263 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2016
  2. Oct 2016
    1. a miscarriage that happened the previous summer

      I've been thinking about this "summer" as an eternal, recurring, single Summer that these characters get to go visit every year. The title "This One" initially focalizes a time and place for this particular story, but for Alice, the "one summer" that she is fixed on is last Summer, when she had the miscarriage.

    2. reminiscent of a Miyazaki heroine

      Yes! This is what I was reminded of but I couldn't put my finger on it.

    3. Rose is not granted any real agency, sexual or otherwise.

      A good point. We of course identify with Rose but (in our discussion Monday, at least) came to dislike her in some ways. So this is a good point about the limits of her position in this world.

    1. Symmetry is fearful precisely because it engenders the absolute annihilation of the diegetic world of the comic

      A key point here.

    2. The balance of the structure might lend a momentary euphoric feeling, a revelatory moment that would seem to make all the elements of the issue come into a clearer focus.

      As indeed happened when I displayed this structure to the class.

    3. Here, we see a very asymmetrical tiger, one who is clearly not that ferocious.

      I don't know. In many versions, yeah, he's pretty meek looking. But a handful of the copies are pretty intense, even for Blake. Of course, the lack of a singular resolution to the question of the Tyger's ferocity is resonant with the other aspects of a/symmetry in the poem.

    4. And yet, this interest is based upon Blake's marginality; he signifies alienation itself

      "I like this one poet, William Blake. He's pretty obscure; you probably haven't heard of him."

    5. capitalist subjectivity

      For me, the hard part here is following the move from the structure of the transcendental self into the material dialectic of capitalism.

    6. penthouse owned by Donald Trump decorated with proverbs from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
    7. a split between self-image and its commodified dissemination

      Like that commercial.

  3. Sep 2016
    1. they are moving to a world of knowing, not understanding

      This is a distinction without difference, which is fine, except I feel like the "then vs now" of this and similar arguments just leaves so much out from oversimplification, especially since he puts "understanding" on the side of computers three paragraphs later. Computers don't really understand anything, although they can occasionally present knowledge back to us using models that make that presentation appear uncannily prescient, it's just an appearance, a trick.

      I realize this isn't the main purpose of this piece.

    1. he evidence for such schemata is the way they allow an artist to produce surprising variations and unpredictable deviations from standard poses, which are nevertheless still coherent with the character's subjective unity

      the "magic" of Disney animals is that they behave like 3D but aren't. When you take their 2D boundaries and lines and make them 3D, the effects are weird:

    2. As it shows up in the comic page, the gaze exposes the spectator to being looked at by the panels from a multiplicity of places at the same time, rendering the spectator simultaneously constituted and fragmented by this kaleidoscopically dispersed gaze.

      cf (later) Watchmen chapter VI

    3. interruptions between panels cannot be straightforward transcriptions of the "real," which, for Lacan, resists symbolization absolutely, because the shapes and sizes of the blank spaces between panels place constraints on the kinds of images that can show up in adjacent panels.

      So this refutes the "blood in the gutter" example by saying that it's not the case that what really happens is in our minds. There is no transcription of the real.

    1. Athirdp~'!.llclisalmostalwaysimplicated,':'andthisconfirmsthatitisindeedattheminimumacompoundsyntagm,orevenamuchlongersequence.chatisatthemajorlevelofsignificance,thethresholdwhereonecanelaboratepertinentlogicalinferences.

      In other words, there must be a higher-order syntax operating. One that the panel-void-panel rhythm is a unit of.

    2. theseintervalsbetweenrwopanelslavishedwithaccuracyandaudacny.?"
    3. theseintervalsbetweenrwopanelslavishedwithaccuracyandaudacny.?

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    1. speak the spells written in the four-letter text of DNA

      A really thorough magic metaphor here.

    2. the magic word: the commands you type into a computer are a kind of speech that doesn't so much communicate as make things happen, directly and ineluctably, the same way pulling a trigger does.

      words have power, especially (literally) in virtual environments

    1. Literacy and access to writing materials were a pre-requisite for diary-writing. Quantitative self-representations are dependent on other forms of literacy: understanding counting, tables and graphs for instance. For digital forms of quantitative self-representation, we need to understand not only both these basic forms of numeracy and data literacy but also some procedural literacies (Mateas 2005).

      A crucial pivot.

    2. Just as the camera taking the photograph is visible in digital self-portraits taken in a mirror, so early photogra-phers often included the tool of their trade in their self-portraits.

      Showing off the technology.

    3. were written by priests and nuns, who were more likely than others to have learned to read and write.

      and also why most autobiographies tended to be spiritual?

    4. visual, written and quantitative.

      Call out to structure

    5. In today’s digital culture, the three modes are intertwined. Digital self-representation is conversational and allows new voices to be heard. However, society disciplines digital self-representations such as selfies and blogs through ridicule and pathologising.

      This is Rettberg's central claim or thesis.

  4. Aug 2016
    1. almost overtakes

      I love the middle panel here. All it needs in order to convey "almost overtaking" is his foot and her foot.

    1. I can guarantee that if you have a domain of your own stuff will break. It will break in some predictable, easy-to-fix ways and probably in some totally weird, tearing-your-hair out kind of ways. Your students will experience this too. And it will be frustrating and terrible. And it will not be standardized or easily consumed. It will not be easily defined or put in a box. It will be gloriously, awfully messy. And you may have to switch directions or gears, and I hope that when you do you talk to your students about what happened and why it happened — and that you work together to try and figure this out.

      This so much.

  5. Jul 2016
  6. Jun 2016
    1. The greatest humbug of all is the man who believes—or pretends to believe—that everything and everybody are humbugs.

      Cynicism is the greatest deception

    2. gorillarities

      what?

  7. Mar 2016
    1. is the art of locating with sufficient precision the place a given book occupies in that network at a given moment.

      Is this ever possible? Is it useful to aim for an impossible target? I get reading as a network, but how -- without understanding the total network simultaneously -- would it be possble to apprehend a position within that network? Much less an exact position?

      But then, if not this, what else is "reading"?

    2. organize their own paths

      So many paths to organize, but I like this metaphor for culture.

    3. Once you have programmatic access to the content of the library, screwing around potentially becomes a far more illuminating and useful activity

      Because programmatic access impose more subtle, rigid and even insidious constraints upon What One Does with literary content? So finding ways to screw around with it shifts the power back?

  8. Feb 2016
    1. Hayles argues that this statement only works if this statement is substantive, "a negation converted into the looming threat of something," although this "something" can only be "negation itself, working to obliterate our everyday assumptions about reality" (788). This claim, however, does not go far enough—within the House negation works to obliterate reality itself. Everything about the House makes you wish to leave it, but it extends and swallows anything with which it comes into contact. This is what might be termed "the revenge of non-Being," as the House attempts to destroy blindly any form of presence with which it comes into contact.

      This is a point of connection and departure from hailes, although it's not clear how Hayles fayles to go "far enough", since Slocombe's farther point could be well-considered as already implied by Hayles. But if nothing else it underscores the substantiation of negation that deconstruction identifies for both authors.

    1. in House of Leaves, consciousness is never seen apart from mediating inscription devices.

      This is the key thing re: the subject.

    2. Camouflaged

      Layers

    1. a kind of intervention into academia

      This is especially important because Hacking the Academy was conceived as (and criticized for, I think) performing just such an intervention.

    2. writing, it is mere “yacking”

      Dang

    3. unexpected revelations

      Understood this way, does the viewpoint of being disrupted, being startled, of not expecting these revelations -- does that not invoke interpretation?

    1. First, and tellingly for this poem, it enhances the significance of the page's white space, which now appears as a poetic equivalent for the physical "nothing" of snow.

      YEEESSSSS

      See also "lighght"

    2. Perhaps even more crucially, deformance reveals the special inner resources that texts have when they are constituted poetically. Nor do judgments about the putative quality of the poem matter. Good, bad, mediocre poems, by whatever measure or judgment: in so far as they are poetically made, they share this special kind of intelligibility.

      Notice that for these inner resources to become manifest, the consideration of its constitution as poetic presumes the outcome as intelligible. This is how performance comes back in.

    3. The syllable of a syllable can also be the letters which are the smallest units of any syllable

      Conveniently, perhaps, this close reading reveals the ways in which this poem comments on close reading.

    4. ass Charles Olson

      typo lol

    5. deformative poetics

      "poetics" implies an assessment. That there are differentiated practical outcomes of different deformative methods.

    6. Deformative moves re-investigate the terms in which critical commentary will be undertaken

      What is at stake here.

    7. In truth, however, they comprise the operating system of language, the basis that drives and supports the front-end software.

      This is an interesting and relevalotory metaphor: that the underlying linguistic rules of spelling, typography, grammar, language, etc. are the operating system (or maybe machine code or assembly would be better analogy) of "imaginative works" and that -- crucially -- such code is incorrectly presumed to be pre-interpretive and pre-critical.

    8. a Humpty Dumpty mode

      That is, it means precisely what he intends it to mean.

    9. Humpty Dumpty, threw in Alice's face to unhinge her conventional imagination of language

      'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'

      http://sabian.org/looking_glass6.php

    10. strategy of estrangement

      To reclaim that "vital force" of a poem, one has to make it strange agin.