Found Writings from 4chan’s /lit/ (blog post)

What did it feel like to be alive and culturally enmeshed in the 2010s? What were our values, our hopes, our insecurities and terrors? Only a few days of /lit/ are excerpted here, but even they give us a glimpse. 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 look, we moved over there. Fantastic. A few billion more planets to visit […] before entropy devours us all huehuehue.”  Continue reading “Found Writings from 4chan’s /lit/ (blog post)”

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 clouds float by, stargazing through the night, or just letting your mind wander out into the universe. Continue reading “Google Music Playlists, 2017”

Information Cycles & Erisology

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Roberto Bolano I detecti e slevaggi

John Nerst of Everything Studies, whose essays include "Partial Derivatives and Partial Narratives,""What is Erisology?" and a statistical analysis of Black Mirror, has contributed to this essay in Section II. His contribution here is especially authoritative, as the governing theme of Everything Studies is the self-coined "erisology" — the study of disagreement. Continue reading “Information Cycles & Erisology”

A Conversation With Sarah Perry

Sarah Perry is a contributing editor at Ribbonfarm, and published Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide through Nine-Banded Books in 2014. Perry occupies a Gertrude Stein-esque role in the intellectual community of post-rationalism, bringing 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 existentialist ethics and ritual practice to aesthetics, and has appeared (in addition to Ribbonfarm) in Carcinisation, The View From Hell, and Front Porch Republic. 

Essential readings: The Systems of the World; Frontierland; The Theory of Narrative Selection.

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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 paper contradicts itself both inter- and intra-paragraph. Yet the term’s formulation has touched some nerve in academia, leading to a wide range of scholarly implementations which somehow must be reconciled and dealt with.

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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”

Is ritual still possible in contemporary society? This essay is one in a series which will examine those spaces which facilitate ephemeral and loosely structured (rather than repeated, highly structured, and strictly observed) events. Such spaces are communal but not socially mandatory; they are spiritual but derive transcendence from ecstasy instead of trial or mundanity.[1]

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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 sea… Brimstone they called it raining down: the cities of the plain.”

— Ulysses, 4.200-221

An introduction to this text can be found here.

The mobilization of Ulysses and Earnest is purposefully audacious and inevitably missteps. The overarching tone, and parts of the analysis, I would characterize as “understandably wrong.”

Continue reading “Ulysses, Wilde, and a Theory of Literary Compression”

Intro to Cargocult (blog post)

In the Second World War, Allied troops airdropped massive amounts of food, weaponry, and supplies onto the Melanesian islands. To the islanders, largely isolated from modern industrialization, the wealth and abundance of the drops was interpreted within a mystical, quasi-religious framework. Upon the war’s end, these airlifts dwindled to a stop, and island cults emerged which attempted to ritualistically summon more supplies. Lacking an understanding of the core mechanisms behind the airdrops — a world war, mechanized flight, the Allied island-hopping offensive — these so-called cargo cults began constructing imitation runways, dressing like U.S. soldiers, and praying that supplies would come without success.

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Text, Telos, and Ritual

I’ve been set free and I’ve been bound
To the memories of yesterday’s clouds
I’ve been set free and I’ve been bound
And now I’m set free
I’m set free to find a new illusion

— “I’m Set Free,” The Velvet Underground

“As time goes on… the universe becomes more and more what experience has revealed, less and less what imagination has created, and hence, since it was not designed to suit man’s needs, less and less what he would have it be. With increasing knowledge his power to manipulate his physical environment increases, but in gaining the knowledge which enables him to do so he surrenders insensibly the power which in his ignorance he had to mold the universe.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

Continue reading “Text, Telos, and Ritual”