--- Thomas Hardy, in In Tenebris - II.
The fourth and final stanza
Let him in whose ears the low-voiced Best is killed by the clash of the First,
Who holds that if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst,
Who feels that delight is a delicate growth cramped by crookedness, custom and fear,
Get him up and be gone as one shaped awry; he disturbs the order here.
For just this poem, pulled from the compendium given above, see here.
--- Gaby Wood, in LRB Podcast Gaby Wood: How to Draw an Albatross, June 16, 2020, a reading of her piece "Diary," London Review of Books, Vol. 42 No. 12 · 18 June 2020
In describing her attempts to use a camera lucida:
The drawings were semi-conscious, made at great speed in order to record an illusion, the way you might wake up and try to write down what had happened in a dream. My favourite results were those that didn’t quite look like something I’d made, yet felt like something I meant.
Another nice quote comes from her description of etching practice
As a novice etcher, I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about ‘states’. Although I’d seen references to an etching’s state – ‘second state of four’, ‘fifth state’ and so on – I hadn’t really taken in what it meant. When you make an etching you tend to work on it in layers, and often over a long period. Painters do that too, but when you’re etching the only way to see the result is to print it (apart from anything else, the print is backwards in relation to the plate). The finished plate, which can be used for hundreds of near identical prints, will have produced printed records of its younger selves, or ‘states’. Of course, you don’t have to call your early trials ‘states’ – you could just call them rubbish and throw them in the bin. But artists often make editions of different states, and collectors might acquire several of them. There’s an acknowledgment, when dealing with this medium, that one image is haunted by its ancestors or alternates.
Here's the image of the albatross from the LRB piece
--- Tara Isabella Burton, in conversation with Richard Aldous about her new book, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, The American Interest podcast June 2020.
From timecode 19:56
There's a phenomenon I've seen since Trump was elected, but also anytime something bad or surreal happens in the news, the sort-of Twitter meme becomes, "Well, this season of America is terrible, this season of America has jumped the shark, can you believe the writers added this plot twist?" And it's a joke, but I think it reveals something very real, which is the sense of, you know, we're aestheticizing our own destruction, as Walter Benjamin might say.
According to Wikipedia, Benjamin said that "fascism tends towards an aestheticization of politics", in the sense of a spectacle in which it allows the masses to express themselves without seeing their rights recognized, and without affecting the relations of ownership which the proletarian masses aim to eliminate. Benjamin said, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), ch.XIX/Epilogue:
Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. (...) Mankind, which in Homer’s time was a spectacle for the Olympian gods, has become one for itself. (...) Communism responds by politicizing art.
At 3:38, Richard Aldous notes that she sums up the key elements of religion as meaning, purpose, community, and ritual.
--- Elon Musk, on JoeRogan Experience #1169,
JR: How far away are we from something that's really truly sentient?EM: Well, I mean, you could argue that any group of people, like a company is essentially a cybernetic collective of people and machines. That's what a company is. And then, there are different levels of complexity in the way these companies are formed. And then, there's a sort of like a collective AI in the Google, sort of, Search, Google Search, you know, where we're all sort of plugged in as like nodes on the network, like leaves on a big tree. And we're all feeding this network with our questions and answers. We're all collectively programming the AI. And Google, plus all the humans that connect to it, are one giant cybernetic collective. This is also true of Facebook, and Twitter, and Instagram, and all the social networks. They're giant cybernetic collectives.
EM: But the AI is informed strangely by the human limbic system. It is, in large part, our id writ large.
JR: How so?
EM: We mentioned all those things, the sort of primal drives. There's all of the things that we like, and hate, and fear. They're all there on the internet. They're a projection of our limbic system. That's true.
JR: No, it makes sense. And the thinking of it as a -- I mean, thinking of corporations, and just thinking of just human beings communicating online through these social media networks in some sort of an organism that's a -- It's a cyborg. It's a combination. It's a combination of electronics and biology.
EM: Yeah. This is -- In some measure, like, it's to the success of these online systems. It's sort of a function of how much limbic resonance they're able to achieve with people. The more limbic resonance, the more engagement.
JR: Whereas, like one of the reasons why probably Instagram is more enticing than Twitter.
EM: Limbic resonance.
--- Ascribed to Albert Einstein. QuoteInvestigator makes a strong case that "this saying was derived from the words of Bob Samples who was presenting his individual analysis of Albert Einstein. . . . the ascription to Einstein is spurious."
From the QuoteInvestigator page, here's the root excerpt from Bob Samples, The Metaphoric Mind: A Celebration of Creative Consciousness (1976), p. 26
The metaphoric mind is a maverick. It is as wild and unruly as a child. It follows us doggedly and plagues us with its presence as we wander the contrived corridors of rationality. It is a metaphoric link with the unknown called religion that causes us to build cathedrals — and the very cathedrals are built with rational, logical plans. When some personal crisis or the bewildering chaos of everyday life closes in on us, we often rush to worship the rationally-planned cathedral and ignore the religion. Albert Einstein called the intuitive or metaphoric mind a sacred gift. He added that the rational mind was a faithful servant. It is paradoxical that in the context of modern life we have begun to worship the servant and defile the divine.
And this is so far well, inasmuch as it leaves the honour of the ancients untouched. For they are no wise disparaged, the question between them and me being only as to the way. For as the saying is, the lame man who keeps the right road outstrips the runner who takes the wrong one. [fn 12, St. Augustine, Sermons, CLXIX] Nay, it is obvious the when a man runs the wrong way, the more active and swift he is the further he will go astray.