Category: Essays
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Otessa
A hot blonde with a trust fund self-medicates into blackouts with the hope of changing her life. What does disillusionment look like, to Moshfegh? The visual field is cinematic, detached, mediation creeping: “I did feel a peculiar sensation, like oceanic despair that — if I were in a movie — would be depicted superficially as…
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Divided Minds
We can’t go on together / with divided minds. —Pseudo Elvis Last time on @4Q248, i.e. PA.blogspot.com: We’re not saying life makes people schizo, we’re talking excessive frustration left unprocessed, or regular baseline frustration amplified by unstable parents [and] chaotic environments, charges vectors in the direction of schizo process. This is not necessarily a humanist…
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Valerie, No
i. dry 35° / lavender / wet west gust Before anything else, Oval (Elvia Wilk, 2019) is an idea novel. Anecdotes, ruminations, political monologues, thought experiments pushing the usual simulations of scifi into something almost philosophy. Its subjects are ecology, government systems, and that ambiguous word neoliberalism (here meant in the sense of blurring private sector and state,…
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The 1975’s Brief Inquiry
1. The 1975 “One and the same civilization produces simultaneously two such different things as a poem by T.S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song, or a painting by Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover… [W]hat perspective of culture is large enough to enable us to situate them in an enlightening relation to…
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Oscillation / Fashion
1. Oscillation You can never really tell when James Murphy’s being sincere, whether he’s making fun of others or making fun of himself. “Pow Pow”’s his statement of philosophy—“from this position / I can totally see how the decision was reached”—which is a sort of pragmatist-PoMo enlightenment: acknowledge perspective’s providence on truth and then turn…
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New Fiction is Psychic Occupation
“How then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another about people, sealed as they were?” (Woolf, To the Lighthouse) Fiction—or more generally, longform narrative text—has long been the handyman of culture, serving whatever functions are needed at a historical moment. The Greek oral tradition, famously, functioned in part to preserve cultural…
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Predictive Processing & Art as Cognitive Remodeling
Visual art — representational imagery — begins somewhere between fifty and one-hundred thousand years ago, overlapping with the Upper Paleolithic Transition. The period consists of rapid gains in tool technologies alongside the beginnings of modern symbolic thought, with human societies developing currency systems, dispersed social organizations, and increasingly sophisticated religious belief.
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On the Erotics of Interpretation
by Suspended Reason w/ James Wood In Antonioni’s film L’eclisse, the luminous Monica Vitti visits the Rome stock exchange, where her fiance, played by Alain Delon, works. Delon points out a fat man who has just lost 50 million lire. Intrigued, she follows the man. He orders a drink at a bar, barely touches it,…
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The Mask is the Face: Self-Design in the Age of the Algorithm
We wear our souls in here. Second Life resident Biology’s offspring is culture, but culture feels little allegiance to its heritage. It has become rabid, turns back to devour its father. But culture is a Cronus, a middle way, a transitory stage. Culture in turn gives birth to the algorithm, but the algorithm feels little…
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Valencia/Rectify/Film/Television/Literature
I. James Nulick’s Valencia opens with an HIV diagnosis. Nulick, protagonist, is dying. He has traveled to the southern coast of Spain to stay at the hotel which gives the novel its name. He has traveled there to hasten his death, to preempt the prolonged and painful corporal vulnerability which immunodeficiency entails.
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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…
Suspended Reason 