flâneur

Brixton Sandhals

0 followers · 936 views

on the atlas — 52

highlights — 181

  • ‘It is not natural to speak well,’ she writes. ‘Eloquence—thinking in words—is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality. In groups, it is more natural to sing, to dance, to pray: given, rather than invented (individual) speech.’
    on eloquence - by roro <3 - communion
  • And the curator who should sit at the threshold between mind and mouth, carefully editing an idea before it manifests into conversation, neutering its fullness for the sake of coherence, had all but disappeared. What remained then was pure articulation.
    on eloquence - by roro <3 - communion
  • many samurai had joined Christian churches as a means of demonstrating their resentment against the new society. And, it was their resentment that caused them to move from a simple and sincere confession of sin to a defense of a pure Christian faith free from idolatry, and to oppose the government’s abuse of religion in its policy of modernization.
    The Making of an Elite: Japanese Christians
  • It’s not just Ravi Shankar, tikka masala, chai, yoga, as well as pilgrimages by American and European youth to India and Dharamsala…but also much of drug culture, which is for better or worse part of modern American and European pop culture…this was very heavily permeated by (popularized) Indian symbols, words, and ideas.
    Open Letter To Indians and Liberals Regarding Immigration and Outsourcing
  • Globalism in the form of exchange of ideas, culture, foods, travel, and even trade is a great thing, but in the forms of mass immigration and of outsourcing it is, for me as a mere idler, a very bad thing because it has such bad effects on nations and peoples that it destroys the friendship and cultural cross-germination that can exist between different cultures.
    Open Letter To Indians and Liberals Regarding Immigration and Outsourcing
  • Substack reinvigorated a zombie version of the blog, an art form of its own. But it has not done the same for essays with a beginning, middle, and end.
    Digital culture and entertainment insights daily: Laptop nonfiction
  • This may be harsh, but not writing is actually the endeavor of a lot of amateur work. A writer sets out to be impressionistic, but moving away from the painting does not make the haystacks any clearer.
    Digital culture and entertainment insights daily: Laptop nonfiction
  • The Vulgar Image reflects the artificial and desireless qualities of the present. It is pornography for a society that is losing its lust and physicality
    The Vulgar Image by Dean Kissick
  • She appears as though living inside a plastic doll of herself – the effect is neither sexual nor erotic. Rather, it is an empty and transparent provocation, too desperate to shock to be shocking. When pornography is endless and freely available, when what was once considered deviant is now celebrated, when everything is accepted and there are very few sexual taboos left, then sexual vulgarity, innuendo, and transgression become almost impossible. When nothing is left to the imagination, there is nothing left to be surprised by.
    The Vulgar Image by Dean Kissick
  • in the Bund in Shanghai, where I’m finishing this essay, in this city set a few years into the future, the phenomenon of posing for photographs all over the place, in often radically banal situations, has developed to a dizzying and unsettling extreme – the whole Earth has become a giant camera, and we are all images
    The Vulgar Image by Dean Kissick
  • The Romantics once valued folk art for its spontaneity, its authentic spirit, and its unconventionality. The hope is that today’s ongoing demolition of taste and further emptying of images of meaning might clear a path for new kinds of strangeness or beauty, and that it might also return to images some of the mystery that has been lost and give them some new, or a very old power.
    The Vulgar Image by Dean Kissick
  • The Vulgar Image is made out of everything.
    The Vulgar Image by Dean Kissick
  • Riding the tube in London and seeing all of the advertisements and the public-information posters, the looping announcements warning you about imaginary pickpockets, demanding that you report anything that does not appear ordinary, telling you what to do – the soft, caring authoritarianism of contemporary Britain – surrounded by everyone watching the talking heads on their phones and refreshing their news feeds, one feels this very strongly, that the entire city, above and below, outside and in, is becoming information.
    The Vulgar Image by Dean Kissick
  • There is too much beauty, there is too much good taste, and there is too much information in the world.
    The Vulgar Image by Dean Kissick
  • They share certain qualities: they are figurative, tasteless, illegible, stupid, fake, disembodied, grotesque, transformed. Some are ludicrously offensive, but it is unlikely that many are that offended by them
    The Vulgar Image by Dean Kissick
  • I also think of how we picture certain moments through our artists. The Last Supper of da Vinci, the Pieta of Michelangelo, the Transfiguration of Raphael. Art reverberates the channeling of history merged with the imagination.
    Easter in three places - Patti Smith
  • bubbles make it as exciting to read as to write. A perfect bubble carries away its idea, along with the mind.
    smoke rings and bubbles – we have scarcely broken into our hoard
  • But it is also the essence of every call to suspend or revise the law for the sake of a higher one, of renewed connection to its transcendental—but utterly intimate—source.
    Personal Problems - Blake Smith
  • Tone is the Trojan horse for meaning. People will open the gates for warmth long before they do for accuracy.
    the truth isn’t enough - by maja - velvet noise
  • In the end, maybe good friends and lovers are prompt engineers of the soul (forgive me for the AI metaphor). They suggest edits, and if we are willing to be warmed, rewoven, occasionally melted, the program of us runs cleaner, closer to what we hoped when we first began to write ourselves into being.
    some parts of you only emerge for certain people - by maja
  • On the Sydney train, I sometimes like to play a quiet game with myself, where I imagine each commuter through the eyes of someone who adores them. The oil-stained man becomes a gentle, loving father. The teenage girl biting her sleeve becomes someone’s irreplaceable best friend. The elderly woman with the fierce stare becomes a widow whose late husband still lives in her posture. I think this discipline, to look with imagined love, can be a form of democratic tenderness. You keep sketching halos until they become easier to see. We become what others imagine us as.
    some parts of you only emerge for certain people - by maja
  • This is why people write songs and then more songs, why entire genres exist just to metabolise its effects. Why people in love can’t stop talking about it, as if they’ve discovered a continent inside themselves.
    some parts of you only emerge for certain people - by maja
  • The essay suggests that in high-energy emotional states, such as falling in love, grief, awe, psychedelics, deep meditation, the brain becomes molten, its patterns loosened, more open to reorganisation. The person we focus on in these states becomes like a mold for the cooling metal, shaping how our thoughts settle, what habits crystallise, what identities take hold.
    some parts of you only emerge for certain people - by maja
  • waiting for the right gaze to bring them to the surface
    some parts of you only emerge for certain people - by maja
  • The emnity between the serpent and the woman (3:14-15) is not only eternal conflict, of the offspring of the devil and of Jesus, but a kind of mismatched desire as well. We see this over and over again in the Gospels: the crowds yearn for Jesus to be what they hope for, and Jesus is that but not quite that7. But it is that mismatch that keeps the crowd drawn to him, if only to try to put an end to him: our enemies, I think, are often those who we wish were more than they currently are.
    Everyone Forgets The Part About Creation Being Cursed
  • Put differently, thorns and scarcity train us in the dust-to-dust limits of being a creature, and equip us to live well in that frame. What Bruegemann—and many intepreters after him—neglect is precisely what the ancient interpreters knew: that the mismatch between our desire for the world to give what we want, and the world’s intransigence to do so, is a pedagogical gift. God’s gift of abundance is this complex provision of a world which does not give as we want, that we might be saved from a matched desire that would kill us.
    Everyone Forgets The Part About Creation Being Cursed
  • By punishing us with death, the lawgiver cut off the spread of sin. And yet through that very punishment also demonstrated his love for us. He bound sin and death together when he gave the law…And yet he ordered things in such a way that the punishment might in itself serve the goal of salvation2.
    Everyone Forgets The Part About Creation Being Cursed
  • Jesus describes the rain coming on the just and unjust. But Jesus, in speaking of that rain, notes with Genesis that the world opens up not only in grain stalks, but in thorns that choke out the wheat, in tares that grow up alongside the wheat. Nature gives, as Genesis says, in abundance, but not the kind that we want. For who desires an ocean of weeds and tares?
    Everyone Forgets The Part About Creation Being Cursed
  • Brueggemann continues to emphasize the rupture between what is expected (death) and what God gives anyway (life). In his commentary, Bruegemann emphasizes the overflowing gifts of God. But, in his treatment of the passage, Genesis 3:17-19—what happens to creation after sin—is ommitted, papered over.
    Everyone Forgets The Part About Creation Being Cursed
  • The Scriptures present this puzzle to us repeatedly: famines, floods, plagues—all signs of something in nature proliferating without end, but doing so in a mismatch of human need.
    Everyone Forgets The Part About Creation Being Cursed
  • We ought to remember what Antoni Gaudí told us: “The straight line belongs to men, the curved one to God.”
    The Importance of Counter-Clockwise Dance Rituals
  • Just as the order of the numbers in a sum makes no difference, just as there is no special sequence to towns on a map, the mind and the masterpiece may pass back and forth between thoughts as often and as easily as trains, between Detroit, Duluth, and Denver, and chapter headings are, in fact, only the names of places. Oral literature had to be sequential (like music before tape), but type made possible a reading which began at the rear, which repeated preferred passages, which skipped.
    Gertrude Stein, Geographer: II | William H. Gass | The New York Review of Books
  • We see prey, danger, comfort, security. Our words are tags which signify our interests: chairs, bears sunshine, sex; each is seen in relation to our impulses, instincts, aims, in the light of our passions, and our thought about these things is governed entirely by what we consider their utility to be. Words are therefore weapons like the jaws of the crocodile or the claws of the cat. We use them to hold our thought as we hold a bone; we use them to communicate with the pack, dupe our enemies, manipulate our friends; we use them to club the living into food.
    Gertrude Stein, Geographer: II | William H. Gass | The New York Review of Books
  • How pleasantly a doll can change its age. I do not even have to dress it differently. My eye alters and a few rags bundled about a stick assume a life, a life at any point or period I like, with any sex and any history I choose—pets, presumptions, peeves—mortal or immortal ills.
    Gertrude Stein, Geographer: II | William H. Gass | The New York Review of Books
  • Furthermore, Gertrude Stein knew that masterpieces, were, as life itself is everywhere, perfect engines of repetition. Just as leaves multiply along a limb, and limbs alike thicket a trunk, a work of art suffers simultaneous existence in many places, and eventually is read again and again, sometimes loved by the same lips.
    Gertrude Stein, Geographer: II | William H. Gass | The New York Review of Books
  • The ice cream eaten is desired again, the song sung is resung, and so we often say things over simply because we love to say them over…there is no better reason.
    Gertrude Stein, Geographer: II | William H. Gass | The New York Review of Books
  • We not only repeat when we see, stand, communicate; we repeat when we think. There’s no other way to hold a thought long enough to examine it except to say its words over and over, and the advance of our mind from one notion to another is similarly filled with backs and forths, erasers and crossing-out.
    Gertrude Stein, Geographer: II | William H. Gass | The New York Review of Books
  • Listen. We converse as we live—by repeating, by combining and recombining a few elements over and over again just as nature does when of elementary particles it builds a world.
    Gertrude Stein, Geographer: II | William H. Gass | The New York Review of Books
  • “Where the danger is, also grows the saving power,” as the German poet Hölderlin once wrote.
    The Reenchanted World, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Translated by Olivia Lasky, Damion Searls
  • The reason we are in the hopeless state we are in is that science doesn’t believe that what is unsayable is real
    The Reenchanted World, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Translated by Olivia Lasky, Damion Searls
  • One of Stafford Beer’s more famous and brilliant phrases was ‘POSIWID,’ which stands for ‘the purpose of the system is what it does.’ It’s a kind of maxim of cybernetics. And it’s very good for diagnosing systems. Instead of saying, Oh, we have a democratic system, we have an education system, you say, The purpose of the system is what it does. And what our society produces is people who are undereducated, or just educated enough to perform specific tasks—the way to get a good education is to study something that has this high economic value. Apart from that, you are pretty fucked.
    The Reenchanted World, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Translated by Olivia Lasky, Damion Searls
  • Everything I saw was heightened and intensified. Everything was physical. The grass, the thoughts, the blood, the sun, the soul. Even the mystery was physical. Wasn’t that what Christianity was all about, that God is flesh and blood?
    The Reenchanted World, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Translated by Olivia Lasky, Damion Searls
  • They were the ones who cut into bodies, programmed machines, scanned brains, researched dreams and trees’ symbiosis with fungi. Their approach toward nature may have been reductive, but at least they were looking at it.
    The Reenchanted World, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Translated by Olivia Lasky, Damion Searls
  • Simondon had written about an alienation that wasn’t due to technology but due to our lack of knowledge about technology: by treating technology as a mere tool, reducing it to its utility, and denying its inherent dignity and complexity; and by elevating it to mystical status, seeing it as an autonomous threat or an alien entity beyond human understanding.
    The Reenchanted World, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Translated by Olivia Lasky, Damion Searls
  • Several times that day, I went over and looked at them. They blended nicely into the surroundings; their leaves quivered like all the other leaves when the wind blew through the garden; their flowers shone like all the other flowers in the sunlight.
    The Reenchanted World, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Translated by Olivia Lasky, Damion Searls
  • Technology calibrates all differences, fills in every gap and crack with images and voices, bringing everything close to us in order to restore the connection between ourselves and the world.
    The Reenchanted World, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Translated by Olivia Lasky, Damion Searls
  • The statement “people are more alienated now than ever before in history” sounds false, like applying an old concept to a new condition. That is not really what we are, is it? If there is something that characterizes our time, isn’t it the exact opposite, that nothing feels alien?
    The Reenchanted World, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Translated by Olivia Lasky, Damion Searls
  • if I were forced to mention the most distinctive feature of our time, it would be precisely that: everything addresses us
    The Reenchanted World, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Translated by Olivia Lasky, Damion Searls
  • The strange thing about playing on the computer was that the meaning remained intact even though there was no one else there. In other words, I must have entered into some sort of connection with the machine; some kind of relationship between me and the machine must have formed. The machine wasn’t the other, but some of the other’s presence must have resided in it.
    The Reenchanted World, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Translated by Olivia Lasky, Damion Searls
  • the unrepeatable and the unpredictable
    The Reenchanted World, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Translated by Olivia Lasky, Damion Searls