All lovers know it’s chemistry,
not physics, that makes the world go round
Androgyne, Stephen Dunn
Arrest occurs at a point of inconcinnity between the actual and the possible, a blind point where the reality of what we are disappears into the possibility of what we could be if we were other than we are. But we are not. (AC)
And from the Journal: “‘It is difficult to know exactly how to make money on AI,’ said Mike Ogborne, founder of Ogborne Capital Management, a hedge-fund firm in San Francisco that oversees a position in Nvidia. ‘This could be the first day of a lot more pain.’” “It is difficult to know exactly how to make money in AI” does seem like an essential aspect of the AI trade; we have talked about OpenAI’s claim that “it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-[artificial general intelligence] world,” and also about a venture capital bet that the way to make money on AI is by buying up homeowners’ association management companies. But the actual answer turns out to be “build a cheap AI model and short Nvidia.” —Matt Levine, Bloomberg Opinion Money Stuff.
Serious thoughts need different cultivation and time to grow; planted as seeds of living speech in the ground of an appropriate soul, they will take root, ripen, and bear fruit as knowledge in due season
Written texts make available the notion that one knows what one has merely read.
From Plato’s Phaedrus, via Anne Carson’s Eros the bittersweet.
McKenzie Wark (2009): Détournement, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 14:1, 145-153
Détournement attacks a kind of fetishism, where
the products of collective human labour in the
cultural realm become mere property. But what is
distinctive about this fetishism is that it does not
rest directly on the status of the thing as a
commodity. It is, rather, a fetishism of memory.
Not so much commodity fetishism as co-memory
fetishism – collective remembrance as fetish. And
what is distinctive about détournement is that it
can restore to the fragment the status of being a
recognisable part of the process of the collective
production of meaning in the present, through
the combination of the détourned fragment into a
new meaningful ensemble. Détournement frees
the process of creation from the private property
of the image.
As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.
And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
‘Love has no ending.
‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,
‘I’ll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.
‘The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.’
But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
‘O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.
‘In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.
‘In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.
‘Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver’s brilliant bow.
‘O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you’ve missed.
‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.
‘Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.
‘O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.
‘O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.’
It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.
As I Walked Out One Evening, W. H. Auden
I like to find
what’s not found
at once, but lies
within something of another nature,
in repose, distinct.
Gull feathers of glass, hidden
…
I like the juicy stem of grass that grows
within the coarser leaf folded round,
and the butteryellow glow
in the narrow flute from which the morning-glory
opens blue and cool on a hot morning.
Denise Levertov, Pleasures
The Eightfold Fence is the fourth episode of the FX limited series, Shogun. The episode premiered on March 12, 2024. A reference steeped in Japanese mythology and the Shinto faith, handled poetically and with agency by several female characters.
Teresa Gierzynska, Four pictures, 2004. via Mala Gallery.
How to construct a picture that will communicate all the magic of spring: augury of something that will inevitably come – space, innocence?
And what about the quintessence of the rich, ripe autumn?
How to present euphoria and freshness contained in the summer.
And, finally, or perhaps first of all: how to present the depressive winter: its moody and full of harmony aura in a way acceptable to us, allowing us to appreciate its qualities, making us to stop complaining and allowing us to rest – before summer euphoria?
How to present it another way?
Sadler, Simon. The situationist city. 1998
As its name implied, psychogeography
attempted to combine subjective and objective
modes of study. On the one hand it recognized that
the self cannot be divorced from the urban environ
ment; on the other hand, it had to pertain to more
than just the psyche of the individual if it was to be
useful in the collective rethinking of the city. The
reader senses Debord’s desperation to negotiate
this paradox in his “Theorie de la dérive” (Theory of
the derive), a key document first published in the
Belgian surrealist journal Les levres nues in 1956
and republished in Internationale Situationniste in
1958. The drift, Debord explained, entailed the
sort of “ playful-constructive behavior” that had
always distinguished situationist activities from
mere pastimes. The drift should not be confused,
then, with “classical notions of the journey and the
stroll”; drifters weren’t like tadpoles in a tank,
“stripped . . . of intelligence, sociability and sexu
ality,” but were people alert to “the attractions of
the terrain and the encounters they find there,”
capable as a group of agreeing upon distinct, spon
taneous preferences for routes through the city.23
[…]
Psychogeography thus produced a social
geography of the city, especially important at a
time when social geography was still struggling to
emerge from the shadow of academic geography.
Against academic geography’s “scientific” taxono
my of the physical factors that supposedly deter
mine the character of a space, social geography
theorized space as the product of society84 It was
an approach pioneered in the late nineteenth cen
tury by the former Communard [Elysée] Reclus, who recog
nized in geography “nothing but history in
space.”85 Situationists were naturally inclined
toward the goals of social geography, which opposed
academic geography’s reduction of the city to “the
undifferentiated state o f the visible-readable realm “
(to use Lefebvre’s d is dainful phrase) and to the
homogenization o f the conflicts that produce capi
talist space 86 Fragmented yet tied together by their
arrows, situationist maps explored the very same
“three orders of facts”— “class struggle, the quest
for equilibrium , and the sovereign decision of the
individual”— that Reclus claimed were revealed by
the pursuit of social geography. 87
[…]
The experiments in detournement that
situationists carried out on literature, political the
ory, and film (all of Debord’s films were built
around detournement) were intended as just the
start. The situationists aimed to eventually
“detourn” bits of city.
This inclination to transgress the boundaries
found in culture and cities also characterized the
work o f Henri Lefebvre, which was so seamlessly
assimilated by situationism , and vice versa, that for
the purposes of this discussion it is hardly possible
or useful to distinguish the two.
[…]
Above all, they sought to understand that
moment when people gain insight into the rational
ized and alienated patterns o f their everyday lives.
Lefebvre’s interpretation of the eruptive “moment”
as embodying “fleetin g but decisive sensations (of
delight, surrender, disguise, surprise, horror or out
rage) which were somehow revelatory of the totality
of possibilities contained in daily existence” could
stand just as well for the situationists’ notion of the
“situation.”88 Both Lefebvre and the situationists
looked to the declaration of the Paris Commune as
history’s sublime “moment” and “situation,” when
ordinary citizens decided to become self-governing.
“The Commune was the biggest festival o f the
nineteenth century,” the second situationist thesis
on the Paris Commune declared. “Underlying the
events of that spring of 1871 one can see the
insurgents’ feeling that they had become masters
of their own history, not so much on the level of
‘governmental’ politics as on the level of their
everyday life.”
Delete tweets, make it private, change the password to something difficult.
Just deleting the account may allow, in time, someone else to use your former handle.
Source: Don’t Delete Your X Account (Do This Instead) | Lifehacker
I prefer Fediverse to At Protocol. I’m currently using rss to follow some bluesky accounts; via openrss.
