Stories & Soliloquies

Stories & Soliloquies
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  • Tag: ephemerality

    • The Ephemerality of Reality and the Permanence of Appearance

      Posted at 12:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on October 22, 2014

      The inspiration for this post was a much longer, more detailed paper I wrote as part of an undergraduate course on Medieval and Renaissance philosophy, which later I revised into my graduate school application writing sample.

      1280px-Última_Cena_-_Da_Vinci_5

      The first time I saw Da Vinci’s last supper, I admit, I didn’t understand the fuss. Of course, what I was looking at was a grainy photograph on a web site, and not the real thing. I saw that it was beautiful, and that it was interesting, but as I was not at the time terribly interested in Renaissance painting, I couldn’t see how it differed much from other works in quality and magnitude. However, the first time I saw the original in Milan, I felt something much more powerful. Perhaps it was my relatively new interest in the Renaissance – it was first time I’d seen something so large and so famous and so old in person – that prompted this strong reaction, but in the presences of the painting, I nearly fell to my knees.

      The rest of my short trip to Italy took me to Florence, where I saw Botticellis and Michelangelos and Donatellos up close. I walked the secret passageway of Medicis, the Vasari Corridor, and saw where Machiavelli lived. There was one central theme to my trip: I fell in love with the Renaissance when I saw it in person. When I saw the originals.

      But these weren’t really originals, of course – they were representations of either real physical things or imagined phenomena, interpreted through the mind of the artists. And because images and stories are reconstructive devices, when ephemeral reality fades, the appearance of the event takes over and replaces it. When we step into an artist’s interpretation of an origin, we don’t just see the representation of some reality; we see that reality as it appears to one particular person – and that tells us at least as much about the artist’s perspective as it does anything else.

      We don’t just want any depiction of the Last Supper, we want to see how Da Vinci imagined it. When it comes to art, we want the original replica so that we can get as close as possible not just to the original experience of something – we want to experience it as a genius would.

      Posted in The Waste Book | 9 Comments | Tagged appearance, art, da vinci, ephemerality, painting, renaissance
    • The Ephemerality of Sand Castles

      Posted at 11:45 am by Michelle Joelle, on August 22, 2014

      Last winter I posted some thoughts on the ephemerality of gingerbread houses (and snowmen). The summer equivalent, the sand castle, is even more temporary. Its such an interesting thing to do – you go into the process knowing full well that what you build will not last, and then you’re still a bit sad when it gets destroyed. But I suppose that’s sort of the fun, once you embrace it.

      For our first sand castle attempt this summer, we built a miniature Viking settlement, loosely based on the finds at L’Anse Aux Meadows in Newfoundland.

      IMG_3134

      But it was quickly trodden over by an adorable toddler the minute we looked away. Alas.

      So we built our next creation with destruction in mind: a fortress guarded with look outs and two concentric walls. We stood guard, protecting it from adorable toddlers and curious puppies and persistent seagulls.

      IMG_3174

      And we faced it out to sea, leaving it’s only open doors facing the water.

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      So that the tide could rush in easily and wash it away, when the time came.

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      It just somehow seemed more satisfying than letting it be destroyed by people. I’m not sure why.

      Posted in The Waste Book | 12 Comments | Tagged beach, ephemerality, photography, sandcastles, summer
    • The End of Paper Media?

      Posted at 11:45 am by Michelle Joelle, on July 23, 2014

      As a follow up to my post on why I’m probably not going to get a Kindle, I wanted to suggest a couple of interesting WordPress posts that showed up in my feed last week, as if in answer to my stubborn refusal to let go of physical books.

      The first is from the excellent blog Natural Zero, which covers a variety of topics, titled “Is the Print Media Dead?“. In it, Mae suggests that the real difference between print and digital media is the dichotomy between permanence and ephemerality. It’s an interesting meditation about how we treat things that are printed in books with an almost exalted reverence, as if publishing = truth. Things that appear online are often taken with a grain of salt, but in a book? When The Lord of the Rings was first translated into a variety of European languages, one country tried to publish an introduction to the book that contained innumerable falsehoods. Luckily, Tolkien was able to persuade the publishers to rethink their fiction, but if he hadn’t been successful, that’s information that anyone could rattle off and back up with a print citation. Scary stuff.

      In that case, the grain of salt that comes with an order of digital media is probably a good thing – it pushes people to find multiple sources for information, decreasing trust. But it comes at a price. Knowledge becomes a slippery fish, impossible to grasp with any solidity. As Mae puts it:

      Magazines and newspapers are meant to be more ephemeral; they’re constantly updating and the latest editions have a shelf life of maybe a month or two, or maybe less than a day. That’s where the “death” of print is going to be felt the most. For other print products, we’re still going to see a decrease. But print isn’t dead; it’s just shifting into a more novel form of media.

      I’m still musing over whether I like this or not.

      The second article is from MJ Wright’s blog, called “How to Win with Writing’s Digital Revolution” (and this is another excellent, excellent blog to check out). This piece offers a more moderate view than you typically see in article like this, and is in that way kind of radical in its rationality. Digital media isn’t necessarily going to steamroll over print books, nor is it just a passing fad. We don’t have to pick sides and adopt the mindset of a seasoned dodgeball player.

      Instead, he suggests that the two can coexist peacefully, and we can all benefit from both.

      Conceptually, we’re looking at complementary channels of communication; and we need to develop a mind-set that says ‘publishing’ means ‘publishing by any medium’. I can envisage buyers wanting to enjoy print but still buy an e-edition to have convenience on the move. Or an e-edition might offer additional content.

      I think most people work like this. I receive a few magazines in the mail and get others online. I read a lot of books in print, but am happy with PDFs for journal articles (although if I really like one, I do still print it out so I can mark it up by hand). I handwrite my notes on a first run, and then type them up into something sensible later.

      Perhaps we just have more tools now, and it would be best to use them all, rather than just picking one or the other. It’s easy to forget that the idea we have of books as a mainstream form of communication isn’t quite the entrenched tradition it seems. For most of our written history, books were rare. In another anecdote about Tolkien, The Lord of The Rings almost didn’t get published because there wasn’t enough paper readily available to print a book of that length in any great number. And that’s incredibly recent, historically speaking.

      Maybe I’ll get a Kindle after all!

      Posted in The Waste Book | 15 Comments | Tagged books, digital media, ephemerality, kindle, links, print media
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