How Literature Saved My Life – David Shields
The title of the book, tongue-in-cheek but still on the cheesy side, fits the showing-all-my-cards-right-up-front ethos of the project.
Chat poses a constant negotiation of presence and absence. It’s ostensibly immediate but built on the invisibility of the interlocutor. Chat is about half-presence, half-engagement. I’m not ignoring you, of course not.
There is no lag time, seemingly no period during which the avant-garde is actually more advanced than the plain old guard. Any sense there might once have been of ‘underground’ or ‘subculture’ has collapsed into one cultural behemoth.
Reading theory, like reading poetry, is exhilarating.
My imagined Gaza was real to me.
Visionary futurist Erkki Kurenniemi’s work seems like a gesture of startling hope in the potential for technology to preserve and reproduce the essence of life.
David Rakoff and Christopher Hitchens . . . straddled the problem of narrative, shaping the story of their own death and through that process making their way towards acceptance of the incomprehensibility of actually dying. Even when accepted, actually dying does not become comprehensible.
The Life of an Unknown Man – Andreï Makine
If Makine has built a romantic aura around his own persona, with his character Shutov he mocks that romanticism.
A look back at the beginning of l’affaire Pussy Riot in the wake of their sentencing.
The document shapes our memory, and our knowledge of the potential for documentation shapes our present and future. I make my Facebook profile? My Facebook profile makes me? Things are getting messy.