Category: theory
The Thrill of Boredom
The Thrill of Boredom – NYTimes.com by Peter Toohey.
Existential boredom, it is claimed, can infect a person’s very existence with unrelieved emptiness, isolation and alienation. And it takes in many well-known conditions, evoked by such names as melancholia, ennui, mal de vivre, tristesse, taedium vitae, acedia, spiritual despair, existentialist “nausea” — and garden-variety depression.
Boredom is counterrevolutionary, it may also be evolutionary.
it acts as an early warning that certain situations may be dangerous to human well-being. It’s not unlike disgust, another emotion that helps humans prosper. Just as disgust stops you from eating what is noxious, so boredom, in social settings, alerts you to situations that can do no psychological good. Boredom, interpreted properly, might act as an alarm.
On Reverie
On Reverie – NYTimes.com by Raphaël Enthoven.
Daughter of consciousness and sleep, reverie blends their realms. Like intoxication, reverie is lucidity without an object, an activity but one that’s passive, a search that begins by giving up and lets itself be dazzled rather than looking. It remains, happily, somewhere between imagination and the ability to put it to use.
Boxing Lessons
One more from the opinionator, Gordon Marino on Boxing Lessons.
Fear is painful, but it can be faced, and in time a boxer learns not to panic about the blows that will be coming his way.
The Spoils of Happiness
The Spoils of Happiness by David Sosa for the opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com (cache: archive.org)
Happiness is more like knowledge than like belief.
[…]To live a happy life is to flourish.
[…]Happiness is harder to get. It’s enjoyed after you’ve worked for something, or in the presence of people you love, or upon experiencing a magnificent work of art or performance — the kind of state that requires us to engage in real activities of certain sorts, to confront real objects and respond to them.
An embodied knowledge situated in events and one’s immediate scene.
Update : 072021
Manifesto for 21st Century Feminism
Tavis Smiley Radio : The Medicalization of Race
Tavis Smiley hosted a roundtable discussing the implications of genome project on drugs, race and medicine. Some of the points are more cultutral anthropology than medicine, but apparently, that is what has been missing in some medical practice.
Here are the direct links to the mp3s — one, two, three, four.
P.S. I am still mad at Tavis for leaving NPR.
Black Atlantic
Afro-Modernism: Journeys through the Black Atlantic
29 January – 25 April 2010
This major exhibition, inspired by Paul Gilroy’s seminal book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), identifies a hybrid culture that spans the Atlantic, connecting Africa, North and South America, The Caribbean and Europe. The exhibition is the first to trace in depth the impact of Black Atlantic culture on Modernism and will reveal how black artists and intellectuals have played a central role in the formation of Modernism from the early twentieth century to today.
From the influences of African art on the Modernist forms of artists like Picasso, to the work of contemporary artists such as Kara Walker, Ellen Gallagher and Chris Ofili, the exhibition will map out visual and cultural hybridity in modern and contemporary art that has arisen from the journeys made by people of Black African descent.
Divided into seven chronological chapters, from early twentieth century avant-garde movements such as the Harlem Renaissance to current debates around ‘Post-Black’ art, this exhibition opens up an alternative transatlantic reading of Modernism and its impact on contemporary culture for a new generation.
Tate Liverpool has initiated a city-wide programme of parallel exhibitions and events that explore the themes and ideas of Afro-Modernism: Journeys through the Black Atlantic. Partners include the Bluecoat, FACT (Foundation for Art Creative Technology), Metal, Walker Art Gallery and Liverpool University.
Supported by Liverpool City Council