Spinel sitting on the ground, chillaxin' in casual clothes which include big sneakers.

One of the most important lessons I ever learned about art was when I became a late addition to the editorial board for the literature part of my high school's lit/art magazine, which nobody ever read.

Because I realized after a couple of meetings that my moments of baffled distress during them were centering around a pattern of our votes electing by majority to reject most of the good, interesting stuff and agree to publish the very bland.

So I was looking around this room of people I mostly liked or respected if not both, trying to figure out what the fuck when there was no reasonable way of asking, until the day we by majority vote sent definitely the best thing submitted all year back pending 'revisions' which of course would not be made, because the poet would definitely either become demoralized or know for damn sure she was too good for our stupid journal. I have no idea which it was; it's a question of mindset, and the submissions were anonymous.

This good poem was rejected for two reasons, both of which were actually manifestations of it being good. One was that it had made a couple of the board uncomfortable--not by having any shocking subject material, mind, just by provoking emotions with unusual descriptive language and indirectness--and they'd transmitted that uneasiness throughout the group during discussion.

And the other, seized upon as an excuse in light of the first, was that by being complex in terms of both structure and notion it had drawn several of us in, interested enough to engage critically and respond in depth, and so we'd marked it up with lots of places we thought a word choice could have been a little stronger, a line break had been a little odd; ways we thought it could have been a more excellent version of the poem we perceived in it. None of them ways it was actually bad. Just places we felt it could have been better.

At the same meeting, we voted to accept a poem that was an utterly tepid rectangle of predictable nothing-in-particular, because no one could find anything in it to object to.

It wasn't good. It wasn't noticeably bad, either, though; it was one consistent level of mediocrity clear through, and thus no part of it stood out as a weakness, and therefore the committee found it more acceptable than the poem that was superior in every way, but which by being daring and interesting had left itself covered in vulnerable places.

The understanding I reached as a result of this experience was multi-layered and difficult to articulate, but the most important part, I think, to share is that the value and quality of a work are not, in fact, very well measured by how many negative things you can find to say about it.

What I tell my students is, “When I start arguing with your ideas, rather than correcting your facts, you know you’re doing something right.”

There’s another takeaway here:

Mediocrity sells.

Well, yes, that's a pretty blatant takeaway, but it is also Known; what this episode illuminated for me was the mechanism by which it sells.

The process by which a group of reasonably intelligent people who mostly have reasonably good taste can still wind up collectively favoring the weak and unremarkable art over the strong and complex.

Because it's not just dumb people with bad taste in decisionmaking positions, or the public Lowest Common Denominator barometer of interest, or cynical marketing teams with very low opinions of their audiences. Like, those for sure are things, but this tendency is also just...an emergent property of group decisionmaking.

One that will tend to crop up whenever it's not compensated for in some way. Committees tend toward the conservative by nature of their structure.

And there's a lot you can do with this knowledge, other than create works infused with your own cynical contempt for your imagined audience. (Seriously. Don't do that.)

What I think is the most important actionable point, which I highlighted above, is you can apply it to interpreting critique constructively, because constructive criticism is a two-player game.

I know a tendency in myself (heightened by why I realize in retrospect were my parents' truly terrible communication skills) and have seen it often in others to think of quality, improvement, and success in terms of the elimination of flaws; to see each individual shortcoming in a creation as a bite taken out of its ideal form, and thus a diminishment of its total value.

This idea is demoralizing, and makes it hard to take artistic risks whole-heartedly. And, especially combined with a defensive frame of mind, it tends to the encourage obsessive pursuit of erasing vulnerable spots as a measure of quality and worthiness. Which, in turn, leads to very poor art for a number of reasons.

The one we're focusing on here being that it becomes bland and characterless in the pursuit of a version of perfection that consists only in negative terms, as 'the inassailable.'

So: do not measure your work primarily by its count of flaws, or count any and every point on which it can be criticized as its ruination. That is not a reasonable measure of value.

A real thing should not be placed in competition against its imagined perfect self to determine its worth; among other reasons sometimes the perfect form of one thing is less impressive or useful or beautiful than a incomplete attempt at something else, and anyway if you already have one of the ideal thing you don't need a second. And if you only see each of them in terms of their distance from perfection that value is lost.

And while 'critical' analysis isn't the same thing as 'criticizing' they will often coincide, because the more invested someone is in a piece and the more points of mental engagement they have, the more likely they are to find something they want to push back at.

So sometimes an absolute storm of criticism mainly indicates 'this is interesting.'

First ape to go to the watering hole with a container and put some of the water in it so that they could drink more later without returning to the watering hole must have been lauded as a fucking genius.

Actually, as someone who used to study anthropology (albeit a very long time ago), I think it is generally accepted by now that the ability to Carry Containers Of Stuff is generally agreed to be one of the real tool-using leaps in human development, perhaps as important as fire. I mean, you'll get the impression that people studying early humans are basically spearhead experts, but that's just because spearheads don't decay. (And because for a long time people assumed that hunting was The Most Important Thing, which has a fascinating intersection with implicit bias and sexism and stuff, and yes I am still bitter at things like 2001 for popularizing the idea that the most important part of human evolution was the ability to bash the shit out of a thing/animal/person, but that's a whole other story.)

Carrying stuff is huge.

If you can put meat in a bag, you can carry more meat. If you can put something like nuts in a bag, then nuts abruptly become a food that you can bring back to the tribe or save for later and not a food that you're required to eat on the spot because they are tiresome and stupid to carry by hand. In both cases your ability to feed yourself and your tribe just got a whole fuck of a lot better.

If you can put your baby in a bag, you now have both your hands free to stick a spear into things, pick nuts, fish, dig tasty cicadas out of the ground, etc. Your ability to feed yourself and your tribe just got a whole fuck of a lot better, and so did your ability to defend yourself while you do it. (And let's face it, your babies were already getting downright ridiculous in terms of the time it takes them to be fully walking-ready, due to brain size and being essentially premature; inventing Multitasking With Baby is like, pure survival at this point, and your way to do that is to create a specialized bag.)

If you can put water in a bag (first water containers very well may have been animal bladders or stomachs, not pots) you can bring water to your sick tribe members and they have a much higher chance of recovering.

And then you have elaborations of the basic "thing that contains objects" idea. If you make an exceptionally loosely woven bag and put it in the water, you can on occasion finesse some fish into it. And then you have delicious fish. If you put yourself in a loose and flexible bag of animal skin, your tribe can operate in the cold better, which changes your entire migration pattern and opens up new environments to you. If you make a hard container and fill it with water and put it over your fire, you have invented a new type of cooking that unlocks whole new food types, such as vegetables that need softening in order for humans to eat them. (Of course at the same time your stomach is becoming steadily more dependent on being able to fuck with your food in this way, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing, because the less energy you spend on digestion, the more energy you have to spend on other things, like brains. And big brains are good for unlocking whole new levels of communication, allowing for fantastic new levels of foraging cooperation, passing knowledge through generations, mate selection, and even various sorts of mental recreation where you imagine something that you don't see, and then convey that to your fellow beings.)

Bags are important, is what I'm saying.

I love all of this but I am going absolutely FERAL over the correlation that clothes = person bag. Bc you're so right but I never woulda thought of it like that

i lost it at "put that baby in a bag bc its already taking a ridiculously long time to walk on its own goddamn"

Trump is a coward. A punk ass bitch. A lowlife.

Day 46– Great Gerudo Basin

Road trip! One’s sleep deprived, one’s haunted by ghosts, and one’s hungry.

(This totk rewrite au is called Familiar Familiar! It all starts when Zelda doesn’t get sent back in time and the butterfly effect devolved from there.)

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