I’ve recently joined the Cultural Strategies Initiative as a Fellow. It’s a relatively new organization that’s focused on building “cross-sector projects and knowledge that will help to illuminate and activate art’s role in saving the world.” No small ambitions here!

Anyhow, as a fellow I’ll be continuing my arts journalism work and undertake a new book project that I started on late last year. In this book I’ll be examining the ways that the arts are currently valued in the US and suggest an entirely new way of thinking about their value. No small ambitions here either…

What contradictions there are in the world.

Someone I care about very much is in a place that has been characterized by poverty, malnourishment, armed conflict, systematic rape, and years upon years of exploitation and oppression primarily by outsiders. And then there is this—the search for worlds and ideas far beyond ourselves.

This slideshow, combined with things I’ve been writing and thinking about lately, reinforced like nothing else for me that life is vast, beautiful, terrifying, confounding, and utterly incoherent.

Photo: Michael Benson/NASA/European Space Agency - Pictured: Jupter's Moon Europa floating in front of Jupiter's massive "Great Red Spot" storm system

“I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.”
—Georges Bataille

“That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise.”
—David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.”
—Gilbert K. Chesterton

For a few years now I've kept a running log of the books I've been reading, mainly for my own interest, but also as a means of recommending and discussing books with others.

Latest Title

Coming of Age: Growing up in the 21st Century, Studs Terkel (I just picked this up in the bargain section at St. Mark’s Bookshop and can’t believe I’ve never heard of it before. I love it.)

&

Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches, Anna Politkovskaya (I wanted to know more about her work and the stories she covered.)

along with a number of books on Buddhism & Meditation