Resonant Thoughts
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Resonant Thoughts: Annie Dillard’s “Teaching a Stone to Talk” (1981)
“At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those created objects,… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Dave Hickey’s “The Invisible Dragon” (1993/2023) and “Perfect Wave” (2017)
“If images don’t do anything in this culture, if they haven’t done anything, then why are we sitting here in the twilight of the twentieth century talking about them? And if they only do things after we have talked about them, then they aren’t doing things, we are. Therefore, if our criticism aspires to anything… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Nate Silver’s “On The Edge” (2024) and Yuval Noah Harari’s “Nexus” (2024)
“The thing is our physiology is really smart. I mean, it’s just really smart. It’s very hard to trick your physiology. We live in a 3D world, we move in a 3D world. So if we make mistakes in our movement, we die. So we have much higher standards in our physiology than we do… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Peter Schjeldahl On Outsider Artists And Critics
“Every good artist is an outsider artist, in a way that counts; and every good critic is an outsider critic, in a way that counts. Good art and good criticism are not ‘practices’—that horrible word, so prevalent in art babble lately. Practices are professional specialties. Associated with art, the word assumes settled social agreements on… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Martin Wolf’s “The Crisis Of Democratic Capitalism” (2023)
“The legitimacy of any system always depends on performance. In the end, people will cease to trust a system that does not work for them.” “The rise of demagogic nationalism and authoritarianism in high-income democracies—the core of today’s political crisis—can be attributed in significant part to…economic failures. The problem is not just the economic failures… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Robert M. Persig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” (1974)
“The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn’t any other test. If the machine produces tranquillity it’s right. If it disturbs you it’s wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed. The test of the machine’s always your own mind. There isn’t any other test.” “The craftsman isn’t… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Ben Murphy’s “Ears To The Ground” (2024)
“There seems to be a trend of placing field recordings into electronic music, presumably to portray some sort of connection between organic and electronic worlds […] For me, this sort of approach has become a bit of a trope, and I think there are much more interesting ways of including field recordings. The thing I… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Glenn McDonald’s “You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song: How Streaming Changes Music” (2024)
“Not only do listeners not want music to become undifferentiated ooze, but no other part of the music economy wants it, either. Artists don’t want to have to make music that can’t be told apart, labels have no way to manipulate an attention economy around noises that resist attention, and streaming services can’t convince you… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Richard W. Hamming’s ” The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn” (1997)
“How are you to recognize ‘fundamentals’? One test is they have lasted a long time. Another test is from the fundamentals all the rest of the field can be derived by using the standard methods in the field” (p.9). “Creativity seems, among other things, to be ‘usefully’ putting together things which were not perceived to… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: W.G. Sebald’s ” A Place In The Country” (1998)
“What may be true of photography, though, is not necessarily applicable to art. The latter depends on ambiguity, polyvalence, resonance, obfuscation, and illumination […]” “Jan Peter Tripp’s paintings, too, have a consistently analytic quality rather than a synthesizing one. The photographic raw material which they take as their starting point is painstakingly modified. Artificial distinctions… Continue reading
