Comments on: Over it

By: newilluminati

newilluminati — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 09:51:04 +0000

If one views the people as the patron of the arts, then many artists are being paid their rightful pittance for enriching human experience if they are on welfare.
Some of Robert Heinlein’s early work pointed out that if you’re going to run society as a corporation, then each citizen is entiled to a share, a dividend, which they can take to exist upon - or work if they wish and forego (part of) the dividend.
Either way, your work MUST interest you or you’re living in hell - at least part of the time, and time is all we actually have. It’s what you’re paid to use up. Everyone is doing time if they’re trapped by their society’s mores and unable to fulfill their own destiny.
And of course there’s another najor consideration - if your work is contributing to the destruction of the planet, the ecosystem, then you are, as Tim Flannery puts it, eating the future. If it harms anyone, the same ethic applies.
Thanks for a great online journal - can we come up with a better term than ‘blog’?

By: danny

danny — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 01:22:25 +0000

The question is, when will I ever be able to make my online contact feel like it counts in the same way as a local, embodied, reliable, hand-holding, movie-going, walk-taking, untimed-conversation-having desperately craved non RSI-giving close friendship experience?

Walter Benjamin suggests that a condition of print modernity is that the storyteller has departed because the social order organises itself in ways premised on the fact that the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners has disappeared. I think the assymmetry between reading and writing [even in blogspace] is elided by the use of the term community in describing these kinds of textual spaces. Gilroy suggests that the performer takes on a comparable role to the lost storyteller, and I think that performance and its theorisation might be where the answers to your question lies. That said, I know less than ever what I should write or why :7. Well, that’s not entirely true - I know I should be writing a consultancy report right now to pay my rent.

By: home cooked theory » Blog Archive » What time is it?

home cooked theory » Blog Archive » What time is it? — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 09:05:24 +0000

[...] rch fella

« Over it What time is it? Kylie’s right. I have no idea why I’ve been imagining [...]

By: Kylie

Kylie — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 07:15:57 +0000

Isn’t every work ultimately boring: they key word is work - not play, not love, not overwhelmingly passionate engagement and wonder, but work. Can work be fun? Yes. Will it always be? Is anything? There is so much satisfaction from work well-done, but it’s an imperative too. We live in a culture in which we must work or be considered an eccentric (the kind response) or a bludger (the common assumption). So chin up misscy gregg, a life of work stretches ut before you, but the value of the future is that the many wonderous deviations and meanderings you will take to get there are beautifully unclear. Maybe your referee was sick of work?

By: melgregg

melgregg — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 23:13:28 +0000

Thanks Glen (I fixed up your comments) :0)
I shall enumerate my gloom-making tasks in another post, after all, I do have all summer… and I was not trying to be porn-like!! Eeek.

I agree with your take on the paradoxically helpful unhelpful conclusion thing. But yeah, it doesn’t take away from the affective response to total, utter rejection!

By: Glen

Glen — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 22:47:20 +0000

“Can you tell my summer will involve not much else but me, my boy and my laptop in various locations?”

That sounds like some weird academic porn. I need to get a laptop.

Ha, yes. I kill me.

Isn’t it the right of referee’s to make outlandish assumptions? Like, that is their function to draw the most unhelpful conclusions from one’s work, so that we can get it back and clarify and so on, and it ends up being paradoxically helpful? I hope responses I have given to people over the years on their work has not been too aggressive or ‘functional’. I have not thought about the affects of criticism. Well that is not true, when marking students work I always write something positive and everything is always constructive. Who has time to write diatribes (except on one’s blog of course).

Can you give some more detail on what gloomy life you allegedly have ahead of you (or, rather, you allegedly give off vibes to another person so they assume that you desired some life of gloom)?

Damn, the gloom vibes. They is bad.

As a sidenote, I often wonder what people are thinking about when they run a little shop or a small business, and I think I could never live that life. Thinking the thoughts that have to be thought. But then I remember I have worked in a shop for four years! I didn’t just think the thoughts that needed to be thought, well I did, but the thoughts that needed thinking were not just related to some John Howard fantasy of small business.