Category: language

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Enshittification [is] extraction unchecked. Doctorow (newyorker)

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David [Harvey]’s commitment to showing how thinking geographically (spatially, in Explanation) transforms our understanding and explanatory frameworks, which he later brings to Marx’ Capital in his path-breaking third book, Limits to Capital. Already in Explanation,David develops spatial concepts that he never abandons. Deploying philosophers of space like Cassirer, he distinguishes between absolute, relative and relational space. This last—space as a system of relations—becoming central to his framework for spatializing Marxist theory. Almost three decades later in Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (1996; his ‘most geographical book’, personal communication) David makes relational space central to thinking space dialectically, returning to two philosophers he read for and cited in Explanation: Gottried Wilhelm Leibnitz and Alfred North Whitehead. (Verso)

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Sarah Trouche (galeriemargueritemilin)

“Does anybody really know you?” might be too narrow, or too rigid, a question, with a passive construction that belies reality. Like Schrödinger’s cat, we may not settle into any particular way of being until someone studies us. Other people help us to know ourselves, working with us to create a shared idea of who we are. So, instead of asking whether we are known, it may be more fruitful to ask whether we’ve arrived, in collaboration with people we care about, at a conception of ourselves that we recognize.

[…]

“Why can he not allow the woman of his dreams to enter his dream?” Cavell asks. The answer, he thinks, is that “to walk in the direction of one’s dream is necessarily to risk the dream.” If Peter and Ellie are to really know one another, they have to merge dreams and reality. This is like “putting together night and day.” It’s scary.

Joshua Rothman, New Yorker, 2024.

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Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,

Withdraws into its happiness;

The mind, that ocean where each kind

Does straight its own resemblance find,

Yet it creates, transcending these,

Far other worlds, and other seas;

Annihilating all that’s made

To a green thought in a green shade.

The Garden, Andrew Marvell

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https://www.tumblr.com/birdbird/795807990185869312/david-hammons-untitled-2017-acrylic-on-canvas

David Hammons, Untitled, 2017. Acrylic on canvas, tarp. 64 x 46 inches (162.6 x 116.8 cm) (canvas size). Gallery.

Executed in 2017, Untitled is a recent example from this series, which began in 2007 and remains ongoing. In these works, painterly canvases are shrouded in mystery behind tarps, blankets, swaths of fabric, or other materials Hammons finds on the street. In Untitled, energetic strokes of blues, pinks, greens, browns, and oranges peer out from the corners of the canvas. Yet, the full composition is blocked from view by the blue-green plastic tarp tied precariously together with a yellow string directly in the center of the viewer’s field of vision. 

“Those pieces were all about making sure that the black viewer had a reflection of himself in the work. White viewers have to look at someone else’s culture in those pieces and see very little of themselves in it.”

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Coconut Grove Spotlight is published by Miami News Trust, Inc.

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The Art of the Impersonal Essay, Zadie Smith. (New Yorker)

An English teacher took me aside and drew a rectangle on a piece of paper, placed a shooting arrow on each corner of the rectangle, plus one halfway along the horizontal top line, and a final arrow, in the same position, down below. “Six points,” this teacher said. “Going clockwise, first arrow is the introduction, last arrow is the conclusion. Got that?” I got that. He continued, “Second arrow is you basically developing whatever you said in the intro. Third arrow is you either developing the point further or playing devil’s advocate. Fourth arrow, you’re starting to see the finish line, so start winding down, start summarizing. Fifth arrow, you’re one step closer to finished, so repeat the earlier stuff but with variations. Sixth arrow, you’re on the home straight: you’ve reached the conclusion. Bob’s your uncle. That’s really all there is to it.” I had the sense I was being let into this overworked teacher’s inner sanctum, that he had drawn this little six-arrowed rectangle himself, upon his own exam papers, long ago. “Oh, and remember to put the title of the essay in that box. That’ll keep you focussed.”

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Dead or Alive, Essays, by Zadie Smith. Penguin Press.

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Andrew Marvell, The Garden

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since feeling is first
who pays any attention 
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate 
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

E.E. Cummings

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