Domingo no mundo (64)

Henri Fantin-Latour, Iris and Hyacinths, with cherries and almonds on the table, 1871.

Not Caring Is A Political Art Form

(...)

Or that you have nothing in common with them. Or that they are not real. Or that they are evil. That you owe nothing to them. The right has a terrible fear of obligation they address by denying it and celebrating its opposite, the laissez-faire social-darwinist every-man-for-himself and devil-take-the-hindmost scramble.* This ideology denies how we are connected, ecologically, economically, socially, emotionally. This is an art of disassociation—literally, in the psychological sense of disconnecting from one’s own feelings. A therapist I know talks about how hollow the young men of the alt right sound, how they’re trying out a fun way to not have to care, not have to connect, not have to be responsible (you can see Incels trying out another version in their screeds in which women are in essence not human and not possessed of genuine rights or feelings.). On August 12 of last year, a man drove a car straight into a crowd of people because he disagrees with their politics and Heather Heyer dies of blunt-force injury to the chest. Another young man shoots up a school; many young men shoot up schools; an old man shoots down 51 and injures nearly 900. These bloodbaths, in which strangers are killed, are also exercises in not feeling and not connecting; they arise from disconnection and they celebrate it as a power to do whatever the hell you want, including killing people at random. The fact that guns and bullets are critical to shooting people is widely denied, and porn or “too many exits and entryways” or any other thing is blamed in the disconnection of cause and effect so that guns can continue to express the great disconnection.  

But it’s also political disassociation: I owe you nothing; I have no connection to you or much of anything; my heart is a gated community; my ideology is a border patrol. It’s even a philosophical disassociation: my acts should have no consequences; cause is unhitched from effect; we will not look at how what we did impacts how they live, whether it’s emissions and the climate or foreign policy and refugees or wealth distribution via federal policy and poverty. It’s what I called the ideology of isolation a couple of years ago.

Rebecca Solnit sobre a polémica do momento, aqui. 

Lugares onde a verdade mora

Portable altar, temporary lab-in-the-field, mobile court – each travelling truth-spot did its job to make people believe. Certain shared understandings acquired legitimacy as they emerged from ordinary places provisionally made special by the momentary unpacking of transformative stuff – Aztecs get aligned with the tenets of Catholic missionaries; scientific data from Antarctic ice convince US Congress to ban lead from gasoline; disputatious neighbours in a remote Chinese village reach an agreeable legal settlement. But lasting churches still get built, and so do brick-and-mortar laboratories and courthouses – often at great expense, and in locations strategically chosen to accentuate their persuasive powers.

Thomas Gieryn, Truth is also a place.

Domingo no mundo (63)

Cuno Amiet, Stilleben mit Blumenstrauss in grüner Vase, 1957.

Uma história incrível

John Kidd’s early life is like a Wes Anderson newsreel of an American upbringing — extraordinary and crackpot, bending toward fabulism. He grew up with a brother of the same name, just without the ‘h.’ John and Jon were the sons of Capt. John William Kidd, a naval officer known to the sailors on board as Starbuck.

(...)

As we settle down to breakfast at a swanky hotel, it’s clear that the controversies of 1988 are all still very much alive for him. Of the 5,000 or so corrections Gabler claimed to have made to “Ulysses,” there is not one of them Kidd cannot discuss, in rich detail, 30 years later. In particular, he is still steamed up about the Penelope chapter. He flipped open the book and stabbed his finger at the dead center of the famous 42-page interior monologue of Molly Bloom. Joyce originally punctuated the chapter with two periods, one at the end and one at the center, appropriately after Molly muses over the word “ashpit.”

(...)

It is fair to wonder about Kidd’s sanity. He is fairly manic when discussing these preciously irrelevant textual changes. They all get explained in the rushed, self-interrupting fervor of the zealot. But in his encyclopedic way of talking, of thinking, of seeing, an undeniable brilliance comes through. This quality was on vivid display the afternoon he welcomed me into his apartment, a unit in a high rise with a nice view of Rio. The place is neat and walled with books on shelves. There are lots of bureaus and built-in dressers, and at one point, when he went to retrieve a book, every drawer he opened was packed top to bottom, side to side, with even more books.

“You really have to read Fernando Pessoa,” he said, handing me a collection of poems, in Portuguese, by this early-20th-century Lisbon writer, titled “A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe.” I cracked open Kidd’s copy to find a swarm of marginal notes on nearly every page, cataloging textual alternatives in the many other Portuguese editions he owns. This is how John Kidd reads everything — as a search for the perfected text.

It’s not just an aesthetic choice for Kidd but a kind of compulsion toward completedness, suffusing not just how he reads literature but also how he talks about it. We discussed “Gargantua and Pantagruel” and “Don Quixote” and “Tristram Shandy.” He considers them all to be “antic” works, his coinage for books that are marked by a “comic take on the encyclopedic narrative just as the ‘Iliad’ is a tragic take on an encyclopedic narrative.” Those novels are playful, like “Ulysses,” but they mean to embrace and comprehend a sense of everything, and it’s this sense of totality and the longing for it that drives Kidd, too.

Jack Hitt, The Strange Case of the Joyce Missing Scholar. 

Domingo no mundo (62)

Stephen Rose, Cherries in a plastic bag, séc. XX.

Sobre as pessoas

I go to the central market, very early in the morning. I like to see what’s in season, what they’re selling. The little businesses that pop up in those places to feed the merchants from the market are pretty helpful. I get an immediate sense of what’s going on in a town and what the food’s like.
[...]
Don’t drink at your hotel. Find out where the people who work at your hotel do their drinking.
[...]
If a place is crowded, but the people lining up are not local, that’s a clue—a bad clue. If it doesn’t have signs in English, it’s almost always worth investigating. I look to see if locals are willing to inconvenience themselves and wait in line for a long time to get something that only costs a dollar fifty, especially if it’s a mixed bag of different incomes. One of the things that’s interesting about Singapore is that you’ll see people roll up in a Mercedes and stand on line behind someone who lives in a housing project. They’re both gonna wait the 25 minutes for the same nasi lemak.
[...]
Generally speaking, there are countries where total strangers will invite you into their homes. In Tehran, just by virtue of being an American, you will probably be invited to dinner. I’d say, just be open. Don’t be afraid. If it’s appropriate to drink alcohol, drink heavily. Be smart, but be open to the world.

Anthony Bourdain numa entrevista.

Stand by

John Dominis,Tokyo, 1959.

The responsibility of believing (2)

Content-selecting algorithms (particularly on YouTube, as Zeynep Tufekci has noted) tend to serve users increasingly extreme content as they try to winnow in on what makes viewing compulsive. This approach, however, is ultimately indifferent to the nature of the content itself. It capitalizes instead on the tension between personalization and social participation, harmonizing the seemingly divergent poles in the experience of consuming one video after another. The algorithms become a proxy for an implied community, an in-group that rewards your curiosity by showing you more and more. They substantiate the idea that you can furrow into yourself by surrendering to personalized content yet still open an entire universe that’s filled with people like you, on the same journey. As the furor over fake news, filter bubbles, and alternative sets of facts suggest, these new possibilities for experiencing pockets of inclusive exclusivity can support actual communities, organized around preferred interpretations. Their “truth” lies in how they make us feel, not in their accuracy. Algorithms alone don’t radicalize users; it’s rather the imagined community behind them, the structured sociality that seems to promise to organize our insular desires, to make our consumption meaningful and socially relevant somehow even as it testifies to our power to get information about anything we want, anything at all.

Online discourse, which grants users a seemingly supernatural sense of their own information independence, favors content made in its image. Often what we like about the internet is not the access it seems to provide to a “real world” that exceeds it, but rather its paranormal qualities, reflected in paranormal content that captures how readily the restrictions of place-bound normality can be transcended. Slender Man, a crowd-sourced ghost that emerged from a Something Awful forum in 2009, exemplifies how the uncanny collaborative power of networks can become refracted as a recursive spiral of seemingly supernatural energy. In an essay for the VQR, Alex Mar writes that “the monster was deliberately vague, his story almost completely open-ended — and so the internet rushed in to make of him what it wanted.” Crowd-sourcing became a kind of self-referential procedure of haunting, taking every proof of its efficacy as an intensification of the otherworldliness inherent in it, capable of obscuring any story’s origins and producing a fog of possibility, a sense of unguided but ever increasing agency. 

(...) 

Information that costs something to believe builds a bond; social media impose that cost, providing a forum of accountability. As the flat-earthers told Burdick, it is hard for them to admit their beliefs to a general public, but that is all the more reason to seize upon technology that multiplies many different publics operating in overlapping simultaneity. This sets our expectations of what we might hope to find when we open our apps: curses, rabbit holes, feuds, loyalty tests, life itself as we want to see it, as inexplicable and unavoidable as the sky.

Rob Horning, True Nonbelievers na Real Life desta semana.

Domingo no mundo (61)

Mas um dia de dentro do sepulcro
também eu me levantei
e também eu como Jesus
tive a minha ressurreição,
mas não subi aos céus
desci ao inferno
de onde revejo estupefacta
      as muralhas da antiga Jericó.

Alda Merini,  A Terra Santa.