beeker ideas

good grief

I think I'm late with this, but I just found what's been going on via here.

trains everywhere

Yesterday I had one of those lucky thought collisions.  The night before I'd started reading The Shock of the New (of which more later), and then in my Bloglines window in the morning I found Dan Hill's post on rail travel.  I love it when this happens. 

In one of the finest and most auspicious beginning of a book I've read, Robert Hughes talks about the way art struggled for adequate metaphors to express the experience of new technology at the turn of the 20th century, and the way it changed our view of the world. 

This is what he said about rail travel.

...certainly no painting of a conventional sort could deal with the new public experience of the late nineteenth century, fast travel in a machine on wheels.  For the machine meant the conquest of horizontal space.  It also meant a sense of that space which few people had experienced before - the succession and superimposition of views, the unfolding landscape in flickering surfaces as one was carried swiftly past it, and an exaggerated feeling of relative motion (the poplars nearby seeming to move faster than the church spire across the field) due to parallax.  The view from the train was not the view from the horse.  It compressed more motifs into the same time.  Conversely, it left less time in which to dwell on any one thing.

I wonder if that last bit is why we all find it so much easier to reflect on the general in a way we find valuable when we're on trains.  Maybe.

realists always sleep well

A while back I read an interview with a bike shop owner who'd been cannily planning his way under the radar of the predicted recession by making various changes to his offering. And he came out with this phrase that's stuck: 'realists always sleep well at night.' Not a particularly original one. But this was the first time I'd thought what the obvious implications of this are. That pessimists don't sleep well seems sad but probably true a lot of the time. But does it also mean optimists don't either. And wouldn't that be a lovely thing - maybe - optimistic insomnia?