technology
The telephone conversation is, by its very nature, reactive, not reflective. Immediacy is its prime virtue. The immediacy delivers quick company, instant stimulation; the stimulation is cathartic; catharsis pushes back anxiety; into open space flows the kind of thought generated by electric return. The letter, written in absorbed solitude, is an act of faith: it assumes the presence of humanity: world and self are generated from within: loneliness is courted, not feared.
“Letters are Acts of Faith; Telephone Calls Are a Reflex,” The New York Times, July 31, 1994.
I think van Gogh was one of the great, great draftsmen. I love the little sketches in his letters, which seem like drawings of drawings. They are condensed versions of the big pictures he was painting at the time, so that Theo and the other people he was writing to could understand what he was doing. These days he’d be sending them on his iPhone. When you look at them, they contain everything. It’s all there. He certainly didn’t do anything by halves.
A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney, by Martin Gayford (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2011), 187.
Because it’s been applied so indiscriminately to such a large spectrum of activities, “curation” is terrible term. But terrible as it may be, “curation” is a buzzword placeholder for a very real and tangible service of investing creative and intellectual labour in sifting the signal from the noise in an age of actual information overload.
“How to invent in an age of information overload,” BBC, November 20, 2012.
I think a portfolio of farms that are doing state-of-the-art farming over a 20-, 30-year horizon will be the best investment money can buy.
“A Banker Bets on Organic Farming,” by Mark Bittman, August 28, 2012.
I have never sent an email in my life. I never received an email. I have two buttons I can touch—the weather and the Huffington Post.
“Older, Mellower, But Still Woody,” interview by Rachel Dodes, The Wall Street Journal, June 15, 2012.
I felt a strange pang of nostalgia for boredom, the kind of absolute emptiness so familiar when I was a teenager, or a college student, or a dole-claiming idler in my early twenties. Those great gaping gulfs of time with absolutely nothing to fill them would induce a sensation of tedium so intense it was almost spiritual. This was the pre-digital era (before CDs, before personal computers, long before the Internet) when in the UK there were only three or four TV channels, mostly with nothing you’d want to watch; only a couple of just-about-tolerable radio stations; no video stores or DVDs to buy; no email, no blogs, no webzines, no social media. To alleviate boredom, you relied on books, magazines, records, all of which were limited by what you could afford… Boredom is different nowadays. It’s about super-saturation, distraction, restlessness. I am often bored but it’s not for lack of options: a thousand TV channels, the bounty of Netflix, countless net radio stations, innumerable unlistened-to albums, unwatched DVDs and unread books, the maze-like anarchive of YouTube. Today’s boredom is not hungry, a response to deprivation; it is a loss of cultural appetite, in response to the surfeit of claims on your attention and time.
Retromania (New York: Macmillan, 2011), 74–75.
My first impulse, when presented with any spanking-new piece of computer hardware, is to imagine how it will look in 10 years’ time, gathering dust under a card table in a thrift shop.
“My Obsession,” in Distrust that Particular Flavor (New York: Penguin, 2012).
Those of you who’ve seen my book—whatever you may think of its contents—will probably agree that it is a beautiful object. And if the physical book, as we’ve come to call it, is to resist the challenge of the e-book, it has to look like something worth buying and worth keeping.
Acceptance speech for the Man Booker Prize, quoted by BBC News, “Man Booker Prize Won by Julian Barnes on Fourth Attempt,” by Tim Masters, October 19, 2011.
Anyone who’s grown up listening to albums and then to CDs can’t help but feel sad about the atomization of music consumption. It would be like if we couldn’t publish a book anymore, only chapters.
Heidi Julavits interview with Jennifer Egan, BOMB magazine, Issue 112, summer 2010.
On a cold January morning, I once asked a fashionably dressed middle-aged woman, standing outside a building on Madison Avenue smoking a cigarette and shivering, whether she had a pen I could use. She didn’t think this was an odd request and was happy to oblige me. After she extracted a pencil not much bigger than a matchstick from her purse, I took out a little notebook I carried in my pocket, and not trusting the reliability of my memory, wrote down some lines of poetry I had been mulling over for the previous hour, roaming the streets. Today, she’d probably be staring at an iPhone or a blackberry while puffing away on her cigarette and it would not cross my mind to bother her by asking for a pencil.
Charles Simic, “Take Care of Your Little Notebook,” New York Review of Books Blog, October 12, 2011.
One thing we do know, that we dare not forget, is that better solutions than ours have at times been made by people with much less information than we have. We know too, from the study of agriculture, that the same information, tools, and techniques that in one farmer’s hands will ruin land, in another’s will save and improve it.
“People, Land, and Community,” in The Art of the Commonplace (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2002), 183.
In an electric information environment, minority groups can no longer be contained—ignored. Too many people know too much about each other. Our new environment compels commitment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.
The Medium is the Massage (New York: Touchstone, 1967), 24.