Exiting Left: “The impact of the virus has thrown the sustaining rituals of politics into disarray and accelerated the migration of social life into a privatized virtual realm. Biological and technological trajectories are unfolding in the absence of effective political control. The question is not whether some political collective can harness these tendencies to some determinate…
Tag: friends
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…
“Lying to yourself about who you are is no less evil than lying to a friend about something important.”
An intellectual does not become unproductive because of some mysterious ailment called “writer’s block.” An unproductive intellectual is an intellectual lost in Evil. Many people think “writer’s block” is a real phenomenon and Evil is only a mystical superstition. In fact, “writer’s block” is the superstition, and Evil the real phenomenon. To escape the sin…
“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