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#307 - Reileen the Armchair Scholar?
Apr. 16th, 2009 04:54 pmEvery time I think about how much I still have to learn about racism, sexism, sizeism, ablism, insert-ism-here, American government and politics, world politics, the environment, society, religion (my own and others), and so forth, I remind myself that all of the voices I admire on these topics have at least 10 to 30 years of life on me. I can only hope I'll be as awesomely smart and educated as them when I reach the age they are now. And that I can't be an expert on everything - I have to pick and choose my battles. At the same time, knowledge of one battle potentially informs knowledge of another battle, and so forth...
Of course, one must start somewhere. I am toying with the idea of setting up a semi-formal personal "lesson plan" for various topics, but I have horrible self-discipline, so while the idea sounds appealing, I fear it is merely a well-intentioned road to intellectual hell. Still, I think I need to find some way of retaining concrete bits and pieces of information that I pick up through my list of usual blogs and the things they link to. I'm good with getting the broader picture of things but horrible with picking through details, and if I'm to eventually dive into Topics Of Graver Note either here or elsewhere, I'm going to need facts. (Much as they may confuse me.) One possible solution I'm seeing with regards to how I organize the information I learn is to use my main topics of personal interest - Greek paganism, for example - as a way of framing and looking at other topics (i.e., feminism, sexism, and the environment being obvious ones for a follower of Artemis). This seems like one of those "duh" moments, but it doesn't hurt to concretize this somewhere.
Another thought: what I may -may - start doing is to practice speed reading through articles or blogposts (using methods outlined in The Complete Idiot's Guide to Speed Reading - yeah, yeah, I know) and, in a notebook set aside specifically for this purpose, writing down bits and pieces of what I can remember before going back and filling in the blanks. I barely keep up with the "daily pages" outlined in Julia Cameron's excellent The Artist's Way, though, so I can't imagine that this will go over well.
I don't know. I frequently feel like I don't have the intellectual capacity to comprehend most of this stuff. But I feel that this is something I must make myself figure out, as an artist with fingers in various creative pies, because that is the way to make what I do - something which is frequently seen as being superficial, superfluous, or otherwise unimportant - relevant to the greater world. I'm not necessarily talking about making overtly polemical or political art; that's not the type of person I am. But the things I learn about people, about society, about the world at large, will and do inform what I do and why I do it: how I decide to interact with the world.
-Reileen
no use in spending all that emotion when there's someone else to blame
Of course, one must start somewhere. I am toying with the idea of setting up a semi-formal personal "lesson plan" for various topics, but I have horrible self-discipline, so while the idea sounds appealing, I fear it is merely a well-intentioned road to intellectual hell. Still, I think I need to find some way of retaining concrete bits and pieces of information that I pick up through my list of usual blogs and the things they link to. I'm good with getting the broader picture of things but horrible with picking through details, and if I'm to eventually dive into Topics Of Graver Note either here or elsewhere, I'm going to need facts. (Much as they may confuse me.) One possible solution I'm seeing with regards to how I organize the information I learn is to use my main topics of personal interest - Greek paganism, for example - as a way of framing and looking at other topics (i.e., feminism, sexism, and the environment being obvious ones for a follower of Artemis). This seems like one of those "duh" moments, but it doesn't hurt to concretize this somewhere.
Another thought: what I may -may - start doing is to practice speed reading through articles or blogposts (using methods outlined in The Complete Idiot's Guide to Speed Reading - yeah, yeah, I know) and, in a notebook set aside specifically for this purpose, writing down bits and pieces of what I can remember before going back and filling in the blanks. I barely keep up with the "daily pages" outlined in Julia Cameron's excellent The Artist's Way, though, so I can't imagine that this will go over well.
I don't know. I frequently feel like I don't have the intellectual capacity to comprehend most of this stuff. But I feel that this is something I must make myself figure out, as an artist with fingers in various creative pies, because that is the way to make what I do - something which is frequently seen as being superficial, superfluous, or otherwise unimportant - relevant to the greater world. I'm not necessarily talking about making overtly polemical or political art; that's not the type of person I am. But the things I learn about people, about society, about the world at large, will and do inform what I do and why I do it: how I decide to interact with the world.
-Reileen
no use in spending all that emotion when there's someone else to blame
