I’ve been thinking about “place” a lot lately. Thinking about “place” led to me write this blog post, which got me digging through the great book Applied Ballardianism again, and a chapter called “Cartographies of the Infinite,” where author Simon Sellars contemplates whether future cities can be “tuned to produce a kind of stereoscopic urbanism.”…
Tag: books
Blood Meridian
I haven’t had the pleasure of reading Blood Meridian yet, but every single Blood Meridian quote I’ve mined from the internet is extraordinary. To wit: They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise…
𝚠𝚎𝚎𝚔𝚎𝚗𝚍 𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚔𝚜
Cities and the Balance of Power: “Cities are like massive information-processing units, with real-estate markets revealing the value of being able to access the networks involved. People put a dollar value on physical colocation and proximity to others who have similarly paid a high price to access density. This implicit sorting lies at the heart of…
Pandemic Inventory
Seems like a lot of people are taking inventory of their pandemic experiences, so I will too. (As someone on Twitter recently joked, citing Garrison Keillor: Nothing happened to me, and now I’m going to tell you about it.) Like millions of others, I spend a lot of time alone these days. Don’t my lonely…
“You were my best friend outside of Paris in 1918. You were wounded in the Ardennes and you died in my arms there. I’m glad you’re back in the world. You have a different face, a different name, but the soul shining out of your face is the same as my friend. Welcome back.”
The best ending to any writer’s interview ever? Paris Review asks Ray Bradbury about the origins of a character named Mr Electrico. His answer starts in our world, opens a trapdoor in the fabric of reality itself, and surges into an elemental realm of cosmic myth. Genuine magic pic.twitter.com/ZKXJan44qQ — Colin Walsh (@Clnwlsh) April 15,…
“A luxury cruiseliner quarantined in San Francisco bay, its well-heeled passengers confined to their cabins for weeks on end. Holidaymakers on lockdown at a quarantined hotel in Tenerife after an Italian doctor comes down with coronavirus. A world of isolated individuals rarely leaving their homes, keeping a wary distance from one another in public, communicating with their friends and loved ones via exclusively technological means. These situations are so Ballardian as to be in the realm of copyright infringement.”
“Twenty-first century life was already Ballardian. The rapid transition, under the new viral order, into further extremes of technological alienation has only made it more so.” https://t.co/IDnD49NXWA — тцпдяапацт (@tundranaut) April 1, 2020 SOURCE: Mark O’Connell, New Statesman
Electroshocks
‘In a society that considers all genuine ideas subversive, which seeks to discourage ideological imagination…the main goal must be to awaken people’s consciences, raising traumatising problems and sending ideological electroshocks: shocking ideas.’ – Faye pic.twitter.com/WCViHq7IWn — ᵗ ᵘ ⁿ ᵈ ʳ ᵃ ⁿ ᵃ ᵘ ᵗ (@tundranaut) July 27, 2019
INTERVIEW: Daniel Kalder (Anti-Tourism)
ANTI-TOURISM Q: Which foreign land that you’ve visited so far was the most impenetrable in your travels — the one that had the most barriers to entry e.g. physical distance, bureaucracy, cost, etc. ? A: Turkmenistan. I visited during the imperial-hallucinatory phase of the Turkmenbashi dictatorship. It took me over a year to get in,…
BOOK REVIEW: “Disaster Fitness: Make Your Demons Do the Work”
“If I neglect yoga, I am troubled by dreams of killing everybody.” — Ann Sterzinger Disaster Fitness: Make Your Demons Do the Work Ann Sterzinger’s “Disaster Fitness” holds that trauma and dysfunction can be harnessed for good and turned to our physical advantage. Pain and turmoil can be used like flamethrowers and grenades against the…