Jacques Barzun in "From Dawn to Decadence"... (emphasis mine)

The Great War produced the tank and the "French 75".... and finally the large-bore gun, "Big Bertha," that could fire a shell over Paris from 75 miles away. I remember its inauguration and effects, worse than the air raids by the noisy Tauben ("doves"), because the big gun fired at any moment of the day, whereas the night raids by planes were concentrated in a short time and preceded by a warning. Taking refuge in a cellar at night was for us children a kind of fun---at first.

That's some shit. I'm listening to Christina Aguilera while reading this bit. #

so i finished "From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present" by Jacques Barzun this morning. It was a pretty awesome book. I'm a big fan of history, and now I'm a big fan of Barzun's style of doing it. #

Barzun takes the unique approach of assuming you already know at least a little bit about all the major events that happen in the last 500 years so he doesn't write a traditional history book about the events. Instead, he writes a book about the culture that has been growing in the pot of wars and liberations: from surveys of popular art; to the progression of literature; to the advances in all fields of science; and, finally some hypothesizing about the future condition of this culture that has started, ever so slightly, on the path to destruction. I recommend it highly! #

In the last few pages I was keeping track and found some interesting quotes that I'll pass along...

"The first thing a principle does is to kill somebody." - Dorothy Sayers via JB, pg 743.
This is pretty terse way of expressing the nearly universal knowledge that people will live, die, and kill by ideals and principles such as religion, state, and love more than any other thing in the world.

"The man in the street who says 'Precipitation probability is twenty percent' is less alive than if he said and felt 'small chance of rain.' " - JB, pg 769.
I like this comment because it really captures that absurdity of sticking to hard to the false perfection of numbers and "precisionate" computers. It leads to a few questions: Why do people have to be so exact? Do people really think like this or are they just trying to sound omniscient? And something that Barzun mentions, whether you're wrong or not is basically all someone can argue with you about if you just shoot off some numbers and probabilities rather than real thoughts, so people hide behind the facade of certainity to protect themselves from criticism.

"Guilty at being ourselves, guilty at not being ourselves. I don't know: guilty at feeling guilty, guilty because we don't feel guilty. Above all, we want to confess--to anybody, about anything." - Cecil Jenikins, Message From Sirius (1961) via JB, pg 786.
To me, this quotation applies very well to the reason so many people have blogs and online journals, or in fact journals in general. They have these strung up feelings that need to be expressed in some way that has some consequence; writing something down and hiding it from all eyes only has so much healing power. And obviously there are varying degrees of this: some while use their blog as a confessional chamber with no replies, while others will disguise their confession of faults and flaws in the seemingly fictional stories and poems of a daily blogger. In general, it seems reasonable to assume that most of the sadness in the world of the privileged elite comes from guilt about living without real problems and uncertaintity over whether they truely deserve their gifts.

Finally, getting back to the discussion with Chrystal over what is art really, Jacques can offer us some guidance through quotation:
"Art is what you can get away with." - Andy Warhol (1987), pg 791.
"Art, ...a single-minded effort to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe" - Joseph Conrad (about 1887), pg 791.
I offer no real interpretation of these findings except this: Art, like the language often used to describe it, is a fluid, not a solid. It changes with the tide and with the times and if you try to hard to hold on to what it once was and what you wish it would still be you'll only find your hands wet with the remnants of forgotten dreams and straw men. Everything is only important in it's own context so in Conrad's time art is one thing, and today it is one other thing. From my naive point of view, I think that the main thread connecting this temporally distant statements is that of emotional conveyance and longing love of lacquer, in the case of paint.

there is a really funny post from moxie's friend tracy on moxie's blog that sounds like the internal monologue of every idiot girl i've met at college.#

tony pierce reveals that he is in fact, his own father. it appears that he was born in the future and raised by his older self then at some point a routine XBI price check goes bad and sent him flinging back to the past as a young boy because it was "Daughters Goto Father's Office Day" or something like that?#

an interesting article about the future of the software industry at random hacks, via ted leung. and there's a neat reply from "Krzysztof Kowalczyk" (i will note that I am a stupid american and have no idea how to even BEGIN trying to pronounce this name.) some interesting stuff, not for me to discuss though because i'm just a bear of little brain. but i tend to agree with KK because it's nearly impossible to interpolate the future and exaggeration is the credo of futurists.#

there's a tidbit of linkage on kuro5hin about The Long Now Foundation, which is an interesting idea to create something to be the lasting memory of our time like the pyramids are for ancient egyptians. in a less abstract way, the goal is a clock that will last 10,000 years. whopper cool.#

obviously wwdc was today and there's some good digesting: here, and there#