Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 136
July 22, 2016
Gimlet Eyes Dept.
Oliver Kamm: On German literature
One of the admirable consequences [of the reunification of Germany] is a flourishing cultural life no longer dominated by the notion of the artist as public conscience. Considering that, as we have lately seen, the artist is typically no more effective a vehicle of public conscience than the next person you pass in the street (and in Grass's case much less so), that's probably just as well.
I had to wrestle with this one for a good long time: why would Kamm...
July 21, 2016
Cynthia's Blues Dept.
Cynthia Ozick Takes Up Arms Against Todays Literary Scene - The New York Times
Ozick has always been a great guardian of distinctions — between the major and the minor, the high and the low. Her fear is that our ability to make such distinctions is rapidly eroding, that we are in danger of forgetting why Henry James is better than comic books, or why Austens novels do not belong in the same realm as chick lit.
The word that jumped out at me there is "better". It's something of a stacked-dec...
July 20, 2016
Be Ye Not As Jerks Dept.
God and Ultraman | Hardcore Zen
We can learn to understand that just because someone doesnt believe in God or Buddha, theyre not necessarily a bad person. We can also learn to understand that just because someone does believe in God or Buddha theyre not necessarily an idiot.
This is a splendid distillation of a position I've been working my way towards for a long time now. Belief or nonbelief isn't absolutely correlated with good behavior; it's all in how you use it. If you use it to build...
July 19, 2016
From The Closet Dept.
Another busy week — much work on MeTal, onAlways Outnumbered,etc. Still reeling from one horror after another — the Nice massacre, the failed Turkish military coup (another case of there being no real good guys on either side here). Let me turn my attention instead to an old creative dilemma: When do you stop entertaining an idea for a creative project, and just cut your losses.
More details: If you keep an idea kicking aroundtoolong in your head, doesn't it run the risk of becoming one of th...
July 14, 2016
The Sense (And Sensibility) Of An Ending Dept.
July 7, 2016
My New Brain Dept.
About two weeks ago, I stopped reading Facebook entirely.
I dropped an email about this to some people I was close to, encouraging them to stay in touch. I didn't delete the account, because I have a number of pages I manage that I do want to keep there, for the sake of both exposure and avoiding having them squatted by someone else. But I logged out of it on all my devices, removed the app from my phone, removed the bookmarks from my browser, and let out the deepest sigh of relief
Two weeks...
July 6, 2016
Major Malfunction (Keith Leblanc)
I once read an interview with experimental percussionist Z'ev about the problem of making music with technology that's critical of the world that produced said technology — "you're like,stuck!" he quipped. The very act of trying to critique what's around you ends up glorifying it, making it seem cool — the same problem Franois Truffaut had with war films. But every now and then someone cuts through the crap: Oliver Stone madePlatoon, and as Roger Ebert pointed out, it did not make war seem li...
July 2, 2016
Tear Along The Dotted Line Dept.
All that reading of John Cage and drawing from the Oblique Strategies must be paying off. Earlier this week, while working onAlways Outnumbered, Never Outgunned,I ran into a wall — or rather, what only looked like a wall. Every obstacle is actually an opportunity, and all that.
June 30, 2016
Other Worlds Dept.
I mentioned at various times before I've been working on "MeTal", a replacement for Movable Type (the program I use to publish this blog) and an alternative to WordPress.
I have a separate blogwhere I'm tracking the development of the project, itself published with MeTal. There's been some activity there recently, so if you're curious about programming generally, web-based applications, CMS/publishing systems, Python, etc., subscribe to the feed for that blog. I'll be posting more frequently...
June 27, 2016
Better Than Nothing Dept.
Which is better, a ham sandwich or eternal happiness? Well, a ham sandwich is better than nothing,andnothing is better than eternal happiness. Therefore, a ham sandwich is better than eternal happiness. — Raymond Smullyan
An old joke, but a good one, and it came back to mind the other day when I was talking abouthow to make one's plans for a creative work. Out of nowhere popped this phrase: "Even a bad plan is better than no plan." I mulled than one over.
