links and bookmarks
Taking a moment to look back on my mark-making here recently and pick out the pieces I thought worked better than others, mostly for my own consideration going forward.
18dec23 and 17dec23 and Next Year’s Notebook – notebook notes
Umberto Eco Formulates The AI Novel In 2011
There’s now a new trailer for Wong Kar-wai’s “Blossoms”. However, that’s only part of the update that we got today about the project …
It turns out that, after nearly three years of filming, “Blossoms” will premiere on Chinese television in ten days, on 12.27.23. The series is a whopping 30 episodes of around 50 minutes each — this totals 25 hours of television.
https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/2023/12/17/hthry946hn6gsktscpkuslovgwiaac
Lycophron’s Alexandra is a dazzling but little-known poetic achievement of Greek literature after the classical period. Written in the third or second century BCE, the poem consists of 1,474 lines in the form of a classical tragedy, but without chorus or dialogue. Instead we get a play-length “messenger report” of a prophecy uttered by the Trojan Alexandra (a Spartan name for Cassandra) when her brother Alexandros (Paris) set out for Sparta on his fateful voyage towards Helen. The prophecy unfolds between Cassandra’s own future and the poem’s literary past as she anticipates and retells a series of Greek myths across the Iliad, the Odyssey, Athenian tragedy and Herodotus’ Histories, along with stories of the settling of the Mediterranean by Achaean and Trojan heroes after the Trojan War and (importantly for Cassandra) the foundation of Rome by the Trojan Aeneas. But, more than that, the Alexandra’s rewriting of Greek literature and history from the perspective of a single female speaker is also a powerful meditation on the limits of language and naming, the gendered voice, literary history and narrative “truth”.
Piece found in 15 December TLS by Matthew Ward, no link because app is broken.
Saved because I don’t know this poem and the form sounds interesting.
Crary describes Techniques of the Observer and Suspensions of Perception as ‘prehistories’ – of 20th-century spectacle in the first book and of our own ‘techno-institutional worlds’ in the second. He confronts these regimes directly in two broadsides, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013) and Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World (2022). Crary aligns these works with the tradition of social pamphleteering that stretches back to the Levellers and Diggers, but the diatribes of Debord are the closer precedent in time and spirit.
‘The ends of sleep’ has a double meaning. The first, clear enough, is that sleep is under threat; a hundred years ago most adults slept ten hours a day, while the average now is six and a half. Neoliberalism has colonised our nightly respite as part of its general operation of ‘bioderegulation’. As with many other military initiatives, ‘the creation of the sleepless soldier’ has moved into civilian life with online producers and consumers attached to global workplaces and markets 24/7. Once a kind of torture, sleeplessness is now a boastful lifestyle for a select few (‘sleeping is for losers’) and an economic necessity for countless others. Less asleep than in sleep mode, many of us live in ‘low-power readiness’ where ‘nothing is ever fundamentally “off” and there is never an actual state of rest.’ More and more we are our apps: the individual is ‘made into an application of new control systems’, ‘a jumble of identities that exist only as effects of temporary technological arrangements’ – systems and arrangements which, passively or actively, we help to administer, thus collaborating in our own disciplining, surveillance and data mining…
Attempt to cross post this from LRB app /
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n19/hal-foster/we-are-our-apps
supernova remnant Cassiopeia A (Cas A) gleams in a new image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
— Read on phys.org/news/2023-12-webb-stuns-high-definition-star.html
With justification, you could refer to these “books” as the Siratori megatext, constituting a long-form nightmarish scroll, or memetic scrawl — pictures included, as if deconstructing emakimono.
It’s questionable if it’s even accurate to say that Siratori “writes” the texts he releases — at least, if the act of writing implies authorial intention or psychological cohesion in any recognizable sense. Perhaps he generates his writing somehow, deep inside his grimdark otaku lab, feeding the living scraps of natural language into some kind of linguistic degloving machine.
I had completely forgotten about Kenji Siratori.
An extreme drought in parts of the Amazon has led to a dramatic drop in river water levels, exposing dozens of usually submerged rock formations with carvings of human forms that may date back some 2,000 years.
See also: hunger stones.
Nick Harkaway:
How often do you print?
I just realised this is a thing; that’s to say, a part of the process. Or, of my process. There’s a sense of reality in printing (and reading on paper) a finished novel. In theory, you can go through an entire creative effort without ever producing paper on your desktop, but for me there’s a separate space of “tangible book” which has a particular moment and a set of uses. This morning I printed the first two chapters to look at, and aside from the sense of pleasure in seeing a physical manifestation of work done (in this instance a sort of echo, because I held the whole book in A4 recycled a while ago) there’s a difference between words on screen and words on paper.
Holding paper, I notice different things. The work feels different – different tonal issues arise, new sections I need to rewrite. It’s akin to – but different again from – reading a book aloud and hearing the cadences, the unintentional repetitions and homonyms, the blunt force wrongness of an unmodified word. The text is not different, but the experience is, and of course it’s still the paper experience of my book that most people will have.
Fascinating. I never print! Printer ink is too bloody expensive!
