Distractibility and Whatever Else Happens

So I just want to write about anything at all.

Today I assembled my Ikea bed in my new apartment. Now I'm back at my aunt's house, hanging out. Gonna go out later and get some food and drank, but for now I'm just relaxing. The rest of my moving will be done tomorrow. I'll move my clothes, my books, my other things. I need to get a bedside table. I lost my swiss army knife tweezers. They fell down the sink drain. Upsetting.

I need to fix this one thing in my new apartment. It is the little ring in the bathroom that would hold a hand towel or something. Maybe I don't need a hand towel, but I don't like having just some random screw sticking out of the wall, and some random ring not hanging on that random screw.

I am finding my distractibility to be pretty startling. Whoa and then without even thinking about it I just opened another tab and started looking at Facebook. Fortunately, because I was writing about it, I realized that I had been distracted from the previous sentence and immediately closed Facebook and came back to writing.

But gosh it is so easy to just stop looking at things and start looking at other things. Oh and then I just opened up New York Times and then immediately closed it again. The Shallows has really made me a lot more reflective on how I am engaging with the internet, what my attention span is like. What the internet does. I don't know. It is awfully odd to me. It is confusing me.

I had an interesting conversation with a friend last night about the internet and history and other stuff. We often talk about the internet. I think mainly because it is hard to establish clearly what is going on to us with this new electronic medium. The question is of benefits and drawbacks. The benefits are obvious: access to information, expansion of culture, expansion of people's horizons. But at the same time the drawbacks may counterfeit these benefits. If the internet is making us distractible, destroying our attention span, then what does cultural expansion matter? If people are being taught to engage with culture in superficial ways then is it really expansion?

I don't know. I just don't know. To me it feels like a crucial question for our age. For this time. Contemporary culture, the internet, the age of information, democracy and capitalism. My aunt made the point that education is essential to democratic societies because we need an informed electorate. But right now it seems as though our voting turn outs are really low. Less than 50%? About 50%? Less than 60%, definitely. So then what to do about education in America? Are people really informed on the issues? When did rhetoric become more important than real issues? Probably at least since the Cold War. Maybe before. I just don't know enough about history.

I sure do think a lot about graduate school. Whether I'm gonna go into a history program or an interdisciplinary program. My interests are so broad. My aunt told me that she can see me ending up at History of Consciousness, or at Chicago Committee on Social Thought, something interdisciplinary. She says that after talking to me a lot she sees how large my interests are and how I'm trying to weave them together. I think I can weave things together quite well. But what kind of program will help me do this stuff the most? I just don't know.

But fortunately I can keep reading for a while longer before I need to decide.

Lol I also just realized that the title of this blog is funny in some way. Distractibility and whatever else happens. I want my own writing to distract me. I want to flow from one topic to the next without knowing what I'm talking about. I'm not focusing. I'm not following linear chains of thought. Certainly Mr. Carr doesn't think that all thought needs to be linear, but that the age of the book did encourage this type of thinking, and that it has certain benefits.

Who knows.

I don't want to end this post yet. I want to keep going for a minute. But I don't know what to write about.

Tonight is an interesting night because it is the last night I'll be staying in my aunt's house. She sure has been great to let me stay with her. But now I'll be having my own apartment. Wild stuff.

I lost my Orca card last night. Huge bummer. I'll get a new one. But it just sucks to have to pay for buses now while I don't have it. Oh well. I will be happy when I don't have to worry about it anymore.

I feel really tired. Not sure why. Oh wellllll. Tonight I want to do something. Yup, gonna.

Oh why does this post feel so inadequate. I feel like I can't talk about what I want to talk about. Not because I'm afraid to talk about things. Well, I am. But also because I don't know what to talk about. I want to talk about romance and love. I want to talk about new socializing and feeling weird. Life is about to change again. Living in my own apartment is going to be a totally new thing. Life is about to change again. I suppose that is the pressure I feel. Is this room. This room that has become familiar over the last six weeks. Now I'm gonna have another new room to get comfortable with. So be it. Just feels strange. I just know it is gonna be new and interesting. HOW EXCITING.

How unthinkable, too.

That is the thing. Unthinkable.

I look forward to being settled in my new apartment. Then I will perhaps be able to write this new essay I have planned. I don't like having it planned and not writing it. So why aren't I writing it right now? Who knows. I'm preparing mentally for a number of things.

I'll write it. That is also what I really want to do, and what I really want to talk about. I want to talk about Zen and creativity.

I Signed A Lease: Uh Oh

LOL! Not really uh oh. More like WHOA HOOOOOO. Just a shocker, and an exciting thing. Perhaps I should just call it a strange thing.

Capitol Hill is the neighborhood. I'm very excited about that. The rent is higher than I would like. Will be pricey. Will take up a lot of the money that I earn as a barista. But oh well. I will make something work. I will make something happen somehow or something. No clue. Good luck to me.

I'm pleased that I have all the things that I need to move in. My aunt has been a big help. We went to Ikea and bought a bunch of stuff. A bed, some sheets, some knives and cutting boards. This new life should be awfully strange and exciting. But who knows. I need to stop spending money on certain things. Like bars. I'll start carrying a flask.

Who knows what I'll do.

This is one of those moments where my writing is flailing. Mainly because the future is now impossible to read. A decision has been made. But what that decision will amount to is unknowable. The future is a blur now. But a blur with four walls. A blur with an outline that is a studio in a neighborhood. Well well well. I'm gonna need some posters. And some other things. I'm gonna need to live harder. I'm gonna need a library card.

I'm starting to make small progress on my new essay. It still doesn't have a definite title. But it is about art, everyday life, creativity, social activism and change, and zen.

I am currently reading Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind and I'm finding it very exciting.

That is all for now. I'll be moving this weekend.

Then things will be different again.

Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows" as Genealogical History: Some Rapid Reflections on This Exciting Book

So last week I started reading Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. I find it very compelling. I only have sixteen pages or so left. I plan on finishing it tomorrow morning on the bus. What a treat.

His main purpose is to argue that the way we engage with the internet is causing changes in our brain that lead to shallower engagement with written works, and thus leading us to shallower and more superficial forms of thought in general. He argues that books effected our brain by cultivating a focused, attentive, and contemplative frame of mind that was more inclined to intellect and creativity. He believes that the transition from the age of books to the age of the internet is bringing about a new type of mind in which we mostly think in these shallow and superficial ways. Thus the title The Shallows.

All of this hinges on two things that I can think of right now: 1. the science of neuroplasticity, which claims that our brain is plastic and changes throughout the entire life span as a result of experience, and 2. the idea that the mind is a result simply of the brain.

The former is a relatively new discovery in the neurosciences, and the latter seems hard to deny. I am digging the book.

It excites me for a lot of reasons and I am going to have to give it an extended treatment in later posts. I am even thinking that I will have to simply integrate it into my essay on The Principles of Art that I am working on. But I'm not sure how I would do that exactly. But I'll worry about that when I finish reading it and when I get further along in the writing of my next large essay project (which I'm not very far into yet).

But I would quickly like to say a few things that are really exciting me about The Shallows, simply to catalog and get my thoughts flowing a bit.

First, I just want to say that I really am enjoying Carr's literary style. He has a masters in English from Harvard and so writes with a nice flourish to his sentences. Not sure how to describe this exactly. I am in someways bad at picking up on the stylistic elements in writing. But I like the way he writes. I just like the way it flows.

I also like the way that he includes memoir in the book. He discusses his personal relationship with computers, what it was like for him to grow up while computers were first being created, and what happened to him later in his life. He talks about what it was like to write the book, how he had to adjust his writing, his blogging, his access to computers. You definitely get a sense of the person. You get a sense that he is deeply troubled by the way that he has been personally been effected by the internet. I like that.

I like it because it reminds me of David Shields. I really enjoyed Shields' Reality Hunger and The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead. Creative non-fiction is a very exciting genre to me, and Carr is doing a branch of it that I am very excited about. Interdisciplinary work that combines neuroscience, history, and contemporary cultural criticism. Uh, how loud do I have to say fuck yeah? I mean, really great stuff.

And I guess one reason I find it so compelling is that the central idea to all of it is neuroplasticity. I've read two books directly about neuroplasticity and have dabbled in some other stuff. I find it to be a very exciting field that his implications for almost every aspect of life. I think that it is really important stuff. So I'm glad to see that he is thinking about how the internet would be engaging with our plastic brains.

One of the most exciting things for me is something I wrote about in my essay of 8/30 'The Genealogy of the Modern Mind'. In that essay I claimed that neuroplasticity implied that minds and history were inseparable. Because brains are plastic, and change based on experience, then minds from different historical periods must look different. Therefore, if we want to understand minds, including our own minds, we must understand history.

Carr's book seems to function on this assumption that the quality of minds and history are inseparable. In particular, I like his chapter called 'Tools of the Mind'. He discusses how in different historical moments people engaged with different external tools to shape their minds. He uses neuroscienctific research on reading to show that literate people have radically different brains than illiterate people. He then speculates about how the invention of the printing press and the spread of mass reading changed brains and thus created new types of minds.

He then does a very good job of asking very 'modern' questions. I quoted modern because I am using the term in the way the Foucault defined it. He said that modernity was an attitude in which an individual tried to understand the nature of their own being by referring to history. That is what Carr is doing. He asks explicitly the questions 'how are the ways we think changing? what is the internet doing to us? what is happening to us right here right now?' Those are the quintessential modern questions. What is happening to me? And how can history help me understand what is happening to me right now?

I think that it resembles a work of genealogical history. He is using history to try and figure out what is going on with our minds right now at this moment. History is not simply there for its own existence, it is there to help us understand our situation and to act more intelligently in our situation. If you glance at my essay of 8/30, that is precisely what I am talking about: the use of history for a tactically useful understanding of the present.

In particular, he is doing a good job of dealing with the history of the industrial revolution, and the history of computers. He never makes explicit reference to Guy Claxton's work Hare Brain Tortoise Mind, but he tackles many of the same issues. He discusses how the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalist economies made efficiency paramount. He claims that these industrial and capitalist views of the economy eventually came to influence the way that people thought about thinking. Thought became something to be measured in terms of efficiency.

He also does a good job of engaging with the question of the rise of computers. The most important issue is the frequent metaphor of comparing the brain to a computer. This implies certain things about how thought 'should' work. But he says that the metaphor is wrong. Which of course it is! The brain doesn't process things in binary, or with algorithms. Clearly neurons work differently than computers do. Here I am pleased to see Carr falls in line with John Searle, a philosopher of minds, institutions, science, and other things. I like Searle, and he has been speaking out against comparing the brain to a computer since at least 1984. Good stuff.

This is all very cursory, but to summarize, I like Carr because he has a literary style that incorporates memoir into his creative non-fiction project. I like him because he recognizes the link between minds, brains, neuroplasticity, and history. He seems to be doing something that resembles Foucault's genealogical history, which I love. He is being so modern in his writing. I'm happy to see that the ideas I have been talking about, rather abstractly, can be executed as eloquently as Carr is doing it. I am also happy to see that he is (implicitly) lining up with Claxton and Searle by recognizing the role that the industrial revolution played in creating this overly 'efficient' and shallow mode of thinking, and by rejecting the comparison of the brain to a computer.

I do have one complaint, however. It has to do with the way that he is using Jeffrey Schwartz's book The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force. I loved Schwartz's book. So exciting and interesting.

Carr has it in his bibliography, and I believe only quotes it once. It is a good resource simply because it legitimates neuroplasticity and provides good background information. But Carr fails to engage with the three most important aspects of Schwartz's argument: the notion of 'self-directed neuroplasticity', the relationship between Buddhist mindfulness and self-directed neuroplasticity, and the relationship between quantum physics and self-directed neuroplasticity. Yes, I understand that those threads can be hard to pull together, especially the quantum argument. But, I dunno. To me it seems like Carr is hinting or getting so close to the idea of mindfulness sometimes. He says that by being attentive we can combat the shallow thinking encouraged by the internet. Mindfulness is all about attentiveness. Perhaps he doesn't think the US would accept these ideas so readily, or get them. The quantum thing I can understand avoiding. It would be hard to talk about that without stepping into a lot of muck. Really fascinating claims, but really tricky stuff, especially given the Schwartz is a mind body dualist, which doesn't jive exactly with the rest of Carr's argument. But anyway, the bottom line is I find it disappointing how both Carr and Norman Doidge (in The Brain That Changes Itself) fail to engage with these crucial components of Schwartz's main argument. The link to Buddhist mindfulness is absolutely essentially.

Mindfulness could give us a way to exert meaningful self-directed neuroplasticity, and fight the enticement to shallow thinking that the internet is presenting us with. My ideas all come back to creative self-directed neuroplasticity. Schwartz's book is booming with hope for this idea, exploding with this idea that we can take charge of our brains plasticity and begin to change it for the better. I just hope that in the last sixteen pages Carr is able to enable some new form of agency in this world of neuroplasticity. I want Carr to give me tools to change my own life. He is certainly giving me tools to understand myself, but is that enough? How am I to convert this new understanding into meaning changes, not only in my life, but in my brain? Which of course would be the same thing.

I just want Carr to talk about self-directed neuroplasticity that is aimed at combatting the effects of the internet. But who knows. I'll finish it tomorrow.

Over and out.

Preparing for This Bad Boy: Getting Ready For My Inadequate Writing on Art

I am starting to make baby steps on my next essay, which was inspired by Collingwood's The Principles of Art. Baby steps. Just beginning the writing. I've written about four pages. Starting to realize how difficult the topic is for me. I have all these tentative titles jumping about in my mind and I have no idea which one I will end up settling on. The general themes that I am talking about are 1. art 2. the relationship between life and art 3. the idea that every action can be artistic 4. the idea that this art of life can be a form of activism 4. the idea that activism can be a form of war 5. that the ideas I explored in my Society's Implicit War essays can be connected to this idea of art as life

Basically I have been vaguely talking about art and creativity for the last month or so. But now that I have read Collingwood's analysis of art I have a fuller picture of what art is and is not. So now I have to try and revamp all of my old writing to reflect this new nuanced understanding of what really constitutes art. Also, I know that there are very legitimate connections to Foucault waiting for me. Foucault talked explicitly about 'the aesthetics of existence'. He talked about how our lives could become objects of beauty, how we could produce our lives in a way so as to make them works of art. The artistic life is real for Collingwood and Foucault. So I need to chase this idea.

All of these ideas are hidden from me right now. The outline I have excites me. It is going to change as I write probably. Some things will get moved around, some things will be added or removed I bet. But here is the outline of the project I am currently working on.

Part I: Defining 'Art Proper'

1. Artistic Expression in General: What is 'Art Proper'?

2. Art is not Craft

3. Art is not Amusement

4. Art is not Magic

5. Art as Imaginative Expression of Emotions

5a. Expression as Exploration of our Emotions

5b. Imagination as the Space Between Sensations and Ideas

5c. Intellectual Emotions

5d. Imagination, Consciousness, and Art

6. Art as Language: How Much Of Expression Can be Artistic?

7. All Social Interaction as the Expression of Emotions

Part II: The Use of Art: Emotional Expression for the Artist and the Community

1. Art, Knowledge of Experience, and Empathy

2. Knowledge of Self and Knowledge of Others: That Artist's Universal Expression as Enabling Empathy

3. Language and Reenactment: How Does Language Work?

4. Reenactment and Empathy: What Does This Have to do With Empathy?

5. The Artist and The Audience: How Does Individual Expression Relate to the Audience?

6.

The Artist's Empathy With His Audience: Expressing The Quality of Contemporary Experience

7.

Art and the Means to a Universal Understanding/Reenactment of the Present: What Is The Universal Thing That The Artist Tries to Communicate?

8. John Searle's Status Functions and Specifying the Universality of the Artist's Expression: Understanding the Structure of Language as Understanding the Task of the Artist

Part III: Becoming the Everyday Artist: Integrating Imaginative Emotional Expression into Daily Life

1. Language and Social Life: All of Life As Art

2. Applying Artistic Expression to Daily Life: Waiting for Moment's to Express Underlying Structures of Life

3. Applying Artistic Expression as Modifying the Content of Action

4. The Constant Project of Studying and Constructing Yourself

5. Foucault's Aesthetics of Existence

Part IV: The Artist as Cultural Insurgent

1. Amusement and the Dulling of Empathy: Combating Amusement

2. Foucault as Artist: His 'Autobiographical' Monographs as Imaginative Expressions of Emotion

3. Language and the Rutting of Thought: Impediments to Creativity

Part V: Spreading the Insurrection

1. The Audience's Empathy

2. The Will to Empathy: Fostering Daily Creativity Through Artistic Work

3. The Artist as Supplying t

he Audience

the Means to Express Their Own Creativity

4. Copyright Law and Creativity: David Shields

I really feel very unsure about how all of this is going to come together. About how it is going to flow as a unified piece of writing. But here goes nothing. I guess I'll keep working on it.

Oh and here is a note about one hour after I originally wrote this. I've decided that I am going to have to do what I did for my Society's Implicit War essays. I'm going to have to flip through The Principles of Art page by page, read all the things I noted and underlined, and pull all the quotations I want. I'll then plug them into my outline in the working piece.

I was thinking for a little while that I could perhaps just sit down and write this thing. That I wouldn't need to pull lots of quotations. But as soon as I started skimming the book I realized how rich my understanding of the book would become if I really took the time to do that. If I really take the time to skim and reread I think I'll be able to do something a lot better. So. The skimming begins. Yikes.

Goodbye September. Hello Apartment. Here Goes Nothing.

So September has been a pretty good month I guess. I've been working at this barista job since the seventh, and oh guess what I feel pretty comfortable with it now. I want to drink more espresso and understand it more. I want to get really good at pulling shots and noticing the nuance of their speed. I want to make good drinks.

But at the same time I find myself getting really really irritated with people and their silly drink orders. It comes in flashes. Someone comes up and orders 'two skinny grande mochas with sugar free hazelnut and whip'. Boom then my brain explodes.

You and your elaborate drink orders! You make me crazy! But hey, drinks. Whatever. I make them.

In other news, I applied for an apartment today and it went through it seems. I'm going on Saturday to sign the paper work. Seems like I will have the keys as early as Sunday, maybe Monday. Boom, there goes my skull.

I sure haven't been having very much time to pursue this new essay that I'm working on. I want to write. But the time. I'll perhaps begin the serious writing tonight. But reading. I read on the bus. That is nice I like that.

But I need to be doing more writing.

If Only I Were An Artist

I find that I move faster than myself

I can't stop because it isn't possible

I probe myself with words because

There is nothing else to do

I move with everything else

Like the world as itself

A thing that means nothing

It means everything only

To the things inside of it

The innards are the most important part

The flowing pieces that make up the whole

The stop and start of the juice and the parts

But a whole has no regard

For itself or for otherwise

It isn't something to think of

It simply is

We all simply are

Just how we need to be and how we are

What does it mean to understand?

If we simply are then how do we become?

What is this

What am I

I'm a monster

As I have heard before

That no one needs to be a human

That we wish we were men or women

But we aren't

We are aberrations

Not because we are savage or unknown

But because normality is a lie

A fiction at best

A place where we will never go

Normality is heaven

Heaven isn't a place

Life is a palace

I am king

We can all be kings

We can all exert our sovereignty

If only we were willing to go to war

We could think of something lovely

We could feel ourselves loving life

We need to love everyone

War needs to be okay

Not because violence is good

But because struggle is necessary

The war needs to be within our own minds

The war needs to be in our neurons

I won't stop this terrible life

I don't have a choice

I will keep up the fight against myself

I will keep loving you all

Because I want one of you to love me

I won't stop smiling

Because I spent too many years being afraid of teeth

I hate what I've been told

About life and love

And I won't stop trying

To understand it all

Because I love the way empathy settles my mind

And fills my heart

I love it all

For all its confusing complexity

Because to give up on understanding

Would bring too much hate

And imply too much insanity

I don't believe in insanity

And think that irrationality is a lie

Isn't everyone doing the best they can?

If you really believed that

Then how could you hate?

How could you give up on understanding?

If you really doubt the existence

Of stupidity and insanity

Then doesn't empathy know no limits?

Doesn't empathy become everything?

If you really believe

In something like struggle

If you really believe that life is hard

Then don't you need to sacrifice yourself

To the altar of empathy?

If you reject the commonplace explanations

You must embrace forgiveness

You can't fight others

Because you haven't even tried

To understand

I'll crush you

If you think you can condemn me

Because I don't want to condemn anyone

I want to feel for you

This is for the love of life

And the sympathy I feel

For every terrible thing

For all the violence

And all the hate

Were all caught up in the parts

Of this moving whole

This frightening swirl

Where we have lost sight

Of how much sadness pushes us

How much fear hurts us

For all the empaths

Reach

Don't stop

Keep apologizing

Keep smiling

Keep loving

Because no one is worth your hate

Everyone is worth your time

And everyone is worth

The extension of your imagination

Living Fast, Breathing Hard

Everything happened quickly today. I got up at 7 something and went to look at a studio apartment on Summit and Republican. It wasn't the biggest room, but it was nice enough that I felt like I wanted it. Plus the location was great. So tomorrow I'm going to put in an application for this apartment. Whoa. What is going on here?

I'm very excited and very nervous. Lots of new life is happening every day. Life moves fast right now. It moves differently than it has before. It doesn't stop. It moves.

I found myself doing what my friend Phil does (shouts out to Phil in Korea). I breath hard. I go hah ho hah ho hah ho hah ho. If that in any way reads like hyperventilating. That is the point. To use hyperventilation to express what I feel like right now.

I am just very excited and very nervous. The landlord said she wouldn't show the apartment to anyone else because she knows that I want it.

Here goes the adventure that is living by myself. Despite how expensive it is, how lonely it is. I don't care. I want to do something new and exciting.

Turns out that I do it everyday.

blah blah blah blah blah.

Can't wait to have my own desk that faces a window so that I can continue with my own thinking.

I do my own thinking everyday. I smile at everyone and I say hello and goodbye. I am the ultimate politeness machine. I hope that I exude that friendliness that every customer service representative should. Yet I strive to maintain my mental independence. I live hard within my own mind. I think hard within my own mind.

I stock bottled water every single day. And I scowl and laugh at every single bottle of water that I ring up. I want to move through this world with awareness. And I try. But it is hard. Because the bottom line is that I don't even know how to look at most things. I don't even know how to think about most things. I need to be vigilant against my own biases. I need to keep trying to think better. I want to think differently, and hopefully better.

I'll keep being myself. I hope that I can keep my perspective on myself and my life.

Fortunately I have my friend R.G. Collingwood to help me keep my perspective on myself. And luckily it seems as though Nicholas Carr is also giving me tools to help me keep my perspective on myself in this contemporary world.

Carr is doing a great job of helping me think about neuroplasticity in the contemporary world. Life changes us. Experience changes our brains. We are mostly our brains.

But I can change my experience. I can change my brain. I can change my mind. I can become stronger than myself.

I believe in you.