...despite our consenting to all the indisputable technologies: despite seeing the political leap that must be managed, the horror of hunger and ignorance, torture and massacre to be conquered, the full load of knowledge to be tamed, the weight of every piece of machinery that we shall finally control, and the exhausting flashes as we pass from one era to another—from forest to city, from story to computer—at the bow there is still something we now share: this murmur, cloud or rain or peaceful smoke. We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open and we sail them for everyone.

Édouard Glissant from Poetics of Relation

How many cultures choose their griots
their shamans, their poets
by putting them off the bus?

Frank X Walker from Black Box

Vanderbilt Avenue, just south of the southeast corner of Vanderbilt and Lafayette.

Brooklyn, New York

With the industrial proliferation of visual and audiovisual prostheses and unrestrained use of instantaneous-transmission equipment from earliest childhood onwards, we now routinely see the encoding of increasingly elaborate mental images together with a steady decline in retention rates and recall. In other words we are looking at the rapid collapse of mnemonic consolidation. This collapse seems only natural, if one remembers a contrario that seeing, and its spatio-temporal organization, precede gesture and speech and their coordination in knowing, recognizing, making known (as images of our thoughts), our thoughts themselves and cognitive functions, which are never ever passive.

Paul Virillio from The Vision Machine

Karma Waltonen: Holding Up a Mirror to Us

“in a graduate seminar on writing, I took in several essays on The Simpsons from various journals, ranging from readable to not. We talked about the pressure students felt to make their writing unreadable, and I pushed them to resist that pressure. Sometimes people don't understand why I write on Margaret Atwood and The Simpsons and everything in between, but they're all about holding up a mirror to us--and I want to talk about that mirror with others, so I do so in academic forms but also in blogs and tweets. And of course the blogs and tweets get read more.”

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