Brick Dust and Iron Birds
Jorge Otero-Pailos, The Ethics of Dust
Thanks to my friend David Michael I learned about the work of Ajene Williams, who’s an artist-in residence at the Sloss Metal Arts in my home town of Birmingham, Alabama. When Birmingham was a booming iron-and-steel town the Sloss Furnaces were burning all the time, but eventually they closed and sat silent for many years, rusting and rotting. But then they were brought back to life as a workshop and school for metalworking. Very cool indeed.
Zadie Smith:
I’m glad I’m not the reader I was in college anymore, and I’ll tell you why: it made me feel lonely. Back then I wanted to tear down the icon of the author and abolish, too, the idea of a privileged reader — the text was to be a free, wild thing, open to everyone, belonging to no one, refusing an ultimate meaning. Which was a powerful feeling, but also rather isolating, because it jettisons the very idea of communication, of any possible genuine link between the person who writes and the person who reads. Nowadays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own. To this end I find myself placing a cautious faith in the difficult partnership between reader and writer, that discrete struggle to reveal an individual’s experience of the world through the unstable medium of language. Not a refusal of meaning, then, but a quest for it.
- A lovely, curious, elliptical meditation on silkworms — among other things — by my former colleague Miho Nonaka.
- I’m pleased to see that my friend Austin Kleon has been reading Walker Percy. Some of you might also be interested in an old post of mine about Cudd’n Walker.
- In my book How to Think, my goal was to encourage my readers towards a thoughtful disposition rather than give them methodical guidance. But since my book came out, Walter Sinnot-Armstrong has published Think Again, which provides a lot of that step-by-step direction, and does so very well indeed. When I was giving a talk at Duke last year I met with Walter and his students, and I was pleasantly surprised at how neatly our books converged.
- Oh, to be an EGOT.
- Thanks to those of you who wrote since he last newsletter with feedback. I am not sure I managed to reply to everyone, so if I failed to get back to you, my apologies.
STATUS BOARD
- Work: Making up exams for both classes
- Music: J Dilla, Donuts (in commemoration of what would have been his 45th birthday on February 10)
- Reading: Zadie Smith’s wonderful essays (see above)
- Podcasts: 99% Invisible
- Food: Rufi’s Cocina (pictured above: Rufi’s amazing tacos al pastor)
- Drink: Still enjoying Aberlour 16