The ways in which we engage with the world is growingly polyphonic.
The ways in which we engage with the world is growingly polyphonic.
Techno Worship: On Merilyn Chang’s “Vague Predictions and Prophecies”
Merilyn Chang
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It’s easy to imagine, though, that many of these stories exist in the same universe—dilapidated and hyper-developed, inhabited by emotionally fragile and lonely characters desperate for some type of human connection. Like many stories that are sci-fi by nature, it presents fictitious realities that are just believable enough to be scary.
So the broccoli on my plate are elms, the mashed potatoes a castle, and the brown sauce is the moat’s muddy water. The sauce’s beans are crocodiles to scare off your enemies. In the castle there’s a radish that rules the kingdom, and a tower where a small marinated carrot I adore is being held captive.
What happens during waking hours, on the other hand, is not a lie. But subjective experience is as unprovable as a dream – particularly for those whose reality is centered around their own body, and how it differs from the norm.
Progress. It’s supposed to be good
for you, for you, and only you.
At the edge, a self reflects through and refracts against another; this is how the book situates itself historically, not about identity but moving through the possibility of several identities.
Maybe all I want from a movie—what any of us wants—is not only something to talk about, but something to talk to.
For cloistered out here, away from all human influence, free of all the clutter and the bustle and the bars, their words took on a life of their own. They took our language and turned it into something new, gave it an alien life.
Leda constantly invents and reinvents the mythology of himself, as if writing his own hagiography.
Everyone keeps telling me
my mother looked so pretty
in her casket. They try to assure me
the mortician did a good job.
My mother looked better
alive.
The other girls were staring at him rapt as he explained the camp schedule. We had never seen a man like him before. Different from any high school boys we had ever known, football players, brothers, or fathers. I myself didn’t have a father. Just a mother who liked “anything that chugged or neighed.”
Erpenbeck treats her characters’ helplessness as deeply felt and tragic, an attitude she might’ve developed as a young person leading up to reunification or during her years directing operas.
We were getting along even better than average, actually. I suspected I might be a better person for a while.
Surface Studies is about reading and writing, not encyclopedic knowledge, cultural context or the history of literature, awards, sales, or markets.
Both the impotence of art and the complicity of the world in the face of atrocity have demonstrated that armed, decolonial struggle never lost its urgency or necessity, despite what the triumphalists of the “end of history” would have hoped.
It’s easy to imagine, though, that many of these stories exist in the same universe—dilapidated and hyper-developed, inhabited by emotionally fragile and lonely characters desperate for some type of human connection. Like many stories that are sci-fi by nature, it presents fictitious realities that are just believable enough to be scary.
What happens during waking hours, on the other hand, is not a lie. But subjective experience is as unprovable as a dream – particularly for those whose reality is centered around their own body, and how it differs from the norm.
Ruby’s style of argument—choppy, playful, sometimes sonically enticing—invites us to look, not just at “poetry” as a concept, but at the poem we happen to read, whose sounds we likely imagine in our heads as we move to the end of each line, along with the person who might have composed it.
Each appearance of gender, which is to say each appearance in our lives of those fuzzy unconscious signals, breaks up and splits into multiple messages.
The poems in Grand Tour are marked by restlessness: their speakers seem uncomfortable, even trapped, within their lyric moments.
Chekhov’s gun isn’t always firing; sometimes it’s just the small, insignificant moments that happen in the meantime, described with clarity and grace, pinpricks of tenderness, the levity of a vignette that passes, that means nothing, that means everything, that exists.
Maybe all I want from a movie—what any of us wants—is not only something to talk about, but something to talk to.
Compared to Stoker’s belief in the positive influence of the Enlightenment and traditional Christian faith, Eggers’s narrative is a darker meditation on modernity’s spiritual blindness.
Without a premature claim to any kind of sagacity—that is, with all due humility, I begin to understand the epigraph to J. Salter’s final novel.
As a reader, it’s flattering to be let in: to understand that the writer is playing with expectations, starving you a bit of plot, feeding you a ton of side dishes instead of a meat and potatoes dinner.
Falling out of love, with an object as much as with a person, is a rupture between the past and present selves.
Frazier wants to slow these moments of change down, hold them fast, and provide them with the level of reflection given to art in prestigious spaces like MoMA’s galleries. The exhibit opens with her instruction that we understand her works as “monuments for workers’ thoughts.”
Because even if you're speaking about ghosts, you're always speaking about yourself—about your neighbors and about your own history.
Lange presents a beautiful and moving depiction of Laughner as a tragic poet amidst the end of the industrial empire of which Cleveland and Northeast Ohio were a microcosm.
I think I'm really interested in things that iterate and shift depending on context, depending on vantage, depending on perspective, depending on relation. So maybe that's what some of that is.
This never really happens, but I wanted it to be a book that anybody could read, more or less, because I got so many ideas for stories from people I worked with—when I worked on farms or in light construction, or growing up working at a pizza place. I always write and read in the morning, and when I worked on the farms or in construction, I would try to do a little bit before work since I knew the day was going to be tiring.
What had stirred Miéville’s return to fiction after more than a decade? What would this collaboration look like? Did this make Reeves a comrade?
In Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond, technology scholar Tamara Kneese, director of Data & Society’s Algorithmic Impact Methods Lab and former green software researcher at Intel, explores the precarity of our data and digital selves.
For cloistered out here, away from all human influence, free of all the clutter and the bustle and the bars, their words took on a life of their own. They took our language and turned it into something new, gave it an alien life.
Somehow the lists got switched
so now when darkness trips
the streetlamps in a single flick
I stand on the porch and yell
for Operation Total Fury
You can wake up to someone day after day and still they’ll appear disfigured somehow, pummeled by the early light.
There are always reasons one begins to write an endless letter to someone who neither exists, nor ever wanted to. When I started, I was someone, too. Now, to keep going, I sit in the workshop, erasing.
They light their soft mustaches with the beating glow of their phones, jingling the hits and misses of a shooting game. They wave them in the air, “Over there,” they yell and disappear. Bugs are erect in the tall grass. I run toward the children, and they toward me, or away, and I run toward them again, barely missing. Their faces gleam green, pink, then red, and purple.
"Let me duck out of the olden days that I may be free now / somewhat over the choppy waves.
So the broccoli on my plate are elms, the mashed potatoes a castle, and the brown sauce is the moat’s muddy water. The sauce’s beans are crocodiles to scare off your enemies. In the castle there’s a radish that rules the kingdom, and a tower where a small marinated carrot I adore is being held captive.
Progress. It’s supposed to be good
for you, for you, and only you.
I liked the emergency room doctor who said, “This isn’t an emergency. You could’ve waited another hour.” Then stabbed a thing into my lung.
The student loan bubble? Tensions with China? The hollowing of rural America? The collapse of the reasonable center? Medical debt, race relations? My God, the climate crisis, and on top of all that the looming threat of another four years, which, all liberal hysteria aside, our enemies in the Kremlin were probably planning right this moment? It added up, and it added up, and it added up until one actually could not believe how much it was adding up.
I want to start by saying that in the fifties and sixties Jews and Blacks moved into Shaker Heights.
I want to start by saying that the press said they were welcomed.
I want to start by saying they were not welcomed.
Smoke. Morphine induced reflective flashback. Restricted area. Observe > feel > transcribe > reflect > repeat. Hospital bed. Breaking news. Large blast. Conspiracies. Message boards. Static. Dread. Cybrids. Phantom limb.