Author: suspendedreason
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Liturgy & Pastoral
Mexico City The mask stares out, eyes appalled, black and glassy. He is anonymous and intensely personal; he sees the opiate addicts and the basement dwellers, the alienated-enfranchised; all the darkness of the developed world, so that it dominates his view and is reflected in his eyes and slowly suffuses his corneas. From here it…
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Found Writings from 4chan’s /lit/
What did it feel like to be alive and culturally enmeshed in the 2010s? What were our values, our hopes, our insecurities and terrors? April 25: And I thought, “This is the saddest thought I think I’ve ever had.” November 22: “…the second we touch down on Mars, people are going to realise how unfulfilling it is. Oh…
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Google Music Playlists, 2017
Suburban Ennui: Surrounded by strip malls and cookie cutter houses, the ‘burbs can be a real drag. Embrace the malaise with a mix of melancholy, ambient, and washed out fuzz. Celestial Instrumentals: We are all made from stardust. Ponder that wondrous fact while spacing out to these dreamy post-rock and ambient instrumentals, perfect for watching…
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Seventies Interior Design
In the seventies, carpets were a way to signal a certain level of middle and upper-middle-class affluence. As such, they could be found almost everywhere. Today, stained wood stands as a similar socioeconomic indicator, at least in coastal American culture. There is the angle by which this is purely contrarian signaling — the upper-class picks a style (e.g. carpeting);…
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A Conversation With Sarah Perry
Sarah Perry is a contributing editor at Ribbonfarm, and the author of Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide (Nine-Banded Books, 2014). Perry occupies a Gertrude Stein-esque role in the intellectual community of post-rationalism, helping bring people together into a salon-like digital space while also producing vitally important work of her own. Perry’s writing has dealt with issues ranging from…
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Clarifying the Heterotopic
Heteropia is a word which originates with Michel Foucault, derived from the Greek héteros (“other”) and tópos (“place”). Its meaning is most concretely delineated in his essay “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias” (from the French “Des Espace Autres,” March 1967), though the phrasing “concretely delineated”may be overly generous. Foucault’s own definition of the heterotopic varies from lecture to lecture, and the aforementioned…
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Post-Ritual Space: Berghain
“To pilgrims and many expats, it is a temple of techno, a consecrated space, a source of enchantment and wonder.” Nick Paumgarten, “Berlin Nights”
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Ulysses, Wilde, and a Theory of Literary Compression
“He looked at the cattle, blurred in silver heat. Silvered powdered olive trees. Quiet long days: pruning ripening. Olives are packed in jars, eh? I have a few left from Andrews… A cloud began to cover the sun wholly slowly wholly. Grey. Far. No, not like that. A barren land, bare waste. Vulcanic lake, the dead…
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Intro to Cargocult
In the Second World War, Allied troops airdropped massive amounts of food, weaponry, and supplies onto the Melanesian islands as part of their island-hopping campaign in the Pacific. To the islanders, isolated from industrialization, the wealth and abundance of these drops were interpreted within a mystical, quasi-religious framework. When the war ended, and the airlifts dwindled…
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Predicting Joyce’s “Calypso”
Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. So begins the fourth chapter of Ulysses. “Calypso” is one of the more straightforward episodes of the novel, but here we’ll look at the way the opening line maintains its own ambiguity throughout the chapter’s opening pages. The suspended ambiguity is initiated in the…
Suspended Reason 