

HST: Goddammit! [pause]. I haven’t thought about it that way. I suppose you could say that in a certain way I have.

2003 interview with Salon

Scale invariance and self-similarity

When you get closer to people who are willing and able to open up they become more interesting and attractive, like zooming in on a fractal.

Of course, some people are going to be horrors nearly all the way in, and some can only talk, and lack the self-knowledge or experience to be open about anything of interest.

Zoom in on me and more often than not you'll get a flat, monochrome surface. Which is OK, but I ought to ask more questions of others and then listen to their answers.

Related post: Love as an emergent behavior

No comment, II

GQ: You mean that you're an artist who is very faithful to the text.

Hackman: Well, that's where the clue is to any creative process, to be able to figure out what is already there. Not to try to embellish.

Gene Hackman interview in GQ

Related: No comment

The third person effect

The third-person effect hypothesis states that a person exposed to a persuasive communication in the mass media sees it as having a greater effect on others than on himself or herself (Davison, 1983). This is known as the perceptual hypothesis, but there is also a behavioral hypothesis predicting that perceiving others as more vulnerable increases support for restrictions on mass media.

Wikipedia

Related: People tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests

Doctors are different

From an application to medical school that I'm editing:

I am currently learning an array of laboratory skills in both cell culturing and in animal modeling. Of these, I enjoy animal modeling the most, as it enables me to cultivate the manual dexterity and finesse required for surgery. Moreover, through hard-work and practice, I have learned to flawlessly induce strokes in rats by occluding their middle cerebral arteries.

Going all Cosmo on you

“People have a fundamental motivation to improve the self and add to who they are as a person,” Dr. Lewandowski says. “If your partner is helping you become a better person, you become happier and more satisfied in the relationship.”

Article on sustainable relationships in the NYTimes that focuses on couples, but seems to work for all kinds

Related quiz

The outstanding characteristic of the mystic’s vision is that it is satisfying

Genuine revolt goes with an all-too-definite life aim — hardly with the lack of it. Whether or not there is anything genuine about the vision, whether the visionary really sees anything, is open to dispute, but there is a wide consensus as to what the genuine experience is like, and how the genuine visionary behaves. As Baron von Hügel pointed out in one of his most penetrating observations, true illumination always results in a special sweetness of temper, a deep, lyric equanimity and magnanimity. The outstanding characteristic of the mystic’s vision is that it is satisfying. He is never frustrated, at least not in our worldly sense. It would be hard to find two less suitable words in any language to apply to Rimbaud than equanimity and magnanimity. This leaves us with Rimbaud as a sort of magician of the sensibility — of that specifically modern sensibility invented by Blake and Hoelderlin and Baudelaire — and an innovator in syntax, the first thoroughly radical revealer of the poetic metalogic which is the universal characteristic of twentieth-century verse.

Kenneth Rexroth - Rimbaud as Capitalist Adventurer

Reach for the lights

Riding at night on the bicycle listening to a DJ set and getting a thrill each time the music built to make the crowd rush on their pills, and I remembered how happy I used to be watching someone discover this world for the first time.*

Now I get a deeper feeling from watching someone get their life together and living for creativity, kindness, health and sustainable joy, which means to say I'm over the trip and want to see what happens next, how people integrate their better selves with reality, those things that [as PK Dick said] don't go away when you stop believing in them.

*I still trip once a year or so [mushrooms] but with the understanding that I'm not going to get anything out of it unless I've worked on myself in the interim using what I learned on the trip before. And at this point in the psychedelic game [just over 20 yrs in] there's very little that I'm being shown for the first time, just lessons that I should have learned long ago: it's all connected, THIS IS IT, overwhelming beauty, and the need for love and inner peace, rather than greed [in all its forms] and furious activity. All the usual suspects.

The pleasures of genre

One recent development in the debate around genres is an increasing discussion of "litfic" as a genre in itself. As M John Harrison, another of Miéville's literary heroes, recently wrote in his blog, "The sooner literary fiction recognises and accepts its generic identity, the sooner it can get help." Miéville heartily concurs: "I love genres; I think they are fascinating. My issue with litfic is not that it is a genre but that (a) it doesn't think it is and (b) it thinks it's ipso facto better than all the ones that are genres. Literary fiction of that ilk – insular, socially and psychologically hermetic, neurotically backslapping and self-congratulatory about a certain milieu, disaggregated from any estrangement or rubbing of aesthetics against the grain – is in poor shape."

A life in writing: an interview with China Miéville

Domain dependent intelligence

vanessa del rio in lips

I hate this idea that if you talk to a director or an author, you will discover something amazing, some secret. What they know is in what they produce. Many of them are idiots. David Lynch, frankly, is an idiot. He is now in a contract to collect millions of dollars to build a huge dome of meditation because he thinks that if more than ten people meditate in the same place they will release energy that will bring peace to the world. But in his movies, he is a genius

Slavoj Zizek in a Google translated interview

Torn between both impulses

aunt peg goes to hollywood

Doubtless the most radical division of humanity that can be made is that between two classes of creatures: those who demand much of themselves and assume a burden of tasks and difficulties, and those who require nothing special of themselves, but rather for whom to live is to be in every instant only what they already are.

José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses

More sincere, more free and more savage

another polar inversion

His conclusion, that in a more numerous society one enjoys more pleasures and suffers fewer fears (in which, in short, men are free), than one does living outside any society or within a very limited one, is an axiom which could be developed in a sociological treatise, and subsequently confirmed, modified or corrected in the light of our experience today. In the same way an entire typology and categorisation of conformisms and rebellions, judged according to their relative levels of sociability or unsociability, could be elaborated from the final sentence of the work [Calculation of the Value of Opinions and of the Pleasures and Pains of Human Life] where there is a contrast between he who is ‘susceptible’ to a greater number of ‘opinions’ and he who is ‘susceptible to fewer opinions’: the former becomes ‘more and more reserved, civil and dissimulating’, the latter ‘more sincere, more free and more savage’.

Italo Calvino on Giammaria Ortes in Why Read the Classics?

The basis of drama is...

So what is the basis of drama? Mamet gazes at me blankly as if the question is naive, then elucidates in one long sentence. “The basis of drama is ... is the struggle of the hero towards a specific goal at the end of which he realises that what kept him from it was, in the lesser drama, civilisation and, in the great drama, the discovery of something that he did not set out to discover but which can be seen retrospectively as inevitable. The example Aristotle uses, of course, is Oedipus.”

Lunch with the FT: David Mamet

Another post on writing

Authoritarian regimes have always been around. The feudal system, the Catholic church, the monarchies, now the plutocracies. Writers will always make themselves heard, as will artists of all stripes. No system can strip humanity of its urgent need to create Art.

Eric Miles Williamson interview

Money, status, sex, drugs

[Layne] Staley denounces “the hypocrite norm, running their boring drills,” and commits himself to consuming whatever drugs are available to him. “Money, status, nothing to me,” Staley sings, though that’s not completely true—it’s the money and status that “allow” him to live this way.

Layne Staley and Bradley Nowell are the living dead

Related: All posts tagged excess

But if a man's education has been literary...

The causes of any widespread scepticism are likely to be sociological rather than intellectual. The main cause is always comfort without power. The holders of power are not cynical, since they are able to enforce their ideals. Victims of oppression are not cynical, since they are filled with hate, and hate, like any other strong passion, brings with it a train of attendant beliefs. Until the advent of education, democracy, and mass production, intellectuals had everywhere a considerable influence upon the march of affairs, which was by no means diminished if their heads were cut off. The modern intellectual finds himself in a quite different situation. It is by no means difficult for him to obtain a fat job and a good income provided he is willing to sell his services to the stupid rich either as propagandist or as Court jester. The effect of mass production and elementary education is that stupidity is more firmly entrenched than at any other time since the rise of civilization. When the Czarist Government killed Lenin's brother, it did not turn Lenin into a cynic, since hatred inspired a lifelong activity in which he was finally successful. But in the more solid countries of the West there is seldom such potent cause for hatred, or such opportunity for spectacular revenge. The work of intellectuals is ordered and paid for by Governments or rich men, whose aims probably seem absurd, if not pernicious, to the intellectuals concerned. But a dash of cynicism enables them to adjust their consciences to the situation. There are, it is true, some activities in which wholly admirable work is desired by the powers that be; the chief of these is science, and the next is public architecture in America. But if a man's education has been literary, as is still too often the case, he finds himself at the age of twenty-two with a considerable skill that he cannot exercise in any manner that appears important to himself. Men of science are not cynical even in the West, because they can exercise their best brains with the full approval of the community; but in this they are exceptionally fortunate among modern intellectuals.

Bertrand Russell - On Youthful Cynicism

Fear eats the soul

I have to tell you something about the relations of strength between those who live in resentment, intoxicated by their bitterness, alienated by their melancholy and their bad blood, and those who, not so much out of virtue as through their makeup, self-discipline, or just because they have something better to do (e.g., a new book to write), manage to escape this merry-go-round of poisonous emotions. It is the second lot who, once again, for reasons of pure emotional mechanics, will triumph over the former. Joy makes them intelligent and strong, whereas spite is a poison and sooner or later poison kills.

Michel Houellebecq - Public Enemies

Sensational results with a sensational process

Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process.

Nassim Taleb - The Bed of Procrustes

My mother was raised in care and I'm terrified of being homeless

Social class isn’t defined for individuals by how much loot one has: it’s defined by how far one can imagine oneself descending. I fear the pit.

Eric Miles Williamson

The same unexpected behavior

As the sun loses energy by radiation, it becomes hotter and not cooler. Since the sun is made of compressible gas squeezed by its own gravitation, loss of energy causes it to become smaller and denser, and the compression causes it to become hotter. For almost all astronomical objects, gravitation dominates, and they have the same unexpected behavior. Gravitation reverses the usual relation between energy and temperature. In the domain of astronomy, when heat flows from hotter to cooler objects, the hot objects get hotter and the cool objects get cooler. As a result, temperature differences in the astronomical universe tend to increase rather than decrease as time goes on. There is no final state of uniform temperature, and there is no heat death. Gravitation gives us a universe hospitable to life. Information and order can continue to grow for billions of years in the future, as they have evidently grown in the past.

Freeman Dyson - How We Know [a review of James Gleick's The Information]