No one cares about books anymore, but what screen now holds the highest value?
Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts
Friday, April 13, 2012
Friday, June 3, 2011
Don't Break My Mark
High, Low and In Between
Mark Jack
What about the fact that we speak too greedily of ourselves? Are we too readily to see in this action a dilemma? Is it possible that we too arbitrarily suggest, by identifying this action as a dilemma, an ethics imperfectly followed?
What of it all?
Moreover, who has allowed the proliferation of such a voice, such an increasingly pedagogical voice, here? (Matthew!!)
There is some strange double movement, here, of democratic specialization. Perhaps it is merely a chaos of opinions imperfectly read as such and the problem of such misreading is due to this confused space. But what space?
Much of the writing I encounter on the Internet is decent at best, but the lack of hierarchical positioning renders our navigation of worth difficult as the decent manifests itself on the same level as the heinous and the sometimes profound. My ability to traverse the information as if perusing a schizophrenic quilt, in my mind, does not perform a revolutionary re-reading of knowledge or power, but instead, relegates language to advertisement. Reading the average blog, one quickly comes across a blue, underlined phrase that, if clicked, takes the reader to yet another page with its own set of blue links to more pages, ad infinitum. Moreover, all this linkage is surrounded by unapologetic advertisements.
In addition to this one may find that most posts are merely a re-rendering of popular culture as performed by the main players into the form of journal. By inserting the presence of the I into the happenings of the day, or some new record, we are asserting both our (meaning bloggers) individuality—as personal and yet non-specialist—and our expertise—as we may suggest, by hyperlink not our knowledge, which might be imperfect, but another’s, which, though possibly imperfect, is at a remove from us, and so deniable, making our assertions as expert via un-impeachability.
So what?
I do find it both discomforting and comforting. The ease with which I, earlier today, watched a music video of Dominique Young Unique and, then, watched a video of Elaine Scarry lecturing at Cambridge is, despite the joy I find in such an ability to access information, a bit disconcerting. Perhaps I am discomforted because I cling to the old forms of access as a means to power, perhaps in my unease I reveal the reluctance with which I approach the focus of much my liberal arts education, which was to challenge such limited access, and subsequently reveal my desire to remain privileged.
The Internet seems to operate spatially and yet I do not find myself using spatial vocabulary.
I have used the word “here” many times in this post and yet, even while my assumption is that here refers to the virtual space of this blog, I can’t help but simultaneously position myself in my bedroom where I am writing this and where I would most likely read it. Here, then becomes a spatial specific word but not a site specific. The word “on” is another commonly used word, which operates in terms of a spatial metaphor. As I write this, I am on a chair, but I am also on my computer.
These are not exactly profound realizations, but I think it is important to recognize the limitations of the spatial metaphors used for the Internet. The collapse of high and low culture is not new to the Internet and, I believe, a positive thing, a sort of continuation of the modernist utopian project. However, the collapse of notions of expertise is problematic. In addition to this, the boundaries of culture and language largely remain. Google searches do not routinely return results that are pages in different languages or that were created in other countries, even if English speakers.
There is a strange geography that we are routinely exploring, and as comfortable as we become and as dependent as we become upon this world we have yet to truly confront the ethics of this space in the same way we have in the physical world. I look forward to the explorations and the critiques.
Love,
Mark
Friday, January 21, 2011
Going to Market
Well, my Puddlers, we've made it to the end of another long week. The blog will be back in full (and hopefully better) swing next week with plenty of posts. However, its cold out there tonight so I am going to skip all of my clever little preamble and leave you with the man who knows how to warm all those hard to reach places. No, I'm not talking about Larry Sanders. I am talking about the one, the only, Mr. Mark (Aurelius) Jack!
Take it away, Mark!
The Debt Collectors
Mark Jack
Lately I have been thinking mostly of isolation, but not solipsism. Well, maybe a weak solipsism, one that isn't terribly true but is, still, somewhat inevitable, or inevitably felt. Something that makes the you think, “What's the other thing?” or “How's the other thing felt?” or “How's the other felt thing felt?”
Whatever it is, I think it may remind me of my childhood and what a horrible thing that would be, but then we are all old and sentimental in our own ways no matter our age or health or education or country of origin or sexual orientation or sexual disorientation or gender or not or even memory.
Just the other day I was discussing tire swings with a friend and we both paused for a second to be sentimental—sans twinkle in the eye. It seems childhood memories necessitate an eye twinkle, but one's eyes never twinkle. The problem with my memory is that the tire swing in question was known to me only when I was 'round two years old. My mother doubts the veracity of my memory in this regard. Most other people don't give a shit. Am I simply remembering a picture or perhaps I am merely doubting my mother's memory? Is it possible to say I remember an other's memory? Am I remembering the telling of it or the memory itself?
Well, I don't know, and maybe these considerations lead absolutely nowhere. In fact, I'm almost certain that the lattter is true—at least as long as I have been formulating the questions. The problem, you see, is I've been reading Samuel Beckett, again. Actually, it's not a problem. This time I’m reading Watt. Honestly, I can't get enough of this guy. Watt is perhaps the funniest book I've read by Beckett; some of his plays are humorous as well, for instance, Endgame. There's some good comedy there. The problem for most people reading Beckett, I think, and it was my problem as well, is that one is told about his absurdity maybe or his mastery/distrust of language, maybe, or all number of things that build Beckett up into some unapproachable and maybe unapproachably weird writer. Well, he is certainly strange. Just look at this photo.
Trust me. Watt is a strange book, but is also funny. The one thing Beckett does not fool around with is sentimentality. He is perhaps the least sentimental writer I know. Actually, that's wrong; let me rethink that. Beckett loves to play with sentimentality. What he is not is sentimental. Watt, rather, is a book featuring a man who is so confused by memory's functioning that there is absolutely no possibility of sentiment being arrived at let alone conveyed. Early in the book, Watt, who is a servant in Mr. Knott's house answers the door and finds the Galls, father and son, who are there to tune the piano. The problem with this scene is that it is as Watt tells it to the author, and Watt is not sure about the workings of memory, but only that this incident, with the Galls resembles all the other incidents of note "in the sense that it was not ended, when it was past, but continued to unfold, in Watt's head, beginning to end."
Watt is a strange character "who had not seen a symbol, nor executed an interpretation, since the age of fourteen, or fifteen, and who had lived, miserably it is true, among face values all his life." So Watt, like many of Beckett's characters find fault in their memories and, more so, find difficulty in considering any symbolic interpretation of the events considered. Often, in Beckett's oeuvre, memory is presented to a character through another medium, such as the tapes in Krapp's Last Tape, and in this respect they are somewhat foreign to the character to whom these memories, these recorded memories belong. They are un-changeable and outside, rather than elastic and internal and meaningful. Although for Watt, memory is elastic in that it is merely a collection of surfaces, and his memory of the Gall's "gradually lost, in the nice processes of its light, its sound, its impacts and its rhythm, all meaning, even the most literal." In this way, the memory is something unincorporated and yet transferable, and prone to editing.
What then, is this process of writing? Memoir and the like seem the most suspicious forms if we think in these Beckettian terms, but all writing is suspect in these terms. We rely so much on the meanings we give to our memories. We learn from them in this way, or we tell ourselves that, when we think back and re-imagine some event that we have progressed in someway beyond it—because of it. Why?
There is a strange and beautiful compulsion to understand our memories as metaphor, and in recording our thoughts and our imaginings we set up an economy of meaning, which pays, sometimes, suspiciously. We are greedy sometimes, extracting whatever dubious self-knowledge we can from that which passes through our minds as the past. This is a curious communication.
Mark
Take it away, Mark!
The Debt Collectors
Mark Jack
Lately I have been thinking mostly of isolation, but not solipsism. Well, maybe a weak solipsism, one that isn't terribly true but is, still, somewhat inevitable, or inevitably felt. Something that makes the you think, “What's the other thing?” or “How's the other thing felt?” or “How's the other felt thing felt?”
Whatever it is, I think it may remind me of my childhood and what a horrible thing that would be, but then we are all old and sentimental in our own ways no matter our age or health or education or country of origin or sexual orientation or sexual disorientation or gender or not or even memory.
Just the other day I was discussing tire swings with a friend and we both paused for a second to be sentimental—sans twinkle in the eye. It seems childhood memories necessitate an eye twinkle, but one's eyes never twinkle. The problem with my memory is that the tire swing in question was known to me only when I was 'round two years old. My mother doubts the veracity of my memory in this regard. Most other people don't give a shit. Am I simply remembering a picture or perhaps I am merely doubting my mother's memory? Is it possible to say I remember an other's memory? Am I remembering the telling of it or the memory itself?
Well, I don't know, and maybe these considerations lead absolutely nowhere. In fact, I'm almost certain that the lattter is true—at least as long as I have been formulating the questions. The problem, you see, is I've been reading Samuel Beckett, again. Actually, it's not a problem. This time I’m reading Watt. Honestly, I can't get enough of this guy. Watt is perhaps the funniest book I've read by Beckett; some of his plays are humorous as well, for instance, Endgame. There's some good comedy there. The problem for most people reading Beckett, I think, and it was my problem as well, is that one is told about his absurdity maybe or his mastery/distrust of language, maybe, or all number of things that build Beckett up into some unapproachable and maybe unapproachably weird writer. Well, he is certainly strange. Just look at this photo.
Trust me. Watt is a strange book, but is also funny. The one thing Beckett does not fool around with is sentimentality. He is perhaps the least sentimental writer I know. Actually, that's wrong; let me rethink that. Beckett loves to play with sentimentality. What he is not is sentimental. Watt, rather, is a book featuring a man who is so confused by memory's functioning that there is absolutely no possibility of sentiment being arrived at let alone conveyed. Early in the book, Watt, who is a servant in Mr. Knott's house answers the door and finds the Galls, father and son, who are there to tune the piano. The problem with this scene is that it is as Watt tells it to the author, and Watt is not sure about the workings of memory, but only that this incident, with the Galls resembles all the other incidents of note "in the sense that it was not ended, when it was past, but continued to unfold, in Watt's head, beginning to end."
Watt is a strange character "who had not seen a symbol, nor executed an interpretation, since the age of fourteen, or fifteen, and who had lived, miserably it is true, among face values all his life." So Watt, like many of Beckett's characters find fault in their memories and, more so, find difficulty in considering any symbolic interpretation of the events considered. Often, in Beckett's oeuvre, memory is presented to a character through another medium, such as the tapes in Krapp's Last Tape, and in this respect they are somewhat foreign to the character to whom these memories, these recorded memories belong. They are un-changeable and outside, rather than elastic and internal and meaningful. Although for Watt, memory is elastic in that it is merely a collection of surfaces, and his memory of the Gall's "gradually lost, in the nice processes of its light, its sound, its impacts and its rhythm, all meaning, even the most literal." In this way, the memory is something unincorporated and yet transferable, and prone to editing.
What then, is this process of writing? Memoir and the like seem the most suspicious forms if we think in these Beckettian terms, but all writing is suspect in these terms. We rely so much on the meanings we give to our memories. We learn from them in this way, or we tell ourselves that, when we think back and re-imagine some event that we have progressed in someway beyond it—because of it. Why?
There is a strange and beautiful compulsion to understand our memories as metaphor, and in recording our thoughts and our imaginings we set up an economy of meaning, which pays, sometimes, suspiciously. We are greedy sometimes, extracting whatever dubious self-knowledge we can from that which passes through our minds as the past. This is a curious communication.
Mark
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)