Meta is Murder — Dont Ask Me I Just Work Here: The family that...
I aspire to the level of conviviality we seem to exude in this rad Polaroid Ash took last night. I guess that means I've attained it already. What should my next goal be?| Tumblr
“The leaders always had good consciences, for conscience in them coalesced with will, and those who looked on their face were as much smitten with wonder at their freedom from inner restraint as with...| Tumblr
I aspire to the level of conviviality we seem to exude in this rad Polaroid Ash took last night. I guess that means I've attained it already. What should my next goal be?| Tumblr
“If I didn’t want to compete, I wanted even less to make new rules about what constitutes victory. I would want what everyone else wanted, even if I couldn’t attain it.” - Faye, in Rachel Cusk’s Transit. These sentences, like much of the texts of Outline, Transit, and Kudos, come from the internal monologue of the narrator, Faye. She does not speak them aloud or to other characters; they are private moral commitments within novels about private terrains. Faye’s promised refusal...| Meta is Murder
I’ve been surprised —stupidly— at the seeming resurgence of moralizing in pop culture (on all parts of all spectra) . I once felt that by aesthetic chance, pop culture had stumbled onto the position asserted by my favorite novelist, Milan Kundera: Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understa...| Meta is Murder
As one moves between the general and the specific, two things that vary are (1) accuracy and (2) reach. Accuracy: how well your policy, design, idea, opinion describes the real facts of reality, how few exceptions and edge cases there are. Reach: how many facts of reality or units or instances your policy, design, or idea describes or accounts for. Accuracy is related to depth and focus; reach is related to breadth and speed. Both are important, and they’re in necessary conflict. This conf...| Meta is Murder
I am an allergic and reactive person, most outraged by the sorts of intellectual atrocities I myself commit. To say this is merely to assert the personal applicability of the now-hoary Hermann Hesse adage: “If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.” Hesse is a figure whom I regard with suspicion, and again: it seems to me likely that this is due to our mutual habits of appropriation, though whereas he re...| Meta is Murder
“We disparage ourselves endlessly, sometimes with reason… but more often, and more damningly, with a kind of black clarity of judgment that reaches right past all that we have or have not done, reaches past any insight or diagnosis that psychology can offer, and fingers us at the heart of what we are. Wrongness, call it. A stark and utter saturation of self: God’s most deep decree Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me.” - The poet Christian Wiman in My Bright Abyss; the final...| Meta is Murder
Saints Augustine and Monica, Ary Scheffer, 1854.| Meta is Murder
By Nika States.| Meta is Murder
For many years since reading A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, I’ve wondered irritably: was David Foster Wallace mocking real people in his essay on the cruise-ship experience? Specifically, this passage stayed with me: “My favorite tablemate is Trudy, whose husband…has given his ticket to Alice, their heavy and extremely well-dressed daughter… every time Alice mentions [her boyfriend Patrick, Trudy] suffers some sort of weird facial tic or grimace where the canine tooth ...| Meta is Murder
So long, Bayou; so long, 2013.| Meta is Murder
Landscapes by Frank Walter (1926-2009), shared here for use in escaping oneself and touching the ground of being, or being consoled amidst all the frothing, confused reactivity of culture by whatever abides, or some such.| Meta is Murder
If this piece gives you concerns about my viability as an employee, renter, applicant, neighbor, etc., please read this disclaimer / claimer. I have an almost technical interest in attempting to describe the subjective experience of certain aberrantmentalphenomena. Apart from any broader concerns and without concluding anything from it, then, here is an attempted accounting of what one might call a “breakdown” or an episode, an instance of bipolar collapse. For those interested: there wa...| Meta is Murder
My father, his father, and his brother in the 1950s. It took me an inexcusably long time to realize how much of what I like about myself, how much of what enables the happiness or goodness I attain, I owe to him; that strange interference that can distort a daughter’s perception of her mother has its counterpart between fathers and sons, everyone knows that; but it took me by surprise nevertheless how much I’d identified and appreciated those things that came from my mother while assumin...| Meta is Murder
This photo was taken in 2003, when she was just a few years old. We had so many adventures over the years; I don’t know how much less I might have lived, how much more closed I’d have been, had I not taken her home from the veterinary hospital where I worked. It was 2001, and she’d been found, hairless and bruised and infected with mange and scabies and worms, in Bayou St. John; they dropped her with us, but she was nearly feral. In taking care of her, I bonded with her and took her hom...| Meta is Murder
Miles Barger posted this wonderful image from The Neighbors, a photographic series by Arne Svenson of scenes in the windows of his Manhattan neighbors. They seem to assert the primacy of unknowable interior spaces, those buried within decor and personality, deeper within ourselves than our names go, deeper than our uniquenesses, into those places where we are archetypes, reacting without will to dreams and fears.| Meta is Murder
“The Church has become close to me in its distrust of man, and my distrust of form, my urgent desire to withdraw from it, to claim ‘that that is not yet I,’ which accompanies my every thought and feeling, coincides with the intentions of its doctrine. The Church is afraid of man and I am afraid of man. The Church does not trust man and I do not trust man. The Church, in opposing temporality to eternity, heaven to earth, tries to provide man with the distance [from] his own nature that I...| Meta is Murder
Venice Running to greet her father as he returns from a diplomatic trip. The Alps Bay St. Louis, MS Bay St. Louis, MS My mother doesn’t care for mother’s day, dislikes its manufactured manipulation of sentiment; she asks us not to do anything commercial for the occasion, so this is all I’ll do: post these photos of her and note, only half-knowing what I mean, that the older I get the harder it is to think of her without falling all the way into the deepest parts of my own heart. I am no...| Meta is Murder
One of the most significant intellectual errors educated persons make is in underestimating the fallibility of science. The very best scientific theories containing our soundest, most reliable knowledge are certain to be superseded, recategorized from “right” to “wrong”; they are, as physicist David Deutsch says, misconceptions: I have often thought that the nature of science would be better understood if we called theories “misconceptions” from the outset, instead of only after w...| Meta is Murder
“Look at the masterpiece, and not at the frame — and not at the faces of other people looking at the frame.” - Vladimir Nabokov in his lectures on Russian literature, opposing the primary type of academic and popular criticism: what we might call the demographic-reactive type. The overwhelming majority of opinion derives less from any internal response to a work of art (or political idea or cultural trend) than from what sorts of reactions we imagine on other faces looking at the frame,...| Meta is Murder
“The leaders always had good consciences, for conscience in them coalesced with will, and those who looked on their face were as much smitten with wonder at their freedom from inner restraint as with awe at the energy of their outward performances.” In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James identifies the union of conscience and will in leaders as one of their defining attributes. By conscience he means their values, their morality, their meaning-systems; and by will he m...| Meta is Murder
