From a post at “we make money not art”, I found this project called littleBits. The idea is a fairly simple one:

littleBits is a growing library of preassembled circuit boards, made easy by tiny magnets. All logic and circuitry is pre-engineered, so you can play with electronics without knowing electronics. Tiny magnets act as connectors and enforce polarity, so you can’t put things in the wrong way. And all the schematics will be shared under an opensource license so you can download, upload, suggest new bits and hopefully see them come to life.

Basically, the project means to democratize the creation of physical technology in much the same way that Cycling ‘74 and IRCAM democratized the means of granular synthesis, or the synthesis of sound from the bottom up, the freeing of the most microscopic materials of sound sampling, allowing one to create their own electronic instruments. They did this first with MAX/MSP, and, in fact, even more so with PureData. (Thanks, Miller Puckette).

Tim Hecker discussed the need for granular synthesis in an electronic music issue of the now-defunct Parachute Magazine, and I think the argument he makes holds for physical, “black-boxed” technology as well as it does for electronic music. The essential idea is that the fetishization of technology or neo-naturalism are both backward ways of dealing with technological development. That is to say, we need to examine the technology insofar as it allows us to move beyond it, rather than allow ourselves to be seduced by a meditation on the state of a single technology, to fixate rather than innovate:

Perhaps a form of electronic music will come which will leave the technology it uses as only a trace — so that the aesthetic field opens up again to allow for spaces which are free from the suffocation of medium-based discourses; an electronic music which leaves its technology as just a murmur.

We do this precisely through, he suggests, granular synthesis rather than pre-programmed sound production software. The beauty computer-made music is, with relatively minimal expertise, how one gains an astounding control over the whole range of possible sounds. LittleBits seems to be making the same possible for those without a complex understanding of circuitry and mathematics (one of the problems holding the spread of granular synthesis is the grasp of mathematics it requires, though, anyone who passed trigonometry should find it well within the realm of possibility to learn).

LittleBits, if you read the interview, seems to require only that you match colors and conceive of simple circuits. It is certainly a first stage, but I think it is the first stage of something wonderful: freeing the basic materials of electronic technologies so that people can make them for themselves. Perhaps some day we will have LittleBits stores next to craft stores: it seems to be a potentially complex but basically simple kit with a nearly infinite number of interesting and cool possibilities. The number of possible basic units is both staggering and encouraging. The idea presents people with the building blocks of their own electronic experimentation, no complex machinery, start-up capital or fancy engineering education required. Maybe some will get a taste for it and move on to more advanced experimentation.

Obviously, this system by itself will not replace consumer technologies with a DIY culture, but projects like this are an exciting step in the correct direction.

Which is all to say: make yr own technology!

I am cross-posting this with my other, collaborative blog: ghostisland.wordpress.com

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A few months ago I found this album by “Angil and Hiddntracks” called Oulipo Saliva, which was built with a great deal of interest in constraint, avoiding the use of the letter “e,” focusing on woodwind instrumentation, the use of an old untuned piano, and even avoiding the use of the key of E.

I would certainly recommend it–a carefully crafted piece at every level. Here’s their myspace page.

With experiments like this, results can be either gimmicky or a wonderful surprise. They are, in this case, pretty dazzling. I wrote a small piece about it and Mickaël must have had a google alert set up for his name, because he dropped me a message and then graciously agreed to have an email conversation with me about his music.

Here’s the text: I think you’ll find that Mickaël is an uncommonly aware, crafty, sharp, interesting, and friendly musician. I’ve let him know that I will be posting this here, and that you may be commenting on it. So, if you have anything to say, make sure to say it.

I would definitely recommend reading the conversation, he’s a lovely guy with a lot of things to say. My apologies for talking so much.

(Sean) First, was it difficult working the constraint in English? I understand that you speak French as well and that the most common letter in both English and French is “e,” so had you ever considered writing your lyrics in French? How did you compose the lyrics? Did you compose music and lyrics separately or did you manage to get into a space where you could just avoid using “e”? (Avoiding letters while writing is still very difficult for me).

(Mickaël) Using English is one code of pop songwriting I’ve always respected. French is my mother tongue; I use it every day. I want to keep the moment of songwriting special.
For Oulipo Saliva I wrote the words first, and then composed the music based on the inner rhythm of what I’d written. Words came out pretty easily, actually – I knew what I meant to evoke (loss), and how (finished lists). The music and arrangement were quite immediate as well. I wrote the entire album in just a few months; it usually takes much longer!

(S) This is pretty interesting to me, because I rarely have the opportunity to ask someone whose mother tongue is different why he or she would choose to write in English. You say that it’s a pop songwriting code you respect, but I still wonder why you would choose it over the French language one, which also has a history and richness to it. Is it only because French is your day-to-day language?

(M) Mostly, yes. Also, I don’t consider French as a pop songwriting code. There are few examples of French speakers who manage to write good pop songs in their mother tongue. Serge Gainsbourg was the most remarkable one; artists like Katerine and Matthieu Boogaerts are quite good at this too, but they’re exceptions. A very large part of the others are really bad!
French is relevant as a language in some other genres, such as hip-hop, and ‘chanson’, of course. But I don’t think it works well in pop music’s various incarnations.

(S) I can understand the draw of a different language, though sometimes I wonder if English needlessly dominates pop music, especially since there are so many sonic possibilities to be explored with the use of other languages. Do you consider writing new songs in French? Might you be worried about the possibility of a concept’s non-translation due to the fact that many people only speak English?

(M) I can’t write songs in French, and don’t think I ever will. Using English to write songs feels like wearing a nice costume. French is, well, dressing casual.

(S) On the constraint of the woodwind sounds: I find it fascinating that you seem to have restricted the creation in every sense, even focusing on the physicality of the instruments. Did you find that the instrumental constraints changed your mode of musical composition?

(M) Absolutely so! I’ve realised that so much depends on ‘matter’. I mean, I could write a bunch of songs with just a piece of rope, if this was all I had. Imagination is important, but it works much better if I impose limits to myself. Saying “let’s use woodwinds as the core part of this album” made me think of the wide range of possibilities this implied. How would an alto saxophone sound if it played the part of (meaning ‘if it acted as’) a slide guitar? There you go: you can hear the result in the song “Kids”. And all over the album, really.

(S) I find this to be the case, too. Imagination is important, but when untempered by constraints, it loses itself. At some level, constraint is related to all creation—rock music generally uses the same 3 or 4 instruments, musicians play in modes, authors write in literary traditions, poetic forms, etc. It is nice to see someone being more imaginative about their work down to the very basic matter of their composition; down to the letters in the words and the material of their instruments. It has almost a free jazz feel to it, of pushing each unit to the limit of its possibilities.
One thing that most impressed me about the album is the playfulness, because often such strict constraints run the risk of being gimmicky, but when executed like this, I think they express a huge amount of creativity, and also an awareness of craft that one doesn’t often come across in music.

Another question: how do you consider your work in relation to musical genres? It definitely speaks to a number of different genres, and I wonder what your aim was in relation to these different genres it flirts with.

(M) One of my favourite bands is Broadcast. I regard Noise Made by People and The Ha Ha Sound as gates to postmodernism (though some artists did step across these gates before them, if only the Beatles). I admire their ability to mix influences from various periods of time, and musical genres, and deliver something that could never have been done before. I hope Oulipo Saliva feels the same – that there is some free-jazz, some hip-hop, some minimalist music in it; even though in the end, I hope these songs are just decent pop songs as well.

(S) Since it is probably hugely expensive to tour with your own piano, do you think your songs would work without your strangely tuned piano? How is it working with a piano like this? Did you end up focusing more on its rhythm than melody?

(M) I did focus on the strange melodies this piano unwillingly renders, as well as the nice blows of its hammers on its century-old strings. Composing with it has been quite magical. Start playing a melody, and another one (a ghost, playful, unexpected harmony) will play at the same time. Always reminds me of the first few notes of Gil Evans’ Last Vegas Tango, which is my favourite piece of music ever.

As we cannot tour with this piano, we’ve figured out a way of delivering the spirit of songs without it; notably through additional guitar, brass, and string arrangement. Conjuring up a ghost piano is something! But it is not a problem, really. I’ve always seen the recording of an album and the moment of a show as two very distinct processes, anyway.

(S) The way you describe the piano reminds me of John Cage’s work with prepared pianos, or even Hauschka’s recent records. Though, it seems like what you are playing is a pre-prepared piano. [(M) It is indeed! I love how this sounds, “pre-prepared piano!”] The timbre is rich, it has a lot of color and aura to it.

So I wonder if you’ve had much interaction with minimalism? Its obvious listening to your music that you’re well acquainted with a lot of forms of music, and your approach seems to mirror the minimalism in its aim if not always in sound. How would you characterize your music’s relation to minimalism?

(M) I generally like randomness in music. The unexpected, the unbalanced… Danger! This is why I love Kim Deal, I think there are lots of happy accidents in her recordings. Now, I like Cage, and Reich, because the process in their music is somehow the opposite. They’re all about accidents, and sometimes their pieces unexpectedly turn into some kind of pop music. “Different Trains” is a pop song, isn’t it?
Their influence was very practical in Oulipo Saliva. The intro in “You most III” is inspired by Cage’s works: the instruction I gave to the brass and woodwind players was “play any note, as long as it lasts 8 times. Then breathe in during one time, and start again.”

(S) Did the musical palette influence your lyrics? Did it help you to open up your music up to other compositional possibilities? I find sometimes setting an absurd limit on something can help open me up creatively and I’m wondering if you feel the same way.

(M) Previously answered – sort of.

(S) Fair enough!

(S) Your videos seem to be fairly high-concept (and very visually arresting, by the way), so have you tended to work around with an organizing concept for your songs and videos, and have just not publicized it much until this album?

(M) There was no plan, really. Different people have been working on the videos. I’m glad if the whole thing looks coherent in the end, but there is no scheme behind all this. Metronomic made A long way to be happy; Bernard Films made Beginning of the fall and Narrow minds. The very latest video was made by a friend of ours, Cédric Lamarsalle: Trying to fit.

(S) Since the literary and musical limitations of your work already interact with each other, I wonder if you’ve ever considered trying to find a way to carry these sorts of limitations over to the videos as well?

(M) Yes, but they’re more absurd. “A long way to be happy” was all shot in reverse order, and edited backwards. That means I walked backwards all the way when we shot the video. I only did it as a reference to Lynch, no big scheme behind this. In “Trying to fit”, all supporting roles wear moustaches… just a funny glimpse to the Beastie Boys, you know.

(S) The album is being advertised almost entirely by the constraints you and your band used in constructing it. Do you prefer that people hear the music first, and then find out about the way it was put together? Or does the order not matter to you?

(M) Well, I love it when some people tell me they like the songs, and can hardly believe me when I reveal the concept afterwards. It does happen occasionally. On the other hand, what attracted me to Perec’s e-less novel, for instance, was the restriction. Then I loved the story. So I guess the order does not really matter, I just don’t want people to think I used limitation as publicity – the aim has always been to write good songs.

(S) I am in agreement about the order. There is some controversy about whether the constraints of such a work should be revealed or not, and often it seems to treat the constraint like a secret that the audience is charged with finding. I think it is nice to see that you treat the limitation as just one thing among many, which is part of the reason the limitation and the work in general succeed.
And it doesn’t seem like you are stressing the limitations over good songwriting. The writing speaks for itself.

Have you considered submitting this to the OuLiPo? I hear they sometimes certify these sorts of things, and as far as I know, no one has done this sort of thing before.

(M)I have indeed. I met one of the current members and he told me he’d given a copy of Oulipo Saliva to the others. But that’s about it…

(S) Hmmm… I would have thought they would be more interested.

(M) I wish!

(S) In following with Georges Perec’s work, did you intend the lyrics of your album to act as a sly reference to the restrictions you set?

(M) Yes indeed. In French, “e” pronounces like “eux” (‘them’). Years after writing La disparition, Pérec admitted he’d written a novel without E as a reference to his parent’s death (without ‘them’). There is something similar in Oulipo Saliva. I don’t want to get into details, hope you don’t mind. But there is something.

(S) No, no, I don’t mind at all. I don’t like it when an artist overdetermines their work for their audience. When there is a debate about the work and the artist “explains” what it means, I find it belittling and sometimes infuriating. Language is a common material of expression for both of us, but means different things to each of us. You have said just the right amount to make me very curious, though!

When you wrote the lyrics, did you have any thematic aims, or did you find that the lyrics took you in strange directions as a result of your inability to use the letter “e”?

(M) I guess you expected me to answer “both”…
Well, both! I knew what I meant, and I took strange, unforeseen bypasses to get there.

(S) I always find myself inspired by the way that expression can be bent around any limitation we set for it, creating something strange and beautiful in the process. This touches on some of the strangeness permeating your record, since the expression is filtered through loss of different types, but becomes something enigmatic as a result. To me, it’s a very noticeable quality that comes through as a sort of color to the music.

(S) Is there anything you’ve been meaning to say about the album but haven’t quite gotten the opportunity to? I understand that people probably mostly ask about the constraint (which I am also guilty of doing).

(M) Not really. I’m glad most relevant subjects are covered when evoking the album with people who liked it. The use of brass; danger; freedom through limitation… There may be some other layers to it, which you (and I) will keep discovering with time. Hopefully.

(S) Would you work with constraints like this again?

(M) Some of my new songs have similar constraints. Writing lines with just one letter, for example. “Remember September Eleven.” Or using all vowels in a short phrase: “Me with you all”.

(S) So, I have to ask, then, have you read Eunoia by Christian Bök? [(M) Only heard of it.] Each chapter uses only one vowel, and then piles an absurd number of rules on top of that. The whole thing is available online. He also has a lot of interesting things to say about conceptual writing. He believes, for instance, that the book shows that each vowel has its own personality. He has written about letters and fractals, among other more abstract ideas. He’s a wonderfully engaging read, and an imaginative, elegant thinker.

That ubuweb site, by the way, is a treasure trove of experimental and avant-garde materials from the past century or so, if you are in to that sort of thing.

(M) Sounds amazing! I’ll definitely check this out.

(S) Do you relish the attention you’re getting as a sort of “mad poet”? It seems that everyone wants to talk about either how whimsical the record is or how strictly determined it is. But I think it’s interesting that few seem to mention just how natural you manage to make it all sound.

(M) Thanks a lot, this is a great compliment. This is probably my biggest challenge, and what a band like Broadcast does best: mixing unexpected elements in a ‘natural’ song. Sylvia Plath did the same in The Bell Jar: instilling poetry in a proper story.

(S) I think it can be an important way of introducing people to new ideas, as well. Smuggle them in under the guise of something familiar. You did a wonderful job with that.

(S) Why OuLiPo “saliva”?

(M) Because of Francis!
Francis is the Hiddentracks’ saxophonist. I love hearing his saliva running through the brass when he’s playing. The album is a tribute to him, really.

(S) Perfect. I love that answer.

“LOL me Ishmael.”

BBC NEWS | Technology | Stephen Fry: The internet and Me.

This article has excerpts from an interview Stephen Fry gave. He is uncommonly even-handed and gently provocative in his criticisms of both the internet and critics of the internet. Certainly worth reading for a man who personifies the concept that there is no “high” or “low” culture. Only culture.

Finer points:

From a defense of abbreviation: “Read Byron’s letters. Never was a mind more perfectly expressed and yet in this fantastically compressed form.”

On email and the liberation of the voice: Suddenly there’s wit, charm, self-deprecation, self-knowledge, understanding – all kinds of qualities.

It’s a literary form in the most basic sense that you’re writing and it’s rather wonderful. The phone will be seen, I think, as a terrible aberration.

On why books will not die with technology: And we love them. I love them. You don’t throw away your books when you buy a computer. You keep both. The beauty of living in the present day is you don’t abandon the past. The past co-exists.

Much of what we do online has obvious analogues in the past: E-mail and IM replace letters and face-to-face chatting. Blogging is personal pamphleteering. Skype is the new landline. Social networks let us map our real-life connections to the Web. It’s not surprising, then, that these new tools deliver obvious social utility—Facebook is the best way to get in touch with old friends, and instant messaging is the quickest way to collaborate with your colleagues across the country. Twitter is different. It’s not a faster or easier way of doing something you did in the past, unless you were one of those people who wrote short “quips” on bathroom stalls. It’s a totally alien form of communication. Microblogging mixes up features of e-mail, IM, blogs, and social networks to create something not just novel but also confusing, and doing it well takes time and patience. That’s not to say it isn’t useful; to some people in some situations, Twitter is irreplaceable. But it is not—or, at least, not yet—a necessary way to stay socially relevant in the information age.

via The reluctant Twitterer’s dilemma. – By Farhad Manjoo – Slate Magazine

This may be true, but this is no reason to swear off Twitter. Yes, I am blogging about Twitter, I understand the absurdity of it. But might it be valuable to introduce a new form of communication that has no direct antecedent? Doesn’t this just mean that it has untapped potential for a differentiation in our manner of communication? I’m not sold that twitter is completely useless, though I am sold on the idea that it is completely distracting. Thoreau made an interesting point on the telegraph:

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer the new, but perchance the first news that will leak through the broad, flapping, American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

On another point: there was a very interesting NYTimes article back in September that spoke to what sociologists call “ambient awareness,” which is, say, the awareness we gain of a person’s moods, health, etc, by sitting in the same room and consciously or unconsciously picking up on small, mostly non-verbal cues. Maybe your friend’s eyes are a bit red, or they are slower in responding than usual, seem sluggish, maybe there is just something about them that just seems different. The article compares the inundation of data we receive from social media to this sort of awareness. Granted, many people seem to view Twitter or Facebook as a contest in which you are required to make as many friends as possible, and this seems ridiculous to me, but as a tool to keep up with people you are sincerely interested in, it simply has no parallel or better in the past.

The communication media of the past had a more direct purpose of conveying an important piece of information: letters were written and rewritten so as to guarantee the truth and nuance of the prose, telegrams were studies in the economy of language, even an email is more important-information oriented than Twitter. Twitter is undirected communication, it is neither completely for someone else nor entirely for yourself. It allows for the harmless presentation of absolutely mundane details without the risk of wasting someone’s time who would rather be doing something else: “I ate a sandwich.” “My throat hurts.” “Celtics down already!” etc. The details are mundane, but may have the effect that a tv often does for people living alone: there are voices in the room. You gain an ambient awareness of those you follow. You can read a book, work on your thesis, etc, but there are voices in the room with you. Things my friends would find too mundane to tell me in an email are exactly the sort of thing they would mention on Twitter or if we were in person, just sitting down for a meal, or maybe watching tv together.

Furthermore, some people are truly masters of the short form: Felix Fenéon for instance wrote little more than tiny little stories based on the news of the day–which, incidentally, someone is posting on Twitter. Marshall Mcluhan also has a ghost-twitterer, and the form would make sense for any writer with a gift for terse, densely packed statements. As an illustration, here are some examples from NYRB’s collection of Feneon’s stories titled Novels in Three Lines:

A dishwasher from Nancy, Vital Frerotte, who had just come back from Lourdes cured forever of tuberculosis, died Sunday by mistake.

Before jumping into the Seine, where he died, M. Doucrain had written in his notebook, “Forgive me, Dad. I like you.”

The Oulipo did wonders with constraint. Michael Agger in Slate brings up the possibility of Twittering as a new sort of Zen Koan. Or what of Twitter as the possibility for a haiku?

old pond . . .

a frog leaps in

water’s sound

Which is all to say that the “lowered” level of discourse isn’t as bad as some would make it out to be. Sure, people will not always put in the thought to make a Twitter post as pithy as Oscar Wilde would (nor can we be sure Oscar Wilde wouldn’t be a boring person to follow on twitter), but the form is not to blame. It allows for both profundity and banality, both of which are valuable in equal measure. As for the banality of it: living in Scotland, I can keep up with my friends in the US, and they can keep up with me. I am privy to the small details of the lives of people I love, whether they happen to be witty (as they sometimes are) or just mundane (as most of our daily details are). Is that really so terrible?

And, in honor of my father who would always remind me when I was complaining that there was nothing good on tv that “It has an off button,” I will remind you that if you don’t like it, no one is making you use it.

In the wake of Freakonomics and Moneyball everyone seems to want to economize everything, that is treat everything as an economic transaction of some sort, attributing rational motivations to every human or nonhuman decision. Which is why we will always need narrative journalism. This is an article in the NYTimes magazine discussing the economics of love, or partnership, or money. It begins with the modern currency, or maybe a timeless one, youth and beauty on one side and money on the other. It fractures out from there, from the rational decision-making through the flaws and jealousies, to the irrational emotional side of things. Nothing, as it shows, is ever quite as simple as we would believe it to be. It is interesting to see how things complicate themselves for men looking for “ego balm” and for women looking for “money.” It looks like it rarely ever stays that rational.

I have my doubts and reservations about the article, but it doesn’t attempt to lead you by the hand to any conclusion save that you simply never know enough. This was the problem, if you remember, with Crash. No short-form journalism, no hand-holding, no finger-pointing. This is the sort of thing I think we need to foster more, quick facts and hand-holding seem to be in no danger of extinction.

Anyway, good article.

Give up!

Looking through my music collection today I realized that the album “Give Up” by The Postal Service is fully 7 years old. This means that it has been 7 complete, tumultuous and jarring years since the first time I remember thinking to myself that I was finally old enough. As we were dragging my boxes, my computer and my speaker system up the stairs of the dorm, I could barely hear my parents over the sound of someone playing “Such Great Heights” loudly enough that we could still hear it in my hall, one flight up and all the way across the floor. I had a minifridge, my parents left me there and I didn’t have anyone to answer to. My brothers had left starting 7 years before that and I remember believing I would never get to that point. I think the record was on repeat, or I’m completely conflating the track with my memories, because I swear it was playing when they left, too. I remember this clearly. I was ecstatic, nervous and a little scared but full of joy.

If you’re my age, the song may remind you of this as well. How strange that an album could make me feel this way.

Give Up carries the ghost of a memory–an elated feeling of not having to wear a tie at school for the first time in years, of finally leaving my conservative private school. I was allowed to wear band tshirts to class. I showed up hung-over. I felt like an adult, though I certainly didn’t act like one.

I met one of my best friends the next day, right after moving in, because he was wearing a Thrice t-shirt. I approached him, a little nervously, to tell him I thought Thrice was cool too. I was worried he would question me about it and embarrass me because I had really only heard one of their albums. We became fast friends, though, because we had both been too lazy to sign up for orientation in time and were crammed into a dodgeball orientation group. This is a better indicator of why we get along than most things could be. How dodgeball was supposed to orient us is beyond me, but it must have oriented us toward something, because we both made it through to grad school. I gave a speech at his wedding last summer.

Realizing that this album is this old is especially strange for me because the album also marked one of the first occasions on which I felt I was cool when buying a record. I might have read the review of it on Pitchfork, which also made me feel cool, too. I listened to it a number of times with a girl that it still reminds me of, though dimly, in a much hazier way than I ever could have imagined or believed at that age. Someone I thought I would obsess over forever has become not much more than an impression of something that I feel I used to remember more clearly, the echo of a feeling that used to occupy my time. Her name comes up every now and again. The record also reminds me of all the upset, sensitive girls I knew when I was in high school and college, who started posting these lyrics to their AOL away messages. Lyrics from this album were probably among the first to show up on Facebook profiles.

After listening to Dntel, and continuing to listen to Death Cab (though not any more), I always thought that this album was a poor translation of the two and a less-than-amazing meeting, but now listening to it I feel like it’s one of those albums that ended up impressing me and meaning more to me than I expected even until this very moment.

Which is all to say, to the people my age: we spent a lot of time with other teenagers being upset, upsetting each other, upsetting ourselves, growing up too slowly and too quickly. This was a very popular album when we went to college. It was probably hard not to hear it if you went to an artsy school like Hampshire. This is an album that was released 7 years ago. 7 years before that, I was 11.

When I was younger I felt it would take my whole life to close the 7-year gap between the day my oldest brother packed up his car for school and the day I would finally get to leave. Now I feel as though I’ve lived most of my life in the 7 years since I did. Time never seems to move at just the right speed.

Suggested reading/watching/listening, or, people who have said it better than I can:

Speak, Memory – Vladimir Nabokov

The Mirror – Andrei Tarkovsky

Marcel Proust – In Search of Lost Time

And, well, LCD Soundsystem.

The first page of Lolita translated into 14 year old girl AOL speak: Ladies and Gentlebeans, I give you, LOLita.

LOLITA LIGHT OF MAH LIEF FIER OF MAH LOINS!!1!!!!! WTF LOL MAH SIN MAH SU!1!!1 WTF LO-LE-TA TEH TIP OF TEH 2NGUE TAKNG A TRIP OF THRE STEPS DOWN DA PALAET 2 TAP AT THRE ON DA TETH!111!! LO!1111! LE!11!!!!1 OMG WTF LOL TA
SHE11!1 WAS LO PLANE LO IN TEH MORNNG STANDNG FOUR FET TEN IN ONE SOK!11! OMG WTF LOL SH3 WAS LOLA IN SLAKS!!1111!1 WTF LOL SHA WAS DOLY AT SKOOL111111 WTF LOL SH3 WAS DOLORES ON TEH DOT3D LIEN1111 WTF BUT IN MAH ARMS SH3 WAS ALWAYS LOLITA
DID111!1! SHE HAEV A PRACURSOR?!!??!? OMG WTF LOL SHE DID INDED SH3 DID11!!111! LOL IN POINT OF FACT THEYRE MIGHT HAEV B3N NO LOLITA AT AL HAD I NOT LOVED ONA SUM3R A CARTANE INITIAL GIRL-CHILD!!!11 OMG WTF LOL IN A PRINCEDOM BY DA S3A!!1!! LOL O WH3N?!?!! WTF LOL ABOUT AS MANY Y3ARS BFOR3 LOLITA WAS BORN AS MAH AEG WAS TAHT SUM3R1111!1!1 OMG WTF U CAN ALWAYS COUNT ON A MURDERAR FOR A FANCY PROSA STYL3
LADEIS!1!!!!! WTF LOL AND G3NTLAMAN OF TEH JURY AXHIBIT NUMBR ONE IS WT S3RAPHS TEH MISINFORMAD SIMPLE NOBLA-WNGAD SERAPHS ANVEID!!!1 OMG LOL LOK AT THIS TANGL3 OF THORNS1!!1!111 WTF LOL

Welcome to my little corner of the blogosphere!

I have a review up at Lizzy Youle’s Food Blog of a meat pie.

At Ghost Island we are currently constructing an online chz-yr-own adventure novel. We took a map and are treating it like a map of Ghost Island, and then playing a game of literary chess with it, by responding to other people’s challenges and then setting our own. It’s collectively insane but, I think, really fun. We are going to self-publish a physical version of it once we get everything together, if anyone is interested in purchasing said book, I’m sure it won’t be too expensive. Check it out, it’s a few posts down, we are nearly done with about 1/3 of the map.

Here is pictorial evidence of how cool the choose your own adventure will be:

Sick!

My father sent me this article this morning, from the New York Times Magazine about those who grow up not knowing a time before facebook. The author, Peggy Orenstein, seems to place a fundamental divide between those who didn’t grow up with it and those who have–she seems to think that those under the age of 25 have no past (no pre-facebook past, that is) to look back on, that facebook will fundamentally change the way that young people grow up.

Yes, I think to a certain extent, this is true. At least that many don’t really have a truly pre-facebook past to look back on. Yes, we are probably growing up differently than her generation. The pitfalls of being a child, of growing into an adult are different: as Liz Lemon notes, there are way more things for a guy not to call you on now. However, this is not better or worse, only different. The landscape Orenstein lays out is from the perspective of someone who does not accept the technology as a matter of fact, but as a generational quirk, something for the kids, the way many generations seem to view the new:

Six of my nieces will head off to college over the next several years. Some have been Facebooking since middle school. Even as they leave home, then, they will hang onto that “home” button. That’s hard for me to imagine. As a survivor of the postage-stamp era, college was my big chance to doff the roles in my family and community that I had outgrown, to reinvent myself, to get busy with the embarrassing, exciting, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity. Can you really do that with your 450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self?

Fear of technology, of change, is endemic to all gaps between generations–she seems to want to question whether or not the new changes in technology are positive or negative, as if it were possible to simply return to a time before facebook or myspace when no one had any of their photos or information published on the internet. But it’s just the way it is. Since my life straddles the pre- and post-facebook landscape, I can say that it is true, it can be remarkably messy to drag an internet trail behind you, messier than simply being able to leave. A physical absence no longer means true absence, every person who has an iphone in their pocket can be triangulated and tacked-down.

It might be harder to escape your past, but this fact might present an opportunity for the consideration of a basic lesson: physically escaping the evidence or location of your past in person does not mean escaping your past. As Orenstein ably observes, Faulkner would love facebook, the haunting evidence of our undead pasts. It reminds us that simply because the past was once hidden, does not mean it was gone. I think my generation and the next will likely have to be more comfortable with their pasts, with seeing records of the radical breaks and cuts that one must make in growing up. We will learn, maybe more than the past generations, that a person is not identical to itself across time. We will learn, maybe, that one doesn’t need to leave their past to make a radical break, to grow up, to continue becoming different.

And to the idea of the entireties of our lives being encoded, digitized and indexed by facebook, google, etc. I think this idea, implicit in the article as a sort of neo-luddite critique rather than an ethical or political one, is reactionary. It reminds me of the articles people wrote when the cassette tape first became a viable commercial medium–terrified that it would kill the radio. If people could record songs whenever they wanted to, what’s to keep them listening to the radio? Or buying records for that matter? To fear or criticize the digitization of lives is a pointless and impossible task. Energy could be better spent fostering a greater critical engagement with the effects, ethics and politics of this digitization, rather than simply raging against change we fear.

The anatomy of a polaroid pack

Digitization cannot replace our memories. To take a picture is not to record a moment, to post on facebook is not to archive that moment. A photograph is not a memory. It is a suspension, a willful suspension. Our lives, in a very real way, exceed our attempts to record them, a photograph or a video is framed, our lives are not. Our sensory, spatial, and temporal experience exceeds any attempt to encode or capture it. This is all to say: our lives, even though they appear to be recorded, are still much richer and noisier, more complex and variegated than any recording would or could ever indicate. And furthermore, there is still a great deal of life lived off the internet, and that can never be put on the internet no matter how much we attempt to record. Our lives will always exceed our recordings of it. A recording is no more than a trace.

The important thing is to examine the ways that this recording affects our memories of real experience. It doesn’t kill or replace our memories, it interacts with them, it operates as a new item introduced into an already complex and dynamic system of remembering. Our memories still work in ways that supplant and alter physical evidence. To remember something is to recreate it. Insofar as memories are never strictly factual, the recording of facts or visual evidence is rather irrelevant to the process of real memory. I agree we should be critical of the system, we should pay attention to it. But people talk about this technology as if it were something that could be changed–this is not the case. They worry, their children live it is as if it were the way it had always been. It will be the same for us and our children, too.

It’s not simply better or worse, necessarily, just different. Not a thing to worry about, though certainly something we should be paying attention to.