David > Recent Status Updates

I did not [photogrsph El Convento de Churubusco], for the churches in Mexico are an end in themselves, needing no further interpretation. I stand before them mute - nothing that I might record could add to their beauty.

The struggle is to live and express life untouched by the ideas of friends and neighbors.

Two figures stand out massively as the architects of our present-day conception of man: Darwin and Freud. Freud's was the more daring, the more revolutionary...As the summit of an evolutionary process, man could still view himself with smug satisfaction,...It remained for Freud to present the image of man as the unfinished product of nature: struggling against unreason, impelled by inner vicissitudes and urges

"Much of what we speak of as discovery consists of knowing how to impose a workable kind of form on various kinds of difficulties."

Bruner writes on what the end of the power of myth means for death: "Today death has become somehow impersonal and unnecessary, perhaps like a fatal vitamin deficiency that might have been prevented or at least delayed...The wonder drugs have shed still another abstract light on dying, and one reads drug advertising with the sense that death must be an error on the part of the consumer."

"Social constructionists have been on solid ground in stressing the historical variability of conceptions of homosexuality, even if they have been mistaken about when these changes occurred."

Anglophone attitudes to homosexuality controlled by economic development: early capitalism dictating emotional/sexual inhibition for the purpose of acquiring capital, late 20th century capitalism emphasizing the liberation attendant on the promotion of consumption.

"The French Penal Code of 1791 and the Napoleonic Code both took freedom of contract to its logical conclusion by decriminalizing homosexual relations between consenting adults."

"Sodomy" as a metonym for everything the lower classes resented the leisured classes for, "evoking connotations that went far beyond sexuality."

Pope Gregory VII's push to make the church supreme over states entailed a moral "purification" drive by which priestly marriage, adultery, sodomy, etc. were repressed. Repression, in turn, bred fiercer moralism in the form of reaction formulation on the part of individual priests who had had to repress their forbidden urges - specifically, for the purposes of this book - homosexual ones.

"Church leaders of the 2nd thru the 4th centuries gave sex much greater attention and w few exceptions rejected it far more vehemently and completely than did the authors of the New Testament."

A classically gripping read! Took a while for me to get around to, but now I'm hooked.

Finding out even more about Bloom & Stephen in the "Ithaca episode" - loving the catechismic style.

Partway thru Ch.14 Oxen Of The Sun - most entertaining part yet with the ongoing meticulous descriptions of hilarious costumes worn by the protagonists and the sexual "perversions" they get up to, including the "she"ing of Bloom. L'ingOL!

Just finished Ch.2, An overall history from ancient times to round about the Han dynasty (2nd century BC to 2nd century AD) of the development of calligraphy. Big Qin dynasty name: Li Si, big Han dynasty names: Zhang Zhi and Cai Yong. All interesting, but difficult to absorb because, at least to a non-expert, the description and analysis of some supposedly different styles often seemed arbitrary and forced.

Just finished Ch. 1 about the origins of Chinese characters: lost in history, but interesting theories. Evolution is the keyword: change is the only constant.

I thought 人生の広場 was a little weak - and the stories are starting to get too samey in style. Still basically enjoyable, though.

Bloom is trying to write a love letter in the pub.

Partway thru "Sirens" - math and music, bronze and gold, gold and bronze, bronze and gold...

Getting into the swing of it at last.

A capital-A adventure!

The main point of the Introduction was about the theory behind Chinese calligraphy, and it made it clear that Chinese calligraphy is a blank slate onto which any number of hobbyists, aesthetes and philosophers projected their thinking, ranging from Cai Yong who advised a meditative approach “as if one were in the presence of the emperor” to Mi Fu who wrote “It’s just for fun!”

Have just read the Prologue, by Wen C. Fong. Regeneration: the idea that the unchanging dao was the guide to constant innovation. The harking back of Chinese artists thruout their history to more ancient forms for inspiration once sated with developments thereto. The creative possibilities in the mixing of styles: Wang Xizhi. The self-consciousness of Eastern art as lagging behind Western in terms of modernity.

This is looking very gloomy.