In a vein closer to my more recent concerns (OK, obsessions), here's a clip from a review of Ziggy "Spider from Mars" Bauman's 2004 book, Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts, which just arrived in today's daily shipment from Amazon. It was on top of the other 4,000 books, or I wouldn't have found it till Spring.

"Once upon a time, Michelangelo was asked how he attained the unparalleled balance and beauty of his sculptures. His recorded answer: "Simple. You just take a slab of marble and cut out all the superfluous bits."

This Renaissance anecdote is related by Zygmunt Bauman near the outset of his new book Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts. It is presented by Bauman as an expression of the paradigmatic model of creation in the modern age, according to which the excision of wasteful material affords the formation of a more perfect whole. For Bauman, what characterizes the modern is the hubristic belief in the perfectibility of virtually everything through sheer human ingenuity and endeavor -- whether the raw material is a block of marble, a society of human beings, or an individual life.

The problematic complexity at the heart of Michaelangelo's paradigm becomes most apparent for Bauman in the particular mode of whittling down inherent to storytelling. For stories, by their very nature, never tell the whole story. That is, whatever resonance stories hold does not come of their exhaustive relation of facts or re-creation of events. Rather, stories gain their power in our lives by their considered and self-conscious illumination of some details and feelings at the expense of many others." [emphasis added]

from: Wasted Lives (book review) by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
source: Tikkun, 1 July 2004
via: Highbeam Research
Copyright © 2004 Tikkun Magazine

boy scavenging on a rubbish dump, Port au Prince, Haiti.
from the cover of Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts.