o1mnikent

David Hockney: Pictures and power | Comment is free | The Guardian

The church had social control. Whoever controlled the images had power. And they still do. Social control followed the lens and mirror for most of the 20th century. What’s now known as the media exert social control, not the church, but we are moving into a new era, because the making and distribution of images is changing. Anyone can make and distribute images on a mobile phone. The equipment is everywhere.

We do not have debates about images. The world of art is separate from the world of images, but the power is with images, not art. An obvious problem is seen. The world of images claims a relationship to visual reality – television and cinema – but this claim cannot now be sustained. We will get more confused if we don’t think about them.

The American Scholar – The Art of Literature and the Science of Literature – By Brian Boyd
For the last few decades, indeed, scholars have been reluctant to deal with literature as an art—with the imaginative accomplishment of a work or the imaginative feast of responding to it—as if to do so meant privileging elite capacities and pandering to indulgent inclinations. Many critics have sought to keep literary criticism well away from the literary and instead to arraign literature as largely a product of social oppression, complicit in it or at best offering a resistance already contained.

Literary academics have also been reluctant to deal with science, except to fantasize that they have engulfed and disarmed it by reducing it to “just another narrative,” or to dismiss it with a knowing sneer as presupposing a risibly naïve epistemological realism. They have not only denied the pleasure of art and the power of science, but like others in the humanities and social sciences, they have also denied that human nature exists, insisting against the evidence that culture and convention make us infinitely malleable.

Cruel and Usual Punishment

“Knowledge is not intelligence.” — Heraclitus of Ephesos.

“Information is not knowledge.” — Albert Einstein.

“… the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.” — Umberto Eco.

It is possible to know too much. It is possible to care too much. Hunger for information can become gluttony.

Stuff White People Like

Four in particular:

First, the sounds: choir, organ, singing, and the like. What made the music more poignant this year was that our church gave up almost all music for Lent: since Ash Wednesday, we haven’t sung much of anything. The absence of music had the benefit of exposing the liturgical logic behind the aesthetics and reminded everyone that all art in worship is never an end in itself. (Also fitting, since our church has two morning worship services with separate styles of music that haven’t coalesced well for the past nine years.)

Second, the silence. There was lots of it: awkward, counter-cultural, did-those-morons (we)-just-crucify-him, what-style-of-worship-is-this? silence. For three entire minutes, I could hear nothing but the sound of my own breathing. I don’t think there’s a more liturgically appropriate day for listening to myself inhale and exhale while contemplating the dire ramifications of a Fall great enough to require God to breathe his last.

Third, during a reading of the Passion narrative in John’s Gospel, I noticed that Joseph of Arimathea isn’t alone when he buries Jesus. From John 19:39: “He was accompanied by Nicodemus, the man who earlier had visited Jesus at night. Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy-five pounds.” That’s an odd anecdote to include, since Nick, the social elite teacher of the law, sneaks a conversation with Jesus in the secrecy of darkness, only to find out that he can’t become born again. Yet there he is, burying the Son of God. Maybe he had a change of heart, or maybe he expresses his skepticism by doing something formative for himself, or maybe he’s trying to make up for his earlier cowardice by removing the alleged king of Jews from the most uncivil and public form of execution. Or maybe John intentionally inserts Nick to point out that his rebirth is only as impossible as Christ’s death.

Fourth, as Jesus was hanging on the cross, the disciples didn’t gather together to figure out how they could apply this to their lives. We shouldn’t either.

From Kevin Corcoran’s blog, fitting Bob Dylan lyrics for Holy Saturday:

Far between sundown’s finish an’ midnight’s broken toll
We ducked inside the doorway, thunder crashing
As majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds
Seeming to be the chimes of freedom flashing
Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight
Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight
An’ for each an’ ev’ry underdog soldier in the night
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

In the city’s melted furnace, unexpectedly we watched
With faces hidden while the walls were tightening
As the echo of the wedding bells before the blowin’ rain
Dissolved into the bells of the lightning
Tolling for the rebel, tolling for the rake
Tolling for the luckless, the abandoned an’ forsaked
Tolling for the outcast, burnin’ constantly at stake
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.
Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail
The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder
That the clinging of the church bells blew far into the breeze
Leaving only bells of lightning and its thunder
Striking for the gentle, striking for the kind
Striking for the guardians and protectors of the mind
An’ the unpawned painter behind beyond his rightful time
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

Through the wild cathedral evening the rain unraveled tales
For the disrobed faceless forms of no position
Tolling for the tongues with no place to bring their thoughts
All down in taken-for-granted situations
Tolling for the deaf an’ blind, tolling for the mute
Tolling for the mistreated, mateless mother, the mistitled prostitute
For the misdemeanor outlaw, chased an’ cheated by pursuit
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.
Even though a cloud’s white curtain in a far-off corner flashed
An’ the hypnotic splattered mist was slowly lifting
Electric light still struck like arrows, fired but for the ones
Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting
Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail
For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale
An’ for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

Sam Harris on Barack Obama – The Huffington Post
We may be ready for the audacity of hope. Will we ever be ready for the audacity of reason?

Not believing in God is not dangerous. Not believing in sin is very dangerous. I think both the Christian right and the New Atheists in essence don’t believe in their own sin, because they externalize evil.
-Chris Hedges, interview in Salon

That ‘thou shalt not’ list just got longer – Los Angeles Times

The New Republic – Cooked Books
The old model of publishing non-fiction, borrowed largely from academia, promised a straightforward result. You picked up an academic journal to find the latest word on French tax farming in the 18th century. You knew that what you were getting was tried, tested, vetted, and replicated, at least as much as was humanly possible. You thought of the author as laying small bricks for subsequent scientific advances. But this model of knowledge accretion never had the accuracy it pretended to. If I had to guess whether Wikipedia or the median refereed journal article on economics was more likely to be true, after a not so long think I would opt for Wikipedia. This comparison should give us pause.

The Incomplete Revolution – ChronicleReview.com
The origins of modern conservativism.