So at the end of just about every year since 2000, I’ve rounded up my favorite (mainly cultural) stuff of the previous 12 months and posted it online. Here are my picks for 2010, which I’ll soon be adding to my permanent Annual Favorites page.
Aside from the great idea of keeping a running annual favorites page, I also appreciate Stephen’s inclusion of museum collections/exhibitions and wines. I keep telling myself I need to keep a beer/whiskey/etc. journal.
wehr:
Amy Stein | Photography | Blog: A Few Questions for Jo Ann Walters
Wow. Check out the whole set.
When I see great portraiture like the stuff here, I am reminded how rare it really is. I was not expecting it to be so good.
wehr:
Amy Stein | Photography | Blog: A Few Questions for Jo Ann Walters
Wow. Check out the whole set.
When I see great portraiture like the stuff here, I am reminded how rare it really is. I was not expecting it to be so good.
Haikus found in the leaked cables. “As is typical, / the Pope stayed above the fray / and did not comment.” (via) Other found poetry-type stuff I’ve enjoyed.
No pain here, no dull empty hours, no fear of the past, no fear of the future.
A very good essay on how the twin ideas of the sublime and the frontier coalesced into the American environmental movement, and how the modern idea of wilderness sets a dangerous sort of man vs. nature dualism that we’re better off without. There’s also the class/race issues, of course, and how modern outdoor experience became not a way of life but a consumptive pastime. And ironically, “Frontier nostalgia became an important vehicle for expressing a peculiarly bourgeois form of antimodernism.” Good stuff.
The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature – William Cronon
The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow. […] The minute you start saying something, “Ah, how beautiful! We must photograph it!” you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it had never existed, and that therefore, in order really to live, you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity; the second to madness.
Upon receipt of Maushart’s out-of-office email stating that she was no longer online, many of them assumed that she’d had a nervous breakdown.
A very good essay on how the twin ideas of the sublime and the frontier coalesced into the American environmental movement, and how the modern idea of wilderness sets a dangerous sort of man vs. nature dualism that we’re better off without. There’s also the class/race issues, of course, and how modern outdoor experience became not a way of life but a consumptive pastime. And ironically, “Frontier nostalgia became an important vehicle for expressing a peculiarly bourgeois form of antimodernism.” Good stuff.
The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature – William Cronon
No pain here, no dull empty hours, no fear of the past, no fear of the future.
Upon receipt of Maushart’s out-of-office email stating that she was no longer online, many of them assumed that she’d had a nervous breakdown.
The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow. […] The minute you start saying something, “Ah, how beautiful! We must photograph it!” you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it had never existed, and that therefore, in order really to live, you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity; the second to madness.
We are all dying of miscellany.
Like many innovative artists, Monet, I believe, was unclear about what he had achieved. Or, to be more precise, he could not name his achievement. He could only recognize it intuitively, and then doubt it.
The enveloping air: Light and moment in Monet – By John Berger (Harper’s Magazine)
An alcoholic writes about AA and recovery. This is a fantastic essay. [$]
My own view-in-progress is that there is no such thing as alcoholism as a disease or an allergy or a condition, but that alcohol is a very effective and potentially addictive medication for a whole host of psychological and neurobiological problems. […]The problem with alcohol is not so much that it is an addictive medication; rather, it’s that, unlike other addictive medications–to which people will also grow or not grow addicted at varying speeds and in unpredictable ways–alcohol’s social function and accessibility obfuscate this reality. If you’re prone to overdoing it, the fact that you’re self-prescribing (and choosing your own dosage) doesn’t help.
And:
Like most alcoholics I prefer to be the center of attention. That’s one of the reasons drinking was fun. You’re the hero of every story.
And also:
When you keep hearing “Relapse is part of recovery, relapse is part of recovery” each night from a different person, sometimes two or three, and then you leave the meeting and see the neon beer signs of the bar on the other side of Main, well, those lights get a little sparklier. Elbows on the bar, squeezed in, the bartender smiles; that smell of the bar, the smell of self-acceptance, joy, and fellowship.
Help is out there, folks.
The drunk’s club: A.A., the cult that cures – By Clancy W. Martin (Harper’s Magazine)
Mark Larson 