More Miscellany from the Internet

First, Brian Neimeier discusses that "works of art last" - the second half of an old saying many of us, including me until recently, only knew as "life is short."

The equivalent Greek word is techne. That's a big clue that everybody before the Modern era would have put Michelangelo and Steve Jobs in the same general category. Both made stuff according to a standard.

That's really what writing is. A carpenter makes a birdhouse by putting wood, nails, and glue together in the right configuration. An author makes a book by doing the same thing with character, setting, and conflict.

The arbitrary split between fine arts like oil painting, sculpture, and literature and crafts like carpentry, plumbing, and coding is a Modern novelty. We take it for granted, but historically it's an anomaly based on largely unexamined assumptions.

Reading the previous two paragraphs may incite the knee-jerk response that broadly classifying authors alongside plumbers is materialist reductionism that sucks the soul out of writing.

Only if you think that plumbers don't have souls.

Second, Black Pilled shows us that the depravity and degradation of Hollywood is far older than we'd like to believe. Both why the Hayes code was put in place, and how it was broken through an "artistic" exploration of psychopathic behavior in "The Pawnbroker"

Incidentally, missed here is another meta-message. While there are few evil white people in the movie per se, every bad person here who's a minority is also shown to only be that way because of the extreme suffering they've gone through.

Third, a quick dissection of mommy/wine culture.

It's touched upon here, but I think bears underlining - leaving aside kids getting online to discover that mommy's been using them as a prop to attention-whore for positive attention, what happens when the kids see mommy posting on line about how they need a glass of wine to get through the stress of the day and their kids?

That problem, incidentally, extends well beyond simply wine culture, as a number of career minded women like to "joke" about how they were fun/etc. and are now only frazzled/boring/stressed out because of their kids/having kids.

Somehow, "you ruined my fun life" doesn't translate to "I love you" in my book. Nor does it translate to "grow up and be an adult and do cool stuff and take responsibility".