orange, tomorrow, space, angel, powder, structure, intimacy lubrication, softening, trombone, withering
orange, tomorrow, space, angel, powder, structure, intimacy lubrication, softening, trombone, withering
Sound, Skin, Fixtures of Continuity
Michael Watkins
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Digital is what
lay on either side
of a boundary that cannot be passed.
Digital is identity.
Think of a gulch.
The best part of a gulch is that it has created this side and that side.
That is also its worst part.
Digital is the harmonium of excellence.
Analog is the wherewithal, deciduous.
Whatever poetry may be latent in cheesy action films and the average videogame involves the culture object’s accidental surreality told flatly.
Multiple day fasts with sunlight and black coffee, 60 hour work weeks, recreational substances, bootcamp workouts, breathwork classes, beach walks with family and dogs, etc. All became experiments to see if I could push the right buttons to become a well balanced individual.
I slept like a hot carbon barrier to the earth. In the dark, a further darkness: owl-hoots with my hands attached. I realized there was a kitten living in the corner, in the dream, it had birdhouses for sale.
By showing you how criticism constructs itself, the aspiring critic does not need discursive x-ray vision or to see a collection of essays as so many articulated skeletons standing discretely atop a blue void. All you need is a little time and effort.
I consider losing my appetite to evidence positive moral and ethical standards.
Oh boy do I love explaining to the angry soccer mom that the Pikachu her daughter received is not, in fact, a boy’s toy and that we are only currently carrying Pokémon in all of our Happy Meals™.
Now, at long last, we have an Allen biography. In Greaves, Allen has found the kind of friend, curator, and collaborator every great artist deserves.
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.
Now, at long last, we have an Allen biography. In Greaves, Allen has found the kind of friend, curator, and collaborator every great artist deserves.
In the quiet of the white space, the aesthetic of restraint creates a storehouse of energy brimming behind and between each uttered syllable.
In her classroom, she would tell her students, “I’m not just going to teach you chemistry. I’m going to teach you life. Because you’re going to need that.”
For those of us who want the art of opera to persist materially—not just metaphysically—it is easier to imagine the end of opera, or art in general, than the end of capitalism.
What illness and pain cast into relief is that our minds will always be lost in translation—and will always remain in a liminal space—somewhere between our embodiment and the outer world.
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.
Multiple day fasts with sunlight and black coffee, 60 hour work weeks, recreational substances, bootcamp workouts, breathwork classes, beach walks with family and dogs, etc. All became experiments to see if I could push the right buttons to become a well balanced individual.
I consider losing my appetite to evidence positive moral and ethical standards.
The genius would be like—do you know the two
ways to eat a beer glass? Like that was a situation
we were often in. He’d learned it from Jasper Gallon.
Kojeve’s theory of desire, based on Hegel’s lord-bondsman dialectic and a huge influence on the thinking of one Jacques Lacan, was that desire isn’t simply about desiring an object, but rather about desiring to be desired, and desiring the object that desires you, in what could potentially become a house of mirrors of recognition and mis-recognition
“Bless us, o Lord,” went the reverential drawl, “and watch over our riders and our livestock. And Lord, protect the brave men and women serving in our armed forces and our first responders. And Lord, we pray that you will guide our elected officials as they seek to lead this country through difficult times.”
Maybe all I want from a movie—what any of us wants—is not only something to talk about, but something to talk to.
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.
Digital is what
lay on either side
of a boundary that cannot be passed.
Digital is identity.
Think of a gulch.
The best part of a gulch is that it has created this side and that side.
That is also its worst part.
Digital is the harmonium of excellence.
Analog is the wherewithal, deciduous.
If she did all of this today, Dylan knew that the only right thing to do would be to put down the spaghetti, remove the towel, drive the twenty minutes to the care facility, hug the woman, and tell her, no, his father wasn’t locked-in.
I didn’t feel like a god.
Thank God I don’t feel like a god.
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.
I slept like a hot carbon barrier to the earth. In the dark, a further darkness: owl-hoots with my hands attached. I realized there was a kitten living in the corner, in the dream, it had birdhouses for sale.
Oh boy do I love explaining to the angry soccer mom that the Pikachu her daughter received is not, in fact, a boy’s toy and that we are only currently carrying Pokémon in all of our Happy Meals™.
We could be many things – I could give it up,
I could tell you exactly what to do.
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.