Austin Kleon

THE GREATEST LOVE STORY OF THE 20TH CENTURY

Except for Reese Witherspoon’s performance, I thought WALK THE LINE could have been a made-for-TV movie, and I wondered why we needed it, anyways, with such great documentation of the Man In Black already: the autobiography, Cash’s video for “Hurt“, and especially Sarah Vowell’s radio essay, “The Greatest Love Story of the Twentieth Century,” about the song, “Ring Of Fire,” and Cash and June Carter’s relationship. (They essay starts 47 minutes into show.)

In this song, to compare love to fire isn’t just the music sexy/heat cliche like you give me fever, or, hunka-hunka burnin’ love, or, it’s gettin’ hot in here. This is fire as in brimstone. Old time religion. Written by the daughter of a people who believe in the eternal flames of hell. June Carter was coveting her neighbor’s spouse, which meant she was breaking one of the Ten Commandments. Loving Johnny Cash was a sin. And for her, the wages of sin were death. A death in which the sinner spent all eternity as nothing more than kindling. When June Carter admitted to herself that she loved Johnny Cash, it is, in a small country and western love song way, not unlike the moment Huck Finn resolves to help the slave Jim escape, even though he’s been told that doing so would be wrong. Alright then, he says, I’ll go to hell.

When you’re getting married, you’re looking around for models. Good examples. Blueprints that you can embellish.

The girls we are going to marry sat around the table, drinking beer, and one of them said, “How come in all these movies you see these artists and musicians leave their first wives after they get famous? Then they meet their soulmate and live happily ever after! The first wife never makes it. It’s scary.”

And I thought about it. Of most my heroes. John Lennon did that. Ray Carver did that. Johnny Cash did that.

And I thought about what I could learn. Other than, people change. I focused on that happy ending. On finding a woman who not only takes care of your soul, but challenges your mind. Your partner and your equal…

THE SCIENCE IN FICTION

I’m such a dunce when it comes to Science Fiction. But lately I’ve found that reading the NY Times science pages–or books on String Theory or The Singularity–gives me so many more ideas for stories and comics. Why is this?

Then I came across a great Vonnegut essay about science fiction. He says the best way to get labelled a science fiction writer “is to notice technology”:

The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown suit in the city. Colleges may be to blame. English majors are encouraged, I know, to hate chemistry and physics, and to be proud because they are not dull and creepy and humorless and war-oriented like the engineers across the quad.

He came into science fiction by accident, observing the small-town GE plant he worked in, full of machines. “I supposed that I was writing a novel about life,” he writes, “about things I could not avoid seeing and hearing in Schenectady, a very real town, awkwardly set in the gruesome now.”

WHEN YOU CAN LIVE FOREVER, HOW LONG WILL YOU WANT TO LIVE?

singularity.gif

On Don’s recommendation, I’m reading Ray Kurzweil’s book, THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR, which is all about the exponential growth of technology, and humans transcending their biology. Here’s a good beginning essay on the Law of Accelerating returns to give you a feel for the book. I can’t read the book without thinking about Terminator 2. these are my notes.

Also: the Future of Western College is uncertain. But based on the the Provost’s Report, it don’t look good.

And: is religious belief a function of evolution? I’ve always thought, and this guy does too, that if there is an eternal heaven where we can live forever in tranquility, it probably resembles something more like a hell.

Eternity is a long, long time, you know.

I CAN’T GO ON, I MUST GO ON

Suggested steps for dealing with the upcoming apocalypse:

  1. Build up your hatred of fossil fuels and the religious right: “The precedents of past leading world economic powers show that blind faith and religious excesses — the rapture seems to be both — have often contributed to national decline, sometimes even being in its forefront.”
  2. Curl into the fetal position with a Harpoon Hibernian Ale.
  3. Listen to some free Stanford lectures on stress.
  4. Read some Kochalka in italian. Listen to the “Hockey Monkey” EP. Dream about American Elf, Book two.
  5. Take solace in the fact that we are not alone. Technology harnessed by UFOs could one day solve the world’s energy problems and save the world…ha!

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