I have thought about this for exactly two seconds, but I bet that the creativity doesn't disappear, it just goes underground because it's no longer 'acceptable'. No doubt there were a few enclaves of dissidents telling hilarious jokes about the anatomy of royalty...........
I know a bunch of young, interesting creative people, and I agree with you, of course creativity doesn't die. The major hurdle now is that all these young people have heads stuffed with sterile dogma and have had so many electrified taboos installed in their brains that their creative spirit is somewhat hobbled. So on top of all the usual artistic hurdles and challenges, they also have to be the kind of person who pursues their vision no matter where or how, even if it means personal denunciation—and being banished for your expression is a high price for anyone to pay.
But there's no doubt every cultural institution has been captured by the Art Marxists and they are like flies who can't absorb anything until they vomit their foul jargon onto it—so the future of creativity in America has to be samizdat or just more sociopolitical narcissistic-therapeutic identity propaganda.
Jul 19, 2023·edited Jul 19, 2023Liked by Chris Bray
More comedy-related reason for optimism towards our youth, this time from my teenage son: we were ordering food at Chipotle recently, and taped to the sneeze shield at the cash register end of the counter was a promotional sign for their loyalty program that read “Ready to Get Rewarded?” However, initially I saw it out of the corner of my eye and misread it as “Ready to Get Retarded?”
I laugh-snorted audibly and my son naturally asked what was funny; I pointed to the sign & whispered to him what I’d thought it said, and he was just about reduced to a puddle laughing.
This was after a soccer game of his, and one of his teammates was right behind us in line watching my son laugh so hard that his face was turning purple, and he wanted to know what the joke was. I asked if he was easily offended, he said no, I told him what I’d told my son, and he too immediately doubled over with laughter.
Obviously, “Ready to get retarded?” is now a catch phrase / inside joke for my son and I. There’s hope for kids today yet.
Eric Hoffer referred to fundamentalist Left ideologues as "disaffected noncreative intellectuals" (he nailed it as usual), and these Grievance Studies zealots are like eunuchs in a harem who need to denounce and undermine what they could never personally achieve or create.
Their greatest strength is moralistic bullying, which is another hurdle on the path of the modern artist: the pressure to conform, to paint within the lines of approved dogma, to not be accused of blasphemy and/or heresy. This pressure is so intense now in culture, it is really ironic that what should be the realm of freedom has become a drab prison yard of the soul.
It turns out the Left slogan "All Art is Political" means all art that doesn't follow approved political thought needs to be attacked and destroyed, along with the artist. All this is simply updated Leninism-Maoism in the realm of culture.
I find Hoffer, along with Lasch and Rieff, to be the best prophets of our moment, they either predicted much of it or saw clearly into the hearts of Left radicals.
This is from Hoffer's "The True Believer":
"Whence come the fanatics? Mostly from the ranks of the noncreative men of words. The most significant division between men of words is between those who can find fulfillment in creative work and those who cannot. The creative man of words, no matter how bitterly he may criticize and deride the existing order, is actually attached to the present. His passion is to reform and not to destroy.
The true-believing writer, artist or scientist does not create to express himself, or to save his soul or to discover the true and the beautiful. His task, as he sees it, is to warn, to advise, to urge, to glorify and to denounce."
From his "The Intellectual and the Masses":
"There is also the remarkable fact that where the intellectuals are in full charge they do not usually create a milieu conducive to genuine creativeness. The reason for this is to be found in the role of the noncreative pseudo-intellectual in such a system. The genuinely creative person lacks, as a rule, the temperament requisite for the seizure, the exercise, and, above all, the retention of power. Hence, when the intellectuals come into their own, it is usually the pseudo-intellectual who rules the roost, and he is likely to imprint his mediocrity and meagerness on every phase of cultural activity. Moreover, his creative impotence brews in him a murderous hatred of intellectual brilliance and he may be tempted, as Stalin was, to enforce a crude leveling of all intellectual activity."
right now I'm reading "The Ordeal of Change" by Hoffer.
True Believer gets all the glory, but he thought that Change was his best work. very relevant to today obviously and he talks about the role that the Elite play in a changing society...can't recommend Hoffer enough...
Yes indeed. Those of us who still live the art life do so in isolation (not entirely a bad thing) because we’re not truly living outside of that realm. There will always be such folks until our human nature has been distorted from the inside out… just knowing that there are people actively working to do that is the worst aspect of Clownworld.
Scott Adams is an excellent example of this. He was cancelled for being misinterpreted as racist. Now, his Dilbert comic strip, for paid subscribers, is more hilarious than when he was mainstream because he has achieved complete artistic freedom.
The general principle in systems theory is autopoiesis , emergence, dynamic equilibrium , self-organization. Cultural evolution.
The insane elements of postmodernism (radical deconstructionists, feminists/multiculturalists/etc.) that reject rationality won’t be able to make the evolutionary leap to awareness and institutions that support creative emergence as described by systems theory.
The pomo lunatics, neo-communists, will languish in the ruins of the rotting, dysfunctional fragile-to-disruption institutions that they infiltrated to carry out their absurd “cultural revolution” to reject reality.
WEIRD culture (western civilization, see Henrich @ Harvard), classical liberalism, is premised on high-social-trust in social institutions such as Constitutional order. (In contrast to medieval mythic order, fealty oaths to warlords or priests.)
Fragility to technological disruption of the hierarchies of curated expertise created by modern rationalism is the underlying driver of the “crisis of meaning” under discussion (see John Vervaeke).
The creativity required to develop anti-fragile thinking, morals, social practices and institutions will be extraordinary, at least that of the Industrial Revolution.
Postmodern social conditions, relativism, nihilism and narcissism, suburban consumerism are the main problem.
One model of cultural evolution that is potentially useful is Robert Kegan’s model of developmental psychology.
Also see David Ronfeldt’s TIMN model, which predicts that paradigm shifts are driven by the disintegration of a system, followed by regression to more primitive thinking (Koestler’s Ghost in the Machine), a period of chaos and piracy, followed by the emergence of a new social form that transcends the old form. Gerhard Lenski described many historical instances of that kind of thing.
The insane Marxist and neo-Marxist ideological cults won’t give up on their dependence on the politics of disruption, chaos, destruction and totalitarian postmoderni relativism, so they will become increasingly corrupt and authoritarian. Thus, a major form of creativity will likely be rooted in the transcendence of postmodern narratives. Iain McGilchrist’s work for instance.
NS Lyons quotes Lasch on the postmodern “belief” that “reality is a social construct”.
The tiny slice of 60s counterculture that was anti-state/libertarian produced the Whole Earth Catalog, which was premised on the idea that (paraphrasing) “we are as gods and might as well get used to it”. The WEC bunch included hippy techies in the SF Bay Area, who invented social media (Deadhead bulletin boards, online or “virtual communities”).
When appropriated by the neoliberal corporate-state, virtual community mutated into a tool for mass psychosis, another example of the dangers of not being anti-fragile to postmodern disruption.
To better understand one aspect of this hurdle for young creatives today, see my first post on the suppression of Morrissey's recordings in recent years, especially the latter half of it where I talk about "partial totalitarianism" and how most creative sectors are ruled by one. https://pomocon.substack.com/p/carls-rock-songbook-no-131-morrissey You can scroll around for an update on that situation on my stack also, or go to the "messages" tab of Morrissey central: https://www.morrisseycentral.com/
I know I can seem endlessly self-promoting in comments, but like a lot of stackers, referring back to previous essays is one of the ways I think. I'm not a major Morrissey fan--i.e., my love of his work can't compare to that I have for Morrison's, Dylan's, Cate Le Bon's, Kevin Morby's, etc.--, but I do think what's been happening to him is a tip-of-the-iceberg sign of the massive defacto totalitarianism which our younger artists really are up against.
Remember it was a bunch of Irish Catholic monks that preserved much literature and religious writings during the Dark Ages, when the Plague and other diseases, not injections, were killing a third of the population. We have our own monks out there doing the same now. I pray your museum survives the Plagues and the barbarians controlling most of our institutions and that enough others survive the coming assaults from the orcs to bring beauty and light back to humanity.
Doing that in my small corner of the world by building a small personal library of books that are 50-200 years old. My goal is that my grandchildren and great grandchildren will find it useful long after I'm gone.
This is something everyone can try to do, rummaging around in old books shops and online. Here, local municipal libraries often sell old cleared books for 1:- no matter if it's The Hobbit in jiddisch (I bought it!) or some detective story or cook book or something else. Might be worth asking at the local library no matter the country in question?
t’s also amazing to think that some of the most important cities in Western history were the size of Dothan, Alabama, and relatively speaking had about as much wealth. A confident and acculturated people can achieve wonders.
In all our decadent phases, we have always returned to the well of Classical culture and Christian faith, and it will be the same when the present darkness ends.
Exactly, and it was the biggest city in the British colonies in America. Even much smaller Charleston, SC boasted cultural refinements one would be hard pressed to find today.
Incredible to think a city of Dothan's size could be at the center of a Renaissance! I'm sure I will be reminded of your comment the next time I drive past it.
I’m going to pull out my stack of Wallace Stegner books to survive the rest of the year. I may literally need the Chronicles of Narnia to get me through election season.
The Clark Institute sounds heavenly, indeed. Better use of money than ol’ Mrs. Winchester and her funhouse. Haha.
For a lighter note, pick up an early Terry Pratchett discworld novel. When I need something heavier, I pick up one of my Grandfather's history books like Whittaker Chambers "Witness" or his many history books. And then I dive into the genealogy for a while. Noting that 100+ years ago people lived just as long as in modern times - IF they made it past early childhood.
Chris, I hope and pray that your family member recovers fully and that all of you can stay out of the hospital for as long as possible. Thanks for the glimpse into what was once possible, and I like to hope will be possible again someday. I recently started trying to learn how to use Midjourney for AI-generated artwork. I’m no artist. AI isn’t either. When I ask it to create a landscape in the style of Monet, or Alexei Butirskiy (a modern favorite of mine), it can come up with some lovely creations. Yet ultimately it’s making me appreciate the original artists’ work far more, because they weren’t replicating someone else’s efforts. That’s all that seems to be happening now - regurgitation.
My impression, watching the shit show of contemporary hospital medicine, is that no one knows how to fix anything, and they just do stuff to seem like they're doing stuff. We'll see.
Jul 18, 2023·edited Jul 20, 2023Liked by Chris Bray
Yup, it's all death by a 10,000 clicks now esp. since algorithms/tech have increased the role of the managerial state of the medical industrial complex.
MIT trained software developer, AI scientist (and Buddhist) David Chapman wrote about the horrors of the medical system when his mother was getting diagnosed and treated for dementia. He used systems theory to try to figure out the health care apocalypse, and came to the same conclusion, health care was never designed as a whole with any coherence.
I'm repeatedly reminded that all time is cyclic, like the natural seasons. We're fast approaching winter. Leaves are nearly gone from the trees, and there's a chill in the air in the mornings and evenings. Creativity and relaxation are not on our minds as much as preparedness and survival. We can complain and fight and resist it, but it will come nonetheless. We know that Spring will come but it seems a long way off...
It's become very difficult to do anything new, or so it seems based on how very little originality is in evidence. Everything just seems like pastiche, when it isn't outright sacrilege and deliberate blasphemy. I wonder if this isn't a neurological issue ... something in cultural conditions causing our left brains to fall out of touch with our right hemispheres, such that we're cut off from the well of creation.
To paraphrase a friend (an artist, classically trained which included learning how to make paints and brushes from scratch):
"If you cannot do anything new, make sure to be good at making the old the best you can"
(It sounds better in swedish)
His point is that inventing a new -ism in art is virtually impossible, while continously improving your techniques and skills and knowledge is highly possible. Sort of like cooking - with skill and dilligence you can make the most basic foodstuffs into a feast, being sloppy and rash can turn the best ingredients in the world into pig slop.
I think most "artistes" today focuses on making a name by following protocol so as to get afoot in the door at the tax-suckling institutions. Man's gotta pay the bills somehow, and there's a real death of Maecenas-type people these days.
Also, the education-systems have increasingly downplayed the importance of doing a thing umpteen hundreds of times to master it; doing it once to pass the test with a high enough percentage correct answers is the norm since when, the 1970s?
To end channeling my dad: "We don't score using percentages and we don't grade on a curve: you either know how to strip, clean and reassemble your rifle or you don't."
I think we - the Occidentals - need to work our way towards that kind of idea, that weeither do and do it as well and good as we can or we don't do at all: not some "75% correct is good enough"-attitude?
Decades of educational indoctrination doesn't really leave much room for originality--which naturally progresses from critical thinking. We're reaping the benefits of "teaching to the test" without electives.
This brought back the memory of the time three generations of us went to Chicago for a weekend of Cubs/Cardinal games and other high culture. We went to the planetarium, Field Museum, Shedd Aquarium and Museum of Science and Industry, and arrived back at our car - a nine year old station wagon - just in time to watch it get stolen. That was thirty years ago, when Chicago was still semi- civilized. Memories are made of this. 🤣
You've got that right. We actually got the car back a few weeks later. We had to go to a car pound that was the size of a large shopping mall. It contained anything you can imagine on wheels or treads that had been recovered. When I commented on the size of the place, I was told it was one of twelve in Chicago, all about the same size. Thirty years ago. Big business on both sides of the law.
Here is something I cannot get thru my head. I think that Ernst Lubitsch was the greatest director of the golden age of Hollywood. But Rouben Mamoulian's "Love Me Tonight" is better Lubitsch than Lubitsch!
Oh, and while I am not a huge Fritz Lang fan, I *do* have a huge Metropolis poster on the wall in front of me... excellent design!
The opening, Paris-awakens section of “Love Me Tonight” is one of the keystones of my personal religion of Pre-Code Hollywood film.
In Godard’s “Contempt,” Fritz Lang – playing “Fritz Lang” – says that among his work he prefers “M” to “Rancho Notorious,” but who knows if that’s how “Fritz Lang” actually felt, let alone Fritz Lang. I could see Godard going either way.
But to leave you with a laugh, I will tell you about the time I was at the Met (where I'll probably never go again... wow) to see the Weimar art exhibit. Weirdly enough, a college friend of mine was there, chaperoning a field trip from (of all places) Massachusetts. He and I were talking, and one of his students ran out of the exhibit and said, "Mr. [Jones], Mr. [Jones], don't go in there! There's naked ladies in there!" Good times. Those kids, although doubtless suffering from vaccine- and chemical-induced iatrogenic illness like nearly everyone else their age, were allowed to go places and do things together. Praise be.
Really insightful. Let' say the decay started at the end of the fifties (just when I happened to be living in a lot cabin in Alaska) after the crescendo of T. S. Eliot fandom, which was a huge thing for much of the 1950s. For those who like easier reading than Eliot or Waugh, I highly recommend a writer I'd heard of since forever but only started reading a few months ago and now can't put down--Louis L'Amour. He knows American history deeply, and specifically the Wild West. He is an excellent and lyrical storyteller. He must be rolling in his grave right now, of course, but read him if you want to get a really good sense of America as it was, and want to pass the hours enjoyably.
Beautifully written. I'm not sure I've read a novel written in the past 15 years. I'm sure there are some good ones, but by the descriptions and reviews I see, I doubt it.
You nailed it with this one. I just finished re-reading A Movable Feast and My Life In France and was just thinking that there was a time where we valued and pursued beauty and creativity. To be fair, both of those books were written and published following atrociously destructive wars. So....perhaps there's hope?
I just finished 'Rebuilding a Lost Faith by an American Agnostic' by John L. Stoddard, published in 1922. Well worth a read and catalogs what went wrong in the early twentieth century. Written at a time when it was thought things couldn't get worse and there was hope of finding a way back. I highly recommend.
I have found myself in your shoes, and have family members that have received the most terrible care these past few years in hospitals. It would have been unthinkable years ago, when I worked in some of the best and largest HC facilities in New England. We have entered a terrible period of decline in health care quality. I have found some bright spots - but at the same time - realize that we have abused our HC providers throughout this mess. I try to support them too and let them know that I appreciate their efforts. It's going to be very hard to turn around.
It is good that you can be there for your family member. Keep a close eye out. Do not be afraid to ask for good care and let them know you are watching. Keep finding moments to re-charge and rest. I wish you well Chris...God Bless.🙏🏻
I have thought about this for exactly two seconds, but I bet that the creativity doesn't disappear, it just goes underground because it's no longer 'acceptable'. No doubt there were a few enclaves of dissidents telling hilarious jokes about the anatomy of royalty...........
There's still creativity -- it's just not mainstream or prominent. But it's out there.
Yup. A recycling and "silver age," but with it's own strengths here and there, despite these usually getting ignored by the dominant platforms and pipelines. Here's how it looks to me in popular music. https://pomocon.substack.com/p/carls-rock-songbook-no-130-my-favorite?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Yes. I see your comment now, just having posted mine.
I know a bunch of young, interesting creative people, and I agree with you, of course creativity doesn't die. The major hurdle now is that all these young people have heads stuffed with sterile dogma and have had so many electrified taboos installed in their brains that their creative spirit is somewhat hobbled. So on top of all the usual artistic hurdles and challenges, they also have to be the kind of person who pursues their vision no matter where or how, even if it means personal denunciation—and being banished for your expression is a high price for anyone to pay.
But there's no doubt every cultural institution has been captured by the Art Marxists and they are like flies who can't absorb anything until they vomit their foul jargon onto it—so the future of creativity in America has to be samizdat or just more sociopolitical narcissistic-therapeutic identity propaganda.
It really helps that the authoritarian jerks have no sense of humor and can't create places where creativity can thrive in the first place.........
Edit: Just think of how many movies "couldn't be made today". They aren't all from 1960........
Or 2000. Caddyshack. Anchorman. Ordinary comedy.
Airplane!
Blazing Saddles!
Even The Office. It heartens me that my left-leaning teenage daughter who’s leaving for college next month loves that show.
More comedy-related reason for optimism towards our youth, this time from my teenage son: we were ordering food at Chipotle recently, and taped to the sneeze shield at the cash register end of the counter was a promotional sign for their loyalty program that read “Ready to Get Rewarded?” However, initially I saw it out of the corner of my eye and misread it as “Ready to Get Retarded?”
I laugh-snorted audibly and my son naturally asked what was funny; I pointed to the sign & whispered to him what I’d thought it said, and he was just about reduced to a puddle laughing.
This was after a soccer game of his, and one of his teammates was right behind us in line watching my son laugh so hard that his face was turning purple, and he wanted to know what the joke was. I asked if he was easily offended, he said no, I told him what I’d told my son, and he too immediately doubled over with laughter.
Obviously, “Ready to get retarded?” is now a catch phrase / inside joke for my son and I. There’s hope for kids today yet.
Eric Hoffer referred to fundamentalist Left ideologues as "disaffected noncreative intellectuals" (he nailed it as usual), and these Grievance Studies zealots are like eunuchs in a harem who need to denounce and undermine what they could never personally achieve or create.
Their greatest strength is moralistic bullying, which is another hurdle on the path of the modern artist: the pressure to conform, to paint within the lines of approved dogma, to not be accused of blasphemy and/or heresy. This pressure is so intense now in culture, it is really ironic that what should be the realm of freedom has become a drab prison yard of the soul.
It turns out the Left slogan "All Art is Political" means all art that doesn't follow approved political thought needs to be attacked and destroyed, along with the artist. All this is simply updated Leninism-Maoism in the realm of culture.
"disaffected noncreative intellectuals"
I am grateful for this term.
I find Hoffer, along with Lasch and Rieff, to be the best prophets of our moment, they either predicted much of it or saw clearly into the hearts of Left radicals.
This is from Hoffer's "The True Believer":
"Whence come the fanatics? Mostly from the ranks of the noncreative men of words. The most significant division between men of words is between those who can find fulfillment in creative work and those who cannot. The creative man of words, no matter how bitterly he may criticize and deride the existing order, is actually attached to the present. His passion is to reform and not to destroy.
The true-believing writer, artist or scientist does not create to express himself, or to save his soul or to discover the true and the beautiful. His task, as he sees it, is to warn, to advise, to urge, to glorify and to denounce."
From his "The Intellectual and the Masses":
"There is also the remarkable fact that where the intellectuals are in full charge they do not usually create a milieu conducive to genuine creativeness. The reason for this is to be found in the role of the noncreative pseudo-intellectual in such a system. The genuinely creative person lacks, as a rule, the temperament requisite for the seizure, the exercise, and, above all, the retention of power. Hence, when the intellectuals come into their own, it is usually the pseudo-intellectual who rules the roost, and he is likely to imprint his mediocrity and meagerness on every phase of cultural activity. Moreover, his creative impotence brews in him a murderous hatred of intellectual brilliance and he may be tempted, as Stalin was, to enforce a crude leveling of all intellectual activity."
My jaw is hanging open in awe. I must have more of this.
right now I'm reading "The Ordeal of Change" by Hoffer.
True Believer gets all the glory, but he thought that Change was his best work. very relevant to today obviously and he talks about the role that the Elite play in a changing society...can't recommend Hoffer enough...
Artists are usually fairly non-political: at least, they don't get into the weeds of day-to-day agitation.
Lacking any sense Of humor, as well
Yes indeed. Those of us who still live the art life do so in isolation (not entirely a bad thing) because we’re not truly living outside of that realm. There will always be such folks until our human nature has been distorted from the inside out… just knowing that there are people actively working to do that is the worst aspect of Clownworld.
Scott Adams is an excellent example of this. He was cancelled for being misinterpreted as racist. Now, his Dilbert comic strip, for paid subscribers, is more hilarious than when he was mainstream because he has achieved complete artistic freedom.
This may be the best comment that I've ever read. On anything. Ever. Well said!
Hoffer is a great philosopher and under appreciated.
The general principle in systems theory is autopoiesis , emergence, dynamic equilibrium , self-organization. Cultural evolution.
The insane elements of postmodernism (radical deconstructionists, feminists/multiculturalists/etc.) that reject rationality won’t be able to make the evolutionary leap to awareness and institutions that support creative emergence as described by systems theory.
The pomo lunatics, neo-communists, will languish in the ruins of the rotting, dysfunctional fragile-to-disruption institutions that they infiltrated to carry out their absurd “cultural revolution” to reject reality.
WEIRD culture (western civilization, see Henrich @ Harvard), classical liberalism, is premised on high-social-trust in social institutions such as Constitutional order. (In contrast to medieval mythic order, fealty oaths to warlords or priests.)
Fragility to technological disruption of the hierarchies of curated expertise created by modern rationalism is the underlying driver of the “crisis of meaning” under discussion (see John Vervaeke).
The creativity required to develop anti-fragile thinking, morals, social practices and institutions will be extraordinary, at least that of the Industrial Revolution.
Postmodern social conditions, relativism, nihilism and narcissism, suburban consumerism are the main problem.
One model of cultural evolution that is potentially useful is Robert Kegan’s model of developmental psychology.
Also see David Ronfeldt’s TIMN model, which predicts that paradigm shifts are driven by the disintegration of a system, followed by regression to more primitive thinking (Koestler’s Ghost in the Machine), a period of chaos and piracy, followed by the emergence of a new social form that transcends the old form. Gerhard Lenski described many historical instances of that kind of thing.
The insane Marxist and neo-Marxist ideological cults won’t give up on their dependence on the politics of disruption, chaos, destruction and totalitarian postmoderni relativism, so they will become increasingly corrupt and authoritarian. Thus, a major form of creativity will likely be rooted in the transcendence of postmodern narratives. Iain McGilchrist’s work for instance.
NS Lyons quotes Lasch on the postmodern “belief” that “reality is a social construct”.
The tiny slice of 60s counterculture that was anti-state/libertarian produced the Whole Earth Catalog, which was premised on the idea that (paraphrasing) “we are as gods and might as well get used to it”. The WEC bunch included hippy techies in the SF Bay Area, who invented social media (Deadhead bulletin boards, online or “virtual communities”).
When appropriated by the neoliberal corporate-state, virtual community mutated into a tool for mass psychosis, another example of the dangers of not being anti-fragile to postmodern disruption.
... or How the West was Won.
Was that a Mel Brooks sequel?
To better understand one aspect of this hurdle for young creatives today, see my first post on the suppression of Morrissey's recordings in recent years, especially the latter half of it where I talk about "partial totalitarianism" and how most creative sectors are ruled by one. https://pomocon.substack.com/p/carls-rock-songbook-no-131-morrissey You can scroll around for an update on that situation on my stack also, or go to the "messages" tab of Morrissey central: https://www.morrisseycentral.com/
I know I can seem endlessly self-promoting in comments, but like a lot of stackers, referring back to previous essays is one of the ways I think. I'm not a major Morrissey fan--i.e., my love of his work can't compare to that I have for Morrison's, Dylan's, Cate Le Bon's, Kevin Morby's, etc.--, but I do think what's been happening to him is a tip-of-the-iceberg sign of the massive defacto totalitarianism which our younger artists really are up against.
I like to think it lies dormant as well.
Not even dormant, but specifically ignored by the people who write the history books.
Think the covid "heroes" are ever going to mention us?
True.
Those dissidents often got hanged or beheaded during their time
A small price to pay for a really good joke about the impotence of the king's member in front of an audience!
But other than that....
Remember it was a bunch of Irish Catholic monks that preserved much literature and religious writings during the Dark Ages, when the Plague and other diseases, not injections, were killing a third of the population. We have our own monks out there doing the same now. I pray your museum survives the Plagues and the barbarians controlling most of our institutions and that enough others survive the coming assaults from the orcs to bring beauty and light back to humanity.
I hope your relative regains their health.
Danny Huckabee
Doing that in my small corner of the world by building a small personal library of books that are 50-200 years old. My goal is that my grandchildren and great grandchildren will find it useful long after I'm gone.
Great idea.
This is something everyone can try to do, rummaging around in old books shops and online. Here, local municipal libraries often sell old cleared books for 1:- no matter if it's The Hobbit in jiddisch (I bought it!) or some detective story or cook book or something else. Might be worth asking at the local library no matter the country in question?
1:- is about 85 cents...
“I pray your museum survives the Plagues and the barbarians controlling most of our institutions . . . “
It’s in Massachusetts. Figure the odds.
t’s also amazing to think that some of the most important cities in Western history were the size of Dothan, Alabama, and relatively speaking had about as much wealth. A confident and acculturated people can achieve wonders.
In all our decadent phases, we have always returned to the well of Classical culture and Christian faith, and it will be the same when the present darkness ends.
Florence, Italy ca. 1400- 60,000-100,000, mostly agriculture.
Dothan, Alabama, now- 71,000, mostly agriculture
Philadelphia, 1776 -- 40,000
Exactly, and it was the biggest city in the British colonies in America. Even much smaller Charleston, SC boasted cultural refinements one would be hard pressed to find today.
Went through Dothan last year. Next time I go through I'll experience it with a new perspective. Thanks!
Incredible to think a city of Dothan's size could be at the center of a Renaissance! I'm sure I will be reminded of your comment the next time I drive past it.
I’m going to pull out my stack of Wallace Stegner books to survive the rest of the year. I may literally need the Chronicles of Narnia to get me through election season.
The Clark Institute sounds heavenly, indeed. Better use of money than ol’ Mrs. Winchester and her funhouse. Haha.
For a lighter note, pick up an early Terry Pratchett discworld novel. When I need something heavier, I pick up one of my Grandfather's history books like Whittaker Chambers "Witness" or his many history books. And then I dive into the genealogy for a while. Noting that 100+ years ago people lived just as long as in modern times - IF they made it past early childhood.
Good suggestions! I’ve also meant to finally finish Mark Twain’s novel on Joan of Arc.
Tolkien comes to mind in the fall…
Anything by Ray Bradbury…
I try to read Dandelion Wine every summer!
Chris, I hope and pray that your family member recovers fully and that all of you can stay out of the hospital for as long as possible. Thanks for the glimpse into what was once possible, and I like to hope will be possible again someday. I recently started trying to learn how to use Midjourney for AI-generated artwork. I’m no artist. AI isn’t either. When I ask it to create a landscape in the style of Monet, or Alexei Butirskiy (a modern favorite of mine), it can come up with some lovely creations. Yet ultimately it’s making me appreciate the original artists’ work far more, because they weren’t replicating someone else’s efforts. That’s all that seems to be happening now - regurgitation.
My impression, watching the shit show of contemporary hospital medicine, is that no one knows how to fix anything, and they just do stuff to seem like they're doing stuff. We'll see.
Regurgitation: 100%.
Yup, it's all death by a 10,000 clicks now esp. since algorithms/tech have increased the role of the managerial state of the medical industrial complex.
MIT trained software developer, AI scientist (and Buddhist) David Chapman wrote about the horrors of the medical system when his mother was getting diagnosed and treated for dementia. He used systems theory to try to figure out the health care apocalypse, and came to the same conclusion, health care was never designed as a whole with any coherence.
https://metarationality.com/post-apocalyptic-health-care
metarationality. com /post-apocalyptic-health-care
The Philistines think they’re in charge, but they are sadly mistaken.
They’re lost if it’s not in the CDC manual.
I'm repeatedly reminded that all time is cyclic, like the natural seasons. We're fast approaching winter. Leaves are nearly gone from the trees, and there's a chill in the air in the mornings and evenings. Creativity and relaxation are not on our minds as much as preparedness and survival. We can complain and fight and resist it, but it will come nonetheless. We know that Spring will come but it seems a long way off...
It's become very difficult to do anything new, or so it seems based on how very little originality is in evidence. Everything just seems like pastiche, when it isn't outright sacrilege and deliberate blasphemy. I wonder if this isn't a neurological issue ... something in cultural conditions causing our left brains to fall out of touch with our right hemispheres, such that we're cut off from the well of creation.
Even commercial speech is awkward and confused:
https://youtu.be/lbL05kZzuvQ
That was sad on multiple levels.
🤦♀️ Snickers really missed an opportunity! It could have been so much more edgy if the switch had been the gals/guys teaming up. An old ad?
Right? "You guys wanna go to a surgeon to switch genitals?"
Was that commercial aired on television????
https://www.thedrum.com/news/2022/04/08/snickers-swinging-scenario-has-everyone-cringing-latest-unfiltered-ad
Yep.
To paraphrase a friend (an artist, classically trained which included learning how to make paints and brushes from scratch):
"If you cannot do anything new, make sure to be good at making the old the best you can"
(It sounds better in swedish)
His point is that inventing a new -ism in art is virtually impossible, while continously improving your techniques and skills and knowledge is highly possible. Sort of like cooking - with skill and dilligence you can make the most basic foodstuffs into a feast, being sloppy and rash can turn the best ingredients in the world into pig slop.
I think most "artistes" today focuses on making a name by following protocol so as to get afoot in the door at the tax-suckling institutions. Man's gotta pay the bills somehow, and there's a real death of Maecenas-type people these days.
Also, the education-systems have increasingly downplayed the importance of doing a thing umpteen hundreds of times to master it; doing it once to pass the test with a high enough percentage correct answers is the norm since when, the 1970s?
To end channeling my dad: "We don't score using percentages and we don't grade on a curve: you either know how to strip, clean and reassemble your rifle or you don't."
I think we - the Occidentals - need to work our way towards that kind of idea, that weeither do and do it as well and good as we can or we don't do at all: not some "75% correct is good enough"-attitude?
Decades of educational indoctrination doesn't really leave much room for originality--which naturally progresses from critical thinking. We're reaping the benefits of "teaching to the test" without electives.
This brought back the memory of the time three generations of us went to Chicago for a weekend of Cubs/Cardinal games and other high culture. We went to the planetarium, Field Museum, Shedd Aquarium and Museum of Science and Industry, and arrived back at our car - a nine year old station wagon - just in time to watch it get stolen. That was thirty years ago, when Chicago was still semi- civilized. Memories are made of this. 🤣
That's the standard Chicago travel package, right there.
You've got that right. We actually got the car back a few weeks later. We had to go to a car pound that was the size of a large shopping mall. It contained anything you can imagine on wheels or treads that had been recovered. When I commented on the size of the place, I was told it was one of twelve in Chicago, all about the same size. Thirty years ago. Big business on both sides of the law.
Here is something I cannot get thru my head. I think that Ernst Lubitsch was the greatest director of the golden age of Hollywood. But Rouben Mamoulian's "Love Me Tonight" is better Lubitsch than Lubitsch!
Oh, and while I am not a huge Fritz Lang fan, I *do* have a huge Metropolis poster on the wall in front of me... excellent design!
The opening, Paris-awakens section of “Love Me Tonight” is one of the keystones of my personal religion of Pre-Code Hollywood film.
In Godard’s “Contempt,” Fritz Lang – playing “Fritz Lang” – says that among his work he prefers “M” to “Rancho Notorious,” but who knows if that’s how “Fritz Lang” actually felt, let alone Fritz Lang. I could see Godard going either way.
Agreed about the opening scene! How about Jeanette MacDonald in her skivvies for Pre-code?
Ah, so much to say here. Re: fertility declines, I'm sure you'll be reassured that H thinks sex is unnecessary in "intimate" relationships LOLOLOLOLOLOL my head hurts (https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/07/can-you-be-close-without-sex). H is also fighting like hell to promote the other BS narrative of today IT'S ALL OK NOBODY BROKE ANYTHING WE PROMISE, which is that being "led" by senile grifters is no probs (https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/07/is-age-just-a-number-ask-biden-and-trump) because if you have decades of experience grifting, then that's just as good as understanding what the people actually want and need.
But to leave you with a laugh, I will tell you about the time I was at the Met (where I'll probably never go again... wow) to see the Weimar art exhibit. Weirdly enough, a college friend of mine was there, chaperoning a field trip from (of all places) Massachusetts. He and I were talking, and one of his students ran out of the exhibit and said, "Mr. [Jones], Mr. [Jones], don't go in there! There's naked ladies in there!" Good times. Those kids, although doubtless suffering from vaccine- and chemical-induced iatrogenic illness like nearly everyone else their age, were allowed to go places and do things together. Praise be.
Really insightful. Let' say the decay started at the end of the fifties (just when I happened to be living in a lot cabin in Alaska) after the crescendo of T. S. Eliot fandom, which was a huge thing for much of the 1950s. For those who like easier reading than Eliot or Waugh, I highly recommend a writer I'd heard of since forever but only started reading a few months ago and now can't put down--Louis L'Amour. He knows American history deeply, and specifically the Wild West. He is an excellent and lyrical storyteller. He must be rolling in his grave right now, of course, but read him if you want to get a really good sense of America as it was, and want to pass the hours enjoyably.
Not only is he a great writer, but he was prolific as hell.
Beautifully written. I'm not sure I've read a novel written in the past 15 years. I'm sure there are some good ones, but by the descriptions and reviews I see, I doubt it.
You nailed it with this one. I just finished re-reading A Movable Feast and My Life In France and was just thinking that there was a time where we valued and pursued beauty and creativity. To be fair, both of those books were written and published following atrociously destructive wars. So....perhaps there's hope?
We're working on making the atrociously destructive war, so....
#fact
I just finished 'Rebuilding a Lost Faith by an American Agnostic' by John L. Stoddard, published in 1922. Well worth a read and catalogs what went wrong in the early twentieth century. Written at a time when it was thought things couldn't get worse and there was hope of finding a way back. I highly recommend.
Trimūrti in Hinduism: Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, Shiva the destroyer 😊
I have found myself in your shoes, and have family members that have received the most terrible care these past few years in hospitals. It would have been unthinkable years ago, when I worked in some of the best and largest HC facilities in New England. We have entered a terrible period of decline in health care quality. I have found some bright spots - but at the same time - realize that we have abused our HC providers throughout this mess. I try to support them too and let them know that I appreciate their efforts. It's going to be very hard to turn around.
It is good that you can be there for your family member. Keep a close eye out. Do not be afraid to ask for good care and let them know you are watching. Keep finding moments to re-charge and rest. I wish you well Chris...God Bless.🙏🏻