On the one hand: James argues that digital technologies privilege our impulses over our intentions, and are gradually diminishing our ability to engage with the issues we most care about; on the other: A longitudinal study of student writing finds that digital technology has not been the downfall of written expression: Students in first-year ( Read more... )

Was lately reading something about (male) travellers and those Amazingly Beautiful Women they saw somewhere a long way away after arduous journeying, which might be partly about Exoticising the Other, but also, I think, about there being some place (or time) which is not boring old Here, where things are amazing.
On the, Not Like The Women I Have ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished the Upward book - not really a biography, more about thinking about him as a literary man, even though one might say that much of his life was one of 'unhistoric acts' as a teacher, Communist, non-Communist far left person, CND activist, etc; which might be more interesting to me, at least, than the endless angsting about ( Read more... )

Somebody in my online circles was posting recently about undertaking a performance and rocked it approximately 95% -
To which I wanted to say, and meant to go and look for it and then got distracted, that thing in a poem by DH Lawrence:
And a Navajo woman, weaving her rug in the pattern of her dream
must run the pattern out in a little break at the ( Read more... )

Further to yesterday's post about bodies and ageing and so on, it occurred to me that people such as athletes and ballet dancers, i.e. people who are all about pushing their bodies to do things other bodies can't do, probably don't feel that those bodies 'will automatically fall into line with [their] will', because they are all about putting an ( Read more... )

Yet another year in which other commitments mean that I shan't be doing NaNoWriMo.

However, I've been reading this, which has some quite sensible things to say about forward momentum and letting it rip.

But I'm also thinking that a messy and unedited first draft without any going back and polishing and picking up inconsistencies may be messy and ( Read more... )

Thinking further about that article I linked yesterday apropos of the virtues of "deliberate mediocrity" as a strategy for beating perfectionism and related issues because of various other stuff coming up.

While no or too low expectations may indeed be a bad thing, high expectations can be pretty awful as well. Looking back I am perhaps glad that ( Read more... )

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This afternoon to the British Museum to see Crafting Beauty in Modern Japan, which is lovely - well worth the seeing.

Thoughts:

The far less rigid art/craft division that seems to be part of Japanese culture.

The combination of traditional forms and techniques with more contemporary techniques and themes.

Textiles are so a significant part of their ( Read more... )