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.

Neste dia há 565 anos

caía Constantinopla. Numa outra Terça-feira de um outro tempo, século, milénio.

Domingo no mundo (60)

Edward Hopper, Lee Shore, 1941.

so that he could see her among the statues and friezes

Amadeo Modigliani: Anna Akhmatova, 1911.

Years later she wrote in her memoirs, "Whenever it rained (it often rained in Paris) Modigliani took with him a huge old black umbrella. We would sit together under this umbrella on a bench in the Jardin du Luxembourg in the warm summer rain."
[...]
On one occasion she visited Modigliani, but found him absent. “We had apparently misunderstood one another so I decided to wait several minutes,” she said. “I was clutching an armful of red roses. A window above the locked gates of the studio was open. Having nothing better to do, I began to toss the flowers in through the window. Then without waiting any longer, I left. When we met again, he was perplexed at how I had entered the locked room because he had the key. I explained what had happened, 'But that’s impossible – they were lying there so beautifully.’”

Lucy Davies, Modigliani and the Russian beauty: the affair that changed him.

To say what you want to say

Now, I have the words of Esmé Wang, Amy Berkowitz, Porochista Khakpour, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Sonya Huber to keep me company. But at twenty-two, I dogeared the shit out of Etty’s book and let it ignite a feeling in me: a permissioning, an urgency, a responsibility and ability to respond. If you are being given this life—and sister, it is so unlikely that you have been given a life at all—then it is wonderful and appropriate to not just spend it trying to survive, but instead to do more, to say what you want to say, to make what you want to make in the world, to at least try to heal what hurts. To strive towards joy, and a love for people and the world, one that refuses to ignore the worst of what humans could do to one another. And yes, yours may be frivolous words, or maybe the act of creating at all feels frivolous, but it is still worth it.

 Janet Frishberg, Get down to Work or God help you.

Domingo no mundo (59)

Maurice Pendergast, Summer Visitors, 1896.

É digno?

In his 2010 book The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah shows that arguments are not what change people’s minds on moral questions — honor is. The end of dueling, or Chinese foot-binding, or the Atlantic slave trade, did not come about, Appiah writes, because of new or more convincing arguments — the arguments against these practices had been in place, sometimes for centuries, before most people were turned against them. What changed was the “honor world” — the group of people who understand and acknowledge the same codes of behavior. Dueling was illegal before it came to seem dishonorable, in part because a newly created popular press brought the aristocracy’s honor code into discussion in lower class circles. This exposure to ridicule or mimicry put a new complexion on a practice that had persisted despite all logical argument against it. 

If debate doesn’t actually change minds, the rhetorical power of social media networks may work best as a way to insist on a broadening of our honor worlds. In the behavior of social media users posting under their real names, identity — contrary to logic-proponents’ assumptions — may be among the strongest persuasive tools. If an honor world is about acknowledging the same codes of behavior, an expanding sense of one’s world can bring unquestioned values or practices into sharp relief. Most Canadians, for instance, would not consider it honorable to rob someone of their land or to break a treaty. (...)

It’s possible for digital interactions to enlarge our honor worlds by bringing us into closer contact with one another. As novels propose moral arguments through character development, digital spaces are best designed not for debating universals, but for developing our capacity to identify through difference. Interacting with a wide range of people with differing worldviews and experiences in digital spaces means more subconscious absorption of alternatives to the life we know. The idea of “debate” imposes an adversarial framework on online interactions, as well as privileging logic as a tool of discovery.

Linda Besner, Faulty Logic.