December 2011
16 posts
2 tags
The Search for Posthumanism
Notes from the 2011 Singularity Summit
by Mike Thomsen
The idea that we can run out of time is peculiar. It’s a product of how we organize our memories.
Human consciousness is a kind of romance with the idea that time is finite and consumable. This assumption of finitude means that time can also become digested and metabolized urge, energizing the desire to imagine what is coming next. Being...
3 tags
Keira Knightley's Vagina
A Dangerous Method taps the allure of sexual dysfunction
by Kartina Richardson
David Cronenberg’s new film A Dangerous Method opens with the ominous notes of a cello, that, leading out of the opening credits, give way to a horn and string crescendo and the disturbing first scene: Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) arrives screaming, restrained by men, in a black carriage drawn by black...
2 tags
The Reluctant Writer
Mina Loy (1916)
Recently published work by modernist Mina Loy from Dalkey Archive
by Mary Borkowski
In a short essay on Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy writes: “You never hear anyone say: ‘I have read such and such a book by Gertrude Stein.’ People say: ‘I have read some Gertrude Stein.’ ” This some bespeaks a lack, a desire to know more, securing her on a tentative, pencilled...
2 tags
Literary Tantalus
The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1941-1956 (Edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge University Press)
by Ethan Hon
It’s fitting that Samuel Beckett’s last endeavor into the literary would be from his deathbed. Two weeks before his death on December 22, 1989, Beckett dictated his English translation of Comment dire to Barbara Bray. The...
3 tags
The Revolution That Wasn't
by Matt Pearce
“I am not a hero. I was only using the keyboard, Mona, on the internet, I never put my life in danger, the real heroes are the ones on the ground. … This revolution belonged to the internet youth, then the revolution belonged to the Egyptian youth, then the revolution belonged to all of Egypt. It has no hero, no one should steal its thunder, we are all heroes.”
—Wael Ghonim,...
2 tags
I'm With Stupid
On the latest edition of Clarice Lispector’s final novel, The Hour of the Star (New Directions)
by Mike Thomsen
Stupidity is always conditional. An observer discovers some ignorance in a subject, or else the subject stumbles on her own stupidity, usually engendering a torturous self-doubt about what other ignorances might be lurking within. The only antidote to stupidity is an agitated...
2 tags
Vaclav Havel, 1936-2011
by Amanda Rivkin
Where are the great men? Are we beyond the point of elevating the individual over the group, or are there simply no more individuals? Marc Sageman, a former CIA officer, has warned for more than a decade of the emergence of “leaderless jihad” as terrorist movements spawn violent individuals. But lately his idea has been turned on its head, as the movement for freedom attempts...
1 tag
The Color and the Sound
Erik den Breejen’s pop synesthesia and the Beach Boys’ SMiLE
by Mary Borkowski
“A color which would be ‘dirty’ if it were the color of a wall, needn’t be so in a painting … There is no criterion by which to recognize what a color is, except that it is one of our colors.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Remarks on Color”
The first time I walked into Erik den Breejen’s studio in...
2 tags
You and Mark Aren't Friends
Facebook’s Timeline turns your old updates into an unexpurgated biography
by Giovanni Tiso
Timeline is the story of your life.
—Mark Zuckerberg
Nine beef consommés, one iced cucumber soup, one mussel soup
—Georges Perec, “Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Ninteen Hundred and Seventy-Four”
Four months...
2 tags
Manet in Tunisia
Rue Mosnier Decorated with Flags, Edouard Manet (1878)
Revolutionary art changes how one can see. So does revolution.
By James Polchin
In January, I waited outside the Grand Palais in Paris for two hours in near-freezing temperatures to see a Claude Monet show, the first in nearly two decades in France.
As it was for everyone I knew who went to the show, waiting for Monet was part of the...
2 tags
On Rage and Swagger
The following is an excerpt from Roman Letters, from Oslo Editions
By Evan Calder Williams
C,
When we spoke last, it was — and how could it not be? — of rioting and necessity, of taking and being taken by times you don’t choose. Lust for what has nothing to do with sex, or perhaps only diagonally, and carrying yourself, getting carried, what could be a battering fury and its restraints,...
2 tags
The Enduring Legacy of Basquiat's Hair
The painter’s generative conflict (and coif) lives on
By Itoro Udoko
Jean-Michel Basquiat had a professional career that lasted just nine years, but in that time he managed to make himself one of the most significant painters of the 20th century and an enduring cultural icon. Basquiat was a bundle of contradictions; he made art from the streets, yet his work appeared in galleries...
2 tags
Be Aware: Nick Kristof's Anti-Politics
By Elliott Prasse-Freeman
“How can you watch people die in the streets?” “You don’t look, you close your eyes.”
Nicholas Kristof, Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times journalist, is often hailed as a defender of the downtrodden, courageously reporting those man-made events that “shock the conscience.” As he traipses the globe to report on its most grisly moments, Kristof is...
3 tags
Who's That Girl?
The heroine of Fox’s New Girl has more in common with a logo design than its audience
By Sarah Handelman
Mortie is a darling girl. She never stops smiling. In her little yellow Mary Janes and her little yellow dress, Mortie is a little yellow speck of sunshine on any rainy day. She likes to go for strolls. We do not know where she comes from. We do not know where she goes. But under her...
2 tags
The Trouble with Digital Conservatism
(via)
Conserving the self in a culture of productive narcissism
by Rob Horning
The cluster of ideas, meanings, and implications associated with Web 2.0 has been amalgamating for the better part of a decade, steadily consolidating to the point where few would deny its cultural significance. The development of more sophisticated search engines and the promulgation of social media have combined...
