An architecture for art
2024-07-21 17:02:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
cat << EOF
I was very taken by a recent Keen On podcast episode featuring writer Andrew O'Hagan where they discuss his recent novel Caledonian Road. It made it into this week’s newsletter, being quite a major influence on the theme.
I've been wondering what makes these sorts of rather grandiose works of art possible. Here are some of the questions I’ve been wondering about:
- What architectures are needed in society to study and create these types of books / collections of stories?
- Are some societies more well organised or pre-disposed to being documented or novelised into fictional stories?
- Is there an observation problem where the observer affects the story they are documenting?
- Are some societies purposely setup to make them difficult to novelise?
Also extrapolating somewhat on yesterday’s post about Rogan’s secret to making cool businesses, I wonder if some of these ideas are something you can apply at a city level. I suppose people do think about such things, though I'm not sure how comfortable I am with life being engineered at this level.
How do you even do that without seeming like senator Palpatine from Star Wars?
Maybe these sorts of questions are things we should be thinking about given that so many things these days appear fake. Catcher in the Rye seems a bit quaint these days.
I think it’s worth noting that for whatever reason, there was a distinct surge of "spiritual push back" from the world around me, in the form of apparently random No! harrasment and apparently accidental chair bumping, as I put the finishing touches to this blog post, from the mostly university students folks that surround me where I am writing this post.
Oh, and some 'you dog' calls from people walking by too!
Proving once again, that for the perpetraitors, harrassment is similar to the tag line of a certain brand of crisps that will remain unmentioned here to avoid any repercussions that might occur:
"Once you pop you can’t stop".
Writing that last paragraph was 10X harder than the rest of the article for some bizare reason. Anyway, nothing to see here, please move along...I am but an unfunny tennis ball.