When the shitty stream is gone, it will be remembered and missed. We will miss the warm filter of fuzz from digital compression, the aesthetics of illegality. The vignetting of television shows as means of escaping the algorithms of copyright detection; the avant framing of filmic action in still photoframes, sometimes bland and decoratively abstract,… Continue reading Someplace, Somewhere, Someone
Category: Blog
Enthusiasm, Play, and “Cool”
Idea: Young animals of countless species have been observed engaging in play, exploring their environment, testing boundaries, and entering low-stakes simulations of behavior that will in adulthood become high-stakes (e.g. wrestling, hunting, dollhouses). In humans, playful exploration in this sense is associated with the sincere enthusiasm of discovery—young children can still be surprised or highly… Continue reading Enthusiasm, Play, and “Cool”
Sontag v. Top-down Frames
The title of Sontag's "Against Interpretation" is misleading, and regularly confuses readers who believe her "erotics of art" precludes interpretive dot-connecting and inference. This is not the case: the piece is more accurately titled "Against Allegorization," or "Against Ideological Readings" — those hermeneutic approaches that set out to find "encoded" and symbolic meanings in a work… Continue reading Sontag v. Top-down Frames
Schematic Disruption
Cognitive poetics is one of the most exciting literary-theoretic subfields I've stumbled upon. So far as I can tell, Peter Stockwell, whose paper on resonance I've cited previously, is one of cognitive poetics' primary authorities, and has written an introduction to the discipline (Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction, 2002). Stockwell summarizes "schema theory," a composite of different theorists'… Continue reading Schematic Disruption
Notes to “Oscillation / Fashion,” pt. 2
Second set of notes to “Oscillation / Fashion.” First set here. 1. Fashion trends are marked by continuity, changing incrementally but continuously year to year. 2. They can be cyclical, with trends come back into fashion or establishing themselves as perennially in (i.e. “classic”). 3. Bandwagon effects occur when a pile-on of adherence or support follows… Continue reading Notes to “Oscillation / Fashion,” pt. 2
Vibe Vectors
Sianne Ngai and Haley Thurston have done much, I think, for aesthetics by formalizing certain descriptive terms previously used informally: the zany, cute, and merely interesting (Ngai); the baroque, whimsy, and cheesy (Thurston). I want to continue that project here. In a separate project from this blog, I've sketched out what a “vibe” might look like if factored in terms more amenable to… Continue reading Vibe Vectors
The Resonant
Sianne Ngai and Haley Thurston have done much, I think, for aesthetics by formalizing certain descriptive terms previously used informally: the zany, cute, and merely interesting (Ngai); the baroque, whimsy, and cheesy (Thurston). I want to continue that project here. "Resonance" is a term used primarily by non-scholarly readers, as Peter Stockwell notes in "The Cognitive Poetics of Resonance," and the vagueness… Continue reading The Resonant
The Merely Epic
Sianne Ngai and Haley Thurston have done much, I think, for aesthetics by formalizing certain descriptive terms previously used informally: the zany, cute, and merely interesting (Ngai); the baroque, whimsy, and cheesy (Thurston). I want to continue that project here. In narrative the epic refers to works of great length, whose diegetic time spans years and… Continue reading The Merely Epic
Corpus as Concept: Poetic Sensibilities in Literary-Theoretic Discourse
There are two parts to an argument I want to make but lack the qualifications: 1) showing poetry, and poets in large, express, across their corpus, a worldview or way of seeing; 2) showing that literary-theoretic discourse actively leverages poets as concept handles in meta-level discourse (discourse about discourse; that is, to talk about how… Continue reading Corpus as Concept: Poetic Sensibilities in Literary-Theoretic Discourse
Notes to “Oscillation / Fashion”
Supplementary notes to twin essay "Oscillation / Fashion." 1. Fashion is important because it is in almost everything. Alfred H. Daniels (1951) 2. If by "fashion" I mean the sociocultural landscape at a given moment — the full topography of associations, connotations, endorsements, baggages, and significations attached to cultural objects and aesthetic decisions — then… Continue reading Notes to “Oscillation / Fashion”
