George T. Anderson is the author of The Year of Perfect Sight (September, 2015). He blogs on transhumanism, tech evolution, and the technological singularity at www.theyearofperfectsight.com (@BlogDatFuturism). He wrote the novels The Tower of Babel and A Chair Between The Rails under the pen name G. T. Anders. His essays have appeared here, in the Other Journal, and in Bedlam Magazine. He holds a degree in music composition and is married to a professional cellist. For more on his music and writing, see http://george-anderson.net or follow @GT_Anders.
“…each moment is a new and shocking valuation of all we have been…” — T.S. Eliot
The Word Is Changing with Its World
Word makes world, and world makes word. To say that a truism is a truism is, itself, a truism.
I understand that we need content cues, a sort of lexical and visual shorthand for what we’ll find in a book or on a website. But I can’t figure out this particular communication ritual, this here branding thing.
Bittersweetly, I may not even see the published version of this piece. I may be leaving the Internet. I suppose it’s rather silly to throw out the baby with the bathwater, but the bathwater stinks. I need to go back to something I used to know, which I can barely remember now.
While artists need to eat, just as everyone else does, the commercialization of creativity has wrought great damage to the creative process and even to our culture’s process of enjoying art. Cranking out the next novel to try and put bread on the table may or may not produce the best version of the novel that is possible; and while the fire of economic need gets us off our behinds to do something, it also easily moves us into a degenerate view of what art is and why we should seek an audience.
Art’s not merely “self-expression.” If James Joyce had written strictly to see himself on paper, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man would not express me; yet it does
All of this began to look like some weird analog to the concept of Signal Versus Noise—except that the meat of artwork, The Good Stuff, wasn’t the signal; it was the noise. The signal that I so desperately needed could only be found in the silence that I refused to practice.
Previous page Next page