Somewhere on a shelf in San Francisco sits CDs bought in Halifax on Barrington Street. They are old now, there plastic cases fogged with the scratches of use over the years. They were ripped to iTunes a long time ago, and have now become artifacts of the 20th Century, mirrored plastic reflecting no 1990s scenes; hidden in a case, on a shelf, with the Pacific Ocean a park away.
Old men steal milkshakes
They drink it up
Thanks for not making me North Korean
To live cleanly in this regard, to live in such a way that is sustainable, is to be called to a more sophisticated life. But again, this asking too much, for it is easier to continue to unwrap the cellophane from the packet of cigarettes and drop it to the ground. Through this `fuck-it` action you prove yourself to be a rebel and cool, and not some airy-fairy girly-hippy environmentalist.
Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age
It’s a long life. You’d better learn how to live with it.
Th x 3
John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards (1992), pages: 503-504:
Buddhist societies are horrified by a great deal in the West, but the element which horrifies them most is our obsession with ourselves as a subject of unending interest. By their standards nothing could be unhealthier than a guilt-ridden1, self-obsessed, proselytizing white male or female, selling God or democracy or liberalism or capitalism with insistent superior modesty. It is clear to the Buddhist that this individual understands neither herself nor his place. He is ill at ease in his role; mal dans sa peau; a hypocrite taking out her frustrations on the world.
As for the contemporary liberated Westerner, who thinks of himself relaxed, friendly, open, in tune with himself and eager to be in tune with others - he comes across as even more revolting. He suffers from the same confused superiority as his guilt-ridden predecessor but has further confused himself by pretending that he doesn’t feel superior. While the Westerner does not see or consciously understand this, the outsider sees it immediately. The Westerner’s inability to mind his own business shows a lack of civilization. Among his most unacceptable characteristics is determination to reveal what he thinks of himself - his marriages, divorces and children; his feelings and loves. [...] Any man or woman produced by the Judeo-Christian tradition is dying to confess - unasked, if necessary. What the Buddhist seeks in the individual is, first, that he understands he is part of a whole and therefore of limited interest as a part and, second, to the extant that he tries to deal with the problem of his personal existence, he does so in a private manner. The individual who appears to sail upon calm waters is a man of quality. Any storms he battles within are his own business.
Of what, then, does Western individualism consist? There was a vision, in the 19th Century, of the individualist as one who acted alone. He had to do so within the constrains of a well-organized society. Even the the most anti-restraint of thinkers - John Stuart Mill - put it that ‘the liberty of the individual must be thus far limited, he must no make himself a nuisance to other people’.2
But if the constraints of 19th Century Western civilization did put him in danger of causing a nuisance, he could simply go, or be sent to the frontiers of North and South America or to Australasia. [...] Rimbaud fled Paris and poetry for an isolated Abyssinian trading post, where his chief business was rifles and slaves. This personal freedom killed him, as it did many others. [...] Even without leaving the West, a man eager for individual action could find room for maneuver within the rough structures which stretched beyond the 19C middle-class society. In the slums, hospitals and factories, men from suffocating backgrounds could struggle against evil or good as if they were at war. By the 1920s, the worst of these rough patches were gone and the individual’s scope of action was seriously limited. In a stable, middle-class society, restraint was highly prized. Curiously enough, this meant that, with even the smallest unrestrained act, a man could make a nuisance of himself and thus appear to be an individual. 3
This is one explanation for the rise of artistic individualism - a form of existentialism which did not necessarily mean leaving your country, although it often did involve moving to the margins of society. The prototypes were Byron and Shelley, who fled in marital disorder across Europe, calling for political revolution along the way. Lermontov was another early model - exiled to the Caucasus, where he fought frontier wars, wrote against the central powers he hated and engaged in private duels. Victor Hugo was a later and grander example …4
Footnotes
1. In Greg Bear’s Queen of Angels the A.I. Jill’s analysis of punishment incorporates the thought that guilt is a result of our self-aware modeling, our recognition that we have failed somehow in the mind’s of Others. Jill thinks (p.417): ‘The self-aware individual in a judgment-society experiences guilt as a matter of course; to lack guilt, the individual must be poor at modeling and therefore inefficient in society, perhaps even criminal’. This line of argument is introduced on page 211, with the pseudo-author Bhuwani quote: ‘With self-awareness comes a sharper awareness of one’s place in society, and an awareness of transgression - that is, guilt.’
2. Consider how we live in a culture that makes a currency out of misery and problems, so that you end up talking about them in some social situation or another. How with someone you are likely to start gossiping about another person, their relationships and such, even though it’s none of your business. But, if you catch yourself doing this and want to take the high road and refuse to discuss what’s none of your business, you are more likely to hurt your conversant’s feelings. One needs to trade social information to maintain good relations. Similarly, one gets into discussing one’s problems for similar reasons. Trade your stories of misery so that we know you’re a member of the group, so that the others can feel good trying to help you and live with the illusion that they are either compassionate or not as bad off, and thus a little superior.
But, as above, becoming a nuisance to others by volunteering too much information about oneself is such a frequent occurrence nowadays. As Theodore Dalrymple as written, in this example describing an encounter with a dying man:
There had been no protest, no self-pity, no demand for special attention. He understood that I commiserated with him, though I said nothing except that I was sorry to see that he was unwell, but he understood also that my commiseration was of a degree commensurate with the degree of our acquaintance, and that demanded no extravagant and therefore dishonest expression. By controlling his emotion, and his grief at his own imminent death, so that he should not embarrass me, he maintained his dignity, and self-respect. He retained a sense of social obligation, a vital component of what used to be called character, until the very end of his life. I mention these people not because they were in any way extraordinary – a claim they would never have made for themselves – but because they were so ordinary. They were living up to a cultural ideal that, if not universal, was certainly very widespread (as my [foreign] wife would confirm). It is an ideal that I find admirable, because it entails a quasi-religious awareness of the metaphysical equality of mankind: that I am no more important than you. This was no mere intellectual or theoretical construct; it was an ideal that was lived. Unlike the claim to rights, which is often shrill and is almost so self-regarding that it makes the claimant the center of his own moral universe, the old cultural ideal was other-regarding and social in nature. It imposed demands upon the self, not upon others; it was a discipline rather than a benefit. Oddly enough, it led to a greater and deeper contentment, capacity for genuine personal achievement, and tolerance of eccentricity and nonconformity than our present, more egotistical ideals.
Dalrymple has said [in the CBC Ideas podcast, 'The Ideas of Theodore Dalrymple'] that we treat emotion as type of pus that we feel must be released or else harm occurs. One ‘has to let one’s hair down’ etc; the abandonment of civilized restraint is popularly believed to be psychologically healthy.
3. Curiously enough, this meant that, with even the smallest unrestrained act, a man could make a nuisance of himself and thus appear to be an individual. Consider how at the 15th minute of Martin Scorsese’s Bob Dylan bio-documentary, No Direction Home (Part I) we get the interviews with Manchester’s 1966 youth, who are critical of Dylan’s turn to electric guitars and the apparent abandonment of his previous acoustic folk singing. The young men are thoughtful in their answers, but one says he thinks Dylan’s gone commercial, that he thinks ‘he’s prostituting himself’. ‘Prostituting himself’ is said as it comes to mind, said strongly into the camera’s lens, and when finished this boy smiles slightly, proud of his act of strong words. This is soon followed by a young man whose thoughts on it are equally considered but at 15:41 he says, ‘this I just can’t stick,’ and then catches himself with sudden upraised eyebrows and a muttered ‘excuse [me]‘, as if we was expecting a whack upside the head from a schoolmaster for his indiscretion.
Of course, in today’s world, such young men (and women) would be inarticulate and full of (probably drunken) swagger, wearing some fucking t-shirt with a message printed across it and saying whatever came to mind, and if it needed bleeping, so be it.
4. Of the likes of Byron: the so called romantic figure, the romantic genius. Richard Rorty, (an excerpt from an audio interview, played on Australian ABC’s Philosopher’s Zone in their tribute program after his death) said:
I think individual romantic figures like Coleridge, Emerson, Whitman, Nietzsche, Derrida, are people who are engaged in romantic projects of self-creation, and this means, in the case of thinkers and poets, finding words that have never been spoken before, words that have no public currency, no public resonance, though they may become the literal meanings, the common coin of future generations.
And in an interview conducted for the RU Sirius program in August 2005, Rorty said,
Novels certainly suggest new ways of doing things. Revolutionary political manifestos, poems, religious prophecies, they all stimulate the youth to make themselves different from their parents and thus produce a human future different from the human past.
He had made similar points before, and this can be found in his 1989 book, Contigency, Irony, and Solidarity (on page 7):
What the Romantics expressed as the claim that imagination, rather than reason, is the central human faculty was the realization that a talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change. What the political utopians since the French Revolution have sensed is not that an enduring, substratal human nature has been suppressed or repressed by ‘unnatural’ or ‘irrational’ social institutions but rather that changing languages and other social practices may produce beings of a sort that had never before existed.
The previous pages had this:
Europe did not decide to accept the idiom of Romantic poetry, or of socialist politics, or of Galilean mechanics. That sort of shift was no more an act of will than it was a result of argument. Rather, Europe lost the habit of using certain words and gradually acquired the habit of using others. As Kuhn argues in The Copernican Revolution, we did not decide on the basis of some telescopic observations … that the Earth was not the centre of the universe, that macroscopic behavior could be explained on the basis of microstructural motion, and that prediction and control should be the principal aim of scientific theorizing. Rather, after a hundred years of inconclusive muddle, the Europeans found themselves speaking in a way which took these interlocked theses for granted.
In other words, the contributions made by the 19th Century ‘romantic figures of self-creation’ was to add new, inspirational language to the discussion, through their novels, plays, and poems. In the case of Rimbaud, the package of consists in adding to the language and then the example of abandonment.
To be engaged in such a project, of discovering for oneself both a language and life, required defiance, and it created the contemporary social condition that John Ralston Saul describes in the chapter from which I took the excerpt above. JRS’ point is to say that the conditions of defiance in the 19th Century is far different from that of the late 20th and early 21st. This is because, as Rorty says on page 55 of the Contingency book:
The creation of a new form of cultural life, a new vocabulary, will have its utility explained only retrospectively. We cannot see Christianity or Newtonianism or the Romantic movement or political liberalism as a tool while we are still in the course of figuring out how to use it. For there are as yet no clearly formulatable ends to which it is a means. But once we figure out how to use the vocabularies of these movements, we can tell a story of progress, showing how the literalization of certain metaphors served the purpose of making possible all the good things that have recently happened. Further, we can now view all these good things as particular instances of some more general good, the overall end which the movement served. [...] Christianity did not know that its purpose was the alleviation of cruelty, Newton did not know that his purpose was modern technology, the Romantic poets did not know that their purpose was to contribute to the development of an ethical consciousness suitable for the culture of political liberalism. But we now know these things, for we latecomers can tell the kind of story of progress which those who are actually making progress cannot. We can view these people as toolmakers rather than discoverers because we have a clear sense of the product which the use of those tools produced. The product is us - our conscience, our culture, our form of life. Those who made us possible could not have envisaged what they were making possible, and so could not have described the ends to which their work was a means. But we can.
JRS’ point in this chapter is to critique how our culture which supposedly privileges romantic rebellion, is in fact conformist. As he says, closing the section from which the excerpt is taken: ‘Today’s individualism can’t really be compared to all this existential activity. Is there a relationship between frontiersman and the self-pampering modern dentist? Between the French Legionnaire and the downhill-skiing Porsche driver? Between the responsible citizen of a secular democracy and the executive cocaine sniffer? All these people were and are engaged in a form of defiance. But there does not appear to be much room for comparison. The phenomena belong to separate worlds.’
The world that we belong to has been created by the example of the 19th Century Romantics, but we do not carry on their legacy. Rather (as a society) we’ve found new ways to conform, ways which we aren’t fully conscious, or understanding of. In the process, we have now generally become more obnoxious, since our defiance has become normalized. We’ve become nuisances to one another, without having experienced the peace of mind that comes from minding our own business. Within this circumstance their is still a need for individuals-who-wish-to-do-so to act out in ‘romantic projects of self-creation’ yet one hopes that they strive to create a new language, rather than learn to speak an already established one.
Therefore hipsters, shave your mustaches.
Rebbecca Young had this in her Facebook, and I’ve decided to fill it out too:
Single or Taken: single
Happy about that: not really
Siblings: a sister
Eye color: brown
Height: 5′11
Can you make a dollar in change right now?: yes considering I’m at my desk and my change jar is to my right.
FAVORITES
Kind of pants: I don’t even know how to describe pants
Number: 15 comes to mind
Animal: nothing comes to mind. Oh wait, maybe bears. Also I currently have a thing for eagles but that’s only because of a recent read novel.
Drink (non alcoholic): water
Sports: none
Month: October
Juice: Orange
Favorite cartoon character: Bugs Bunny maybe. Cartman from South Park comes to mind too.
HAVE YOU EVER…..?
Given anyone a bath?: No
Bungee Jumped? : No
Made yourself throw-up?: No
Eaten a dog: Only hot dogs
Loved someone so much it made you cry?: yes if you mean from heartbreak
Played truth or dare?: yes
Been on a plane?: yes
Came close to dying?: not really
Been in a sauna?: I don’t think the ones at the community pool counts, so no, but yes if they do.
Been in a hotub?: yes
Swam in the ocean?: yes
Fallen asleep in school?: yes
Ran away?: no
Broken someone’s heart?: I really don’t think so. But maybe. I wouldn’t know.
Cried when someone died?: yes
Cried in school?: Yes. Elementary school sucked that fucking much.
Fell off your chair?: yes
Sat by the phone all night waiting for someone to call?: Maybe back in the mid-90s, but certainly not recently.
Saved MSN conversations?: Yes
Saved e-mails?: All the time
Used someone?: I would have to say yes.
Been cheated on?: I don’t think so.
WHAT IS…
your good luck charm?: I don’t have one.
your new favorite song?: ‘Music is my hot hot sex’ by Cansei de ser sexy
beside you?: tape dispenser, swiss army knife, desktop clutter to right. book shelves, printer, window to my left
last thing you ate?: apple muffins
What kind of shampoo/conditioner do you use?: anti-dandruff stuff
EVER HAD…
Chicken pox: yes
Sore Throat: yes
Stitches: yes
Broken a bone: no
DO YOU…
Believe in love at first sight?: yes
Have a Long distance relationship?: no
Like school?: no
Who was the last person that called you?: the girl from the agency
Who was the last person you slow danced with?: It’s been too many years for me to remember that.
Who makes you smile the most?: Danielle Williams
Who knows you the best?: Maybe Danielle? But I don’t feel well known by anyone at all.
Do you like filling these out: I’m doing it aren’t I?
Do you wear contact lenses or glasses?: both
Do you like yourself: yes
Do you get along with your family?: yes
ARE YOU…
Suicidal? : no
What did you do yesterday: not much. today was more productive
Gotten any awards?: yes
What car/truck do you wish to have?: none
Where do you want to get married?: I don’t really go for marriage stuff.
Good driver?: yes
Good Singer?: no
THIS OR THAT..
Scary or Funny Movies?: hate scary, funny: Big Leibowski comes to mind. There are others of course, but this is my favorite.
Chocolate or Vanilla? : chocolate
Root beer or Dr.Pepper? : root beer
Skiing or Boarding?: neither
Summer or Winter?: this year it’s winter
Silver or Gold? : sometimes silver, gold’s got something going on to, but for the most part I find the whole affection for such metals absurd.
Diamond or Pearl?: neither
Sprite or 7up? : they’re the fucking same
Coffee or Sweet tea? : coffee
Are you oldest, middle or youngest? : oldest
TODAY DID YOU…
Talk to someone you liked: no
Buy something: no
Get sick?: no
Talked to an ex? : no
miss someone?: no
LAST PERSON WHO…
Slept in your bed?: me
Saw/heard you cry?: no one
Made you cry? : i don’t really remember crying stuff. My Dad though comes to mind
Went to the movies with?: I think that must have been Ed, back in February.
Ever been in a fight with your pet?: no pets
Been to Mexico?: no
Been to Canada?: live there
Been to Florida? : no
RANDOM…
do you own a lava lamp?: no
How many remote controls are in your house?: More than I can think of
What was your last dream about?: Not sure about last night, but a couple of nights ago I dreamt I was getting arrested at a Guantanmo Bay conference.
What book are you reading now?: more than I want to list here
Best feeling in the world?: orgasm
Future KIDS names?: Coco if it’s a girl, boy undecided
Do you sleep with a stuffed animal?: no
What’s under your bed?: papers
Favorite sports to watch?: none
Favorite Locations?: nothing comes to mind, ‘cept maybe some parks
Piercing/Tattoos?: no
Who do you really hate?: Members of the Bush Administration but upon them I wish peace (props to the metta meditation training).
Do you have a job?: not presently
Have you ever liked someone you didn’t have a chance with?: all the time
Are you lonely right now?: yes
Song that’s stuck in your head right now?: maybe the Hot Hot Sex one above
Have you ever played strip poker? no
Have you ever been on radio/TV?: yes
Ever liked someone, but thought they’d never notice you?: all the fucking time. in fact, related to your last question, I like someone right now who was on tv today.
Whats the first things you notice about the opposite sex (visual)?: if I’m behind them its the ass, from the front face
Are you too shy to ask someone out?: not if I’ve been drinking
Butter, Plain or Salted popcorn?: butter and salted, but only when I indulge
Dogs or cats?: dogs
Favorite Flower?: hibiscus maybe?
Do you like to travel by plane as opposed to car?: no
How many pillows do you sleep with?: three
How long did it take you to do this survey?: I didn’t keep count
Worth quoting in full (after all, it is a press release) with emph mine:
What’s in a name? Initials linked to success, study shows (Link)
Do you like your name and initials? Most people do and, as past research has shown, sometimes we like them enough to influence other important behaviors. For example, Jack is more likely to move to Jacksonville and marry Jackie than is Philip who is more likely to move to Philadelphia and marry Phyllis. Scientists call this phenomenon the “name-letter effect” and argue that it is influential enough to encourage the pursuit of name-resembling life outcomes and partners.
However, if you like your name too much, you might be in trouble. Leif Nelson at the University of California, San Diego and colleague Joseph Simmons from Yale University, found that liking your own name sabotages success for people whose initials match negative performance labels.
In their first study, Nelson and Simmons investigated the effect of name resemblance on batters’ strikeouts. In baseball, strikeouts are recorded using the letter ‘K.’ After analyzing Major League Baseball players’ performance spanning 93 years, the researchers found that batters whose names began with ‘K’ struck out at a higher rate than the remaining batters. “Even Karl ‘Koley’ Kolseth would find a strikeout aversive, but he might find it a little less aversive than players who do not share his initials, and therefore he might avoid striking out less enthusiastically,” write the authors.
In a second study, the researchers investigated the phenomenon in academia. Letter grades are commonly used to measure students’ performance, with the letters ‘A,’ ‘B,’ ‘C’ and ‘D’ denoting different levels of performance. Nelson and Simmons reviewed 15 years of grade point averages (GPAs) for M.B.A. students graduating from a large private American university.
Students whose names began with ‘C’ or ‘D’ earned lower GPAs than students whose names began with ‘A’ or ‘B.’ Students with the initial ‘C’ or ‘D,’ presumably because of an unconscious fondness for these letters, were slightly less successful at achieving their conscious academic goals.
Interestingly, students with the initial ‘A’ or ‘B’ did not perform better than students whose initials were grade irrelevant. Therefore, having initials that match hard-to-achieve positive outcomes, like acing a test, may not necessarily cause an increase in performance. However, after analyzing law schools, the researchers found that as the quality of schools declined, so did the proportion of lawyers with name initials ‘A’ and ‘B.’
The researchers confirmed these findings in the laboratory with an anagram test. The result of the test confirmed that when people’s initials match negative performance outcomes, performance suffers. These results, appearing in the December issue of Psychological Science, provide striking evidence that unconscious wants can insidiously undermine conscious pursuits.
###
Author Contact: Leif Nelson ldnelson@ucsd.edu
Psychological Science is ranked among the top 10 general psychology journals for impact by the Institute for Scientific Information. For a copy of the article “Moniker Maladies: When Names Sabotage Success” and access to other Psychological Science research findings, please contact Catherine West at (202) 783-2077 or cwest@psychologicalscience.org.
The Rady School of Management at UC San Diego educates global leaders for innovation-driven organizations. A professional school within one of the top-ranked institutions in the U.S. for higher education and research, the Rady School offers a Full-Time MBA program, a FlexMBA program for working professionals, undergraduate and executive education courses. Our lineage includes 16 Nobel Laureates (former and current faculty) and eight MacArthur Foundation award recipients. The Rady School at UC San Diego transforms innovators into business leaders.
Comments: I’m thankful that the author of this press-release took the time to explain letter grades to me, and thought it was interesting that students with initials ‘a’ and ‘b’ did not perform better than students with grade-irrelevant initials, which is only the entire rest of the alphabet. This alone seems to make such a correlation absurd.
The only reason I’d understand having the scale explained is to account for the international audience, but then again, this is written in English, so it’s not like there are a ton of Chinese out there who suddenly know about how North American grading works. For the Europeans, I imagine they’ve watched enough American movies and television to already be familiar with the system.
Is the argument then that the increased ’slightly less’ performance of the world’s Cynthia Donaldsons, Charles Davies’, Duncan Camerons is based partially on their names? So you’re saying that the reason Albert Burns got an 80, whereas David Connors got a 78 is because of their names?! Is this is why Cory Doctorow believes in ‘anti-copyright policies’!?
And this from a school that considers itself an educator of global leaders! No wonder the world is so fucked up. For one thing, such a study takes for granted a measurement of success which is itself a social construction dating back a century and out-of-step with the needs of present society. For example I imagine that to graduate with top marks from an MBA school you’d need to do rather poorly in the ethics department, especially environmental ethics. Failing the Humanities would also help, since at no point should you consider your employees as human beings desiring to live full lives. They must be refered to as ‘human resources’ (which would have served as a perfectly adequate term for slavery). Their natural desire to be as richly compensated as your gang at the top of the hierarchy must be kept in check and exploited for ’superior job performance’.
The fact that they felt the need to explain to us the letter-grade system seems to be evidence of an inability to imagine another, from which the ethical disasters of capitalism naturally follow. Further, the awarding of the marks leading to grades is mostly arbitrary, and dependent on many factors, including the fact that teachers are as biased as any other human being. So Connor gets 77 while James gets 80 because the teacher likes James more and gave a slightly higher mark to his answers over Connor, who doesn’t say a lot in class.
This study is trying to suggest that Connor, Cory, Charles, Cynthia, Duncan, David, etc, have an ‘unconscious attachment’ to their initials and are thus sabotaging their ’success’ in order to see it written on their tests as a reward counterbalancing the anguish of feeling like a failure. Not to mention the subsequent mockery from the class’ ’successful’ students (a mockery which is ‘unconsciously’ endorsed by the teacher since schools are supposed to help establish the pecking order, so that the authors of this press-release and study get sorted by high grades into university; then onto Masters and PHD programs and are then able to conduct such stupid studies open to such easy mockery).
As for the quoted baseball example, it is equally absurd and subject to the same critique offered above.
In my arbitrary grading system, based on my measurements of success, this study gets an F. Or, no, no, I’ll make the system so that L and N are the lowest grades, and J isn’t much higher, to make it fit with Leif Nelson’s and Joseph Simmons’ thesis.
It’s not so simple as saying we have something called computers which are connected to a network of wires. They’d be like, what? Our intuitive understanding of the Internet comes from our understanding of things like photographs, phones, and television.
So, Galileo walks into a bar…
First, we learned of a way to preserve the image projected by a lens.
Then we discovered that many such images, seen quickly in succession, would appear to move.
Then we harnessed the power of lightning. We learned it was a type of liquid which we could transmit things through, like the way sound can travel great distances in bodies of water. Just as water can become a part of the air through boiling, so too could the liquid of lightning become part of the air, and we found a way to take our images, which when strung together and looked at quickly would appear to move, and we turned them into air, so that people with boxes all over the world could see these moving images. These boxes were really just fat framed piece of glass, all the parts making it work residing inside. It would just run through the images we had beamed through the air using electricity. We also found a way to document sound, and so when we synced up the sounds to the moving images, it looked like the people were as alive as they appear to us now.
This was about seventy years after we learned of a way to transmit voices using the power of lightning through wires which we strung between cities and homes in a vast fisherman’s web of connections.
(// Q: But why explain TV?
A: Because you need to get them to imagine things moving on glass screens.)
So, we’d found a way to make things move on pieces of glass, using the power of lightning. And we had this network of lines through which we could talk to one another. It took some work but we found a way to hook up the two, and so in the eventually we had these pieces of framed super-glass hooked up to this network, and the glass displays whatever we want on it - printing type, paintings, our mechanic images so described above (which we call ‘photographs’ which is just a pretentious was of saying ‘light drawing’). They are like windows only we can chose what to see through them.
All the world’s a stage, and all of its art has become set design.
