forgetgutenberg

I’m not sure why, but there you have it.

The more I think about it, the happier I am that I got a phone with a camera attached – it fills exactly the same niche in my life that disposable cameras used to fill, without the trash. Also without having to pay for developing, which is a nice bonus.

One of the best assignments ever, actually : in my senior studio class, the professors handed us all disposable cameras, and told us to go nuts.

I got some great photos (well, photos I am quite fond of, anyway), and an unfortunate habit of taking pictures without looking, often while doing something else. It makes my vacation pictures somewhat unusual, but it means I come up with fun things every now and then.

Anyway. The phone isn’t as good as my old 35mm, but I’ve always got it.

When I was in middle school (ish), our math teacher kept telling us that “math is the pursuit of laziness.” The tragic mistake she made was in not defining laziness. It turns out that when they use “lazy,” they mean something entirely unlike what the word actually means in English.

Apparently “laziness” means “doing it the right way the first time around, even if it’s harder in the short term, to save long-term energy.” Who knew? Well, apparently, a whole lot of people. Not me.

I suppose I could take this opportunity to be bitter about math, and the state of public education when I was a wee lass (it hasn’t gotten better), but I had a different point to make.

Namely, that I have decided that I am going to be lazy this year.

To be more precise, I am going to redefine laziness so it works for me. If, shall we say, I need to change my reading habits so that I get through some ridiculously dense German philosophy … all right, I’m drawing the line at learning German. I’ll live with translation, and remind myself that quality beats quantity. It’s ok to not read very many books in a year. No, really, there are some people who only read, like, a couple of books … and some of them are relatively non-threatening and perfectly capable of functioning as people. It must be all right.

I’m going to sit on some (really cool) projects until I’m actually ready to get them moving. For once, I’ll think all the details through – or at least enough of them that I’m not going to end up realizing half-way through a major project that everything about it is wrong, wrong, wrong. (Not that I’ve done that before or anything.) Which means trying for a certain amount of hush-hushery. (That is not a word. I’m aware. Have I mentioned how fed up I am with people who can’t cope with grammar/language abuse? Read some Joyce, people, get a sense of humor.)

And I’m going to try being lazy. Just to see if it really works, or if my middle school math teacher was just messing with our heads (she might’ve been; middle school math was very strange).

And now for the other side of that argument : which I am choosing, right now, to think of as focus. By sometime in the next paragraph, I will probably switch to some other thought. I’ll try to warn you in advance.

I hear noises – no. That’s not quite right. I used to hear noises about this strange beast called focus. I believe there was something about “focusing” on one thought, one piece of work. I decided that I didn’t trust the institutional educators, and went off on my own.

Focus is a problem. There are two sides to focus – there’s the finding time, motivation focus. That one, I need, but have some issues finding. Then there’s the one that tends to cause me trouble when other people are looking: disciplinary focus. By which, in this instance, I mean sticking to one, fairly narrow, field. I’d get so bored! Also, what would I do at times like these: when what I need to do is let something sit, at the back of my mind, developing until it has enough substance to stand the light of day? I mean, good grief. What’s wrong with trying to learn everything, preferably all at once?

That, my dear reader, is a rhetorical question. Still, I prefer to try to learn as much as possible. Much more interesting, less likely to end in boredom. The problem is, for this approach to work, time management suddenly becomes ridiculously important.

I haven’t figured that out yet.

I’m not even quite sure I’ve even got the whole linear narrative flow down, and after reading some Zizek earlier, I don’t have a lot of faith in my grasp of English sentence structure.

Well, that’s what keeps it interesting. Some of the problem is that I prefer to understand histories from a practical standpoint – which only works in art and  some social areas, but it does make a difference as far as I’m concerned. Would I have the same level of interest in copyright if I didn’t know where it came from and why? Probably not.

Admittedly, some of it is just distractability. I keep circling disciplines entirely unlike the ones I claim as mine; I suspect that I am waiting for the right teacher to come along. It’s more fun to have random fragments of knowledge than it is to ignore most of the possibilities lurking about; so I have to keep reminding myself that self-discipline is key, and crush my impatience.

The biggest argument against focus is patience. Think about that.

So why do I keep fussing about why I’m doing, instead of just doing?

Honestly. I don’t know. It might be a personal failing, it might have something to do with being the child of intellectually weird people, it might be that I’m paralyzed by fear of what happens when I fail to act.

Ok, I have to ‘fess up here – it’s all of the above.

Personal failing : I analyze almost everything to within an inch of its life. (Which might almost be a useful skill, except I’m spending my time analyzing things that are pretty trivial to most everybody else.)

My parents : Whatever else I say about my parents, I think they did a pretty awesome job. That said, they’re not normal (which, when I am coming up with things to be grateful for, is always in the top five), and I learned Piaget and Marx fairly young. Which might’ve done something to my intellectual … process.

Fear? Oh, yeah. I admit it. I’ve taken some risks, but lately I’ve been falling prey to the trap of a daily grind. There hasn’t been enough going out and making things happen. Like, all right, it’s not about selling or whatever, but good grief! It might be February, but that’s no excuse to cower under the blankets doing nothing! Get a flashlight, draw pictures while you’re trying to keep warm … Hmm. I think the winter might be getting to me. Took long enough.

Anyway. It’s important to me that I think about the socio-cultural implications of craft and art. Which sounds a whole lot more intellectually rigorous than I really want it to, and also kind of pretentious.

But then Warren Ellis, who is often strange but bizarrely prescient, rambled about something called Papernet. And, well, read for yourself. I think it’s fascinating, perfect, and right along the lines of what I want to be thinking about. Or, well, working on. Add it to the list.