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Text of the page (random words):
is enclosed in a single mercury bulb the lights of the bank offices and insurance companies north of the belt line float in it outlines of their buildings obscured by bright haze this has been my quotidian my every day for two years now this little two meter square balcony the skyview that has been my most constant companion i am grateful for it i would have lost my mind down here without it i never wanted to come south spent my 20s proudly remaining above the mason dixon even as everyone else my age seemed to migrate to the sunbelt for work eventually the migration caught up with me and brought me first to atlanta and then here to dallas they became my quotidian okra in the supermarket sweet tea everywhere sky glow in atlanta i could only glimpse it through the canopy but here i am looking out at addison right now and the sky is all alight brighter than any star horizon to horizon the only lights you can see are planes sometimes 5 or 6 at once when traffic is stacked up over dfw down here in the urban south there is a starless quotidian which i hated for a long time but it came to me to seem vibrant alive the glow of a place filled with furious human activity of a place people wanted to be and now that i m going back north to a sleepy pennsylvania college town where the nearest city s population peaked in 1940 and is now half its former size i think i ll miss that the youth the glow still i ll have the stars again at least posted by andy at 1 35 am 0 comments tuesday april 09 2013 skyglow if this front doesn t break soon i will 83 and muggy in april is just uncalled for uncalled for dallas i m going to sit and watch the skyglow for a bit and see if the rain starts its an activity that calls for whiskey but i m out of calories for the day so i ll have to stick to sparkling water i love useless moments like this waiting on the rain and listening to the hum of the highway they are so far and few between these days so threatened by our constant productivity my latest theory project is trying to find some framework for articulating this love i tried marcuse but he was no help sartre everyone told me to stay away from right now agamben seems like my best hope dunno hard to say somehow i need to figure through a way to argue that the useless is not useless that it is in fact crucial human that it s availability and its shape should not be left to the whims of market aristocrats that we need a democratic uselessness anyway that will be for another day right now gonna see if this front breaks posted by andy at 11 33 pm 1 comments sunday april 07 2013 if you only read on explanation of the marxist concept of commodity fetishism today make it this solid summary of the idea and how its misuse in contemporary scholarship by gavin of unfashionably late gavin is also one of the under appreciated stars of marxist leninist weird twitter posted by andy at 10 47 am 0 comments saturday april 06 2013 the problem with the future bruce sterling s 2013 sxsw benediction has been talked about over the course of the last month or so as is usually the case with his contributions to the conference cory doctorow clearly got a kick out of it i thought it was great thought provoking stuff the piece still hasn t been transcribed anywhere so i ended up listening to it on my phone while i took a walk around the neighborhood this made his discussion of the disruption of long form text by short form always on media all the more cogent i particularly liked the part where cranky old bruce really lets fly about the state of things to his audience of boosters and entrepreneurs and tech wizards everything is getting worse he yells at them almost to the point of his voice breaking despite all their talk of making the world a better place through disruptive technology the climate politics the economy all are in decline where s the betterness he asks thus i was a little confused by his ending which sounded what seemed to be a triumphalist note he encourages his argument to take responsibility for killing the past and then to kill it and eat it anyway the future i m paraphrasing here because digging the exact language out of the audio in the clunky soundstream format the piece is being shared in is a pain will be and must be built on the ruins of the past in retrospect i think i understand what sterling is going for he wants to avoid what he perceives as a sort of guilt laden retreat from movement and experimentation the tendency that makes young people enamored of home pickling and infatuated with the futile notion of returning to subsistence farming an attempt to return to a romanticized past as perhaps i am engaged in as i attempt to revive this blog in a weekend of manic posting but the language of the future and the past so common to this sort of discourse shifts sterling s argument in a way that partially erases his careful critique of disruption as progress from only moments before in a sense the language is similar to that used by rip a remix manifesto when it argues that the fight over copyright is one in which the past in the form of big media companies attempts to control the future in the form of girl talk mostly i would suggest that rather than exhorting people to take up the cause of building the future despite the cost we might more acutely need to focus on the idea which sterling motions to of thinking about taking responsibility for the future we build given that creation is indeed always creative destruction shouldn t we make sure that what we build balances what has been lost and moreover the discussion of a monolithic future conceals the fact that that future will be experienced differently by different people we have a responsibility to build our futures in a way that does not immiserate the futures of others this is something that the young rich powerful future builders at places like sxsw seem increasingly blind to we need a future for everyone not just the best and brightest and most innovative to talk about a future rather than the future might at least move us in the direction of understanding that while future change is indeed inevitable the direction of that change is not posted by andy at 6 34 pm 0 comments labels push this elemental dallas one of my favorite undergraduate professors was a bit of a theory throwback he still identified as a freudian long after trends had moved to continental philosophy he taught the survey of methods in literary criticism course i took which might explain why i m not exactly a cutting edge theorist today somewhere along the way he worked in the idea of analyzing pieces based on the four classical elements i have no idea where this came from as scholarship it seems doubtful as a habit of mind i can t seem to shake it confronted with something new i often find myself thinking water earth air or fire atlanta as a city was clearly claimed by water it rained in the sort of torrents i had only ever seen last an hour in other places for days on end even during a supposed drought the summer was sticky and had you drenched in your own sweat in minutes dallas on the other hand is a city that all but water seems to have a hold on earth for the flat plains and endless dust fire for the baking sun air for the wind and the constant air traffic and the open cloudless sky in the end though i think this is a city of air seen from above dallas is a patchwork of uninterrupted light since there are no trees tall enough to break line of sight to an airliner on final approach the city is naked to the sky and that sky has been a source of endless fascination for me living here there are aircraft aloft within view of my balcony more often than not the airport to my north hosts quite a diverse set long ezs beech starships the last flying b 29 the birds are even more interesting than the planes falcons pushing flocks of starlings around the sky like sharks on shoals of herring a few nights ago i was sitting out before bed and heard a strange rattling cry i looked up and there was a checkmark of egrets white bellies lit orange in the streetlight flying across the night sky in inverted silhouette even here in the suburbs of dallas the most domesticated and controlled place you could imagine the sky is still wild just like the firefly theme song said it would be posted by andy at 1 59 pm 0 comments friday april 05 2013 why i want you to read this blog i m going to ask you to indulge me for just a minute actually i m going to ask you to indulge me for just a minute a couple times of week for the foreseeable future i m asking you to read this blog blogging which was for a brief moment a prime means for people to keep in touch seems of late to have been mostly displaced by social networking especially facebook which allows for more robust content than the ultra concise twitter i ve thought about leaving facebook especially given its increasingly worrisome ambitions i m not sure i want facebook to become a general purpose portal for digital content i m quite certain i don t want it to become a geo political entity on par with nations still at this point choosing to exit facebook seems like choosing to stop listening to my friends colleagues and neighbors like ignoring their lives in a profoundly anti social way no until such a time as we can migrate the network somewhere else facebook seems to be an evil we re stuck with still there is something about the facebook composition experience that leaves me feeling like something is missing something we had back in the moment of personal blogging we seem to have lost the space of our own that blogs once provided a space in between the more formal and controlled writing of published work including work published on higher profile edited group blogs and the constant rolling present of the social network a space where a draft of a thought too big to fit in an update status can be hashed out over the course of a day a space we control and thus can navigate and retrieve thoughts from the archive more readily of course we haven t really lost this space this blog has still been here unused all these years what we ve lost are readers coming to the space i can link to my blog but doing that is asking an indulgence leave the stream of the rolling now for a few minutes and come pay attention just to me just dropping the link in the stream isn t enough to compel anybody to click on it my google analytics suggest so i m asking that indulgence dear reader click the link i could just keep posting stuff here and dropping links and hoping for the best but writing is hard when you know no one is reading help me out here s what i ll promise you in return if and when you revive your old blog and start dropping links into the rolling present i ll click on them posted by andy at 2 02 pm 2 comments a modest mooc posal proposition 1 only the most excellent teachers can teach well enough to out perform moocs proposition 2 moocs can teach the skills ordinary people need to become excellent conclusion run a mooc to teach teaching and make moocs obsolete posted by andy at 8 54 am 0 comments thursday april 04 2013 turing test the first short story i ever wrote was called turing test it imagined a young man fooled into corresponding with a computer the punchline was the machine was in no way alive it was just crudely recycling phrases from a linguistic database it wasn t a very strong story really the way i conveyed the computer s patchwork prose was clunky and obvious and unconvincing but the idea of it sticks with me especially as we re now hearing about machines that write news articles and grade student essays there are many valid criticisms of these sorts of efforts at least one prominent young cultural critic has been on twitter all day laying into the idea that machines can think indeed the firms behind these automated techniques have every reason to spin and hype their machines well beyond their actual capabilities still i think it is worth taking the idea that they might succeed seriously i guess i find the notion of an external machine automaton writing plausible because for me the experience of writing is one of being dependent on internal biological automata i don t always know exactly where the words come from or why they go together they just show up sort of and i put them down on the page often they emulate the voice of an author i ve recently been reading i sometimes think of the unconscious me that serves up words as my language engine this is why i sometimes struggle to teach writing because i myself am not always consciously aware of how it is that i come to write i m pretty sure the science fiction author william gibson is talking about a similar writing experience when he talks about writing as a process he carries out as a collaboration with his subconscious in the documentary no maps for these territories so i m guessing this isn t just me thus we are confronted with yet another specter the spectre of the preconscious writing machine which is the spectre of the final and ultimate unbundling that of productive work and lived experience for even as authors may have lived with the language engines inside our heads for a very long time we still felt to some degree coextensive with them and in any event we could not be separated if you wanted it you had to feed us and our relationship with it felt so intimate it was part of our everyday life our identity our expression every word to a loved one every argument with a rival it was embedded in it all so surely we must have thought this cannot be alienated long after the ditch digger and the line worker and even the musician have been automated out of existence we will still be here surely language is the fundamental measure of the human it is the core after all of the humanities but what if what if it isn t anymore within our lifetimes what if experience must face the world alone shorn of productive value what then posted by andy at 10 52 pm 0 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