Category: Uncategorized

On art and money

From a recent article in The Wall Street Journal;

“Starting Tuesday, the world’s chief auction houses—Sotheby’s, Christie’s and boutique house Phillips—will seek to sell at least $1.6 billion worth of art during a two-week series of sales, setting an expectation they haven’t met in the past three years.

Had a kind of lazy Sunday, so just a few comments on my new city

Santa Fe, NM, like all places, has good and bad. The good is that the climate is pleasant and there appears to be good mountain hiking nearby. The people seem friendly and relaxed.

The bad is they have aggressive drivers here; I think fast and loud driving is a hobby for some people here. They also seem to like messy smoking in public and walking dogs that bark very loudly. Construction workers don’t seem to care about how much noise they are making either.

More on This Side of Paradise

From the text;

“You an inmate of this asylum?.”

Amory nodded.

“Awful barn for the rent we we pay.”

Amory had to agree that it was.

…

“Where’d you prep?”

“Andover — where did you?”

“St. Regis’s.”

A few thoughts.. Fitzgerald had a privileged upbringing and initially went to Princeton but may have partied too much, got into the military, and did not graduate. It is almost disturbing how many very successful people don’t graduate from college.

There is a certain danger to going to elite high schools and colleges. The general public can target you for it, if you become powerful. I am not powerful at all now, but I have classmates who are now and have been attacked by mainstream media;

i also think this is an interesting novel because it was apparently the most successful of his novels during his life. It seems like the slightly fictionalized social experiences of a young man. The Great Gatsby may have seemed too tragic at the time; and Tender is the Night too focused on mental illness.

 

 

From The Irish Times on stoicism

“Lttle did Zeno of Citium know that 2,300 years after he founded Stoicism in the street-schools of Athens, fragments of his thought would be passed around Silicon Valley by latte-swilling millennials as though he were the oracle himself.”

There can be good and bad to any philosophical thought. I think the good of stoicism is it helps you to look at the world plainly and clearly. I think that bad of it is allows you to to deliberately kill yourself. That is a sin.

In US culture, Ernest Hemingway may be the most famous stoic in the art world and appears to have killed himself while  on heavy psychiatric drugs and maybe too much booze.

More on Guyland and a random comment

This is another risqué post, but it based on a scholarly book and deals with a reality

From the book:

“Staring at women is one of Guyland’s greatest pleasures .”

One of my college first-year students in an essay class wrote in favor of pornography. My main comment to him was he was being polemical and not considering the damage porn can do to some of the actors. Not all but many.

This is a complex issue in the US. My student used good research about how much money porn makes in the US, and I agree that it is better than actual sex work.

I have been un-friended by two or three people recently. That is okay. Even some of my own family have got angry with me recently. Freedom of speech matters. If my posts bother you, block or unfriend me from social media.

On a recent WaPo article by Sebastian Smee about the artist Jack Whitten

“Why does art exist? Not so much to beat up on toast as to enact and embody a whole other set of possibilities. The possibility, for instance, of continual transformation. Of richness and subtlety and surprise. The possibility of promiscuity when it comes to meanings, and susceptibility when it comes to ideas and emotions. The possibility that all things known and unknown are interpenetrated.”

This is an important question and one that is difficult to answer. When I was a college teacher, I had a colleague who taught philosophy and bluntly told his students he thought art is immoral. I think art exists to make beauty from life’s pain. Sometimes it is just about calming yourself.

It brings to mind a 1980s pop song called “Asleep” by The Smiths. Here are a few lines:

Sing me to sleep
Sing me to sleep
I’m tired and I
I want to go to bed

,,,

There is another world

There is a better world

Oh, there must be

Well, there must be

On an outsider columnist’s perspective of U.S. politics

FromThe Irish Times:

“For weeks after she was sworn in as vice-president, an Italian restaurant in Washington displayed no fewer than 10 portraits of Kamala Harris across its patio. Spread over half a block, the pictures tracked her life from student to state office holder to next in line for the grandest job on Earth. Older Washingtonians can tell you if Dan Quayle received the same billing.”

This is sometimes called “cult of personality.” Harris is the first black and female vice president, but it does not mean she should be publicly worshipped like some kind of Jesus: the Twelve Stations of the Harris.

I think Biden and her are basically place-holder leaders because liberals were so angry about Trump’s rhetorical style. I think the column is also interesting because outsiders can have a fresh and more honest perspective.

On Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quite on the Western Front

I picked up a copy of this lately. It was apparently the favorite novel of my psychiatrist boss at NIH when I spent two summers  as a clerk there in college. It is about young people being looed into war by authorities.

These are the last two paragraphs in English (the author was German):

“He fell on October. 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole  front,  that the army report confirmed itself to the single sentence: All Quiet on the Western Front.

He had fallen forward and lay on the  earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long;  his face had an expression of calm, as almost glad the end had come.”

I am not expert in history, but World War I is more of a mystery to me than World War II. WW II seems to be about after-affects of WWI, Adolf Hitler’s insanity, and racism against Polish and Jews.

I liked my boss at NIH and his colleague doctors, even though I got very angry at Fauci online recently.

 

More on Z, and Halloween

From text of the novel  by Therese Anne Fowler:

“For the next few weeks, I was tired and uncomfortable and crabby, and antisocial because of it.”

Scott and Zelda drank a lot of alcohol, and I think one of the problems with substance addiction is it can make you antisocial, even if it makes you calmer, more energetic, and more social at first. The novel implies Zelda could not have more than one child because of her problems, and that may be one reason Scott left her.

On Halloween, the holiday comes from the Celtic tradition of Samhain which is a celebration of autumn harvest. It may be why so many wear scary costumes to remind you of death, whether of plant life in the Fall or human life.

On family disputes

Was going to write about media, but got into a heated online argument with a relative today that is on my mind. I started it by telling a joke in response to one of her posts she found inappropriate and it escalated into insults.

Sometimes the people who know you best can be most hurtful. I have written before that it can be easier to be honest with strangers than people you know well; it is a paradox.

I suppose it has to do with objectivity. It is difficult to avoid subjectivity with your own relatives. Donald Trump said once that he likes nepotism, which is usually considered unethical. He proved it with his White House staffing. I don’t think it matters, if the relatives are qualified.