Can the art/act of writing be explained by studying the brain? “The choice of writing as a living and a way of life is more complex than is likely to show up in a neurologist’s PET scan. Nor, unlike in other artistic fields—music, the visual arts—does literary talent make such a life any easier by appearing early. “No Mozarts in literature,” more than a well-known saying, is a fact. There are not too many Joseph Conrads, either, and Conrad published his first book when he was thirty-eight. Nor, despite all the programs and creative-writing classes, can writing really be taught.”
Category: ideas
One Store Fits All?
How is it that everyone on earth seems to be happy shopping at Walmart? “Eight out of ten American households shop at Wal-Mart at least once a year. Worldwide, more than 100m customers visit Wal-Mart stores every week. Photographs circulated over the internet and purporting to come from the Exploration Rover show NASA’s recent discovery of a Wal-Mart on Mars. The mathematics of big numbers suggests that Wal-Mart’s growth must slow. Amazingly, the opposite appears to be happening.”
The Sad Seedy Side Of Legendary
Legendary performances take on an aura of their own. “The trouble with legends is that they simultaneously attract and repel. There’s a serious downside. The world of legend worship is patrolled and inhabited by very sad people, almost all of them men. This is not a world that suffers fools gladly. There is something embarrassing about being part of it.”
On Pop Culture And The Art Of
John Rockwell: “Pop culture is not necessarily interesting in itself: it’s merely an index of the state of the broader social culture, or a way to sell newspapers or CD’s or commercials. The trouble with that mercantile mindset is that the popular arena is indeed the source of some of the best art out there, and artistic excellence calls forth smart criticism. Even elitist criticism — the kind produced by critics who love popular art but scorn the populace as a bunch of Menckenesque rubes easily manipulated by commercial interests.”
Learned Aggression
“A surprising natural experiment, reported in Public Library of Science Biology, an online journal, suggests that the level of violence in baboon society is culturally determined. Cultural transmission of behaviour has been seen in many animals besides humans. But until now, it has concerned what foodstuffs are good to eat, how to make and use tools, and how to communicate (many bird songs, for example, have learned regional dialects). Cultural transmission of, for want of a better word, manners, has never before been observed outside Homo sapiens.”
The God Culture: Heavenly Comeback Or Hellish Culture War?
“Nearly 40 years after Time magazine posed the question “Is God Dead?” signs of His resurrection are everywhere: Mel Gibson’s ‘The Passion’ is on its way to becoming the highest-grossing independent film of all time, while the apocalyptic ‘Left Behind’ novels, based on the Book of Revelations, have sold 58 million copies, a publishing jackpot… The nation’s born-again president pronounces Jesus his ‘favorite philosopher’ and trumpets America’s mission to battle evil in the world. And faith avowals are all but requisite on the campaign trail – with hell to pay for anyone who demonstrates biblical illiteracy… Is all this ferment a result of post-Sept. 11 anxiety? Or has spirituality become just another commodity in a world where consumerism has become the ultimate value?”
Jumbling Up Culture (Whatever You Want To Call It)
How is it that “high” culture and pop culture separated so thoroughly? “I’m not quite sure how it got to be this way — writers of heavy books on one side, mass media on the other — because it wasn’t always so. The great American cultural blender once produced whole art forms, such as Broadway musicals and jazz, that might well be described as a blend of the two. But nowadays, that gap is so wide that I’m not even sure the old descriptions of the various forms of “culture” — highbrow, middlebrow, popular — even make sense any more.”
When Fans Become Organized Fans (Is That Bad?)
“Most people are fans of some cultural product or another: a football team, a soap opera, a rock band, a political party. But organized fandom is widely derided for its allegedly excessive devotion to trivial entertainments. Similar stereotypes used to dominate the academy, particularly among critics of capitalism and/or modernity, for whom the fan was the slack-jawed, brainwashed embodiment of consumer culture—the viewer who didn’t merely swallow passively the pulp fictions produced by the culture industry, but centered a large part of her life around those same products…”
Diversity In Education? Not Even Close
“In the end, we like policies like affirmative action not so much because they solve the problem of racism but because they tell us that racism is the problem we need to solve. And the reason we like the problem of racism is that solving it just requires us to give up our prejudices, whereas solving the problem of economic inequality might require something more — it might require us to give up our money. It’s not surprising that universities of the upper middle class should want their students to feel comfortable. What is surprising is that diversity should have become the hallmark of liberalism.”
Hockey: Built For Life In Canada
Everyone knows that hockey is a national obsession in Canada, but even some Canadians are surprised by the way the game has suddenly exploded across the nation’s cultural scene. Just as baseball has inspired generations of American authors, singers, playwrights, and photographers, so hockey is now finding its way onto Canadian stages, screens, and bookstore shelves. If baseball is as pastoral and cerebral as Americans would like to believe themselves to be, hockey is distinctly Canadian: simultaneously graceful and gritty, with a quiet undercurrent of ugliness that almost requires a poet’s soul to understand. And just as hockey is facing a crisis that threatens to destroy the sport, many Canadians fear that their unique culture may be slipping away as well…