I shot an arrow in the air. She fell to earth in Berkeley Square
January 2, 2014 § Leave a comment
I want to talk today about how early print complicates any trajectory from manuscript to digital, focusing on some common mistaken assumptions that are made about early print. The first assumption we make is that print replaced manuscript, that once the printing press was invented, writing by hand withered away. But print is not the opposite of manuscript. Indeed, we might understand print as having spurred on an increase in handwriting…
Our notion of what is important, of the difference between print and manuscript, of what readers do with texts, has been shaped by the assumptions and practices of collectors and curators in the nineteenth century. The questions that I asked about whether we consider a specific work print or manuscript are not questions without important implications for researchers. In most libraries, print and manuscript are cataloged separately, often with different curators in charge and with different policies and grants in place. Early modern readers might not have differentiated between print and manuscript, but nineteenth-century caretakers of those books did, and often remade them according to their notions of what was appropriate, assumptions that continue to govern how we treat and encounter early books. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Saoirse Wall
We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees
January 1, 2014 § Leave a comment
The monkeys accomplished their goal of recreating all 38 works of Shakespeare. The last work, The Taming Of The Shrew, was completed at 2 AM PST on October 6, 2011. This is the first time every work of Shakespeare has actually been randomly reproduced. Furthermore, this is the largest work ever randomly reproduced. It is one small step for a monkey, one giant leap for virtual primates everywhere. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Kevin Russ
For in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men; well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril; – nevertheless, the sea is the sea
December 31, 2013 § Leave a comment
Boston Dynamics was as much its YouTube channel as it was a robotics firm. Poorly lit, with a look that betrayed iMovie’s default settings, the videos were what Boston Dynamics did best: present experimental technologies as logical conclusions. Of course we’ll have quadruped robots running faster than Usain Bolt. I mean, obvy. The banality of it all; how could you resist? But there were consequences to this kind of thinking.
PETMAN isn’t the T-1000. It was meant to test hazard suits worn by military personnel, so, the logic goes, it needed to move like one. LS3 isn’t a mobile weapons platform, but a way to haul supplies across uneven terrain. In neither case are the technologies murderous on their own, but a very real problem lies in the goals they serve. Here are robots meant to streamline war. Make war go faster.
My—our—obsession with Boston Dynamics served as a kind of military boosterism. An obscenely large foam hand emblazoned with the words Real Future Shit (and, occasionally, We’re All Going to Die). Also, a sense that only in a not-too-distant future will war be truly horrifying, when it’s waged by articulated legs, quadcopter swarms, railguns—only then. I’m absolved of any guilt about the wars happening right now because I’ve transferred it to the future still buffering. Fearing what a robot might do makes me comfortable with what drone strikes do right now.
Paralysis comes swift when you think of all the ways you’re complicit in ongoing horror. So 2013 went to drone pilot confessionals. Snake robots in water. It was also the year I turned 30, and, feeling nostalgic, searched for early footage of the Gulf War—the moment, I think, science fact and science fiction became inseparable, inviting all of us to imagine what could be at the cost of what already was.
No one company should take all the blame, if that’s even the word. The speculative arms industry is thirsty and involves universities, blogs, commercial gimmicks—even DIY makers cobbling better, cooler drones in the backyard. Harmless, robbed of context. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: tim_d
I know men are supposed to be visual creatures but it’s the music I can’t stand
December 30, 2013 § Leave a comment
I’ve tried to bite my lip on the No More Page Three campaign…
I find Page 3, with its large picture of boobs taken with the woman’s consent, actually somewhat better than all of the other pages of longlensings and body-shaming and gleeful rubbing over celebrities and their mental health, and so forth. That’s not even including the frequent bouts of overt racism, homophobia, transphobia and ableism that pepper its foul pages. The whole publication is absolutely fucking vile, and participates actively daily in outright harassment of women who have the misfortune of being famous, or poor, or brown, or whatever other excuse they can conjure to invade their privacy and pretend this is somehow in the public interest…
Now, one could say this campaign is a transitional demand in ending the objectification of women. However, that’s ignoring the fact that objectification is itself a symptom; the problem of objectification did not magically spring from nowhere… that’s assuming that No More Page Three is actually about objectification, which many of its supporters argue it is. I’ve read the text of the No More Page Three petition. I read it before deciding–with all of these criticisms already in mind–not to sign it. And it is just about boobs. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: [unattributed]
Rie shook off the dust and the sayings
December 27, 2013 § 2 Comments
The Yomiuri Shimbun has published an account of the events leading up Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s visit to Yasukuni Shrine two days ago. If the timeline and the quotations in the story are accurate — and there is no reason to doubt that they are — a picture emerges of a ruthless Abe, unbound by courtesy or caution in his dealings with his most prominent political allies.
Here is the snippet on Abe’s call to Yamaguchi Natsuo, the leader of the party whose House of Councillors votes Abe relies upon to guarantee the passage of legislation:
“I’ll visit the shrine at my own discretion,” Abe told Natsuo Yamaguchi, leader of New Komeito, the junior coalition partner of his Liberal Democratic Party, over the phone at about 11 a.m. on Thursday, about 30 minutes before he headed to the shrine.
“I cannot support that,” Yamaguchi told Abe.
“I didn’t think you’d agree with me,” Abe said before hanging up the phone.
Abe also informed LDP Secretary General Shigeru Ishiba of his intention to visit the shrine in the same morning.
What the Yomiuri narrative fails to clarify is that Yamaguchi and Ishiba already knew Abe was on his way to Yasukuni before the PM made his courtesy calls. Major news outlets began publishing and airing alerts regarding the Abe visit 30 minutes prior to Abe’s 11 a.m. call to Yamaguchi. Ishiba found out about the visit from the reporters covering him, when they all started shouting at him, “What is your opinion of the prime minister visiting Yasukuni?” An exasperated Ishiba replied, “Why are you all asking me my opinion of a Yasukuni visit?” The reporters shouted back, “Because it has been announced!” Ishiba, trying to appear nonchalant, turned and walked away, repeating the news to himself, “Oh, it’s been announced. Hmmmm.” read more
PHOTOGRAPH: [unattributed]
Let’s face it, Jesus wouldn’t spend Christmas sitting in a chair making remarks
December 26, 2013 § Leave a comment
Three-quarters of our planet Earth is covered with water, most of which may float organic cities. Floating cities pay no rent to landlords. They are situated on the water, which they desalinate and recirculate in many useful and non-polluting ways. They are ships with all an ocean ship’s technical autonomy, but they are also ships that will always be anchored. They don’t have to go anywhere. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Ekaterina Zakharova
don’t tell us, just hand the plot over
December 24, 2013 § Leave a comment
The story goes something like this: right around Christmas time in 1822, Clement Moore went out in a carriage to buy presents for his family. His wife, Catherine, and his six children (all between the ages of 8 months and 7 years old) waited for him to return so that they could carve the turkey and celebrate the holiday together. Before he left on his shopping expedition, his 6- year-old daughter, Charity, asked him to write “something special” for Christmas and so, with the snow starting to fall and the carriage loaded up with presents, Moore wrote “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” a long poem that he would read to his family later that evening and that, according to legend, they absolutely loved.
It was not until the following Christmastime that the poem was printed, so for a whole year those lines were the private property of the Moore family. Then one day Charity showed the poem to Harriet Butler, who was a friend of Moore’s and the daughter of the Reverend David Butler of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Troy, New York. Harriet Butler made a copy and sent it to Orville L. Holley, the editor of the Troy Sentinel, with no author’s name attached. And that is how it came to be printed on December 23, 1823, in the Troy Sentinel. Moore’s name would not be associated with the poem until 1837, when his friend, the editor Charles Fenno Hoffman, printed it in the New York Book of Poetry. Moore eventually printed it himself in his first and only book of poems, which wasn’t published until 1844, over two decades after its original printing.
In many ways this is a typical story of 19th-century verse composition and circulation. Poems were often published anonymously, and often this anonymity gave rise to much-desired readerly speculation and rumor. (There are some, I should say, who will still make the case that Moore was not the author of this poem, but that’s another story entirely and not the one I am going to tell here.) But why did this particular version of Santa Claus’s Christmas Eve visitation get more attention than others, since others were circulating at the time? And why was Moore so slow to deny authorship of it? What lies behind the myth of Moore’s now almost two-century-old composition of this poem for his daughter?
It’s hard to read the poem as anything other than a utopian, feel-good fantasy of holiday giving and magical surprise, written, as the story above tells us, by a father for the entertainment of his family. If you like, go ahead and read them that way one last time… read more
PHOTOGRAPH: [unattributed]
It’s home – it’s a rug, it’s a home, it’s a rug, it’s a window, I d’pbbpp
December 23, 2013 § Leave a comment
A new project from artists Addie Wagenknecht and Pablo Garcia, brbxoxo, searches online sexcam sites and only broadcasts feeds when the performers are absent. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Amanda Jasnowski
Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book
December 19, 2013 § Leave a comment
This film was made based mostly on the data of “Nuclear Explosions 1945-1998” by Nils-Olov Bergkvist and Ragnhild Ferm… The blinking light, sound and the numbers on the world map show when, where and how many experiments each country has conducted. watch
PHOTOGRAPH: lunitalaura
The Fed was tired of doing nothing, so they decided to stop doing it
December 18, 2013 § Leave a comment
In Wyndham Lewis’s extraordinary 1928 satire The Childermass, recently deceased odd couple Pullman and Satterthwaite (a Don Quixote and Sancho Panza pairing, or aspects of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein if you prefer) wander the “Time-flats”, the unstable purgatorial landscapes of the hereafter, as they seek admission to the heavenly Magnetic City.
In one more than averagely baffling episode Pulley and Satters find that they have meandered into a “Time-scene” where all becomes smaller in an artificially diminishing perspective, and – as in H G Wells’s 1901 story The New Accelerator – people and animals are frozen in immobility. Arriving at a living tableau straight out of Rowlandson, they identify the time as the late eighteenth century, and the place as Islington – specifically, the Old Red Lion Tavern where, as Pullman recalls, Tom Paine wrote his Rights of Man.
As childish Satters peeps into the garden of the tavern, he sees three men around a table, on which is placed “an object the size of a large hen’s egg, of bright ultramarine …” Fascinated, Satters tweaks the pigtail of one of the miniature figures, which, coming to life, upbraids him “with a slight American accent,” proving itself to be Paine. (The identity of the other two figures sat before the egg is not suggested, though the Williams Blake and Godwin might be a fair bet.)
Pullman, perhaps aware of the terrible dangers, familiar to all science fiction readers, that might result from interference with the past, is horrified. But he is powerless to restrain his companion, who, in a fit of spite, snatches up the miniature Paine and runs off with him. The mannikin sinks his teeth into Satters’s hand, who retaliates by trampling him “in an ecstasy of cruelty … into an inert flattened mass.” Having gratuitously killed off the Enlightenment and human rights, the pair are abruptly flung back into the present, or at least, what passes for time present in their shifting afterlife.
The episode is touched on by several commentators, but I’m not aware of much analysis of the details. In the novel as in his wider work, Lewis is concerned with what he sees as the deleterious cultural and political effects of “time philosophies”, and in particular the subjectivised model of time as creative flux promoted so influentially by the philosopher Henri Bergson. Alan Munton has noted how the instability of the landscape, much of it apparently invented by the grotesque Bailiff who presides over the entrance to the City, suggests the untrustworthy and contingent nature both of fiction itself and of the political structures embodied by the Bailiff. More recently Jonathan Goodwin has also highlighted the relevance of the novel to the political climate of the late ‘twenties.
But why the eighteenth century? And why Tom Paine? And what is the mysterious blue egg that so attracts Satterthwaite? Maybe this episode comes a bit more into focus when set alongside a possible source for Lewis, the bestselling An Adventure of 1911 and 1913 – the first hand accounts of the “Moberly-Jourdain incident,” sometimes tagged as “the ghosts of Versailles”. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Mary Robinson
my nerves are bad to-night 