Cold Shower Reflections

I just woke up this morning and I couldn’t get any hot water in this new apartment. Then I couldn’t get any of my burners to turn on. I suspect something has gone wrong with the gas company. I haven’t been in touch with them since I moved in, so I don’t know what they did. Not sure how to contact them, or who the gas company even is. I sent my landlord a text so I’m hoping that she will contact them or something. Who knows what is going on with this.

But I’m trying not to be irritated. Or I’m trying to recognize my irritation and be okay with it. Since I finished “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind” I’m very interested in being mindful, just accepting things. Yeah, acceptance.

I think that is they key word. The key thing to do. Accept things as they are. This morning I have to accept that my gas stove isn’t working and my shower isn’t producing any hot water. Even as I wrote that I had to sigh/cringe a little bit, because it is frustrating. I wanted to have a hot shower. I wanted to cook eggs.

But everything changes. And soon enough this will change too. I’ll be able to cook eggs. Perhaps tonight, perhaps tomorrow. God forbid I can’t cook eggs until next week. Who knows.

But I don’t know. Looks foggy outside today. No clue what is going on. Hmmm. Whatever.

Just writing because I want to be mindful. I want to accept things. But it is frustrating when things like this happen. But whatever.

The First Word Document Blog

10/12/10 - 9:05 pm

So I am blogging in a word document. I am trying to look at my essay that I’m working on. “Art and Intellectual Insurgency.” “Zen and the Aesthetics of Existence.” These are some vague working titles I have in my mind. But the honest to god truth is that I feel too tired. I feel very tired these days. Working 9-6 mon-friday is hard. It takes up so much time.

I don’t know if I want to work ‘the double shift’ and do my own work at night. I think I will eventually. But right now I’m a bit too tired and a bit too occupied by being in my own new space. Because part of it is that I am now living in my own apartment. I’m experiencing the freedom of being able to go out and eat and hang out with people whenever I want. But who knows. I just feel torn between all sorts of directions in my life.

I feel a bit torn about my next reading project. I’m pretty sure that I’m going to read Slavjo Zizek’s Violence. It just seems like a pretty perfect example of the things that I want to talk about. I have written a good bit about violence. And I have also been doing a fair amount of watching of Zizek online. I like to watch videos of him. He has amazing things to say. And the way that he says them is perhaps one of the best things. He has such excitement, such drama in his voice. So much conviction. He makes jokes, he says outrageous things, he subverts in subtle ways. I just find him pretty fascinating at the brief glances I have had.

Whoo, so tired. I’m also thinking about reading a novel. In Straw Dogs John Gray discussed a novel called Utz and I own it now. I’m looking at it right now and want to read it. It is about a guy who lived in Czechoslovakia during World War II and how throughout the entire war he just expanded his porcelain collection. He loves collecting porcelain. It doesn’t matter to him that all these terrible things are happening around him. He just keeps collecting his porcelain.

Perhaps it will give me a bit of perspective on the way that I am living my life right now. I just stock bottled water everyday. I stoke Coca-Cola for people to buy. I make 20 oz mochas with extra chocolate and whipped cream. I just feel out of touch. Not because I know what it is to be in touch and I somehow need to get back in touch. I feel out of touch because I don’t even know what it means to be in touch. It is just unclear to me what is happening at anytime and anyplace. Where does all this bottled water come from and how did everyone become so comfortable just buying it all the time? We love coffee and milk and pastries. We love America.

I also have been contemplating my own writing a lot since yesterday. My friend told me that I was a strong analytical writer but perhaps hadn’t found my voice yet. It is true in many ways. I am still learning so much and have so very much left to learn. But my voice is in the background of it all. I think that my voice is an invisble web that is tying all these different ideas together. I think that my voice echos in my analyses. I can hear my voice. Or rather I can feel my voice. I feel it bubbling in the background. It has clear statements of its own to make. But I can’t produce them yet.

I drew my friends attention to my post in July titled ‘In Defense of Thinking a Lot’. Then I reread it and I was really pleased with what I had written. I didn’t cite anyone, and I just put it all out there what I was all about, what I love to think about.

I finished Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind at work today. Great book. Excited to finish it. Who knows what is going on.

My voice. That is what is going on.

I am struggling to write this analysis of life as art, the art of life. I just always feel so far in over my head when I look at my outlines. This was true for all my big essays. For Society’s Implicit War, for The Everyday A Priori Imagination. All of those things freaked me out and felt impossible. And then I wrote them. I know I’ll write this one too. Just need to do it.

A quick library post

I am in the Capitol Hill library branch. Today was the first day that I bussed to work from my new apartment. It was a good time. I don't have internet access at my new place and I'm not sure if I am going to get it or not.

Unfortunately this leaves me in a situation in which I am reevaluating my relationship to this blog. Clearly I am going to keep posting on here. No doubt. But will I do it from home and then upload it at other times? How will I manage a limited connection to the internet?

For one thing I just pulled my outlines for my most important blog post that I'm working on. Something about Zen and the Art of Minds. I have yet to come up with a good title. But I'm working hard on this essay and I think it is going to be a real kick in the pants for my mind. Oh well.

I need to do some thinking about how this is all going to work out. Good luck to me. And to the rest of you.

Distractibility and Whatever Else Happens

So I just want to write about anything at all.

Today I assembled my Ikea bed in my new apartment. Now I'm back at my aunt's house, hanging out. Gonna go out later and get some food and drank, but for now I'm just relaxing. The rest of my moving will be done tomorrow. I'll move my clothes, my books, my other things. I need to get a bedside table. I lost my swiss army knife tweezers. They fell down the sink drain. Upsetting.

I need to fix this one thing in my new apartment. It is the little ring in the bathroom that would hold a hand towel or something. Maybe I don't need a hand towel, but I don't like having just some random screw sticking out of the wall, and some random ring not hanging on that random screw.

I am finding my distractibility to be pretty startling. Whoa and then without even thinking about it I just opened another tab and started looking at Facebook. Fortunately, because I was writing about it, I realized that I had been distracted from the previous sentence and immediately closed Facebook and came back to writing.

But gosh it is so easy to just stop looking at things and start looking at other things. Oh and then I just opened up New York Times and then immediately closed it again. The Shallows has really made me a lot more reflective on how I am engaging with the internet, what my attention span is like. What the internet does. I don't know. It is awfully odd to me. It is confusing me.

I had an interesting conversation with a friend last night about the internet and history and other stuff. We often talk about the internet. I think mainly because it is hard to establish clearly what is going on to us with this new electronic medium. The question is of benefits and drawbacks. The benefits are obvious: access to information, expansion of culture, expansion of people's horizons. But at the same time the drawbacks may counterfeit these benefits. If the internet is making us distractible, destroying our attention span, then what does cultural expansion matter? If people are being taught to engage with culture in superficial ways then is it really expansion?

I don't know. I just don't know. To me it feels like a crucial question for our age. For this time. Contemporary culture, the internet, the age of information, democracy and capitalism. My aunt made the point that education is essential to democratic societies because we need an informed electorate. But right now it seems as though our voting turn outs are really low. Less than 50%? About 50%? Less than 60%, definitely. So then what to do about education in America? Are people really informed on the issues? When did rhetoric become more important than real issues? Probably at least since the Cold War. Maybe before. I just don't know enough about history.

I sure do think a lot about graduate school. Whether I'm gonna go into a history program or an interdisciplinary program. My interests are so broad. My aunt told me that she can see me ending up at History of Consciousness, or at Chicago Committee on Social Thought, something interdisciplinary. She says that after talking to me a lot she sees how large my interests are and how I'm trying to weave them together. I think I can weave things together quite well. But what kind of program will help me do this stuff the most? I just don't know.

But fortunately I can keep reading for a while longer before I need to decide.

Lol I also just realized that the title of this blog is funny in some way. Distractibility and whatever else happens. I want my own writing to distract me. I want to flow from one topic to the next without knowing what I'm talking about. I'm not focusing. I'm not following linear chains of thought. Certainly Mr. Carr doesn't think that all thought needs to be linear, but that the age of the book did encourage this type of thinking, and that it has certain benefits.

Who knows.

I don't want to end this post yet. I want to keep going for a minute. But I don't know what to write about.

Tonight is an interesting night because it is the last night I'll be staying in my aunt's house. She sure has been great to let me stay with her. But now I'll be having my own apartment. Wild stuff.

I lost my Orca card last night. Huge bummer. I'll get a new one. But it just sucks to have to pay for buses now while I don't have it. Oh well. I will be happy when I don't have to worry about it anymore.

I feel really tired. Not sure why. Oh wellllll. Tonight I want to do something. Yup, gonna.

Oh why does this post feel so inadequate. I feel like I can't talk about what I want to talk about. Not because I'm afraid to talk about things. Well, I am. But also because I don't know what to talk about. I want to talk about romance and love. I want to talk about new socializing and feeling weird. Life is about to change again. Living in my own apartment is going to be a totally new thing. Life is about to change again. I suppose that is the pressure I feel. Is this room. This room that has become familiar over the last six weeks. Now I'm gonna have another new room to get comfortable with. So be it. Just feels strange. I just know it is gonna be new and interesting. HOW EXCITING.

How unthinkable, too.

That is the thing. Unthinkable.

I look forward to being settled in my new apartment. Then I will perhaps be able to write this new essay I have planned. I don't like having it planned and not writing it. So why aren't I writing it right now? Who knows. I'm preparing mentally for a number of things.

I'll write it. That is also what I really want to do, and what I really want to talk about. I want to talk about Zen and creativity.

I Signed A Lease: Uh Oh

LOL! Not really uh oh. More like WHOA HOOOOOO. Just a shocker, and an exciting thing. Perhaps I should just call it a strange thing.

Capitol Hill is the neighborhood. I'm very excited about that. The rent is higher than I would like. Will be pricey. Will take up a lot of the money that I earn as a barista. But oh well. I will make something work. I will make something happen somehow or something. No clue. Good luck to me.

I'm pleased that I have all the things that I need to move in. My aunt has been a big help. We went to Ikea and bought a bunch of stuff. A bed, some sheets, some knives and cutting boards. This new life should be awfully strange and exciting. But who knows. I need to stop spending money on certain things. Like bars. I'll start carrying a flask.

Who knows what I'll do.

This is one of those moments where my writing is flailing. Mainly because the future is now impossible to read. A decision has been made. But what that decision will amount to is unknowable. The future is a blur now. But a blur with four walls. A blur with an outline that is a studio in a neighborhood. Well well well. I'm gonna need some posters. And some other things. I'm gonna need to live harder. I'm gonna need a library card.

I'm starting to make small progress on my new essay. It still doesn't have a definite title. But it is about art, everyday life, creativity, social activism and change, and zen.

I am currently reading Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind and I'm finding it very exciting.

That is all for now. I'll be moving this weekend.

Then things will be different again.

Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows" as Genealogical History: Some Rapid Reflections on This Exciting Book

So last week I started reading Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. I find it very compelling. I only have sixteen pages or so left. I plan on finishing it tomorrow morning on the bus. What a treat.

His main purpose is to argue that the way we engage with the internet is causing changes in our brain that lead to shallower engagement with written works, and thus leading us to shallower and more superficial forms of thought in general. He argues that books effected our brain by cultivating a focused, attentive, and contemplative frame of mind that was more inclined to intellect and creativity. He believes that the transition from the age of books to the age of the internet is bringing about a new type of mind in which we mostly think in these shallow and superficial ways. Thus the title The Shallows.

All of this hinges on two things that I can think of right now: 1. the science of neuroplasticity, which claims that our brain is plastic and changes throughout the entire life span as a result of experience, and 2. the idea that the mind is a result simply of the brain.

The former is a relatively new discovery in the neurosciences, and the latter seems hard to deny. I am digging the book.

It excites me for a lot of reasons and I am going to have to give it an extended treatment in later posts. I am even thinking that I will have to simply integrate it into my essay on The Principles of Art that I am working on. But I'm not sure how I would do that exactly. But I'll worry about that when I finish reading it and when I get further along in the writing of my next large essay project (which I'm not very far into yet).

But I would quickly like to say a few things that are really exciting me about The Shallows, simply to catalog and get my thoughts flowing a bit.

First, I just want to say that I really am enjoying Carr's literary style. He has a masters in English from Harvard and so writes with a nice flourish to his sentences. Not sure how to describe this exactly. I am in someways bad at picking up on the stylistic elements in writing. But I like the way he writes. I just like the way it flows.

I also like the way that he includes memoir in the book. He discusses his personal relationship with computers, what it was like for him to grow up while computers were first being created, and what happened to him later in his life. He talks about what it was like to write the book, how he had to adjust his writing, his blogging, his access to computers. You definitely get a sense of the person. You get a sense that he is deeply troubled by the way that he has been personally been effected by the internet. I like that.

I like it because it reminds me of David Shields. I really enjoyed Shields' Reality Hunger and The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead. Creative non-fiction is a very exciting genre to me, and Carr is doing a branch of it that I am very excited about. Interdisciplinary work that combines neuroscience, history, and contemporary cultural criticism. Uh, how loud do I have to say fuck yeah? I mean, really great stuff.

And I guess one reason I find it so compelling is that the central idea to all of it is neuroplasticity. I've read two books directly about neuroplasticity and have dabbled in some other stuff. I find it to be a very exciting field that his implications for almost every aspect of life. I think that it is really important stuff. So I'm glad to see that he is thinking about how the internet would be engaging with our plastic brains.

One of the most exciting things for me is something I wrote about in my essay of 8/30 'The Genealogy of the Modern Mind'. In that essay I claimed that neuroplasticity implied that minds and history were inseparable. Because brains are plastic, and change based on experience, then minds from different historical periods must look different. Therefore, if we want to understand minds, including our own minds, we must understand history.

Carr's book seems to function on this assumption that the quality of minds and history are inseparable. In particular, I like his chapter called 'Tools of the Mind'. He discusses how in different historical moments people engaged with different external tools to shape their minds. He uses neuroscienctific research on reading to show that literate people have radically different brains than illiterate people. He then speculates about how the invention of the printing press and the spread of mass reading changed brains and thus created new types of minds.

He then does a very good job of asking very 'modern' questions. I quoted modern because I am using the term in the way the Foucault defined it. He said that modernity was an attitude in which an individual tried to understand the nature of their own being by referring to history. That is what Carr is doing. He asks explicitly the questions 'how are the ways we think changing? what is the internet doing to us? what is happening to us right here right now?' Those are the quintessential modern questions. What is happening to me? And how can history help me understand what is happening to me right now?

I think that it resembles a work of genealogical history. He is using history to try and figure out what is going on with our minds right now at this moment. History is not simply there for its own existence, it is there to help us understand our situation and to act more intelligently in our situation. If you glance at my essay of 8/30, that is precisely what I am talking about: the use of history for a tactically useful understanding of the present.

In particular, he is doing a good job of dealing with the history of the industrial revolution, and the history of computers. He never makes explicit reference to Guy Claxton's work Hare Brain Tortoise Mind, but he tackles many of the same issues. He discusses how the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalist economies made efficiency paramount. He claims that these industrial and capitalist views of the economy eventually came to influence the way that people thought about thinking. Thought became something to be measured in terms of efficiency.

He also does a good job of engaging with the question of the rise of computers. The most important issue is the frequent metaphor of comparing the brain to a computer. This implies certain things about how thought 'should' work. But he says that the metaphor is wrong. Which of course it is! The brain doesn't process things in binary, or with algorithms. Clearly neurons work differently than computers do. Here I am pleased to see Carr falls in line with John Searle, a philosopher of minds, institutions, science, and other things. I like Searle, and he has been speaking out against comparing the brain to a computer since at least 1984. Good stuff.

This is all very cursory, but to summarize, I like Carr because he has a literary style that incorporates memoir into his creative non-fiction project. I like him because he recognizes the link between minds, brains, neuroplasticity, and history. He seems to be doing something that resembles Foucault's genealogical history, which I love. He is being so modern in his writing. I'm happy to see that the ideas I have been talking about, rather abstractly, can be executed as eloquently as Carr is doing it. I am also happy to see that he is (implicitly) lining up with Claxton and Searle by recognizing the role that the industrial revolution played in creating this overly 'efficient' and shallow mode of thinking, and by rejecting the comparison of the brain to a computer.

I do have one complaint, however. It has to do with the way that he is using Jeffrey Schwartz's book The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force. I loved Schwartz's book. So exciting and interesting.

Carr has it in his bibliography, and I believe only quotes it once. It is a good resource simply because it legitimates neuroplasticity and provides good background information. But Carr fails to engage with the three most important aspects of Schwartz's argument: the notion of 'self-directed neuroplasticity', the relationship between Buddhist mindfulness and self-directed neuroplasticity, and the relationship between quantum physics and self-directed neuroplasticity. Yes, I understand that those threads can be hard to pull together, especially the quantum argument. But, I dunno. To me it seems like Carr is hinting or getting so close to the idea of mindfulness sometimes. He says that by being attentive we can combat the shallow thinking encouraged by the internet. Mindfulness is all about attentiveness. Perhaps he doesn't think the US would accept these ideas so readily, or get them. The quantum thing I can understand avoiding. It would be hard to talk about that without stepping into a lot of muck. Really fascinating claims, but really tricky stuff, especially given the Schwartz is a mind body dualist, which doesn't jive exactly with the rest of Carr's argument. But anyway, the bottom line is I find it disappointing how both Carr and Norman Doidge (in The Brain That Changes Itself) fail to engage with these crucial components of Schwartz's main argument. The link to Buddhist mindfulness is absolutely essentially.

Mindfulness could give us a way to exert meaningful self-directed neuroplasticity, and fight the enticement to shallow thinking that the internet is presenting us with. My ideas all come back to creative self-directed neuroplasticity. Schwartz's book is booming with hope for this idea, exploding with this idea that we can take charge of our brains plasticity and begin to change it for the better. I just hope that in the last sixteen pages Carr is able to enable some new form of agency in this world of neuroplasticity. I want Carr to give me tools to change my own life. He is certainly giving me tools to understand myself, but is that enough? How am I to convert this new understanding into meaning changes, not only in my life, but in my brain? Which of course would be the same thing.

I just want Carr to talk about self-directed neuroplasticity that is aimed at combatting the effects of the internet. But who knows. I'll finish it tomorrow.

Over and out.

Preparing for This Bad Boy: Getting Ready For My Inadequate Writing on Art

I am starting to make baby steps on my next essay, which was inspired by Collingwood's The Principles of Art. Baby steps. Just beginning the writing. I've written about four pages. Starting to realize how difficult the topic is for me. I have all these tentative titles jumping about in my mind and I have no idea which one I will end up settling on. The general themes that I am talking about are 1. art 2. the relationship between life and art 3. the idea that every action can be artistic 4. the idea that this art of life can be a form of activism 4. the idea that activism can be a form of war 5. that the ideas I explored in my Society's Implicit War essays can be connected to this idea of art as life

Basically I have been vaguely talking about art and creativity for the last month or so. But now that I have read Collingwood's analysis of art I have a fuller picture of what art is and is not. So now I have to try and revamp all of my old writing to reflect this new nuanced understanding of what really constitutes art. Also, I know that there are very legitimate connections to Foucault waiting for me. Foucault talked explicitly about 'the aesthetics of existence'. He talked about how our lives could become objects of beauty, how we could produce our lives in a way so as to make them works of art. The artistic life is real for Collingwood and Foucault. So I need to chase this idea.

All of these ideas are hidden from me right now. The outline I have excites me. It is going to change as I write probably. Some things will get moved around, some things will be added or removed I bet. But here is the outline of the project I am currently working on.

Part I: Defining 'Art Proper'

1. Artistic Expression in General: What is 'Art Proper'?

2. Art is not Craft

3. Art is not Amusement

4. Art is not Magic

5. Art as Imaginative Expression of Emotions

5a. Expression as Exploration of our Emotions

5b. Imagination as the Space Between Sensations and Ideas

5c. Intellectual Emotions

5d. Imagination, Consciousness, and Art

6. Art as Language: How Much Of Expression Can be Artistic?

7. All Social Interaction as the Expression of Emotions

Part II: The Use of Art: Emotional Expression for the Artist and the Community

1. Art, Knowledge of Experience, and Empathy

2. Knowledge of Self and Knowledge of Others: That Artist's Universal Expression as Enabling Empathy

3. Language and Reenactment: How Does Language Work?

4. Reenactment and Empathy: What Does This Have to do With Empathy?

5. The Artist and The Audience: How Does Individual Expression Relate to the Audience?

6.

The Artist's Empathy With His Audience: Expressing The Quality of Contemporary Experience

7.

Art and the Means to a Universal Understanding/Reenactment of the Present: What Is The Universal Thing That The Artist Tries to Communicate?

8. John Searle's Status Functions and Specifying the Universality of the Artist's Expression: Understanding the Structure of Language as Understanding the Task of the Artist

Part III: Becoming the Everyday Artist: Integrating Imaginative Emotional Expression into Daily Life

1. Language and Social Life: All of Life As Art

2. Applying Artistic Expression to Daily Life: Waiting for Moment's to Express Underlying Structures of Life

3. Applying Artistic Expression as Modifying the Content of Action

4. The Constant Project of Studying and Constructing Yourself

5. Foucault's Aesthetics of Existence

Part IV: The Artist as Cultural Insurgent

1. Amusement and the Dulling of Empathy: Combating Amusement

2. Foucault as Artist: His 'Autobiographical' Monographs as Imaginative Expressions of Emotion

3. Language and the Rutting of Thought: Impediments to Creativity

Part V: Spreading the Insurrection

1. The Audience's Empathy

2. The Will to Empathy: Fostering Daily Creativity Through Artistic Work

3. The Artist as Supplying t

he Audience

the Means to Express Their Own Creativity

4. Copyright Law and Creativity: David Shields

I really feel very unsure about how all of this is going to come together. About how it is going to flow as a unified piece of writing. But here goes nothing. I guess I'll keep working on it.

Oh and here is a note about one hour after I originally wrote this. I've decided that I am going to have to do what I did for my Society's Implicit War essays. I'm going to have to flip through The Principles of Art page by page, read all the things I noted and underlined, and pull all the quotations I want. I'll then plug them into my outline in the working piece.

I was thinking for a little while that I could perhaps just sit down and write this thing. That I wouldn't need to pull lots of quotations. But as soon as I started skimming the book I realized how rich my understanding of the book would become if I really took the time to do that. If I really take the time to skim and reread I think I'll be able to do something a lot better. So. The skimming begins. Yikes.