Do bodhisattvas need to tweet?
My disillusionment with the Dalai Lama started when he opened a Twitter account and peaked when he took to the stage with on-air bully Russell Brand. Label me uncool, but I don't think bodhisattvas need to tweet. A quick search for active Twitter accounts for Jordi Savall and Jonathan Harvey draws a blank. So, perhaps I am not so uncool after all.
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Comments
I follow this blog via twitter updates regarding posts. & as someone who is essentially isolated in my city from other classical music fans, twitter has at least given me the opportunity to network & discuss classical music with others irrespective of geographical (or even social perhaps) obstacles.
I've even found a bona-fide published composer to help me with my theory questions!
However, I agree, the DL's account was / is lame.
To constantly complain that twitter is full of lowest common denominator crap however simply suggests i think that you are following & listening to the wrong people.
What is the point after all of using twitter to reinforce opinions & ideas from the status quo of mainstream media? (music criticism or otherwise?) Although yes, many apparently do. There's no accounting for taste. Welcome to the real world. We are all looking for a seam of gold in a towering edifice of shite.
Not that it isn't prone to the occasional maverick salvo of irrationality & vitriol either. But then the voices of the marginalised (to whom many twitter at least gives a voice) aren't always going to be pleasant, sophistcated, nuanced, obligatory...
Accept twitter for what it is, & use it to your advantage if you can.
Stop trying to pave the road with leather, & put on a pair of shoes!
Although clearly one man's gold is another man's 'shite' (now, how did that expression recently become so ubiquitous, I wonder), I have some sympathy for Tim in his isolation. I am nigh on totally isolated in my town, which is in the Bible Belt -- 73% fundamentalist, biblical literalist, evangelical, and arch-conservative. But what I have trouble finding is intelligent, sustained conversation - in essence, dialectical - and Twitter is the very antithesis of that. Indeed, conversation of that nature is now harder to find in almost any context. The 'sound bite' we associate with television news has been joined by the 'word bite', and Twitter is both the exemplar and another promoter of that tendency. I am, of course, one of those 'hermits'. (-:
however the soundbyte is not without it's values if done well - be those values aesthetic or functional (i seem to recall a Charles Rosen discussion on romanticism & the fragment somewhere.. something else i discovered & read via twitter...),
& again, this blog is case in point, as primarily i use twitter as a vehicle to scan summaries of new content (or recommendations) from blogs or individuals (less commonly, organisations) who i know don't receive coverage of any sort in any mainstream broadcast media, which, thanks to the internet, i now rarely watch or listen to.
so essentially, "don't shoot the messenger", as ironically, it's your message that is also being delivered, for those concerned enough to listen to it.
personally, i find it something of a creative challenge to reduce as much content as i can to 140 characters. i have surprised myself (& others) on occasions with the power & impact & detail that can at times be conveyed.
anyway, this is a great blog (as we readers all know) so long may it reign, even if i find myself continually rolling my eyes at the anti-twitter salvos...
i wish there were other tools & processes in life that so easily lent themselves to redefinition, in an image & manner that best befitted the individual user.
@bloodymortimer
(sorry, poor attempt at humour, bob)
salams,
b.
In my view of the best aphorisms ever written is Cioran's:
"The more we try to wrest ourselves from our ego, the deeper we sink into it"
The idea that you can escape from or transcend the self is an illusion, a false salvation, and so at the heart of Buddhism is a lot of rampant egomania. Twitter being a vulgar platfrom for the inaities of ego, it's little wonder the DL is there.
Ironically the very people best disposed to write well on there are also the least likely to do so. A Pascal or Cioran would run a mile. Alain de Bottom [sic], however...
Bob, seeing as you are a Francophile and a lover of esoterica, have you come across EM Cioran? The English translations of his work are unsurpassable, and the French themselves consider him to be the greatest prose stylist in their language (remarkable considering he hated French and it was his 3rd language!)
I would recommend "The Trouble with Being Born" and "Tears and Saints". The former for searing, distilled and stunningly poetic insights into the self, existence, eastern religions, every day life etc and the latter for the relationship between music, tears and sainthood.
There would be some seriously interesting and far ranging 'paths' to come from Cioran...