Thursday, May 6, 2021

Althouse

Althouse

"You are … irritating and unbearable, and I consider it most difficult to live with you. No one can tolerate being reproved by you, who also still show so many weaknesses yourself..."

Posted: 06 May 2021 10:52 AM PDT

"... least of all in your adverse manner, which in oracular tones, proclaims this is so and so, without ever supposing an objection. If you were less like you, you would only be ridiculous, but thus as you are, you are highly annoying."

Wrote Arthur Schopenhauer's mother to her 19-year-old son. Quoted at the beginning of "How Adult Children Affect Their Mother's Happiness/Plenty of moms feel something less than unmitigated joy around their grown-up kids. Make sure yours feels that she's getting as much out of her relationship with you as she gives" by Arthur C. Brooks (The Atlantic). 

The two-century-old letter amazes not just for its mix of archaic diction and sick burns, but also because it violates some of humanity's most basic assumptions about how mothers feel about their children.... Research suggests that plenty of mothers, while perhaps not as up-front as Johanna, feel some resentment toward their adult progeny, especially when the relationship feels unequal....

Researchers studying mothers have also found that almost 54 percent said their relationship with their adult child or children was ''intimate but also restrictive," that they had "mixed feelings" about the relationship, or some other ambivalent statement.... [T]he biggest predictor of interpersonal stress between adult child and mother was her affirmative answer to the question ''Do you feel that you give more than you receive in this relationship?''...

The next time you call your mother... ask her about something going on in her life that doesn't involve you at all but that you know is important to her. Ask for details, listen, and then offer your thoughts.... Don't take her for granted, and treat her with the attentive love she deserves.

(To comment, just email me at annalthouse@gmail.com.)

"Advocates of cluttercore... 'admit that they have a lot of stuff but that they're going to take pleasure in that and arrange [their items] in ways they like. As a counter aesthetic to the minimalist hegemony...'"

Posted: 06 May 2021 10:28 AM PDT

"'... that makes sense to me.'... Cluttercore turns ordinary people into curators. It takes real creativity to think about what goes where and what each item says about the other. Plus, decluttering can possess bleaker undertones. 'I have a running list of theories... People organise and declutter to distract themselves from the seriousness of living in the Anthropocene and its existential threats – a burning planet, the Sixth Great Extinction – inoculating us against the pandemic of anxiety.' You'll never tidy your house in the same way again. And there are yet other benefits to maximalism. Richer nations throw away tons of stuff every year, often dumping unwanted items on poorer countries who lack the infrastructure to dispose of them properly, decimating local landscapes. In this context, cluttercore becomes a revolutionary riposte to the explosion of 'stuff'..."

From "'Cluttercore': the anti-minimalist trend that celebrates mess" (BBC).

Order and chaos — you've got to find your own balance and notice when order/chaos is out of balance. Those who push order will provoke the agents of chaos, and those who create chaos energize the order freaks. Get somewhere in the middle and verge in the direction that feels good to you, but not too far.

I remember the lovely minimalism that was mid-century modern. The coolest house on our block in the early 1960s was 100% "Danish Modern." I saw the reaction: hippie/bohemian patterns and all sorts of overlapping rugs and tapestries and 50 year old dark wood furniture from junk shops. The minimalism was declared "uptight" and "sterile." We wanted real-life rooms that looked the way those minimalist rooms looked when we were on LSD. What a chaotic jumble we wanted for a while there. Then, in the late 70s, a look called "high tech" called out to us — glass, metal. 

I've been through enough cycles that I'm content to wait out anything I don't like. The other day, I blogged a photograph that showed the cabinets in our kitchen, which are natural maple, and someone in the comments — I had comments at the time — now, you need to email me, annalthouse@gmail.com — felt moved to say they had the same cabinets and they were painting them white. You want me to paint the natural wood?! Because kitchens must be white these days? Did you read that a non-white kitchen is dated? Google it, and you'll see that now the white kitchen is what's old. 

Minimalism hit so deep and hard that it produced anti-minimalism. But don't worry. Go whichever way you like. The anti-minimalism will bring back minimalism.

Here's a Pinterest collection of 280 hippie kitchens. Example:

Wildness in one's own yard.

Posted: 06 May 2021 08:41 AM PDT

I just needed to walk around to the back... 

IMG_4552

The Ideal City.

Posted: 06 May 2021 07:06 AM PDT

That's "The Ideal City" by Fra Carnevale, c. 1480–1484. 

This post was created to front-page something that appeared after the fold on another post today, so if you care about context, read through to the "FROM THE EMAIL" section of the post that went up at 7:09 a.m.

I like it out of context too. The image itself seems out of context — idealized.

"Could you clarify the purpose of this kind of post?"

Posted: 06 May 2021 09:48 AM PDT

David emails:

Your blog post today: about a NYT article contained: 

  • A pull quote from the article
  • A link to the article 
  • No content from you. 

Since you disabled comments on your blog, I have been trying to understand how you view the blog's purpose.

This particular post, which contained no original content from you, is the kind of thing you used to post in order to elicit discussion. But because that is no longer possible, I do not understand your intent. Do you now see yourself as an unpaid advertiser for the NYT? I hardly think they need your support, and simply reposting NYT content seems pretty weak.

Could you clarify the purpose of this kind of post? Maybe a post explaining it would be helpful.

My emailed response:

"Could you clarify the purpose of this kind of post?"

No. 

Think your own thoughts.

ADDED: I hope you remember that I got rid of the comments because of a round-the-clock problem with some very destructive trolls. I could not handle the work. Otherwise, I'd have left the comments on. But there is a type of comment I feel much better off without, and that is people who'd say — over and over — things like: Why do you read the NYT? She's still reading the NYT. What do you expect, it's the NYT? When are you going to stop reading the NYT?

ALSO: Why did David think I had to explain my purpose when elsewhere he assumed he knew my purpose? He wrote, "This... is the kind of thing you used to post in order to elicit discussion." If you could read my mind then, why not read my mind now? A lateral-thinking guess is that he was never really interested in my purpose only in whether my posts worked the way he liked. If a post prompts people to comment, then it also prompts people to think, and each person's thinking takes place whether they get to share their thoughts in writing or not. That's why I said "Think your own thoughts." 

Do you get better thoughts if you have to do your own thinking and cannot immediately scan other people's instant reactions? 

Here's another idea: Read the post out loud to your companion and have a conversation about it in your real-life space. That's something we here at Meadhouse do all the time.  

AND: "That's something we here at Meadhouse do all the time." It's also something people did in the old days, when there was only one copy of the paper newspaper. I remember my paternal grandfather, Pop, reading the paper in his living room, mostly silently, but now and then reading something out loud. You can still do that!  

Caitlyn Jenner's campaign ad — complete with images of Bruce Jenner winning the Decathlon and the ancient voice-over "He wants the world record."

Posted: 06 May 2021 09:38 AM PDT

Here's how I ran into the ad: Here's a screen shot I made:

That's not a fleeting glimpse of the past. There are repeated images from the stellar 1976 Olympic performance and of Caitlyn today looking feelingly at the gold medal. 

We hear Jenner's voice: California needs "new leaders... who are unafraid to challenge"  —  pause — "and to change" — pause — "the status quo." At that first pause, right before "and to change" — we see 2 magazine covers, side by side, one with Bruce Jenner celebrating winning the gold and one showing Caitlyn Jenner. That is, Jenner is "unafraid to challenge and to change the status quo," as demonstrated by breaking the world record in the Decathlon and then — in a second bodily achievement — coming out as transgender. 

I wonder how hard it was to decide whether to elevate or obscure the Jenner of the 1970s.

How can this person be presented as accomplished enough to warrant serious consideration as a candidate for Governor of California? Jenner has one truly great accomplishment: How do you not use it? The thought might be just don't run for Governor if you're not going to use that. But it's possible that Jenner actively wanted to generate greater freedom and comfort for everyone. 

Remember how easily Jenner soothed Joy Behar, who'd repeatedly called Jenner "he"? At the time, I said:

Good move by Jenner. Someone who wants to win the support of the masses can't lean into self-based fussiness. It's fine to recommend compassion about pronouns for young people who are struggling with their identity, but when you want to present yourself as ready to take on everyone else's problems and govern, you need to make people feel that you are well grounded and fully supported from within. You need to make other people comfortable — not worried that in talking about you they could say something wrong and have their lives ruined.

So, I think Jenner's idea is to make people comfortable and to present the transgenderism as a courageous accomplishment, something positive to count in Jenner's favor, not something that makes other people feel burdened and endangered. As a candidate, Jenner has to offer to make people's lives easier, not to challenge them to talk and act with continual woke awareness.

FROM THE EMAIL: Tim writes:

It is a great ad, I agree with James Woods, but I have conflicting reactions to its significance. 

For sure, Caitlyn Jenner, having been a sports hero for GenXers' entire lives and for most of the adult lives of Boomers, is in the unique position of being able to embrace being a woman without having her manliness questioned. That doesn't quite capture it, but I'm sure you know what I'm going for with that strange phrase. And because she is running as a Republican and rejects some of the crazier elements of trans activism, she is also in the unique position of being able to pull together the not-crazy people on both sides of the political divide and maybe even craft a reasonable palatable version of "woke." 

But in watching it, I'm also reminded of Kimberly Klacik and her viral campaign for congress from Baltimore. Her ads were exciting, and people were excited. She seemed the perfect Republican to win over urban blacks and break the back of one of our country's most corrupt and incompetent political machines. And all that online excitement translated into approximately zero votes as she lost in a landslide.

There's only so much you can do with an ad, but Jenner also has big pre-existing fame. With Klacik, you couldn't tell who she was. And Baltimore is not California. California has had Republican governors in recent years.


"Paper architecture has often had a real utopian or critical underlying agenda to it... [It] was often explicitly anti-capitalist, and emphasized the possibilities of a post-revolutionary society."

Posted: 06 May 2021 07:05 AM PDT

"Today's C.G.I. interiors, on the other hand, offer a fantasy of individual consumption and relaxation, but suggest a certain amount of political indifference. 'This seems like there's no plan, no societal vision, no critique....Taking a historical view, to have anything appropriating fictional utopian architecture with no utopian vision is a bit depressing.' The earlier part of the twenty-tens saw an explosion of 'cabin porn' on Tumblr: a nostalgic, earthy aesthetic of Obama-era hipster Americana—all wool blankets and gas lanterns and flannel jackets—which, in hindsight, may have channelled a growing uneasiness about accelerating digitization. By contrast, the aspirational, hyperrealistic interior-design imagery on Instagram—some call it 'renderporn'—isn't wary of digital life.... 'There might be a way in which C.G.I. architecture is appealing because it completely disavows the reality of scarcity—monetary, planetary.... There's this fantasy of freedom, where the real pinnacle of freedom is doing whatever you want without any material constraints.'..."

From "The Strange, Soothing World of Instagram's Computer-Generated Interiors "Renderporn" domesticates the aspiration and surreality of the digital age" by Anna Wiener (The New Yorker). A random example of what she's talking about:

This had me thinking about the "layouts" in "The 3 Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch." The Wikipedia plot summary begins:

The story begins in a future world where global temperatures have risen so high that in most of the world it is unsafe to be outside without special cooling gear during daylight hours. In a desperate bid to preserve humanity and ease population burdens on Earth, the UN has initiated a "draft" for colonizing the nearby planets, where conditions are so horrific and primitive that the unwilling colonists have fallen prey to a form of escapism involving the use of an illegal drug (Can-D) in concert with "layouts." Layouts are physical props intended to simulate a sort of alternative reality where life is easier than either the grim existence of the colonists in their marginal off-world colonies, or even Earth, where global warming has progressed to the point that Antarctica is prime vacation resort territory....

Maybe people are using drugs with those "Renderporn" images. 

Interesting to think of these trips into Instagram as an alternative to travel in a world wrecked by global warming and disease and violence and excessive tourism. If the places don't really exist, there's nowhere to travel to and no one is able to get any closer to this unreal idea than you are. Instant equity. 

I think a better use of your mind would be to look at the Renderporn and not feel dreamily pulled in but to see it as insipid and disgusting. Resist the fake.

Which reminds me — the author of the New Yorker article — has a book titled "Uncanny Valley." I think it's a good idea to retain whatever aversion to the fake you've managed to preserve thus far.

FROM THE EMAIL: Policraticus says:

When I browsed the work of Fournier on Instagram I was immediately struck by how much they evoke the Renaissance paintings of the "Ideal City". The imposition of art upon nature can often be beautiful, but it is always seems sterile. Like the man who was disappointed in his modernist architect, I have to ask, "where do I hang my coat?"

Here's the Wikipedia article, "Ideal City" ("An ideal city is the concept of a plan for a city that has been conceived in accordance with a particular rational or moral objective"). Here's a painting from the 15th century:

A fallen sprig of very young oak leaves.

Posted: 05 May 2021 04:18 PM PDT

Photographed by Meade: 

 IMG_0640 

I like the fleshy, sugary look of them.
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