Tengal
Maybe I’m just an artist in a very general way…what interested me most were these composers who were pushing the boundaries of notated music… You approach the musician maybe in a more spiritual way, in a more direct way.
What I Think About When He Talks About Running
Run by ll_browneyes_ll
I was cruising down the escalator (shouldn’t this be called descender?) from the train platform when I told this photographer guy from work about the little book I was almost finished with and still holding on the way to the other station line. I didn’t know, I began my monologue, that this writer I’ve been reading ran a marathon almost every year since he was 33. That’s also about the same time he started to take writing seriously as his profession. He just ran, I continued, and he’s still doing it until now, what is he, like 60. Grabe, no? And I thought, yeah, that’s a lot. But since then, he’s also published book after book of stories and novels one after the other. No gap that will leave a runner behind his target time. It’s apparent of, course–what he’s saying–that writing’s a lot like running. Only it’s too lazy to jump onto such a cute catchphrase. It’s better to run through (hah!) his trainings and marathons. Which reminded me how many times I’ve attempted to run regularly, no writing metaphor intended, and failed. But I understand him when talks about pace, about the music he listened to on the go, how it’s a loner’s sport, how there’s usually nothing so extraordinary to inspire writing, that it’s usually just running on and on.
Ignorance and Playing Dumb
I would like to think of my “ignorance” less as a personal failing and more as a massive cultural trend, an example of doubling, of psychic numbing, that characterizes the end of the millennium. If we can’t act on knowledge, then we can’t survive without ignorance. So we cultivate the ignorance, go to great lengths to celebrate it, even. The faux-dumb aesthetic that dominates TV and Hollywood must be about this. Fed on a media diet of really bad news, we live in a perpetual state of repressed panic. We are paralyzed by bad knowledge, from which the only escape is playing dumb. Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live. Stupidity become proactive, a political statement. Our collective norm.
Jane Takagi Little in Ruth L. Ozeki’s My Year of Meats, 1998.
Photo from the Seattle Edible Book Festival.
