'Content'

Some time ago, one of my co-workers told me, as if he is doing me a big favor, that "you need to have your own opinions." Yeah, ok. I suppose he gets to judge whether an opinion is my 'own'?

This reminds me of a particular self-aggrandizing strand of make-believe: everything that is not one's own is bad.

That is to say, people conflate ownership and actual value, and give free pass to aggressively ignorant attitudes: "So long as the opinions are my own, who cares about the truth?"

Let go your earthly tether

In the episode The Metal Clan, an interesting work within a work appears:

出尘世羁绊,入虚无如风

Let go your earthly tether. Enter the void and become emptiness, like the wind.

Starving artist as an aesthetic and all round excuse for being an asshole

There was a time when artists and writers flocked to inexpensive cities to allow themselves the trials of making art over the trials of making a living. In North America today, the main site of literary activity or literary business – which more and more amount to the same thing – is Brooklyn. Yet it’s probably one of the toughest places for a writer to live cheaply and noodle about, wearing rags. What happens when artists gravitate to places where they can make art only with great financial effort; where writers have to be journalists, adjunct professors, or work in cafés to pay the rent, leaving little time to write their novel, while learning every few months that one of their herd has secured a six-figure advance for their first book? What do their relationships and values look like, and how do their love stories unfold? This is the world of Adelle Waldman’s first book.

 
Starving artist as an aesthetic and all round excuse for being an asshole