“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look - I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring - caring deeply and passionately, really caring - which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté - the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball - seems a small price to pay for such a gift.”
“Middle classness” is not really an economic category at all; it was always more social and political. What being middle class means, first and foremost, is a feeling that the fundamental social institutions that surround one—whether police, schools, social service offices, or financial institutions—ultimately exist for your benefit. That the rules exist for people like yourself, and if you play by them correctly, you should be able to reasonably predict the results. This is what allows middle-class people to plot careers, even for their children, to feel they can project themselves forward in time, with the assumption that the rules will always remain the same, that there is a social ground under their feet. (This is obviously much less true either for the upper classes, who see themselves as existing in history, which is always changing, or the poor, who rarely have much control over their life situation.)
Bicycle drawings by Geoff McFetridge
On cycling in LA:
“You have to kind of get through that first layer of Los Angeles before you get to what is awesome about the city. It’s a texture. It’s a collage. And the bicycle is like a cross-fader. The bicycle is a way to travel between these things that mix. How do you read a place by looking at the space between the things it appears to be? The bicycle travels in that space.”
On the difference between art and cycling:
“I guess the point is keeping your eyes wide open to the world around you. My artwork is so much about looking inward and cycling helps me stay exposed and keep looking outwards. Having it in my life has always felt like a gift – it is so cathartic. I start a ride worried about something and end it without any worries at all.”
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
Can’t decide if this was the best book to have read this week or the absolute worst book to have read this week.
Elisa Gabbert summed it up quite nicely in her 2021 year-end roundup:
17. The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker (1973) — I heard about this book from a Louise Glück poem. It must be having a moment, because all my library’s copies were checked out already, so I bought one. I had the immediate sense that it belongs to the canon of books that, like Hyperobjects and Crowds and Power, explain everything. It’s all about how our motivation in all things is the fear of death, hence we have to align ourselves with some greater symbolic power, a big lie from beyond, that allows us a sense of “cosmic specialness,” allows us to feel heroic, to deny death, to deny our ultimate fate as “complex and fancy worm food.” Religion, in the past, made this easy, providing a ready-made meaning-of-life and assurance of immortality if we followed the rules. Modernity has made it more difficult, more of a figure-it-out-yourself affair, and many of us struggle our whole lives to find (or invent) a kind of meaning we can believe in, to feel like we have some control over nature. Art is one way; for worse people, there’s war. The language and some of the thinking around gender, sexuality, and mental illness is outdated and kind of ~yikes~ but regardless, this is full of good insights and writing and ideas. Really enjoyable in its sweep. Concludes on the limits of psychotherapy: “Not everyone is as honest as Freud was when he said that he cured the miseries of the neurotic only to open him up to the normal misery of life.” Here are some more choice quotes: “Religions like Hinduism and Buddhism performed the ingenious trick of pretending not to want to be reborn, which is a sort of negative magic: claiming not to want what you really want most.” “This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it.” “The narcissistic project of self-creation, using the body as the primary base of operations, is doomed to failure.” “Man’s body is a problem to him that has to be explained.” “Full humanness means full fear and trembling.” “In a word, illness is an object … At least it makes us feel real and gives us a little purchase on our fate.” “Neurosis is today a widespread problem because of the disappearance of convincing dramas of heroic apotheosis of man.” “The jump doesn’t depend on man after all — there’s the rub: faith is a matter of grace.” “He has to go the way of the grasshopper, even though it takes longer.” “Life itself is the insurmountable problem.”
Notebook of Robert Farris Thompson
Thompson’s notebooks contain comments, musical notation, sketches, and phrases and their translations, along with ticket stubs, symposium programs, and photographs of interviewees. Here he shows a notebook with his sketches of puppets, and a postcard, from the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico city.
When we meet a work of art, there’s something about that encounter that isn’t fixed in time, but rather, it unfixes time: the shaft opens. The past and present exist in the same moment, and we know, as beings, that we are connected. All the people who lived before us, all who will come after us, are connected in this moment.
Robert Caro’s “Planning Calendar,” 1971
He shoots for 1,000 words a day — each day is marked with how many words he wrote with excuses in parentheses. (“Lazy,” “sick,” etc.)
The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending one day by day: what one calls one’s ‘real life’ is a phantom of one’s own imagination.
C.S. Lewis
We don’t suffer these days from any lack of communication, but rather from all the forces making us say things when we’ve nothing much to say.
Gilles Deleuze
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