“The problem is that people who like science and technology, and people who like storytelling and the arts have typically been placed in different buildings since about the age of 16. We haven’t been taught how to admire each others’ work, to recognise excellence, or even to know that there is excellence in “the other culture”. There’s a kind of sullen arrogance on both sides, with some people in both camps simply denying that the other knows anything worth listening to. There is a kind of “worthy” arts professional who thinks that knowing nothing about games – like saying “I don’t even own a television!” – is a marker of intellectual superiority.”
Quotes
‘I set myself a schedule of three to five pages a day’
“With more than 40 works, five Man Booker nominations and a win under her belt, does she consider herself prolific? She scoffs at the word. “Joyce Carol Oates is prolific; I’m just old,” she says, drawing out the last word for laughs. At 75, she says writing hasn’t become any easier, listing her main distractions as laundry and emails. She sets herself a “schedule of pages rather than a schedule of times” aiming to write three to five pages a day. “You can cheat by increasing the type size,” she says. “Then you get really motivated and feel like you’re really speeding along.””
who continued to work as both a plumber and a taxi driver until his late 40s
“While working, I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at me in disbelief. ‘But you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here?’ It was obvious that I was installing his dishwasher and I told him I would soon be finished. ‘But you are an artist,’ he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish.”
“Marshall McLuhan, what are you doin’?”
“I’m making explorations. I don’t know where they’re going to take me…. I want to map new terrain rather than chart old landmarks… As an investigator, I have no fixed point of view, no commitment to any theory—my own or anyone else’s. As a matter of fact, I’m completely ready to junk any statement I’ve ever made about any subject if events don’t bear me out, or if I discover it isn’t contributing to an understanding of the problem. The better part of my work on media is actually somewhat like a safe-cracker’s. I don’t know what’s inside; maybe it’s nothing. I just sit down and start to work. I grope, I listen, I test, I accept and discard; I try out different sequences–until the tumblers fall and the doors spring open.”
I attest to your grey matter.
“They said in the Eighties that painting was dead, well, painting hadn’t even started. It was such a narrow minded period of time, the conceptualists really tried to get rid of painting completely.
The area of imagination, the playing field for art, is so gigantic that no-one’s really explored it. That would be the legacy that I would want to leave, the exploration of what imagination can lead to, how it would compound itself to become expladential.
In other words what my generation does I would like to see another younger generation come and step on that and make that one step further into wild abstraction, to compound the poetry, make it lyrically remarkable.”
Theorie der Halbbildung
“At its highest, the philosophical idea of culture [Bildungsidee] sought to form and to preserve natural existence. It meant both the repression of the animalistic in humanity through their adaptation to one another, and the salvage of the natural in opposition to the pressure of the decrepit, man-made order over and against them. The philosophy of Schiller – that Kantian and critic of Kant – was the most pregnant expression of the tension between these moments, while in Hegel’s theory of culture – under the name of externalization [Entäußerung] – just as in late Goethe, it is the desideratum of adaptation, in the midst of their humanism, that triumphs. Where such tension dissolves, adaptation becomes all-triumphant, and its measure becomes the merely existent. It prohibits the positive from erecting itself over and against the given. By the power of the pressure that it exerts on people, adaptation perpetuates the amorphous which it was intended to form – aggression. Just this, according to Freud’s insight, is the source of civilization’s discontents.”
Is this episode going on the air live ?
“No, Homer, very few cartoons go out live, it’s a terrible strain on the animator’s wrist.”
Frightened Control Freaks
“Whenever I’ve had to write prose I always find writing the description is really frustrating, because I think I could just draw this. And also there’s always so much more content to a drawing than to a prose description. I feel like there’s always so much more to be done with that. Plus when you’re writing prose you’re competing against Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and it’s very difficult to do anything that would be ultimately satisfying in terms of really differentiating yourself. At best I could write a halfway decent novel. That’s all I could ever hope for and that would be quite an accomplishment.”
“It sometimes seems like that’s the overriding trend in comics right now, beautiful drawings and empty stories.
I can’t tell if that’s just the result of a generation of kids who are raised with this different form of receiving media. Is it that or is it just that they’re coming out of the art world more than they used to? I don’t know, but there is something very strange about that. It doesn’t seem to be attracting people who just want to create stories and aren’t that visually oriented. You would sort of think that would be a part of the comics world that was opening up. At least I haven’t really seen that. Or they could just be doing stories I’m not very interested in.”
“Get stuck in and change it”
“If you think academies are a red herring, a partial and inconsistent solution to a problem that has been wrongly framed, then you need to somehow respond to this; choose a school that is still local authority-controlled, and support it to stay that way. Or become a governor of an academy, to uphold the values that you loved in community schools: that they serve the whole community.”
Paul Greer 