Joseph

Marshall McLuhan was spot on here -"people prefer bad news to good news, because bad news provides them with a "survival emotion" while good news threatens them with change

It is the story that makes the difference.

So, it’s very easy not to know north from south because it all looks the same, the ice and the overcast sky. And he said, “Well, you know, it’s just now,” he might have been in his fifties, “it’s just now that I think I begin to understand the ice.” And he’d been living there all his life. Then he said, “And now I’m really too old to hunt.”

“An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer,”

If you want everybody to have the same truth, or to believe in the same things, then you’re talking about the loss of tension and the collapse of the world.

\Vhat is different is the way they use and experience time. For the Tiv, time is like a capsule. There is a time for visit-ing, for cooking, or for working; and when one is in one of these times, one does not shift to another.

Economic miracles stem from discovery, not repeating tasks at greater speed.

Fiction’s abyss is si-lence, nada. Whereas nonfiction’s abyss is To-tal Noise, the seething static of every particu-lar thing and experience, and one’s total free-dom of infinite choice about what to choose to attend to and represent and connect, and how, and why, etc.

I know that many of these virtues have to do with the ways in which the pieces handle and respond to the tsunami of available fact, context, and per-spective that constitutes Total Noise. This claim might itself look slippery, because of course any published essay is a burst of infor-mation and context that is by definition part of 2007’s overall... See more