tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-58289054012141544572024-02-18T23:09:03.561-05:00belᴀtɘdpupilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12085197110139248913noreply@blogger.comBlogger85125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5828905401214154457.post-13198858832658866312021-03-06T20:42:00.001-05:002021-03-07T20:33:22.200-05:00character limit<p>A humble request.</p>
<p>Before you invite me to zoom, ask whether it could be a phone call.</p>
<p>Before you call me, ask whether it could be a text.</p>
<p>Before you text me, ask whether a DM would be better.</p>
<p>Before you slide into my DMs, ask whether email might be more considerate, in this case.</p>
<p>Before you send an email, do you really need the post office to survive?</p>
<p>Before you mail me a letter finally, ask yourself,</p>
<p>How treacherous are our words?</p>
<p>Despairing, come to where I am; take my face in your hands.</p>pupilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12085197110139248913noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5828905401214154457.post-6243927795108015472017-01-25T10:32:00.000-05:002017-01-25T10:45:06.202-05:00parental RealpolitikEn route to school today: According to my second grader, the worst thing about the president is that he puts his name prominently on buildings and "wants to name all the streets with his name."<br />
<br />
"He doesn't know," she continues, "that everyone dies."<br />
"Or at least," I offer, "he doesn't seem to care about anyone but himself."<br />
A pause, then: "I can't wait until Donald Trump dies," she says, not without animosity.<br />
<br />
Friends, I did not try to chasten her sentiment or provide some platitude about ill will. I honored the feeling of an other – her – made space for it in the morning air. Fight me.pupilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12085197110139248913noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5828905401214154457.post-32273824272191499792016-12-31T16:08:00.000-05:002017-02-03T14:13:37.981-05:00empireDenver. I am reading <i>The Man Without Qualities</i> on an elevated glass walkway between airport concourses. Behind me: terrifyingly flat, endless plains. I am sitting with my back to them so that, when I look up from my book, I see instead the snowy scapes of the Rockies, interrupted periodically by the silhouette of a jet taking off in the direction from which I've just come.<br />
<br />
I am really hungry but cannot decide which food to try to eat; I approach the counter and recoil. Or, between chapters, I wander from one identical bookstore to the next – in which the only books on offer are "now a major motion picture," and the magazines are differentiated by the degree of shrillness with which they celebrate capitalism (on a scale of <i>Economist</i> to <i>Inc.</i>), perhaps with some firearms and naked women on the top shelf, for our more direct patrons. The bathrooms at the end of this walkway double as tornado shelters. My friend and former roommate <a href="https://verspaetet.blogspot.com/2012/10/heterotopia.html">OF</a> lives and practices architecture in this city, but for some reason I have never visited...always coming and going from coast to coast. Someday, maybe.<br />
<br />
Today I read and wait for the proverbial connecting flight that will plug me back into some reality – a quality (speaking of Eigenschaften) that this walkway lacks: in the nonplace of the airport, it is even more in-between, more <i>non-</i>. Perfect for disappearing into a long novel about civilization devouring itself.<br />
<br />
In a bid to loosen Leo Fischel's daughter Gerda's attachment to Hans Sepp and his German nationalist and anti-semitic circle (at the desperate request of Gerda's mother Klementine), Ulrich visits Gerda and relates a (spurious) history of the earth's moon, which, he finally reveals, has no truth to it; in fact, he says, "the moon isn't really coming any closer to the earth."<br />
<br />
Last year at this time I was finishing <i>IQ84</i> in the <a href="https://verspaetet.blogspot.com/2015/04/madame-bovary-cest-moi.html?showComment=1451445232975#c5204019666198811101">Dallas airport</a>, under more or less the same circumstances – a chrono-architectural link forms, not unlike the one between 1984 and IQ84; superimposition superimposes itself as mood. Perhaps, as Philip K. Dick would have it, "the empire never ended."<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/uOcf_KoCBDE?rel=0" width="560"></iframe>pupilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12085197110139248913noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5828905401214154457.post-35882149713356362942016-11-19T13:22:00.000-05:002016-11-21T02:46:20.293-05:00normalicy and Ausnahmezustand<blockquote> VIII<br />
<br />
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are "still" possible in the twentieth century is <i>not</i> philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: right;">—Benjamin, <i>On the Concept of History</i> (1940)<a href="#FN">†</a></div></blockquote><br />
On October 16, 1996, Carolyn Forché gave a reading at my alma mater. By then I was two months gone, living in New York, but a certain friend secured a cassette recording for me and an autographed copy of Forché's indispensable <i>The Angel of History</i>. Over time, and repeated listenings, I adopted as my own an interstitial moment in the reading, appropriated even its diction and syntax, and sowed it in my mind like a land mine. And over the years, I would dig it out and gently unwrap it on the bar where I was drinking, say, and discussing the issues of the day with a friend.<br />
<br />
Here is Forché's <b>set-up</b>:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Wisława Szymborska just won the Nobel Prize for Literature. She's 73 years old. She's one of the few women to win it. It's very nice that she won it. It would be nice if all of us could learn how to say her name, but it's hard, you know. She's in here; I'm very proud to say that Wisława Szymborska is in <i>Against Forgetting</i>. Because the Communists thought that her writing was too obscure – and morbid, they said – so they banned her. And I will read you a poem of hers so you can judge for yourself if you think that it's too obscure.</blockquote><br />
Here is her <b>charge</b> –<br />
which I recall with unreal lucidity bursting in my brain as Amerika responded to 9/11<br />
and as media endlessly circled the idea of A Return To Normalcy<br />
(and as I debated whether "normalcy" was even a word),<br />
and which flashed up again this summer while discussing the US presidential election with friends in Berlin,<br />
and which flits up in the Now, again, in the wake of 11/9:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>We like to think that if we are alive someday in a time of great moral crisis, that we would hide people, that we would be in the resistance, that we would make sure that people weren't killed, that we would be...that we would act morally and in conscience. We also suppose in our imaginations that we would survive. We always think that we would be one of the ones to make it through.</blockquote><br />
So we <i>like to think</i>, except, if we cannot contemplate the negative, too, then it's not thinking. "Wisława Szymborska has something to say about that," Forché continues, "and about the coincidence and happenstance and real fate of that. And this is her poem called 'Any Case'" (<a href="http://inwardboundpoetry.blogspot.com/2006/05/117-any-case-wislawa-szymborska.html">and this is the translation</a>, by Grazyna Drabik and Sharon Olds, that Forché included in <i>Against Forgetting</i> and read that night, in 1996).<br />
<br />
I should really get around to digitizing that Forché reading. Before night falls.<br />
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† Harry Zohn's translation (from <i>Illuminations</i>), with which we might quibble, but not today. Here is the original from the <em>Gesammelte Schriften:</em><br />
<br />
Die Tradition der Unterdrückten belehrt uns darüber, daß der ›Ausnahmezustand‹, in dem wir leben, die Regel ist. Wir müssen zu einem Begriff der Geschichte kommen, der dem entspricht. Dann wird uns als unsere Aufgabe die Herbeiführung des wirklichen Ausnahmezustands vor Augen stehen; und dadurch wird unsere Position im Kampf gegen den Faschismus sich verbessern. Dessen Chance besteht nicht zuletzt darin, daß die Gegner ihm im Namen des Fortschritts als einer historischen Norm begegnen. – Das Staunen darüber, daß die Dinge, die wir erleben, im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert ›noch‹ möglich sind, ist <i>kein</i> philosophisches. Es steht nicht am Anfang einer Erkenntnis, es sei denn der, daß die Vorstellung von Geschichte, aus der es stammt, nicht zu halten ist.pupilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12085197110139248913noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5828905401214154457.post-9827493763095574182016-10-31T07:06:00.000-04:002017-04-18T21:37:55.605-04:00outpostLast year (uh, 2014; read on) <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/10/when-ouija-boards-were-sexy/382203/">this thing in <i>The Atlantic</i></a> – culled, apparently, from <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2014/10/29/roman_mars_99_percent_invisible_the_ouija_board_s_strange_history.html">an episode of Roman Mars’ <i>99% Invisible</i></a>, which itself leans on <a href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-strange-and-mysterious-history-of-the-ouija-board-5860627/?no-ist">this thing in the Smithsonian magazine by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie</a> – happened across my desk on the same day as <a href="http://magick.codes/">this thing</a> (h/t <a href="http://lifewinning.com/">Ingrid Burrington</a>), and I thought that, to respond to the coincidence, I should dust off something apropos from a decade ago...<br />
<br />
but before I got around to it (half a year flits past) <a href="https://readfold.com/">FOLD</a> was rolled out (h/t <a href="http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2015/04/22/introducing-fold-a-new-tool-and-a-new-model-for-storytelling/">Ethan Zuckerman</a>)...<br />
<br />
and now, months and months and months after that (it's not called <i>belated</i> for nothing, folks!), <strike>the dusting-off has happened as a FOLD experiment</strike>:<br />
<br />
the dusting-off has been completely abandoned, and you will not be invited to read "'Reach out and touch someone,' 1868-69," my 2005 essay on spiritualism, Planchette, the Ouija Board, and the telephone. But here are the epigraphs:<br />
<br />
Ghost: <i>Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing<br />
To what I shall unfold.</i><br />
Hamlet: <i>Speak; I am bound to hear.</i><br />
<br />
<i>On errands of life, these letters speed to death.</i> –Melville, “Bartleby”<br />
<br />
<i>Strange, that my first passionate love letter should<br />
have been addressed to a dead girl. Can they feel, I<br />
wonder, those white silent people we call the dead?<br />
Sibyl! Can she feel, or know, or listen?</i> –Dorian Gray<br />
pupilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12085197110139248913noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5828905401214154457.post-78076747272789643632016-08-18T05:41:00.001-04:002016-08-18T05:43:02.793-04:00am TorIch sitze.<br />
<br />
As I have often done in the morning after dropping das Kind off at camp, I am at a table outside the Spätkauf, sipping espresso and sunning my face before beginning my work for the day. Up rolls an elderly man – sweatpants, old windbreaker, sandals with socks (natürlich). <i>Rolls</i> because he is using a walker with wheels and a handbrake. And because the door into the Späti is a big step up from sidewalk level, he parks there, just at the threshold, and shouts in his morning greeting. The man inside asks him what he would like. It appears they have done this before.<br />
<br />
"Fünf Sterni und fünf Kindl!" comes the reply.<br />
<br />
The shopkeeper spryly comes out from behind the Kasse, takes the beers from the fridge, and places them into the wire basket fixed to the front of the man's walker. Money is exchanged, farewells also. And then, with a creek and the tinkle of glass bottles – a uniquely Berlin tintinnabulum – the elderly man wheels off over the paving stones in the direction of the Schlesisches Tor. After pausing briefly to chat with another man, he continues his slow progress toward...home?<br />
<br />
It is 9:30 in the morning.pupilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12085197110139248913noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5828905401214154457.post-61381467401127679922016-06-16T20:36:00.000-04:002016-06-17T10:31:07.395-04:00"The Dog Barking"You asked me about what I think of this political season (you did not ask me what I think about this political season). Because you asked me (you did not ask me), I let Thomas Bernhard's <em>Frost</em> speak for me:<br />
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<blockquote>"I could say it's the living end," said the painter, "but it's the end of life, by turns low down and high up, low down, then all around, it smashes its head against the snow blanket, it crashes incessantly against the awful iron in the air, the iron in the air, if you must know, that's where it gets shredded, and you have to breathe it in, breathe it in through your ears, till you go crazy, till the noise shreds you, till your earlobes smash brain and muzzle, muzzle and brain with the limitless naïveté of destructiveness. Listen to it, stop and listen to it: that yapping! It's not possible to eradicate it, all you can do is push it back, push it back with your brain, push back the yap, the bark, the ghastly godawful yowling, you can press it down, but then it comes up worse, it will crush flesh, soul and flesh, it's established itself like maggots in space, established itself everywhere, in the shattering fat of history, in the quarterstaves of the insoluble diluvia . . . It makes no sense," said the painter, "to try and hide in the dog barking, it will find you out, and then even your fear will be chewed up . . . Yes, I'm frightened, I'm frightened, everywhere I hear: fear and fear, and I hear fear, and this ghostly trauma of fear will ruin me, drive me mad, not just my illness, no no, not just my illness, but the illness <em>and</em> this trauma of fear . . . Listen . . . how the barking organizes itself, how it makes space for itself, listen, it's the cracking of the canine whips, it's canine hyperdexterity, canine hyperdespair, a hellish serfdom that is taking its revenge, taking its revenge on its grim devisers, on me, on you, yes, you too, on all limitless apparitions, on all limitless, terrible, basically cut-off apparitions, on human organs, which are the organs of heaven and hell, on the infernal organs of the heights and the celestial organs of the depths, on the jailbird unhappiness of all tragedians . . . Listen, these tragedians, listen to them: that stubborn deafmute breed of snakes' tongues, listen to them: the monstrously unappetizing republic of all-powerful idiocy, listen to them: this unsolicited shameless parliament of hypocrites . . . There are the dogs, there is their yap, there is death, death in all its wild profusion, death with all its frailty, death with its stink of quotidian crime, death, this last recourse of despair, the bacillus of monstrous unendingness, the death of history, the death of impoverishment, death, listen, the death that I don't want, that no one wants, that no one wants anymore, there it is, death, the yap, listen, the unlawful drowning of reason, the refusal to give evidence of all supposition, the spastic smack of soft brain on concrete, on the concrete floor of human dementia . . . Listen to my views on the yap, listen . . . I want to try and plumb the thinking of the infernal tempest, the confusion of eras, Cambrian, Silurian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, and Jurassic, the monstrous Tertiary and Quaternary, the monstrously meaningless rejection of the great floods licking up from the depths . . . Listen to me, I am going into the yap, I go in and smash their fangs, I yell at it with the thunder of my unreasonableness, I scramble its processes, its mendacious propaganda . . . Listen, stop, listen, the sweating stupid slavering dogs' tongues, listen to the dogs, listen to them, listen to them . . ." We were standing on the spot from which you can see down into the Klamm. "Wolves," said the painter. "From here you can see straight down the throat of all wolf science." He was exhausted. I could hear the dogs. I could hear the barking and yapping. I was exhausted too. I was stunned by the painter's outburst, my body felt crushed as though by a rockfall; "and then I found him crushed on the road, below me, at my feet," the painter was saying. I immediately organized the painter's outburst. I'm astonished, I need only to push the button on my listening machine, and the outburst passes over me. But I'm exhausted. I'm utterly exhausted. "Listen," said the painter, "it's the yapping of the end of the world. Quite manifestly it's the end of the world in person, in this yapping. How sternly and implacably it's proceeding in people's faces, in people's faces, in the face of thoughts, in the face of reason, against all ridicule." He said: "I'm afraid. Come. Let's go. Let's go to the inn. I can't stand to hear any more of that yapping." Never had the dogs barked like this without interruption all day and all the previous night. "What else could this yapping portend," said the painter, "as we know everything and understand everything, if not the actual end of the world." He lengthened the words "end of the world" across his tongue like a priceless delicacy, and like a "sinful pleasure" he pulled the words "end of the world" across his tongue. Then we were silent. In the ravine, he said: "Infamy! Don't you see what it says up there, high up in what we flatteringly term of mother of heaven: it says: Infamy!"<br />
<br />
Before he retired to his room, "not to sleep, but to howl to myself in the silence of horror," he said: "How everything has crumbled, how everything has dissolved, how all the reference points have shifted, how all fixity has moved, how nothing exists anymore, how nothing exists, you see, how all the religions and all the irreligions and the protracted absurdities of all forms of worship have turned into nothing, nothing at all, you see, how belief and unbelief no longer exist, how science, modern science, how the stumbling blocks, the millennial courts, have all been thrown out and ushered out and blown out into the air, how all of it is now just so much air . . . Listen, it's all air, all concepts are air, all points of reference are air, everything is just air . . ." And he said: "Frozen air, everything just so much frozen air . . ."</blockquote>pupilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12085197110139248913noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5828905401214154457.post-79794080148202286192016-01-01T04:00:00.000-05:002016-08-27T14:20:57.305-04:00einen guten Rutsch ins neue Jahr<i>This list of</i> Some Things I Will Miss About Berlin <i>was drawn up hastily on June 26, 2013, and revised, NYE-style, December 31, 2015. Evidently in my barely-employed Hausfrau years I only ate, drank, and bicycled the hugeness of Berlin...</i><br />
<br />
21. Lunches at Primo Maggio<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEix4OfFmPzV-3LB6gYOjtjHBtHO_kOoKsGU3pfQg7euYtQKmTblYKidzifoLxyzgNRmtvVSc_eb79Z77VWve9DVvzK4IBjphJ_PnB5lk2qzOBweEsqOOTHZZJhPsmodwnAzhYOqlF8dvng/s1600/Photo0297.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEix4OfFmPzV-3LB6gYOjtjHBtHO_kOoKsGU3pfQg7euYtQKmTblYKidzifoLxyzgNRmtvVSc_eb79Z77VWve9DVvzK4IBjphJ_PnB5lk2qzOBweEsqOOTHZZJhPsmodwnAzhYOqlF8dvng/s640/Photo0297.jpg" width="480" height="640" /></a><br />
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20. Brunches at Mayor<br />
<br />
19. One never waits for a table anywhere (except that one evening, a Good Friday).<br />
<br />
18. Our first farewell was with R's kindly pediatrician on Hauptstraße in Schöneberg. I am not looking forward to reentering the American healthcare "system."<br />
<br />
17. A culture of repair: jackets restitched, shoes resoled, furniture mended<br />
<br />
16. The fishmonger on Dieffenbachstraße always greets me with a cheery <i>Moinmoin!</i> no matter what the time of day. The shine of his shaved head matches his smile.<br />
<br />
15. Also Mo's Falafel<br />
<br />
14. On market days, weighed down by purchases from the Maybachufer Wochenmarkt, I always pass by an overcoated honey dealer, plying his box of wares just outside the Edeka/BioMarkt on Kottbusser Damm.<br />
<br />
13. Crunch, crunch. A sprinkling of gravel over the snow instead of bike-corroding chemical melt that liquifies everything just enough to ensure that the sidewalk becomes a sheet of ice when in the dark hours everything refreezes<br />
<br />
12. And your bike is not already stolen, <a href="http://verspaetet.blogspot.com/2013/06/lost-document-binge.html">most of the time anyway</a>.<br />
<br />
11. Buildings with proper courtyards, yes, and hallway and stairway lights that must be switched on manually and that, on a timer, ruthlessly extinguish themselves before you've reached your apartment door<br />
<br />
10. <i>Space:</i> enough broken glass and dog shit for everyone<br />
<br />
9. Drinking Kristall from a big glass beer glass, while standing on top of a giant pile of dirt, watching my child play in a construction site<br />
<br />
8. Bakeries. Everywhere. Auch Bier.<br />
<br />
7. Laugenstangen mit Butter und Schnittlauch<br />
<br />
6. Everyday people on everyday bicycles<br />
<br />
5. <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/04/berlin’s-tempelhof-airport">Das Tempelhofer Feld</a><br />
<br />
4. <a href="http://verspaetet.blogspot.com/2012/03/archipelago.html">Spielplatztopia</a><br />
<br />
3. Kita-Gutschein<br />
<br />
2. <a href="http://www.wochenmarkt-deutschland.de/fisch-vom-grill">Fish Truck</a><br />
<br />
1. Silvester<br />
<br />
0. Der Flughafen Berlin-Tegelpupilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12085197110139248913noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5828905401214154457.post-16430073303548431522015-11-10T07:00:00.000-05:002015-11-15T14:42:58.864-05:00mawThe half-crazy super is sorting the garbage as I'm coming back into the building and waylays me with an obscenity-heavy disquisition on the garbage and recycling iniquities of the other superintendents on the block. The lecture is so intricate that, in the final analysis, I'm unable to figure out whether he supports a regime of recycling, with its rules and sorting requirements, or not. I gather, at least, that "in the 70s" the building's waste bags were impossibly heavy, bulging with every kind of thing. I also gather that the sanitation patrol people exercise their fining powers with vengeful pettiness. The super lauds their efforts for the most part, even as he expresses bitter resignation at the fact of their powers. But in the case of a fellow super – "a fucking idiot" who argued with a sanitation patrolman, who then radioed an NYPD car and lied to the real cops about "the idiot" having put hands on him – my guy's attitude turns to bitter hatred of the authorities.<br />
<br />
Later in our "conversation," he describes a woman who liked to dump her household garbage in the public basket on the corner. A sanitation patrolman patiently stakes out the location, then catches her redhanded one morning and writes the ticket. With a shake of his head, the super stabs the air with his voice like a dull knife: "100 bucks!"<br />
<br />
"Well," I circumspect, "the city has to make money somehow."<br />
<br />
"<i>No.</i> This city is never satisfied. Not in a million years."pupilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12085197110139248913noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5828905401214154457.post-57278492666520875212015-10-09T09:45:00.001-04:002020-11-14T14:43:39.321-05:00little by little and then all at onceThe narrator in Murakami's first novel, <i>Hear the Wind Sing</i> –<br />
<br />
<blockquote>There was a time when everyone wanted to be cool.<br />
<br />
Toward the end of high school, I decided to express only half of what I was really feeling. I can't recall the initial reason, but for the next several years this was how I behaved. At which point I discovered that I had turned into a person incapable of expressing more than half of what he felt.</blockquote><br />
– reminds me that, to conclude my high school graduation speech, with the unusually tall co-valedictorian, Alethea, towering over and beside me (she is a judge now?), I quoted McClintic Sphere:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care.</blockquote>pupilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12085197110139248913noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5828905401214154457.post-2207543046657332942015-09-30T00:41:00.000-04:002015-09-30T00:41:40.204-04:00exodus 2, diamond jubileeAnd now for my 75th <i>belated</i> post, some <a href="http://verspaetet.blogspot.com/2015/08/exodus-1.html">more</a> things I posted on Facebook — and later deleted:<br />
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<b>2010</b><br />
<br />
1/15<br />
<br />
whew, was beginning to worry that mustaches of the 19th-c was dead<br />
<a href="http://mustachesofthenineteenthcentury.blogspot.com/2010/01/early-faceshelf.html">Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century: The Early Faceshelf</a><br />
<br />
1/31<br />
<br />
celebrities resemble me, not the other way around<br />
<br />
3/29<br />
<br />
weird<br />
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/24/opinion/global/24iht-opednote.html">Apology - Correction - NYTimes.com</a><br />
<br />
4/6<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T8y5EPv6Y8">Werner Herzog Reads Curious George</a><br />
<br />
4/10<br />
<br />
o, vanity google alerts, what sweet joys and sorrows you bring...<br />
"Langlois suggests Seth died at sea..."<br />
<a href="http://capecodhistory.us/genealogy/lost/i108.htm">lost and wrecked</a><br />
<br />
4/15<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2010/04/what_david_foster_wallace_circled_in_his_dictionary.html">The words David Foster Wallace circled in his dictionary. - - Slate Magazine</a><br />
<br />
5/2<br />
<br />
keggers of yore continues to be the only website that matters and has outdone itself...the bible has to be, as rb would say, the punctum in this snap...<br />
<a href="http://keggersofyore.tumblr.com/post/566824945">KEGGERS OF YORE</a><br />
Comment: i like this photo more and more. there's another frame, the picture hanging on the wall, which is cut off but for the very bottom...<br />
Comment: wow, american surfaces. anticipates all the photography i saw in nyc in the late 90s<br />
<br />
5/7<br />
<br />
Greatest computer science paper of all time? I think Yes...<br />
<a href="http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/remove.pdf">www.scs.standford.edu</a><br />
Comment: Fig. 1 is my new fave thing. Here's the full, hilarious context: <a href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2010/05/01/worlds-most-excruciatingly-ironic-conference/">http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2010/05/01/worlds-most-excruciatingly-ironic-conference/</a><br />
<br />
5/25<br />
<br />
"almost like a Jane Eyre movie" ahahahahahhahahahhahahahahhahahahhahahahhahahahahhahahahahhahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahhahahahhahahahahahhaha "it's like an interactive art thing going on"<br />
<a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/sex-and-the-city-2-is-emotional-3-d/">"Sex and the City 2" is "Emotional 3-D"</a><br />
<br />
6/25<br />
<br />
h/t marshall<br />
<a href="http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/roland-barthes-reviews-pac-man">McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Roland Barthes Reviews Pac-Man.</a><br />
<br />
7/15<br />
<br />
i think i'd move to tehran, too, if you tried to resettle me in fucking tucson<br />
<a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/shahram-amiri-iran-nuke-defector-left-million-cia/story?id=11171171">Iran Nuke Defector Left Behind $5 Million</a><br />
<br />
7/16<br />
<br />
HA<br />
<a href="http://aspicandotherdelights.tumblr.com/post/748081517/what-nightmares-are-made-of">aspic and other delights (What nightmares are made of…)</a><br />
<br />
9/3<br />
<br />
Har. Isn't this what happened during recording of the vocal track for the last song on Sunn O)))'s _Black One_? "Condensation formed inside the coffin as guests delayed filtering in. When the groom finally took his cue to present the bride, the lid wouldn't budge. Before long, he was slamming the glass trying to break through as the bride wailed inside, her makeup running down her face. It would be an hour before she was finally freed."<br />
<a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2010/aug/22/local/la-me-persian-parties-20100822">As Iranian American weddings grow more lavish, some call for restraint</a><br />
<br />
9/17<br />
<br />
<a href="http://nawaat.org/portail/2010/09/17/the-internet-freedom-fallacy-and-the-arab-digital-activism/">The Internet Freedom Fallacy and the Arab Digital activism</a><br />
<br />
9/23<br />
<br />
i've just had myself explained to myself in a picture<br />
<a href="http://limboyouth.com/post/1120756646/bob-dylan-vs-neil-young-2007-by-tony-romano">Limbo Youth</a><br />
<br />
9/24<br />
<br />
awesome<br />
<a href="http://www.handmadecharlotte.com/disturbing-ideas/">Disturbing Ideas | handmade charlotte</a><br />
<br />
9/28<br />
<br />
keep walking, mubarak<br />
<a href="https://globalvoices.org/2010/09/28/egypt-the-inevitable-mubarak-photshopping-contest/">Egypt: “The Inevitable Mubarak Photoshopping Contest”</a>pupilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12085197110139248913noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5828905401214154457.post-38226035945928802462015-08-02T21:38:00.000-04:002015-08-02T21:39:49.474-04:00exodus 1Some things I posted on Facebook — and later deleted:<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
<b>2008</b><br />
<br />
10/14<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=688">The Pinocchio Theory >> Blog Archive >> Addendum</a><br />
<br />
11/11<br />
<br />
the Judith Butler piece cited here is essential reading<br />
<a href="http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/010812.html">k-punk: Disavowal, left and right</a><br />
<br />
11/25<br />
<br />
<a href="http://mustachesofthenineteenthcentury.blogspot.com/2008/11/fine-choice.html">Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century: A Fine Choice</a><br />
<br />
<b>2009</b><br />
<br />
1/1<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n01/sara-roy/if-gaza-falls-">Sara Roy · If Gaza falls ... · LRB 1 January 2009</a><br />
<br />
3/24<br />
<br />
(EtG: for some reason, i think this bit of City history will appeal to you)<br />
<a href="http://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2004/07/last-rat-pit-in-new-york.html">The Last Rat Pit in New York</a><br />
<br />
About 10 years ago: "Senator Paul Wellstone, Democrat of Minnesota, said that Congress had ''seemed determined to unlearn the lessons from our past mistakes.'"<br />
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/05/business/congress-passes-wide-ranging-bill-easing-bank-laws.html">CONGRESS PASSES WIDE-RANGING BILL EASING BANK LAWS - New York Times</a><br />
Comment: (h/t david isenberg: <a href="http://isen.com/blog/2009/03/congress-passes-wide-ranging-bill.html">http://isen.com/blog/2009/03/congress-passes-wide-ranging-bill.html</a>)<br />
<br />
3/31<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/21/AR2009032104050.html">Facebook Bug Reveals Private Photos, Wall Posts (Updated)</a><br />
<br />
4/5<br />
<br />
The Last Baron!<br />
<br />
4/12<br />
<br />
<a href="http://southissouth.wordpress.com/2009/04/10/palestine-cartography-of-a-man-made-island/">Palestine, cartography of a man-made island | SOUTH / SOUTH</a><br />
<br />
4/13<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/apr/13/europe39s-telecoms-aid-with-spy-tech/">Fed contractor, cell phone maker sold spy system to Iran</a><br />
Comment: i should add that a very real question here is: how is this in any way different from what verizon, at&t et al did for the US govt?<br />
<br />
5/6<br />
<br />
i should hope the media will atone for its sin of sensationalism wrt the karpinski paper. i should hope, i say. but there's no hope for the media<br />
<a href="http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2498/2181">Facebook and academic performance: Reconciling a media sensation with data | Pasek | First Monday</a><br />
Comment: <a href="http://www.esztersblog.com/2009/05/06/facebook-and-grades-revisited-aka-peer-reviewed-publication-at-record-speed/">Eszter’s Blog » Blog Archive » Facebook and grades revisited aka peer-reviewed publication at record speed</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.wired.com/2009/05/facebooks-e-mail-censorship-is-legally-dubious-experts-say/">Facebook's E-mail Censorship is Legally Dubious, Experts Say | WIRED</a><br />
<br />
5/26<br />
<br />
<a href="http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/05/26/palestine-israeli-armed-police-disrupt-literature-festival/">Palestine: Israeli Armed Police Disrupt Literature Festival · Global Voices</a><br />
<br />
5/28<br />
<br />
pace wb's 'dialectical image,' 19th-c epistolary novels are written in the language of 21st-c phishing scam emails<br />
<br />
6/25<br />
<br />
essential reading<br />
<a href="http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/953/re3.htm">Al-Ahram Weekly | Region | A nation divided</a><br />
<br />
6/26<br />
<br />
<a href="http://zeroanthropology.net/2009/06/25/causation-or-correlation-a-useful-crisis-notwithstanding-u-s-democracy-promotion-in-iran/">Causation or Correlation, a Useful Crisis Notwithstanding: U.S. Democracy Promotion in Iran | ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY</a><br />
<br />
7/1<br />
<br />
word<br />
"Debbie Harry was born today."<br />
Comment: i used to see debbie harry at the gourmet garage on broome st all the time, but i don't think she noticed me<br />
<br />
7/2<br />
<br />
<a href="http://tofuttibreak.tumblr.com/post/133069079">tofutti break</a><br />
Comment: i haven't been able to get enough of tofutti break lately; there's this too <a href="http://tofuttibreak.tumblr.com/post/133654693">http://tofuttibreak.tumblr.com/post/133654693</a><br />
<br />
7/6<br />
<br />
"But the authors also point out that it may not be necessary to pay; they cite a publication in progress that indicates it's easy to harvest a lot of that information from social networking sites like Facebook."<br />
<a href="http://arstechnica.com/science/2009/07/social-insecurity-numbers-open-to-hacking/">New algorithm guesses SSNs using date and place of birth | Ars Technica</a><br />
<br />
7/9<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2009/07/08/wrestling-with-jeffersons-moose/">Wrestling with Jefferson’s Moose | ... My heart’s in Accra</a><br />
<br />
7/13<br />
<br />
now with 13% more spleen<br />
<br />
7/16<br />
<br />
HA! there are only pots and kettles, and they're all black-hearted<br />
<a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/07/16/us-iran-france-idUSTRE56F5BP20090716">Iran summons French envoy over "oppression"</a><br />
<br />
7/18<br />
<br />
"While trying to get turned around, the woman driving the hot dog on wheels accidentally hit the gas instead of the brake and lodged the Wienermobile under a house."<br />
<br />
7/21<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2009/07/professor_henry_louis_gates_jr_speaks_out_on_racial_profiling_after_his_arrest_by_cambridge_police.html">Skip Gates Speaks</a><br />
<br />
7/22<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/soccer-game-or-tear-gas-palestinians-put-controversial-ad-to-test-1.280506">Soccer game or tear gas? Palestinians put controversial ad to test</a><br />
<br />
7/23<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.globaldashboard.org/2009/07/23/the-paper-of-rumour/">The paper of rumour</a><br />
Comment: <a href="http://jilliancyork.com/2009/07/23/on-holding-bloggers-accountable/">http://jilliancyork.com/2009/07/23/on-holding-bloggers-accountable/</a><br />
Comment: <a href="http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2009/07/23/when-the-times-reports-rumors/">http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2009/07/23/when-the-times-reports-rumors/</a><br />
<br />
7/30<br />
<br />
you can't make this shit up<br />
<a href="http://www.newsweek.com/viewpoint-obama-should-send-bush-mideast-81649">Viewpoint: Obama Should Send Bush to Mideast</a><br />
<br />
8/1<br />
<br />
dear motorists of cambridge, mass, thank you for activating your turn signals after you are already halfway into your turns; but why bother?<br />
Comment: touched a nerve, it seems: never had so many people "like" something of mine<br />
<br />
8/13<br />
<br />
my colleages at <a href="https://opennet.net/">opennet.net</a> have begun releasing updated data and reports on global Internet censorship. this week new reports on the middle east and north africa were made available.<br />
<a href="https://opennet.net/blog/2009/08/oni-releases-2009-middle-east-north-africa-research">ONI Releases 2009 Middle East & North Africa Research | OpenNet Initiative</a><br />
<br />
8/14<br />
<br />
"I'm Lieutenant Custard & His Banger Of Time." joe genaro's voice fills me with pleasure and good memories. what to say? oj with einstein...<br />
<br />
9/7<br />
<br />
well played, well played<br />
<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/scott/nerd-venn-diagram#.bibk4G7lr">Nerd Venn Diagram [PIC]</a><br />
<br />
9/11<br />
<br />
"Like a regular guy / like you and me [...] It's check out time"<br />
<br />
9/15<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1212013/Revealed-The-ghost-fleet-recession-anchored-just-east-Singapore.html">Revealed: The ghost fleet of the recession anchored just east of Singapore | Daily Mail Online</a><br />
<br />
9/16<br />
<br />
i take that back. this may in fact be the best kegger of yore yet<br />
<a href="http://keggersofyore.tumblr.com/post/189200182">KEGGERS OF YORE</a><br />
<br />
9/17<br />
<br />
<a href="http://wonkette.com/411130/what-was-metro-thinking">WHAT WAS METRO THINKING? | Wonkette</a><br />
<br />
9/22<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/opinion/22tue1.html">Editorial - The Rights of Corporations - NYTimes.com</a><br />
<br />
10/21<br />
<br />
mini-robots, ATTACK!<br />
<a href="http://masslawyersweekly.com/2009/10/21/sjc-case-aims-to-prevent-crimes-by-mini-robots/">SJC case aims to prevent crimes by ‘Mini Robots’</a><br />
<br />
10/23<br />
<br />
<a href="http://nms.sagepub.com/content/8/5/825.abstract">The mp3 as cultural artifact</a><br />
<br />
11/3<br />
<br />
cent ans, punks<br />
<a href="http://www.lemonde.fr/disparitions/article/2009/11/03/l-ethnologue-claude-levi-strauss-est-mort_1262337_3382.html">L'ethnologue Claude Lévi-Strauss est mort</a><br />
<br />
11/28<br />
<br />
<a href="http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2009/11/27/stunning-example-of-the-neutrality-of-whiteness/">Stunning Example of the Neutrality of Whiteness</a><br />
<br />
12/2<br />
<br />
<a href="http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/12/eff-sues-feds-tell-us-how-you-use-facebook-for-cyberstalking/"><br />
EFF sues feds: tell us how you use Facebook for cyberstalking</a><br />
<br />
12/3<br />
<br />
<a href="http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2009/11/question-mark-question-mark-question-mark.html">Question Mark Question Mark Question Mark</a>pupilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12085197110139248913noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5828905401214154457.post-67592999682220211172015-07-04T00:30:00.000-04:002015-07-04T01:00:10.228-04:00Ein BerlinerWe could not have lived in Berlin as well or as cozily without the help of our Tagesmutter / neighbor / fixer / friend who, for no discernible reason except kindness, made our little family part of her world.<br />
<br />
Her bio-family might not have been from Berlin originally. They might have been from somewhere boring and not-Berlin. She is the youngest. After some out of control years in the city ("Oh, Seth, if I tell you that some times I did not think I would live to the next day"), she had children of her own and settled with them in Kreuzberg.<br />
<br />
Her father was born in 1923 and died in 1989. When he was eighteen he had a "Yiddish girlfriend." His brother made some kind of official report about her, and she was deported to a camp. Father then served as a military courier for three years of the war, at the end of which he returned on foot to the family, from a great distance.<br />
<br />
Her father gave her and all of her siblings "Hebräischen Namen." She did the same for her three kids (who are – she struggles to translate – "mixed caste": their papas are west African immigrants)...oh, except for the middle child, named after the title character of a popular U.S. sitcom about a black teenager. "I love that show when I was growing up."<br />
<br />
Her father was outlived by his brother, who died in 1995. "We never had contact with him. Nimmer. My father would not have contact with him."<br />
<br />
She related these stories to me in parcels, at pick up or drop off, and then our house affairs would draw us hence.pupilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12085197110139248913noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5828905401214154457.post-15901001590180147362015-06-12T09:54:00.000-04:002015-12-30T08:51:49.402-05:00A tangent on agency: One claim (I’m tempted to say “myth,” and I’m tempted to use the adjective “ontological”) for big data is that, given a behavioral dataset of sufficient size, agency in the classical liberal sense gives way to agency in the sense of <i>emergence</i>, in which the subject is no longer in control of her truth; her truth is produced through a predictive analytics. The data show me better than I know myself. It strikes me that these competing notions of agency (liberal subject versus emergent subject) will themselves be applied in discriminatory ways. Privilege will permit some people to derive power from the revelations of big data, to mix and optimize these two kinds of agency, while disadvantaged people will end up having the emergence model applied <i>to</i> them — and be further disempowered as a result. </tangent>pupilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12085197110139248913noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5828905401214154457.post-92033953784864301652015-06-03T10:19:00.000-04:002015-06-03T10:19:42.687-04:00tweet #∞<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">algorithmic really has become the new cyber-</p>— Seth Young (@autresy) <a href="https://twitter.com/autresy/status/605956395922358273">June 3, 2015</a></blockquote><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>pupilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12085197110139248913noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5828905401214154457.post-46574590956455986482015-05-06T22:50:00.000-04:002015-05-06T22:50:12.032-04:00Look both ways!You on Amsterdam glide<br />
mid block without the light<br />
then turn, like a leaf out of season<br />
red against my bicycle bell.pupilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12085197110139248913noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5828905401214154457.post-61117806032287038242015-04-24T23:24:00.003-04:002015-04-25T10:16:12.762-04:00Madame Bovary, c'est moi."What word would you use," the psychoanalyst asks while my eyes seek the canyon of Manhattan towers visible from her window, "to characterize the feeling in all these things you've been describing?" Me: "Elegiac."<br />
<br />
<blockquote> Since I respect you, let me tell you a secret.<br />
As a cow devours grass, so literary themes are devoured; devices fray and crumble.<br />
A writer cannot be a ploughman: he is a nomad, constantly moving with his wife and herd to greener pastures.</blockquote><br />
After ripping through the first section, Juan García Madero's journal from November 2 to December 31, 1975, it took me months to fall back into the <a href="http://verspaetet.blogspot.com/2015/03/authentica-habita.html#more">The Savage Detectives</a>. Then, momentum: I take the last third or so of the novel in great gulps, mostly on the 1, nearly missing my stop every time, accompanied by a rising, heaving disillusionment at not having lived like a visceral realist or an infrarealist — hard-boiled. Bolaño didn't believe in exile, "especially when the word exile is set beside the word literature."<br />
<br />
The momentum carried me headlong into Cole's <i>Open City</i>, which I had begun in Berlin and abandoned in a kind of panic, like catching a glimpse of yourself reflected at an unexpected angle in the bus window against which you've been resting your head; and for a moment you forget where you were going in the first place. This time I finish. The two, <i>The Savage Detectives</i> and <i>Open City</i>, pass through each other in Liberia, as though a minor character in Arturo Belano's travels there has wound up in a Queens detention center: Saidu telling his story though plexiglass to Julius. Now I fret that there is something equally despicable in my past that I have secreted away, even from myself, and that the therapist will uncover soon.<br />
<br />
Directly on the heels of <i>Open City</i>, <i>Zoo, or Letters Not about Love</i> completed what now feels like a coincidental symphony — through Shklovsky's compressed exile in Berlin, a mental or spiritual breakdown between the lines of an epistolary novel that, like <i>The Savage Detectives</i>, ranges freely and idiosyncratically over a literary tradition and its recent politics. For both RBA and VBS, detection and the detective novel were special keys, but for opening what door? while Julius wanders to know himself, like the lunatic quoted by Benjamin: "I travel to know my geography."<br />
<br />
<blockquote>...Moving diagonally like a knight, I have intersected your life, Alya, and you know how that was and how it is; but you turn up in my book like Isaac at the fire built by Abraham.</blockquote><br />
If ever a lady doth-protested too much, it was me writing dustily on the board <i>clack tsssh click</i> that the characters in the novels we will be reading this semester are not people; do not (for you cannot) identify. <i>Drops the chalk into the tray.</i><br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<blockquote>I need money / I need love / I need a Cadillac / t'give me a shove / get me out of this uptight / midnight / into some limelight / again, yeah, cuz I know / my ego / ain't my amigo anymore / I need whiskey / I need style / I need a job / to make it worth while / and get me out of this uptight / midnight / into some limelight / again, yeah, cuz I know / my ego / ain't my amigo anymore / yeah, cuz I know / my ego / ain't my amigo anymore</blockquote><br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Ir0K8Xhxc34?rel=0" width="420"></iframe>pupilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12085197110139248913noreply@blogger.com63tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5828905401214154457.post-16742168557238328942015-03-09T23:00:00.000-04:002015-04-26T08:20:11.115-04:00Authentica Habita<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSKe2cX0ZHSiJIoDysE_FZz1-ON5yFk2bvj71qlEYD2hEP1vE7fC1U3VeQXd-frh37UHc9sX9dDdTKY3rzmlzK0ZVeti3u7pv06zJJbT_RlcUY343gj1S8rgPokJ7VcOU7ekZVjSAYg_Y/s1600/993015_10151699386441796_275620578_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSKe2cX0ZHSiJIoDysE_FZz1-ON5yFk2bvj71qlEYD2hEP1vE7fC1U3VeQXd-frh37UHc9sX9dDdTKY3rzmlzK0ZVeti3u7pv06zJJbT_RlcUY343gj1S8rgPokJ7VcOU7ekZVjSAYg_Y/s400/993015_10151699386441796_275620578_n.jpg" /></a><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Photo by <a href="http://ourbicyclebuiltfortwo.tumblr.com">Carmen Young</a>.</span><br />
<br />
<a href="http://verspaetet.blogspot.com/2012/05/cities-cities-cities-cities.html?showComment=1420190251157#c8107862984623007510">As I was saying</a>, <i>The Decline of the German Mandarins</i> is a terrific companion for <i>The University in Ruins</i>.<br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
Visited PK + RS in PDX over the holidays. PK asked how things are going in NYC. I repeated something that I've been saying to MK for awhile: that I've begun to feel...not uprooted, but un-rooted. I no longer feel at home anywhere. I move from city to city, always just a year or a few years too early or too late. Always <i>-jected</i> in some way, floating. Desychronized from my own prior experiences of a place, a scene. Not there.<br />
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"Of all the islands he'd visited, two stood out. The island of the past, he said, where the only time was past time and the inhabitants were bored or more or less happy, but where the weight of illusion was so great that the island sank a little deeper into the river every day. And the island of the future, where the only time was the future, and the inhabitants were planners and strivers, such strivers, said Ulises, that they were likely to end up devouring one another." —Jacinto Requena, Café Quito, Calle Bucareli, Mexico City DF, September 1985<br />
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<i>From a project begun as a personal thing in PDX in June of 1995 and finished as an academic thing in NYC in May of 1997:</i><br />
<blockquote>The nostalgia for destiny,<br />
The destiny of nostalgia.<br />
In order to meet Benjamin half-way, on common ground, or better: his ground, we must relinquish the idea of ground altogether. Common sense tells us that the exile is estranged, alienated, or divided from someplace or something—all the forms that can be organized as home. But exile in fact dissolves the entire concept of alienation and home.<br />
The condition of exile initiates being-no-longer-from-anything.<br />
The exile is simultaneously banished from everything, hence from nothing,<br />
and by virtue of the estrangement from nothing, the exile cannot be at home anywhere,<br />
The exile is always already not at home,<br />
But there is no originary displacement,<br />
The exile is displacement,<br />
His nostalgia is for the void, that is, the messianic future.<br />
In the writing of Benjamin, then, nihilism vies with melancholy — the nostalgia of the exile is for the condition of exile.</blockquote>Salad days, baby. All this sounded so cool at the time, but I didn't buy it, not really.<br />
Now it all sounds silly to me. Silly and true.<br />
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<i>Adapted from an email to DA, March 23, 2013:</i><br />
<br />
It’s easy to feel guilty here about not squeezing every last ounce of 'culture' from the place. After all, we know our stay is temporary – not tourist-temporary, but still.<br />
<br />
Despite the motivations of guilt and temporariness, we’ve done very little in the way of exhibits and monuments and the like. I prefer Raucherkneipen and parks to galleries and museums. Our friend JD's visit will be a good forcing function to do some Denkmäler or whatever.<br />
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When I lived in New York I always felt anxiety that I wasn’t experiencing The Real City because I kept weird student hours, drank all the time, manipulated my responsibilities. I saw art and shows, classrooms and bars, not the inside of a rush hour 4 train. The Real City belonged to real people who had lives and real jobs and real obligations and struggles. People for whom the weekend was the weekend, not a continuation of the academic week by other means.<br />
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Now, in Berlin, the reverse: I feel anxiety that I’m not experiencing the city because I have a family, a domestic life, difficulties, obligations that prevent me from going out late and participating in the kinds of goings-on that, in NYC, made me feel divided from The Real City. I've been in Berlin for eighteen months, and I haven't stood on line at Berghain.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPHclmF6Y0Vkp6gcO7rxoZRNupXRIfNxHt0BACWDcTXaSLJ3DxRg_x6qsbjQDzc18HTR7S1n7ii-rc0TQFa8AFjOGu7Q7XiZASa7d9gRTjYonOG8oefFikydUn-qSxetbuWwaTjfzXW-I/s1600/922724_10151698133916796_235350061_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPHclmF6Y0Vkp6gcO7rxoZRNupXRIfNxHt0BACWDcTXaSLJ3DxRg_x6qsbjQDzc18HTR7S1n7ii-rc0TQFa8AFjOGu7Q7XiZASa7d9gRTjYonOG8oefFikydUn-qSxetbuWwaTjfzXW-I/s400/922724_10151698133916796_235350061_n.jpg" /></a><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">The author at Schloss Charlottenburg. Photo by <a href="http://ourbicyclebuiltfortwo.tumblr.com">Carmen Young</a>.</span><br />
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I moved to leafy Bristol Street, in Cambridge, and immediately conceived a plan to document "The Grape Arbors of Wellington-Harrington." I would photograph the many grape vines planted in the neighborhood – they were usually entwined with a metal frame and wires or chainlink to form a carport – and then pin the photos into a Google map. (My landlord said the original cuttings were brought by Portuguese immigrants like his own parents.) I counted dozens and dozens over the years, all in <a href="http://www.cambridgema.gov/CDD/planud/neighplan/neighs/~/media/A3C6C4E5FFEB4A269D4B64923CC53447.ashx">Wellington-Harrington</a>. In the end, I never photographed a single one. (Later, DA turned me onto the <a href="http://bathtubmarysofsomerville.tumblr.com/">Bathtub Marys of Somerville</a>; <i>now</i> we're talking.)<br />
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I struggle like an amnesiac against those eight years of Massachusetts. They are precisely a trauma. I can't recall them, but I experience their effects as a kind of deep internal bruising.<br />
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"Is it the stratified city or the prismatic city?" he had written in a forgotten notebook.<br />
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The Tempelhoferfeld at dusk, a knitting pattern of impatient bats take flight. OF + J are visiting. OF and I are discussing urban spaces, <a href="http://verspaetet.blogspot.com/2012/10/heterotopia.html">as always</a>, and he casually lays something simple and clear on me that's transformed the way I look around when I'm on a city street. Of all the kinds of diversity we hope for in a neighborhood, age, perhaps, is the most important, for when people of all ages are living on top of one another, the street is alive around the clock. Children, young people, families, older folks, and everyone in between,—all have very different needs and use patterns. This plenitude of time and type of use is one of the things that undesirable gentrification interrupts. Pace Richard Florida, when the neighborhood becomes all coworking salons by day and hip bars by night, game over. You win, locusts.<br />
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The <a href="http://verspaetet.blogspot.com/2012/03/archipelago.html?showComment=1348598518732#c2575452087690308659">criticism of gentrification</a> that concerns itself with authenticity is itself part of gentrification.<br />
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"What stuck with me was the way in which Heidegger’s Nazism suddenly explained some of the ideas in Being and Time (sorry, Sein und Zeit) that formerly I had ignored as mere agrarian German romanticism — all that stuff about 'rootedness' and 'destiny.' It turns out that 'rootedness' was a code word meant to differentiate authentic Germans from 'wandering Jews.'" —David Weinberger, <a href="http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/2010/07/10/2b2k-understandings-web/#comment-58665">in a comment on his blog</a>, July 11, 2010<br />
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"Pour ce livre [<i>Paris Passages</i>] aussi bien que pour le 'Trauerspiel' je ne pourrai me passer d'une introduction qui porte la théorie de la connaissance—et, cette fois surtout sur la théorie de la connaissance de l'histoire. C'est là que je trouverai sur mon chemin Heidegger et j'attends quelque scintillement de l'entre-choc de nos deux manières, très différentes, d'envisager l'histoire." —Benjamin, letter to Scholem, January 20, 1930<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiyVZ-kPQn5CHKbP6gM74r1Ch1OI9H_LRz0QLpnDigKlNHjOe_Qb96EP6izkrxhWYwOacuRGc_liRmJxYyPeId6YTgjSyheN6TKFHhQHlxjIpxBwXeoGgTBnmV0fTsHxOTSHNfO8HZh5c/s1600/995117_10151691892056796_1301589550_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiyVZ-kPQn5CHKbP6gM74r1Ch1OI9H_LRz0QLpnDigKlNHjOe_Qb96EP6izkrxhWYwOacuRGc_liRmJxYyPeId6YTgjSyheN6TKFHhQHlxjIpxBwXeoGgTBnmV0fTsHxOTSHNfO8HZh5c/s400/995117_10151691892056796_1301589550_n.jpg" /></a><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">View from the balcony of a Hobrechtstraße apartment. Photo by <a href="http://ourbicyclebuiltfortwo.tumblr.com">Carmen Young</a>.</span>pupilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12085197110139248913noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5828905401214154457.post-46194334130627167422015-02-21T10:34:00.000-05:002015-02-21T10:34:40.085-05:00another A.Phenomenology of spirit: Whenever my mind turns absently to Kojève, which is surprisingly often, he is played by Theo Kojak. There stands the prophet, gesturing before Lacan, Bataille, Merleau-Ponty, Queneau, Breton, Sartre (?). His head shines. <i>The Battle of Stalingrad was the battle between the Right Hegelians and the Left Hegelians,</i> he intones. <i>Who loves ya, baby?</i>pupilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12085197110139248913noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5828905401214154457.post-72479203508084794902015-01-05T03:26:00.000-05:002015-01-05T12:47:45.845-05:00autumn III: Spouse of Thieves"In the film [<i>Valis</i>] Brady schemed constantly on Linda, Goose's wife (in the film, for some reason, Goose used his real name, Eric Lampton; so the tale narrated had to do with the marginal Lamptons). Linda Lampton wasn't natural; that came across early on. I got the impression that Brady was a son-of-a-bitch despite his wizardry with audio electronics. He had a laser system set up which ran the information -- which is to say, the various channels of music -- into a mixer unlike anything that actually exists; the damn thing rose up like a fortress -- Brady actually entered it through a door, and, inside it, got bathed with laser beams which converted into sound using his brain as a transducer. / In one scene Linda Lampton took off her clothes. She had no sex organs. / Damdest thing Fat and I ever saw." —PKD, <i>Valis</i><br />
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I am watching a film:<a href="#FN">†</a><br />
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We are reading a book in which the narrator, a woman called Ida, is going about writing – rather, mostly procrastinating on – the biography of her academic mentor, with whom she had studied the literature of detection, puzzle novels, and metafiction, completing – no, very nearly completing (OK, barely even starting) – a dissertation about Julian Barnes’ debt, in <i>Flaubert’s Parrot</i>, to Pierre Delalande. A brilliant and seductive polymath – if a comparatively barren academic – her mentor had written <i>his</i> dissertation on some autobiographical transubstantiations of Italo Svevo's <i>Coscienza di Zeno</i>. That’s probably where the resemblance ended between teacher and student.<br />
<br />
The biography writing gig came in the form of a strange phone call in the night – the kind people get in second-rate thrillers and conspiracy flicks. <i>Oh, yes, it’s not what’s said that makes your heart race, but what’s not said.</i> Mouth open. <i>Why don’t you say something or hang up!</i> We must picture the kind of movie that one lazily takes in from the back of a pickup truck at a rural drive-in. Ida hadn’t known her mentor had passed, actually; and the editor on the phone didn’t say so aloud, but his pitch of the project presupposed that, yes, Hamlet Godman was dead. More, there was something, something raffish in his tone. <i>Not a bogus </i>biographie romancée<i> but like Sebastian Knight with a lashing of sleaze, right?</i> Click.<br />
<br />
Once upon a time, Ida is the kind of washed up video store clerk who might be addicted to the lonely pursuit of repeatedly watching episodes of <i>Spooks</i>, say, or <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2PbG6KQKsE">odd music videos</a>, or reruns of the kinds of travel programs that air on PBS. She had accepted the assignment – but Godman is, or was (she corrected herself) my beloved academic mentor – because it seemed better than mourning, though she couldn’t tell whether, when muttering through the decision under her breath, she meant mourning for herself or for him. Anyway, let’s be honest, she needed the advance...which she now fritters away in pursuit of the principal pleasure of procrastinating on writing: <i>more research...</i><br />
<br />
...in the course of which Ida discovers, or claims to, a private journal, her mentor submitting himself to anxious recollections and grueling self-examinations, revealing the messy life that had glimmered only darkly beneath his coarse charisma and apparent with-it-ness.<br />
<br />
Ida’s narration becomes preoccupied with her secret publication of Godman’s private journal as an obscure blog and by the arrival of a commenter there who, with each post she publishes, alarmingly reveals greater and greater knowledge of her duplicitous undertaking. <i>Reckless concoctor! Plagiarist!</i> Post by post, the blog alternates awkwardly between rich, sensual remembrances – which are acknowledged, in a kind of meta post, to be a mix of fiction and fact – and excruciating excavations, descents into the cave of the self, a self now flayed by a critical eye accustomed to making judgments in the literary arena. Indeed, the journal treats its author like a character to be dismantled, exactingly taken apart, like Victoria Wren – or was it the Bad Priest? (she can’t remember now) – a made thing.<br />
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I hope Godman can forgive me, from whatever afterlife he’s in, for my previous belief in his omniscience.<br />
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<i>In the mirror I notice for the first time that my face is not symmetrical.<br />
Not least because in early adolescence I ignored the instructions of the orthodontist.</i><br />
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Genre. It’s always too late to un-master the habits of chronically unhappy people.<br />
<br />
<i>Everyone I know, young and old, seems to have begun therapy at around the same moment in time.</i><br />
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She jumps up from the desk, ruffling her hair, knocking over the chair, her shadow elongating until it obtains the corner of the room where a blind man crouches with a pistol.<br />
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<i>The experience of beginning to read a book for the first time and it being so uncannily like what you yourself think and yet so excruciatingly brilliant and amazing and clear and satisfying that you cannot stand it, panic, run out of the room, smoke a cigarette, and never return to the book but talk about it constantly, as though the opening five pages contained everything there was to know about it. After a few years you begin to accumulate a pile of these intimately abandoned books and that’s when the problems really begin.</i><br />
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Godman (OK, Hamlet then) always used to say (anyway, I think it was he) that, in graduate school, one could never confess that one was reading something, you know, for the first time. One must always only be “<i>re</i>-reading Proust (for instance) recently.”<br />
<br />
<i>It happened again when I picked up </i>Poke at the Mannequins!<i> by Gavrila Haviland, a book I’d seen on the shelf in my apartment since last fall but resisted reading because the back cover blurbs were hyperbolic and the author is roughly my students’ age. Reading celebrated published authors who are less than half my age is something I abhor doing. A tightness spreads from deep inside my gut and moves up to my lungs and then rams into my heart. I’m having a panic attack. My brain puts on a slide show of the passing years in reverse and focuses on the wreckage of projects begun and abandoned by the side of my life’s road. My eyes turn inward and I see myself shrinking to the scale of a single cell. Where do these young writers mine their knowledge?</i><br />
<br />
I have taken up smoking again (she stubs out the cigarette after only two puffs, leaving its crumpled cylinder dangling out of the potted philodendron on her desk). Something about this blog deranges me. I see that I will never be able to get a hold of what others see when they see me. The mirror may brim with brightness, but I don’t know. The vastness between what concerns me about me and what others see swallows me up. How did he manage the tightrope across? Somehow he made it back from those inspiring classroom performances, to this place of survey and flagellation.<br />
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<i>Tempus fugit velut umbra. It goes without saying that that is why I find myself writing my thoughts. As a way of stopping time. Tonight I am not writing. Fugit hora. I am watching the subway excavation/fresco scene in </i>Fellini’s Roma<i> over and over again. Fugit gloria. Even music and sound succumb to the universal law and are devoured by eternity.</i><br />
<br />
“For each professor, there are many students,” Hammy (the other students called him Hamgod) sighed to me once, during his office hours. I agree. Students remember all of their finite number of professors. Professors, by contrast, could hardly remember the infinite number of students, faces and more faces constantly flowing through their courses. The favorite or star student in any particular year must be disabused: you remember the professor, but he does not remember you, not in any workable detail, at least. Perhaps the student’s <i>work</i> is remembered? No, probably not, not even at storied Paragon University, Oregon.<br />
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<i>After a lashing of whiskey I feel free to confess in these pages that one cannot sustainably take the position that literature at its best is an intricate complex of inside jokes without revealing one’s own indolence and shallowness. As a general approach to interpretation the position seems to guarantee a reasonably good flow of sex from first years but it can’t last. Ida is a different matter. She is already a steady workman in the guilds, a true believer in the puzzle as the highest literary...and an encounter with her would not lack for a certain awareness and fright as I would catch sight of my own mediocrity. Her drafts are rubbish, all trickery and unnecessary literariness and anyway I loathe typographical frolics in books. Ida would make a good wingman.</i><br />
<br />
Neither of us predicted the Theory Generation novels...and their realisms. OK. But I am still vaguely embarrassed when I’m drawn into, say, a symphony, something retro-ish like Górecki’s 3rd, unless I’m sharing it with someone else for <i>their first time</i>, and can keep my distance, and play the teacher and be enthusiastically unabsorbed.<br />
<br />
<i>Here are the Blok lines that circle in my mind in the small hours:</i><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><i>Night. Street. Gaslamp. Pharmacy.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Senseless, dull glow.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Live another twenty years—</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Nothing changes. Nowhere to go.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>You die. Begin again from the beginning,</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>And everything repeats itself again:</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Night. The canal’s icy ripple.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Pharmacy. Street. Gaslamp.</i></div><br />
The moon is a thief. Bang.<br />
The slate snaps shut. Action. Take two. The camera is over her shoulder<br />
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† <i>Drafted December 2012, re-drafted January 2013, re-re-drafted December 2014, re-re-re-drafted January 2015; "happy" "new" "year."</i>pupilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12085197110139248913noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5828905401214154457.post-83366511956886749362014-12-31T23:59:00.000-05:002015-01-01T03:06:29.753-05:00tweets #16-27+3<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">popular elitists versus elite populists: suplex!<br />
— Seth Young (@autresy) <a href="https://twitter.com/autresy/status/11125764038">March 27, 2010</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">The end of an era http://twitpic.com/2c7ros<br />
— Catherine Bracy (@cbracy) <a href="https://twitter.com/cbracy/status/20499574694">August 6, 2010</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><a href="https://twitter.com/radioberkman">@radioberkman</a> time for this classic http://web.archive.org/web/20070420144535/http://www.thewebshite.net/nickelback.htm<br />
— Seth Young (@autresy) <a href="https://twitter.com/autresy/status/28800019111">October 26, 2010</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">subliterate clowns?<br />
— Seth Young (@autresy) <a href="https://twitter.com/autresy/status/55728521087156224">April 6, 2011</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">Be unrealistic, demand the possible. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/ows?src=hash">#ows</a> (slogan originally suggested by <a href="https://twitter.com/bat020">@bat020</a> )<br />
— Steven Shaviro (@shaviro) <a href="https://twitter.com/shaviro/status/125736934516592640">October 17, 2011</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">“The Things That People Do When They Think No One's Looking” by Hella is my new jam. ♫ <a href="http://t.co/MFC0AE1x">http://t.co/MFC0AE1x</a><br />
— Seth Young (@autresy) <a href="https://twitter.com/autresy/status/190173763474698242">April 11, 2012</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">DRONES OPEN THE REFRIGERATOR DOOR. IT IS HOLLOW: A STAGE PROP. DRONES WAIT. A HUMAN COMES ALONG. IT CLOSES THE DOOR. IT LOOKS SATISFIED.<br />
— Drone Insertion (@DroneInsertion) <a href="https://twitter.com/DroneInsertion/status/190522094348546048">April 12, 2012</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">in The Future, real marriage equality means that all weddings are officiated by unmanned Predators <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/nicedayforadronewedding?src=hash">#nicedayforadronewedding</a><br />
— Seth Young (@autresy) <a href="https://twitter.com/autresy/status/200737910654386176">May 11, 2012</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">schubert's ninth is kind of corny, but i like it.<br />
— Seth Young (@autresy) <a href="https://twitter.com/autresy/status/249114840847745024">September 21, 2012</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><a href="https://twitter.com/autresy">@autresy</a> Why thank you, Seth!<br />
— Dr Jonathan Zizmor (@doctorzizmor) <a href="https://twitter.com/doctorzizmor/status/373044953233903616">August 29, 2013</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><a href="https://twitter.com/southsouth">@southsouth</a> guess it's time i reread chasin's "Class and Its Close Relations: Identities among Women, Servants, and Machines"<br />
— Seth Young (@autresy) <a href="https://twitter.com/autresy/status/387013143181787136">October 7, 2013</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">evidently still might have a chance to do an ethnography of ethnographers<br />
— Seth Young (@autresy) <a href="https://twitter.com/autresy/status/433469091714592768">February 12, 2014</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><a href="https://twitter.com/lifewinning">@lifewinning</a> Chris Marker's Notting Hill<br />
— Seth Young (@autresy) <a href="https://twitter.com/autresy/status/520049840064299009">October 9, 2014</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">in which i am hassled by The Man <a href="http://t.co/MqjrOL07">http://t.co/MqjrOL07</a><br />
— Seth Young (@autresy) <a href="https://twitter.com/autresy/status/238678233585971200">August 23, 2012</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">"everyone who poisons himself with nicotine, and especially alcohol, is ruthlessly destroyed by the One State" <a href="http://t.co/eTwWvVAirN">http://t.co/eTwWvVAirN</a><br />
— Seth Young (@autresy) <a href="https://twitter.com/autresy/status/538353453912059904">November 28, 2014</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>pupilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12085197110139248913noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5828905401214154457.post-53235685008761142842014-12-29T01:16:00.002-05:002022-11-02T23:21:54.786-04:00fall I: thematize me"Your spirit is time-reversed to your body / stereographic mix up field on field / it started growing up the day your body dies / only apparently real to irreal" —Sonic Youth, "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3o0XSedkPTY">Stereo Sanctity</a>"<br />
<br />
<br />
Now it was winter.<a href="#FN">†</a><br />
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For weeks this last fall I had been listening to Converge’s “Predatory Glow” several times a day; it’s the finale to their recent <i>All We Love We Leave Behind,</i> and its lyrics begin, "I've found myself / running out of time / relating to those that / just stopped trying / clinging to those little things / and the light they bring / I bow down to you / extinguished youth" (for more, <a href="http://songmeanings.com/songs/view/3530822107859442475/">this transcription</a> seems mostly correct). It’s disappointing to me when the closing song on an album doesn’t sound like a ship on fire in the middle of the ocean. Converge know how to end an album:<br />
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Parenthetically, do we not seek out “new” music to listen to because it is unburdened by memory associations, for listening to “old,” “familiar” music always seems to draw us back against the current? New music isn't yet tied to a life time or place or stratum. Surely now, thanks to my overplaying, “Predatory Glow” will be October of 2012 whenever I hear it.<br />
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(Cobweb or chain of memory. At once I recall struggling to explain to M.S. between sets at a “Neue Musik” piano performance why a blog should take “belated” as its title. But then, it wouldn’t be unfair to say that my first website, from ye olde late 90s, in the end became a way for me to share the lyrics from songs that were affecting me most urgently at a given moment; I need only think of a pretext for their use or display. Epigraphs are always handy. I also recollect struggling with Elliot Carter’s “Insomnia.” The occasion for the struggle was a paper for a course called “Music since 1968,” which was taught by an accomplished student of Carter’s! The paper was about the relation between Carter’s music and the poem of Elizabeth Bishop’s that it set. Soundtrack, “a mirror on which to dwell.”)<br />
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Personally, I am not averse to bombast.<br />
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Why do I find some pop songs so compelling? As though the lyrics were written by someone sneaking into my room at night, ghost writing my high school diary. As though “the shadows are really the body.” A circle between high school journal and pop song lyric whose most crystalline expression is the kid writing during class, from memory, the full lyrics of an Iron Maiden song on his trapper keeper.<br />
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What <i>is</i> the relation between the lyrics and the music they “accompany?”<br />
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Footnotes? at first ridiculing, then destroying the main argument of the piece. Or the lyrics could figure what the music seems to be doing abstractly. Then pop singers always say: the lyrics have a personal meaning for me; individual fans will make of them what they will. Everyone shall have their own interpretation that I am not responsible for! Or the lyrics are a kind of de-figuralization that allows anyone to inject some semantic something into them? And how does that complicate our notion of the physical force of music? the way it moves the body despite its abstractness, and of the words, which seem to rip away from the flesh and float over like ashes. High school diary, high school poetry.<br />
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Song lyrics are supposed to be abstract enough to enable individual interpretations, and at the same time, they do not sound meaningful and invite such interpretation without seeming to figure the music they “accompany.” That's a question.<br />
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And we haven't yet accounted for the voice. Perhaps the voice is precisely this site or relation between lyrics and music?<br />
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And if song lyrics are so important to me, then why am I so terrible at hearing what they are in the first place – I always need the booklet, the text – let alone deciphering them?<br />
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<blockquote>I had a dream<br />
and it split the scene<br />
but I gotta hunch<br />
it’s coming back to me.</blockquote><br />
It took me twenty years to realize that “split” could mean divide <i>and</i> leave.<br />
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† <i>Composed November 2012, edited February 2013, published December 2014.</i>pupilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12085197110139248913noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5828905401214154457.post-24564343983275083462014-11-29T21:27:00.000-05:002014-11-29T21:31:49.067-05:002 + 1 dreamsJournal. June 26, 2013, 5:33pm. Daydreaming on the sofa, I recollect two dreams from the previous night.<br />
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<a name='more'></a> Downstairs hallway with lockers. PK is going to work. Some bird somehow through the crack of a barely open window takes the biggest bird shit of all time on my jacket, which I promptly put in the washer there. It is also an Asian restaurant? I think BL is there.<br />
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Walking slowly up a path or street, from the ferry or somewhere downtown, which is crowded with movie film crew personnel, as though they are queued to enter the house. To people who challenge me and my reason for being there, I explain that I am a friend of the director. The street/approach is your current one. I lounge under an umbrella drinking some kind of tropical kind of thing, as though suddenly the end of my walk, directly outside your house, is in Aruba or something. You [ZS] greet me, we chat briefly, and then, knowing you are very busy, I say something to the effect of "Go in there and boss those people around; you're so divine at it."<br />
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"The content of all dreams that occur during the same night forms part of the same whole; the fact of their being divided into several sections, as well as the grouping and number of those sections—all of this has a meaning and may be regarded as a piece of information arising from the latent dream-thoughts" (Freud, <i>The Interpretation of Dreams</i>).<br />
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And then a few nights later I had a dream in which I related both of these dreams to both of these people. And then PK wrote to me. And then ZS called me and asked me, and I said the two dominant moods of the dream were inside knowledge and regret at not spending more time together. And then ZS said, "What if the dream-me were some aspect of yourself, what would that mean?" And I explained it could mean that I have to get off my ass and do some work now, or it could mean that I need to think about whether or not I should ever play a leadership role in something.pupilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12085197110139248913noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5828905401214154457.post-10590323890580010972014-11-27T11:37:00.000-05:002019-02-10T16:39:31.222-05:00Denkplatz D-503<i>This post was drafted practically at the dawn of time. April 27, 2013. Even then already it was belated. Not sure why I'm moved to hit Publish today. Perhaps a response to the <a href="http://www.datasociety.net/">new job</a>. You know, the one I've had since September 2013. Which is to say, not a new job. So. </i>Belated<i>, ladies and gentlemen, belated through and through.</i><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC7kcEk1rAlCPf3EFYqnQgmh753pUk3yMQ-YWUnf_1vYNEmb8J1TPU5NsG9vpmLWwe205VPUGgPfbfvU7Qyga_k02a1vD7_aVRwVkiQNImkkS_lvpG7QBPp7cIGjagyX4p8TbahjtEYgo/s1600/UNTITLED.gif" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC7kcEk1rAlCPf3EFYqnQgmh753pUk3yMQ-YWUnf_1vYNEmb8J1TPU5NsG9vpmLWwe205VPUGgPfbfvU7Qyga_k02a1vD7_aVRwVkiQNImkkS_lvpG7QBPp7cIGjagyX4p8TbahjtEYgo/s320/UNTITLED.gif"></a><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Theo A. Nusyg, <i>untitled</i> (1997), ink on bar napkin. Used by permission.</span><br />
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A year ago I was reading a post by Jeffrey Schnapp, <a href="http://jeffreyschnapp.com/cold-spots/">(Icy) cold spots</a>, with great interest:<br />
<blockquote>Or might it [the library cold spot] instead be imagined as a portable ice-cube shaped, battery equipped, signal jamming device that an authorized patron or librarian could introduce into a given space to reprogram it, as it were, on the fly? Or might it assume the form of an enclosure structure or booth, a kind of phone booth in reverse?</blockquote>I decided to tweet a question in response: "as libr's jamming cube would also interrupt surveillance, would it become a criminal space? or is contemplation already criminal?"<br />
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"Not sure why it would interrupt surveillance, since surveillance systems are usually running on a hard wire," came Professor Schnapp's <a href="https://twitter.com/jaytiesse/status/191542331571322883">reply</a>, which suggested that, unsurprisingly, Twitter had not served me well in speaking clearly. (OTOH, the poor workman blames his tools, the poor abstractician blames his concrete.)<br />
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And then I forgot all about the exchange until the <a href="http://dp.la/">DPLA</a> launch last week got me to thinking about libraries. Thus, a belated note, not so much of clarification as of dilation. <a name='more'></a><br />
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Circa 2006 the executive director of the Berkman Center related an anecdote to me about an observation made by a visitor at the Center. At the end of his tenure there, the visitor was walking the creaky halls of the three-story Victorian which housed Berkman (housed it until – another kind reprogramming on the fly – it was <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/ericag/sets/72157600453606750/">moved down the street</a>, and the Center was given a new home). As always at Berkman, there were a bunch of people with varying degrees of formal/informal affiliation working in every crevice of the place. Working: typing at computers. The visitor observed that this was all well and good – and the proof is in the pudding, look how productive! – but he was troubled that he saw no one leaning back and reading a book or, I don't know, staring off into space.<br />
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So my old boss hoped to elevate a fruitful alternation between reflection and production as a goal of the spatial programming of the Center when it moved into its <a href="http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/about/contact">new home</a>: above all, to be sensitive to the idea that, periodically, we must do something other than produce produce produce, something other than be connected. At the <i>center for Internet & society</i>, cultivating this sensitivity is harder than it sounds. (Incidentally, Berkman is how I became aware of Jeffrey Schnapp's work. He is now one of the Center's directors.)<br />
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Bias: golly, <a href="http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-disconnectionists/">disconnection</a> sounds swell to me. For I am a slow thinker. Last year I was writing <a href="http://verspaetet.blogspot.com/2012/05/collapsed.html">collapsed</a> while I should have been working on something else. This year I am doing the same, writing this instead of that. Procrastination is my way of working through something. Crookedly. The digression is the lesson. I guess.<br />
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The immediate context of 'the library cold spot' is an emergent theme of conversation in a design practicum on the library. The practicum is practical; the "Library Test Kitchen" actually builds things, e.g., here is a take on the cold spot in question: <a href="http://www.librarytestkitchen.org/projects.html">(scroll down to) <i>Wi-Fi Cold Spot</i></a>. The theme, by contrast, is more aspirational: "the role of spaces of silence, contemplation, refuge and retreat in the library of the future." The urgency of this theme derives from the approaching ubiquity of connectivity. Hyper-connection is bound up with anxiety around silence and solitude. Or perhaps the anxiety is determined negatively, winding out from how unremarkable hyper-connection feels.<br />
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Libraries have sought to be centers of information in a connected age. Now that connectedness is becoming hyperconnectedness, thanks in no small part to handheld devices, the Library Test Kitchen begins asking after the role of quiet space in the library. It's a fun sort of inside-out question: how architecturally to program a certain silence now in the library? Schnapp dangles a possibility, "a kind of phone booth in reverse."<br />
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An image floats free, which had been lodged in my memory somewhere between a non-existent New Yorker cartoon and an apocryphal standup comedy routine or episode of <i>Seinfeld,</i> of someone stepping into an out-of-order phone booth in order to make a call on a cellular phone. I try to use the Internet to find the New Yorker cartoon, or the comedy routine, and find instead <a href="http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2012/03/12/cell-phone-booths-in-davis-family-library-location-update/">Cell Phone Booths in Davis Family Library – Location Update</a>. It must take Clark Kent a long time to locate a phone booth in which to become Superman.<br />
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<a href="http://matrix.wikia.com/wiki/Telephone_booth"><img border="0" src="https://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130302053659/matrix/images/thumb/9/98/Telephone_booth_escape.png/320px-Telephone_booth_escape.png"></a><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://matrix.wikia.com/wiki/Telephone_booth">Source</a>.</span><br />
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I also flash on: if the jamming cube or reverse phone booth chills a zone, interrupting connections, preventing information getting in and out, then it also complicates surveillance. Perhaps a prior kind of surveillance continues to function. A photographic device sees you go into the reverse phone booth, and it sees you come out. But my response to Schnapp had more to do with the way in which our behavior is increasingly surveilled in and on the network. By "going dark" one interrupts that. Surveillance is presupposed as the law of the land. Interrupting it is criminal. Sort of like loitering seems to interrupt a certain productivity. Thus the question of whether contemplation per se is already criminal because it's anti-social and opaque to power, non-instrumental.<br />
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Interlude: "I blew up the building." "Why?" "Because you made a phone call."<br />
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As a practical matter, I can imagine the reverse phone booth or jamming cube being used to create a space of "IRL" criminal activity as much as "contemplation" criminal activity. Let's sloppily call it the <a href="https://www.torproject.org">Tor</a> effect. Let's also admit that the library cold spot already exists in the form of cell phone and wireless signal jammers and Faraday cages. Police and security services are sure to be good customers of the companies that manufacture them. And citizens will use these things, too, in unanticipated ways. And they will shun the library, perhaps, if it no longer serves their needs because it exposes them to online monitoring as the price for access to information.<br />
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<a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/boston-bombing-suspect-found-hiding-in-boat/8/">Hot or cold</a>, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev would have been better served in his purposes by the <a href="http://www.watertownlib.org">Watertown Free Public Library</a> than by a <a href="http://gpstracklog.com/2013/04/boston-bombers-tracked-by-gps.html">stolen car</a>. We express relief at his apprehension. But we should be anxious about the means — and hope that in the future it remains possible for the library, or any institution or person, to preserve a space, architectural or otherwise, beyond monitorability.<br />
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I'm not optimistic.pupilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12085197110139248913noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5828905401214154457.post-24798754955226386532014-11-15T23:01:00.003-05:002015-06-20T22:45:54.053-04:00SNS SOS<i>The following originally appeared on <a href="https://plus.google.com/101719882333971812336/posts">Google+</a>, Oct 12, 2012.</i><br />
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It's worth carefully thinking through the question of natural monopoly in relation to the so-called social graph (is there really only one, i.e. <i>the</i> social graph?). What makes the question interesting, I think, is that the users of <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/08/facebook-business-plan-utility-monopoly">Facebook</a> are not its customers in the sense that monopolizing the social graph is not monopolizing social networking -- but rather a certain kind of advertising. Unless I am mistaken, people don't open a Facebook account in order to be advertised to...pupilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12085197110139248913noreply@blogger.com2