life has gotten busier.
Funny. I know this about myself, I do much better when I have slightly too much to do. It’s like the lyric
“I don’t believe in energy
the tension is too low”
Like a sewing machine. If then tension isn’t right, everything is tangled
It is a cliché to talk about calligraphers losing their jobs as soon as the printing press was invented. I suppose they mourned the loss of their art. Except that new art was formed. The advent of the printed word changed everything almost immediately.
Walter Benjamin wrote The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. I am not saying read it. It is a CRAZY difficult little essay to read. I am not kidding when I say I had to read each sentence three times before I could move on to the next one. AND I found it pretentious.
But it exploded my brain. What possible measuring stick can we use for art when it is all mechanical, or digital? What does it mean to spread the elusive epiphanic beauty of art all over the planet by mechanical reproduction? Because we are already doing it.
I dare to say, this very message is an example of that. I’ll name it: the Wonderblog is art. And I am disseminating it mechanically-digitally all over the world.
It used to be that art was exclusive. The beautiful Book of Kells, with words drawn so beautifully and artfully angels were given the credit for creation.
There is one Book of Kells. I have seen it. It is in a museum, behind glass, and it is open to one place that day. If I wanted to see the next page, I have to wait and come back after they have turned the page behind the glass for the day.
Except, there are now facsimiles. I have pored over the reproduction in detail. It is not the same as the original. But I can touch it and see it in a way the original does not allow.
Which means I can use it intelligently as a metaphor for this other bit of art, this blog.
Benjamin says that art in the age of reproduction means a transformative availability. As in, with so much thought-provoking and inspiring art so widely available, we must all be changed.
I have had that discussion, “Is this art, the kind that is popular and widely available, good art? Is it as high quality as the more difficult, less accessible art?” and it’s a fine discussion. But Benjamin points out something else entirely, which I had not thought about. If my belief that art changes us is true, that has consequences If art changes us and makes us better human beings, then the wide availability of lots of art will change lots of people.
Are you ready for us all to evolve again? Because we are tipping off the point.
FUDOG
Fear
Uncertainty
Doubt
Obligation
Guilt
FUDOG
It kinda sounds like a cuss word. “Those FUDOGers!”
It feels like hell.
And it looks the poison arrows in the quiver of Beelzebub. All multi-pronged and dripping with noxious fluid that burns.
Those FUDOG feelings are, however, fully self-inflicted. And that is what makes them so insidious.
We have found the enemy. Oh boy have we found the enemy. It is us.
No. It’s me. It’s me that feels fear and doubt. It’s me that takes on an obligation and guilt. It is me that is uncertain.
I don’t want to be. I want to be free, confident, convinced, loving, and pure.
That doesn’t make as good of an acronym. But I guess free doesn’t need a mnemonic device. We remember that we want to be free.
I have been meaning to write this piece about FUDOG for a while. But I was uncertain, afraid that I didn’t have it together enough to explain the research that led me to this discovery of how these work together. I doubted I had the right to portray this as my own idea; maybe I was obliged to credit a source that I’m not sure of.
FUD is a well-known tactic in politics. And I read about FOG in an article about unhealthy relationships.
But I think I put it together. At least I did for myself
Fear
Uncertainty
Doubt
Obligation
Guilt
I started to think of how I make my choices. When I recovered from surgery, I finally got enough sleep to think and not react.
Am I making this choices, taking this action because of FUDOG? Isn’t that the opposite of how I want to live my life?
I want to spend my time doing things that I love, with people I love. Who is using FUDOG tactics on me?
Maybe I don’t have to cooperate. Maybe I am not obligated to cooperate.
I may feel guilty. True, I AM guilty. All have sinned, and I raise my hand. Here! Sinner reporting.
So. I want to walk in love and freedom, and leave behind the part where I am imperfect. Grace is necessary. For me, From me, To me.
And for everybody else. If I am not twisted up and poisoned with fudog, then maybe I will have some grace left over to give to other people too.
Even if I am not sure what I’m doing. Even if I’m not as good as I’d like to be.
Shake it off. Cut it off.
NO FUDOG ZONE
Have a blessed Wednesday, readers. That’s what I’ve got.
Chris went over the list of things the kids are expected to know for kindergarten. They say that a bigger vocabulary is the best indicator for success. So. I have to say new words to her.
She is a learning sponge.
used the bath toys to explain the 5 different kinds of animals.
Read that this is an important time to teach vocabulary. Every category was represented, thank you dinosaur, duck, frog, fish (shark), and her own self.
She repeated after me: reptile, fish, bird, amphibian and mammal.
She is however resistant to the idea that she is an animal. I reassured her that she is a person.
Volcano is not an animal. Water is not an animal. It’s fund to discuss these things.
There is nothing more beautiful on earth than my daughter. And I would like to say that is true objectively, and know that this is an immovable truth that I have found for all time.
But there is no such thing as objective beauty, is there? It is all in the eye of the beholder.
Other people tell me she is beautiful sometimes. She doesn’t seem concerned about it. But I am flattered to have a fellow admirer of her eyes, and her little hands and legs and skin and all-over body.
One of the side effects of having a daughter is that she looks like me. A little. I think she has my eyes. She definitely has my legs. Her little legs, perfect legs straight and strong, and they are kinda mine.
Stupid women’s magazines will make disparaging comments about thighs that rub together–presumably because they are too fat–and I have always felt like that was a flaw that I should find a way to correct. The inside seams of my jeans rub and wear out first. Obviously it’s something wrong with me.
But Veronica’s perfect body has strong thighs that meet all the way down to her knees.
Like mine.
Maybe those magazines are wrong. Because she is undeniably perfect and beautiful. Never a doubt.
I do enjoy the beautiful. I have an art print in my dressing area. La Toilette
Isn’t she pretty? It’s nice to have her there as I get ready for my day and try to make myself presentable.
Veronica noticed her one day. She pointed and said “It’s mommy.”
Well. Perhaps she is a mommy. That’s also nice to think about.
“No. It’s you mommy.”
“That’s not me. It’s somebody’s mommy, but that’s not me.”
She is too beautiful to be me. If I were to sit like that there would be so many flaws, I would not…I just couldn’t..
“It’s you mommy!” Veronica wasn’t giving it up. SHe insisted that the beautiful woman in the drawing was me.
I guess to her, I am that beautiful. For her, the flaws are not even visible or possible.
Maybe the magazines are wrong. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
And love makes everything beautiful.
We’ve evolved the telling of ThreeBears…We have called out Goldilocks as a porridge thief. So, this means we have to define thief more closely.
But really, we also have to define porridge better. I told Veronica last night I would make porridge for her this morning. She said “Weewwy?”I SO WISH I COULD RECORD THAT WORD (really) COMING OUT OF HER MOUTH.
it is so cute.
I woke up early. So, I am making porridge for her….Why did I have to start with steel cut oats…?
Having coffee with a friend, she was telling me her trails and struggles with her son.
I had to ask questions to understand what was going on. And then I said “You know what you need to do?”
Well. I said it a few times. Then the third time I said it, I interrupted myself. “Like I know how to solve all your problems…”
I don’t want to seem like a know it all. But I am listening, and I have ideas and suggestions. Naturally, my first pass ideas have been tried already by the woman who lives daily with her problems. So, when I say “You should..” with such confidence, it would seem like I am calling her an idiot. Of course she’s tried all the easy stuff already.
But she said “Oh I can totally run your family. I know how to fix all your problems!”
I laughed. She knew I was only trying to help.
That’s what friends are for. And maybe it’s supposed to work that way.
I can go to my friend and say “This is driving me crazy!” and feel all hopeless.
My friend will say to me, “You know what you need to do?”
And I probably already tried that, but then I call explain some more, and she will suggest some more, and in the end she may not have any really useful suggestions.
Because it’s hard.
And I’ve been trying to solve it for a long time.
But what she can do is have a positive attitude, and let me feel like this thing is fixable. We don’t have to figure it out today, but we can talk about it, and keep up the faith.
So maybe it’s not always arrogance to tell each other “You should…” It could be the boost we need.
Madhuri made a point of giving Veronica a toddler bible last weekend. I didn’t think it could compete with Cat in the Hat, but she loves it.
The Mean Giant (david and goliath) is a hit. and she seems to really get into the stories.
I haven’t entirely known how to talk about or share the Bible with her. I suppose I am a little conflicted about how to transfer my faith to her.
But after the reading, I thought, Hey, we should pray. They pray in sunday school, and she seemed uncomfortable with it. But I realized, I don’t ask her to pray at home, so of course it would be weird for her.
But I gave it a shot, praying for her after reading the bible stories. She was okay with it the first time, and the second time, she wiggled and yelled a nonsense song.
well.
today, after we were getting in the car after grocery shopping, she grabbed my hand while I was buckling her in. “Thank you mommy for being here and grocery shopping and things.”
well. How nice. “thank you Veronica, for being a good girl, and doing such a good job of listening.”
“I want to pray.”
!
!!
She grabbed my hand. “Dear God, You are a special God. Thank you for everybody. Amen”
At a birthday party, passing out the cake, I asked Madhuri, “How did you celebrate birthdays when you were little?”
Madhuri is from India, born in 1940, and she has spent most of her adult life helping take care of children. She took care of Veronica, and the girl whose birthday we were celebrating this day.
She told me “We would make rice pudding, and neighbors would come get some. We did not make a big deal about birthdays. We did not have cake. We did not have an oven.”
“So, everything was cooked on top of the stove, like in a frying pan? That must be how naan is made, so you had everything you needed without an oven.”
“No, naan is made in a special oven. There was a bakery where people would go for things that must be from an oven.”
And she began to describe with wonderful detail how the family would use the small stove they had to make the food. They would take cow patties and mix it with rice hulls and form balls using their hands, which dried out and could be used as fuel. That would be put in the base of the chimnea-type stove, with small chunks of coal—which they broke themselves. In order to conserve the fuel, all the cooking had to be done at once. So the whole day’s cooking would be done and then that was that.
Later, apparently, they began to use a propane-like gas to fuel the stove. But it was considered very expensive so they conserved it.
“Madhuri, you know that people right now complain that the neighborhood baker is going away because of the big corporate stores. But. We all have ovens in our homes now. We aren’t dependent on a bakery to get bread.”
Suddenly the history of the world (as I know it) flashed before my mind. I hadn’t realized that an oven was a precious commodity. And not just an oven. The butcher on the corner is supplanted by our sub-zero stainless-steel-finish refrigerator.
I think about places like France. Did they not have ovens in France, during the Revolution? When everyone went to pick up their baguettes and croissants everyday? I had a picture of it like it was Disneyland. They went there because they were friends with the baker, or he made better pies then they could. But no! They had no choice.
And an oven was a big investment. You bought an oven, or inherited it, and you were set for life. The whole neighborhood had to come to you if they wanted to eat bread. And a butcher would have set up a place to keep his meat cold enough not to go bad. A root cellar? A supply chain of ice? Either way, this kind of setup would be a very secure middle class business. Back before refrigerators and ovens.
But wait! Russia is famous for peasant houses having enormous stoves. Is that one of their advantages over the other world peasants? And oh yeah! Isn’t Russia obsessed with Bread? As I recall, they have a whole big fetish of bread. Maybe that is in part why. They had the ovens to make the bread.
I would have to spend a long time with Wikipedia to thread out the true history of the oven. But this technological advance of something I take so fully for granted is a huge leg up.
You know what is strange now? I don’t go to a bakery shop to buy my bread. I go to a big corporate store…Target or Vons. And I buy bread that was made a long time ago in a location far far away. But we have figured out how to preserve bread—as well as a thousand other necessary foods—and get them all over the place.
I have lived in this house for 7 years. I have not made bread. I have an oven. But I could probably—no assuredly, I could survive and thrive without using my oven.
America spent some time building infrastructure that Vons and Target takes advantage of. And I take advantage of Target and Vons, so I get the great benefit. AND for a hobby, if I wanted to DIY I could go bake bread.
India is still trying. I know it is better than when Madhuri was a child. There are a lot of places that have a ways to go with building the systems that can get people what the truly need. But her story made me rethink the world I live in.
And it made me appreciate the cake I was finishing.
“Have you seen how many Disney channels there are?”
The Disney channel is now 6 Disney channels. And even so, we are rare among our peers, we have discovered, because Veronica actually has cable tv. Most of the kids her age are DVD-only households, with memberships to Netflix or some such.
There is no shortage of stuff to watch. So why can’t I find anything I like?
It’s not just TV, either. I have the impression that music, movies and books are all in a malaise. My favorite literary podcaster, Michael Silverblatt, expressed a dissatisfaction in current books coming out.
What is happening? There is an avalanche of new content vying for our attention every second. At the same time, there is everything from the past still available.
We need a butler, a curator, to sift through it all and give us what matches our personal taste exactly. Why doesn’t this exist?
But I don’t trust just anyone to advise me. The one who is to select for me, for me only, is probably not trustworthy. Probably he’d be in the pocket of the promoters. I know this racket.
Who could I trust? Some people seem to trust the movie theaters to serve up something close to what they are going to like. They do seem to have a certain sameness to what they provide. Music? The radio stations, with their formats give us a consist product.
So where can I go for something different? There is the catalog that has been around forever–the classics
But the something new. That is what I’m looking for.
I remember a friend, a beautiful Russian Westside girl I used to work with. She bemoaned the lack of smart men. She probably meant rich men. But she wanted them smart for sure: “Tell me something I don’t know!” she complained.
Right. Show me something I don’t know about yet. The web is laid out like a map for everyone right? Except, it’s a long long way to get from here to there. How do I find the new?
I can. But it takes so much work. Which is why I would like a curator. I want someone to do it for me.
The one place I’ve seen that does curation is job sites. I encountered a site that—for a fee—will serve up exactly the high-paying job I am looking for.
Except I can go find those jobs on my own. It just takes time, and skill I suppose. . Since,I am going to make money if I go find a better job it makes sense to pay for a curator to help.
I need someone to help me find new music, books and stuff to watch. But I don’t think I’m really ready to pay for it. Probably because I’m especially not willing to pay for what it would actually cost to get a good one.
But then again, they say that with enough data, they can find the patterns that predict what I like. But I’d like to think that art is the unpredictable, the thing that doesn’t fit the pattern.
When everything is equally accessible, everything is equally inaccessible. I suppose I have to rely on the new bit of art to be so very different that it shines out of the crowd somehow. and I have to make sure to keep looking.