On Strangers

“Thinking back on that moment before the painting in the gallery, I now realize I would usually have taken the subway. I have only just started taking the train again, which has reminded me that the experience of New York usually is an experience of a sea of innumerable faces. Taking the subway means daily having at least one person’s face across the aisle and many faces in your line of sight. You can’t help but study the concentrated face of a reader, the elsewhereness of a daydreamer, the sadness here, the exhaustion there, the twitchy concentration of a game player, the open face of the tourist, and even the practiced but not quite impervious shell of the city dweller, lightly armored in sunglasses or headphones. In staring at the face in Borremans’s portrait, I wasn’t left thinking about the history of early Netherlandish panel painting. I was instead reminded of the experience of moving through a city, the mix of intimacy and alienation that comes from incessant, packed proximity with strangers. It was okay to stare there in the gallery, to contemplate the dignity and complexity of this subject, with the strange costume, the visage part mask and part portal, suggesting something as awesome and truly unknowable as an individual person. Isn’t this a paradox, to be made to remember the faces of strangers?”

John Vinclair, “On the Faces of Strangers: Michaël Borremans’s Pandemic Portrait” - theparisreview.org/blog/2021/07/30/on-the-faces-of-strangers-michael-borremanss-pandemic-portrait/

On Focus

“There aren’t many hard-and-fast rules of time management that apply to everyone, always, regardless of situation or personality (which is why I tend to emphasise general principles instead). But I think there might be one: you almost certainly can’t consistently do the kind of work that demands serious mental focus for more than about three or four hours a day. As I’ve written before, it’s positively spooky how frequently this three-to-four hour range crops up in accounts of the habits of the famously creative. Charles Darwin, at work on the theory of evolution in his study at Down House, toiled for two 90-minute periods and one one-hour period per day; the mathematical genius Henri Poincaré worked for two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon. Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Ingmar Bergman and many more all basically followed suit, as Alex Pang explains in his book Rest (where he also discusses research supporting the idea: this isn’t just a matter of cherry-picking examples to prove a point)… The truly valuable skill here isn’t the capacity to push yourself harder, but to stop and recuperate despite the discomfort of knowing that work remains unfinished, emails unanswered, other people’s demands unfulfilled. That’s the spirit embodied by one monk at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert in New Mexico, interviewed by the writer Jonathan Malesic for his forthcoming book The End of Burnout, which I’ve been enjoying. The monks’ daily work period lasts (can you guess?) three hours, ending at 12.40pm. Malesic writes: ‘I asked Fr Simeon, a monk who spoke with a confidence cultivated through the years he spent as a defence attorney, what you do when the 12:40 bell rings but you feel that your work is undone. “You get over it,” he replied.’”

oliverburkeman.com/fourhours. I’d only add that if you practice this regularly over time you can find longer stretches become possible for five hours or so each day. The other thing that’s missing here is that most creative work is surrounded by other tasks that have to get done for various reasons but aren’t that challenging to accomplish. In university life there is the almost constant tedium of email and spreadsheets, but also other chores depending on your administrative roles that have to be kept at bay. The trick is to get them out of the way when energies are low and you couldn’t do focused work anyway. Work so that the focused concentration is directed to your priority publication each day no matter what else is happening and leverage that momentum to the next day and so on until it’s ready to send out for editorial review. Even if overwhelmed with crises in one day, let it go, and set the goal to protect at least four hours tomorrow knowing the technique works over the long haul.

On Meritocracy

“Wooldridge rehearses – and largely owns – many of the arguments levelled against meritocracy since the 1950s and voiced with such vehemence on both the left and the right today. Our world clearly is too divided, too unequal, too unfair. But the answer, Wooldridge insists, is not to scrap meritocracy altogether and still less to return to the kind of old-school nepotism and patronage... Rather, he argues, we need a concerted push to introduce more and wiser meritocracy, while at the same time striving to remoralise it. That would involve major investments in education and further efforts to pluralise elite schools and universities that still cater disproportionately to the well connected, despite their rhetoric of inclusion. It would also involve fighting seriously to improve social mobility and to challenge the sclerosis of the rich, putting more workers in elected office and on corporate boards, and (though Wooldridge doesn’t say so directly) paying them more. Finally, the cognitive elite needs to relearn humility and a sense of duty and responsibility to the social whole – call it, if you like, noblesse oblige.”

Darrin McMahon, “Review of The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World, by Adrian Wooldridge” - literaryreview.co.uk/earning-our-stripes.

On Complaint

“Weil’s essential contribution to the theory of complaint comes by way of her distinction between ordinary suffering and something she calls ‘affliction.’ Suffering is pain one can bear, pain that does not imprint itself on the soul. Sometimes, we even choose suffering, as in strenuous exercise, unmedicated childbirth or getting one’s ears pierced. Getting beat up in an alleyway by strangers is not like any of those forms of suffering. A violent attack, even one that does minimum physical damage, hurts in a distinctive way—in a way that, as Weil would put it, raises a question. ‘The same event may plunge one human being into affliction and not another,’ writes Weil. Her view is that the kind of suffering that makes a mark on the soul is incomprehensible suffering.”

Agnes Callard, “Why Am I Being Hurt?” - thepointmag.com/examined-life/why-am-i-being-hurt. Interesting essay on complaint, protest, venting and how to really listen to others in light of recent events.

On Digital Recognition

“The challenge for social movements is how to update Fraser’s perspectival dualism for an age in which the platform is becoming a dominant distributor of both reward and mutated forms of recognition. Few movements can afford to abstain entirely from the reputation economy. A lesson from Black Lives Matter is that social media’s accumulation of reputational capital can be harnessed towards longer-standing goals of social and economic justice, as long as it remains a tactic or an instrument, and not a goal in its own right. Campaigns may trigger or seize reputational bubbles that spread at great speed—#MeToo is an example—and potentially burst soon after, making a political virtue of the ability to shift movements into other spaces, including the street. The quest for recognition is more exacting and slower than that for reputation, and appreciating this distinction is a first step to seeing beyond the cultural limits of the platform, towards the broader political and economic obstacles that currently stand in the way of full and equal participation.”

William Davies, “The Politics of Recognition in the Age of Social Media,” newleftreview.org/issues/ii128/articles/william-davies-the-politics-of-recognition-in-the-age-of-social-media. Interesting summary of the challenge of political recognition today that rightly identifies the need to think past the paper mentalities of print culture in Habermas’s account of the public sphere. Davies’ concluding critiques are probably both needed at once in my view. That is, both the internalist work within the semiotic system of surveillance capitalist digital platforms to identify inequalities, as well as the externalist innovation of new platforms and explicit connection to existing democratic institutions. In any case, this is one of the debates of our times it seems to me, and interesting to see someone connecting this genre of political philosophy to everyday life issues.

On Peacebuilding

“But very often peacebuilding initiatives were anonymous and unseen. In 1983, John Lampen, an English Quaker, moved to Derry in Northern Ireland. A year later, he was joined by his wife, Diana, and their children. The Lampens were inspired by the work of another Quaker, Will Warren, who had lived in Derry for many years and had quietly befriended both sides in the conflict, including various members of the rival paramilitaries. Warren once said that his role as peacebuilder had been ‘to listen to people on both sides … and maybe, one day, to help them to listen to one another’. Listening was the central element of Quaker peacebuilding... Peacebuilders are often searching for metaphors to understand the mysterious process they’re engaged in. Addams spoke of ‘peaceweaving’, and in their admiring essay about her, the political scientists Patricia M Shields and Joseph Soeters in 2015 wrote of why it’s an apt metaphor: ‘individual, often fragile, strings are connected through the process of weaving, which does not homogenise the combined, often colourful, strings but lets them work together despite their differences.’ Diana Lampen calls peacebuilding a spider’s web: there are delicate links in all directions with, at the centre, not a spider but peace itself... If it’s true that peacebuilding requires not esoteric learning but sacrifice, sensitivity and artistry, it might be that we’re closer than expected to what Mac Ginty in 2014 called ‘the elixir’ of peacebuilding: ‘local ownership’. Not in the sense that locals accept what’s cooked up for them, but that they actually create their own recipes for peace. ”

Tobias Jones, “Peacebuilding Is an Artform Crafted by Divided Peoples,” - aeon.co/essays/peacebuilding-is-an-artform-crafted-by-divided-peoples

On Timekeeping

“But since the 14th century, we’ve gradually been turning our backs on nature and increasingly calculating our sense of time via manmade devices. It began in the monasteries of Northern and Central Europe, where pious monks built crude iron objects that unreliably but automatically struck intervals to help bellringers keep track of canonical hours of prayer. Like any machine, the logic of the mechanical clock was based upon regularity, the rigid ticking of an escapement. It brought with it a whole different way to view time, not as a rhythm determined by a combination of various observed natural phenomena, but as a homogenous series of perfectly identical intervals provided by one source. The religious fervor for rationing time and disciplining one’s life around it led the American historian Lewis Mumford to describe the Benedictine monks as ‘perhaps the original founders of modern capitalism.’ It is one of the great ironies of Christianity that it set the wheels in motion for an ever-unfolding mania of scientific accuracy and precision around timekeeping that would eventually secularize time in the West and divorce God, the original clockmaker, from the picture entirely.”

Joe Zadeh, “The Tyranny of Time,” - noemamag.com/the-tyranny-of-time/

On Beethoven and Bridgetower

“It’s a passionate and sweepingly epic work , but there’s also drama off stage in what is arguably Beethoven’s most loved and performed violin sonata [No. 9, Op. 47 in A major]. In our first collaboration with Belvoir St Theatre, we explore the drama, passion and scandal surrounding this masterpiece, and the interconnected fates of those that came after it: Tolstoy’s story of jealousy and murder, and Janáček’s First String Quartet, both bearing the title The Kreutzer Sonata. Known as The Kreutzer for its dedication to the violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer (who likely never played this difficult, titanic work), what has been lost in history is its original dedication to George Bridgetower – a far more accomplished violinist of mixed European and West Indian descent, and a kindred spirit to Beethoven – who performed with the composer at the Sonata’s premiere... However, in its success lay its downfall. While celebrating with a drink (or three) Beethoven and Bridgetower spectacularly fell out, and Bridgetower’s name was removed from the dedication, and from history.”

Attended this performance by the Australian Chamber Orchestra last night here in Newcastle. An eerie feeling to be in a theatre again after 2020’s hiatus, but a reminder of how live performance lingers in the mind over days. The theme threaded through the mashup of compositions seemed to me to be the manifold inspiration of music. In this case, a forgotten encounter between composer and virtuoso (Beethoven and Bridgetower) rippled out to other composers (Janácek), authors (Tolstoy), and audiences. What is to explain how one work goes on to inspire the ACO to now reclaim the Kreutzer Sonata’s original attribution as the Bridgetower? I suppose thinking about it the day after, the performance offered a kind of catharsis, an honest response to a year experienced as diverse facets of tragedy. Such honesty may make one hopeful, even if for a brief moment, that this year may be better than the last. - aco.com.au/whats-on/2021/beethoven-and-bridgetower.

On Aristotle's Poetics

“After carefully investigating the matter, Aristotle inked a short treatise that became known as the Poetics. In it, he proposed that literature was more than a single invention; it was many inventions, each constructed from an innovative use of story. Story includes the countless varieties of plot and character—and it also includes the equally various narrators that give each literary work its distinct style or voice. Those story elements, Aristotle hypothesized, could plug into our imagination, our emotions, and other parts of our psyche, troubleshooting and even improving our mental function.”

“The Empathy Generator - In this narrative technique, a narrator conveys us inside a character’s mind to see the character’s remorse... The invention’s original prototype was tinkered together by the anonymous Israelite poet who composed the verse sections of the Book of Job, likely in the 6th century B.C. Since empathy is a neural counterbalance to ire, it may have reflected the poet’s effort to promote peace in the wake of the Judah-Babylonian-Persian wars. But whatever the reason for its initial creation, the invention can help nurture kindness toward others.”

Angus Fletcher - smithsonianmag.com/innovation/eight-literatures-most-powerful-inventions-and-neuroscience-behind-how-they-work-180977168/. An interesting summary of neuroscientific work at Project Narrative on the effects of literary techniques.

On Early Demokratia

“Of course, a simple return to early democracy is neither possible nor desirable. But early democracy does help us better understand the frailties of the modern democratic experience. A closer look at early democracy can in turn help us to understand what we might do to see that democracy today fulfills the underlying idea of demokratia: bringing power to the people... [for instance] we need to think of new investments that might better connect citizens with government by giving them information sources that are in touch with reality and that, in the case of the US, would avoid fanning the flames of longstanding racism. In some countries, most notably the US and the United Kingdom, the local press, though known to be both more trusted and less partisan than national outlets, faces economic conditions that are leading to its disappearance. A subsidy for local news outlets could be money well spent... [moreover] as we become ever more tribal in nature in countries such as the US, perhaps we could learn more from societies that actually had tribes. The lesson wouldn’t be to establish new tribes or clans of our own: it would be, instead, to examine how different political and social institutions can aid in creating links for people living in different places, from different backgrounds and holding very different beliefs. The idea here would be to help strengthen and unify society by creating new links across the lines of polarisation.”

David Stasavage, “Lessons from All Democracies,” aeon.co/essays/democracy-is-common-and-robust-historically-and-across-the-globe.