From "Eat Me, Drink Me, Like Me /Is love in the attention economy unreal?" by Tara Isabella Burton (in The New Atlantis, Winter 2020).
This is a very interesting article. Highly recommended. But I got totally sidetracked wanting to understand that Simone Weil quote — "Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love."
It doesn't really fit the idea Burton is talking about, which is the urge and effort to grab attention. The article title "Eat me, drink me, love me" comes from this Christina Rossetti poem, "Goblin Market." Excerpt:
“Did you miss me?But the Simone Weil quote seems as though it must mean not clamoring for attention but paying attention. Read the Weil quote in context here, then — if you're with me this far — apply it to what we are doing or failing to do when we experience what Burton calls "purely dystopian... in the disembodied terrain of the Internet."
Come and kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeez’d from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me;
Laura, make much of me;
For your sake I have braved the glen
And had to do with goblin merchant men.”
As for "the dandies of the café terrace":
Nineteenth-century dandy culture... was said by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, one of its chroniclers, to be for “miniature Gods.” The dandy, aloof and nonchalant, is never subject to the affection of others, or to the contingency that comes with being loved. He does not love, for he is emotionally invulnerable. Both d’Aurevilly and his fellow dandy Charles Baudelaire believed dandyism to be about the disconnect between the power to affect others and the power to be (at least seemingly) unaffected. In one telling anecdote, Baudelaire compares the dandy to the myth of the Spartan schoolboy concealing a stolen fox from his tutor by hiding it under the boy’s tunic. The boy maintains a courageous air of impassivity with his tutor until the fox claws out his innards and kills him. “A dandy may be blasé,” Baudelaire assures us, “he may even suffer; but in this case, he will smile like the Spartan boy under the fox’s tooth.”....ALSO: That Simone Weil quote appears in a recent WaPo piece, "Mysterious Matisse/What are these three strange figures doing?" It's easy enough to state the obvious: It's "Bathers With a Turtle" — they're looking at a turtle. But:
Why does it have their attention?... The philosopher Simone Weil likened attention to prayer, calling it the “rarest and purest form of generosity.” I think she was onto something. But beyond that, I don’t know. The mystery persists.
३१ टिप्पण्या:
Pinch me, do I not whine?
It seems like a stretch.
Whip me. Beat me. Make me write bad checks.
The virus has gone bureaucratic. Noon news "There are more than a thousand cases OF coronavirus in Ohio now."
English requires regular stress, and bureaucrats stress prepositions to fulfill the rule, not having any feel for what's important in what they're saying.
Lack of attention.
Prof, please edit. Excitement typos in several spots.
Narr
Avatar my ass
It is nightmarish, after all, to compete with giants rats and fried bats for page clicks.
Should that've been "There are more than a thousand cases of Corona beer in Ohio now" ?
"...the same thing as prayer"
To lose oneself in the contemplation of and desire to become one with the Other. (Paging Rudolf Otto, is he hanging around here?)
As AA says, pretty much the opposite of the whatever is happening in the "attention economy" (awful phrase, that).
Well, that's highly dysfunctional. If your selfhood is dependent on the attention of others, then there is no real self, but rather an amalgamation of different selves always oriented in light of all the others in a given system of interaction. And who anchors those selves? Other selves. So everyone is then made anxious about how others are responding while no one has a center or is a center that can provide genuine trust or acceptance.
So what's a better way to understand the self? What is the solution? Well, I wrote a whole book on that. It's crazy expensive (silly publisher changed their pricing structures near my submission time), but I'm happy to share it for any who are interested.
Thanks, Narr. "Excitement typos" is funny. Fixed 2 but am worried that "several spots" means more than 2.
You may know that I almost always publish without proofreading, then go back and read, and maybe I catch the typos. There's always an interval — if you consume before allowing the post to cool — when there will be typos — usually homophones and missing words (like yesterday's unfortunate omission of "not").
I'm not justifying publishing without proofreading. This whole thing — my blog — is a mysterious habit. It works (for me!) at the level it works, which involves lots of impulses and I have to just let them play out. The alternative is not a more perfectly composed blog but a dead blog.
“A dandy may be blasé,” Baudelaire assures us, “he may even suffer; but in this case, he will smile like the Spartan boy under the fox’s tooth.”
The dandy, then, will go to any lengths to be known by others not to care for being known by others, even to the point of death.
Paddy,
$111 for a kindle book. Are you trying to peddle it off as a college text?
Here’s a potential positive of the avatar/attention economy...
The grandkids will all be getting on the bus to go to school next fall. My days in the nursery will end and I’ll be able to work again.
In the VR/multimedia programming world, I can be known solely by my avatar and my online resume of work. Nobody needs or cares to know that I’m 70. My business avatar can be any race, age and gender I choose.
I’ve been experimenting with Adobe’s Character Animator program. Creating an animated avatar for online interaction is a lot easier than it used to be. The lip sync is done automatically.
Creating a young rock star avatar to represent myself as an online music performer is definitely within reach.
What banality. Poor atheists trying to go deep. Ann stick to the basement.
I love "Goblin Market"! "For there is no friend like a sister /In calm or stormy weather." How fortunate I am to have two.
Apropos Simone's point, to quote that rough and wrong poetry of Wallace Stevens:
Say next to holiness is the will thereto,
And next to love is the desire for love,
The desire for its celestial ease in the heart
The attention economy is doing so badly now that people can barely focus enough attention to figure out what "the attention economy" is. #newconceptswecanverywelllivewithout
how about restaurants hotels, department stores, churches, schools the brain slug just starved on this person,
I don't want dead perfection, so please keep blogging imperfectly. Typos grab my attention, and then I have to show everyone else I noticed.
Narr
Once an editor . . .
Better imperfectly composed than dead. (Just doesn't have the zing of the original)
The Covid-19 Information Hub says to "Complete a self Assessment" (before going to a doctor i presume). Doubting i could do that (Complete a self assessment) i drove to the drive thru test center this morning, thinking once i tell them i feel sic they'll test me.
That assumption was faulty. No one is tested without a script.
So i drove to the last doctor i saw (last year) and they wont even let me in the door, call and tell us what you are here for, someone at the door said. I called, I need a covid test prescription i said. Download an app and use it to make a...disembodied (to make this post relevant) conference appointment. i made one for later this afternoon. And i'll probably get the script, since i'm paying out of pocket. No offence to the medical Establishment.
With any luck, i may be able to be tested tomorrow. My designated test site is already closed for the day.
#ThoughtsAndPrayers
As I remember from Freshman Sociology (100 years ago) the "self" was the sum total of our understandings of other people's expectations of our behavior, with people in "reference groups" having more weight than others. Not flattering, but maybe not all wrong.
Not only did the doctor give me a prescription for the test, the covid test, i think he gave me a prescription for the Trump cure. He did mention that it's unproven but he was going ahead and prescribing it for me.
Best doctor i never met.
Good luck Lem.
Duh. Attention, the zone, laser focused, samadhi state, speaking in tongues. This is not a ground breaking analogy
Keep us posted Lem. Good luck.
Bandy Lee has described Mr. Trump's speeches as "word salads" or “jumbles of extremely incoherent speech" that are sometimes observed in schizophrenia or other mental illnesses.
Yes Bandy Lee did say that, is that not a gas man? ( a sixties word.)
"Attention economy"? Am I missing something? Never heard of it. No plans for further investigation, either.
If it enriches your life though, go for it. Whatever it is.
टिप्पणी पोस्ट करा