skandalon

The better I got to know him, the more his productivity awed me. I have always been a plodder, a person who anguishes and struggles over each sentence, and even on my best days I do no more than inch along, crawling on my belly like a man lost in the desert. The smallest word is surrounded by acres of silence for me, and even after I manage to get that word down on the page, it seems to sit there like a mirage, a speck of doubt glimmering in the sand. Language has never been accessible to me in the way that it was for Sachs. I’m shut off from my own thoughts, trapped in a no-man’s-land between feeling and articulation, and no matter how hard I try to express myself, I can rarely come up with more than a confused stammer. Sachs never had any of these difficulties. Words and things matched up for him, whereas for me they are constantly breaking apart, flying off in a hundred different directions. I spent most of my time picking up the pieces and gluing them back together, but Sachs never had to stumble around like that, hunting through garbage dumps and trash bins, wondering if he hadn’t fit the wrong pieces next to each other.

✖ Via Leviathan by Paul Auster, New York: Penguin, 1992, p. 55

• Jul 27, 2010 link notes tagged: art author novel writing word thing creation creativity composition relation fragment destruction Paul Auster Leviathan

technology ipad computer laptop camera photo writing evolution obsolescence reblog

✖ Via superamit: “I’m calling it now: The laptop starts dying tomorrow” by Amit Gupta, April 2sd, 2010

Maybe. But the logic used in this argument is weak in at least two ways.

1) DSLR cameras, Point&Shoot cameras and Cameraphone are all compared here as devices capable of taking pictures and videos. How are desktop computers, laptops and iPads compared? As devices to surf the web? To do video editing? Graphic design? Reading eBooks? Writing a thesis?

2) Consider the latter : can an iPad replace the laptop for users who write a lot, and not just at home? I’d like to have more feedback about the iPad’s keyboard from someone who’s using it extensively (not just to write emails). I can’t help but think that somehow Gupta is suggesting that if you write a lot, you should stay home.

• Apr 03, 2010 link notes reblogged from superamit [via] tagged: technology iPad computer laptop camera photo writing evolution obsolescence

✖ Via Arnold Dreyblatt: “The Wunderblock”, 2000 (table from mdf with internally mounted tft-display and computer, chair)

About this art instllation:

“In 1925, Freud wrote a text that compares the faculty of memory to a child’s toy known as a Wunderblock. It consists of a wax slab stretched with cellophane, upon which a text may be inscribed, and just as readily erased by lifting the cellophane layer up and away from the wax slab. In contrast to Freud’s model, in which the pressure of the act of inscription onto the cellophane surface continues in the direction of the underlying layer of wax, in „The Wunderblock, the original selection and entry of data has been concluded in the past. The movement originates from ROM and is held in RAM, before travelling up towards the surface. Quite independently of our own states of presence or absence, the installation searches and inscribes autonomously. One has the impression that the underlying textual sources can never be perceived in their entirety. Because the many texts fragments are inscribed and erased simultaneously, one can read a given fragment only with difficulty before it vanishes. The model of memory demonstrated here is at once highly unstable, fragmentary, incomplete, perishable and ephemeral. The sentence fragments appearing and disappearing on the screen describe a process of finding and loss, safeguarding and destruction.” (more)

About Arnold Dreyblatt:

“Arnold Dreyblatt (b. New York City, 1953) is an American composer and visual artist. He studied music with Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, Alvin Lucier and media art with Steina and Woody Vasulka. He has been based in Berlin, Germany since 1984. In 2007, he was elected to the German Academy of Art (Akademie der Künste, Berlin).” (Wikipedia)

“A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’” is a very short text written by Freud in 1925 and first published in German the same year (PDF).

This text is the subject of an essay by Jacques Derrida first published in 1967 as part of the volume Writing and Difference (Google books preview, Amazon). It was translated to English in 1972 and published in the Yale French Studies (no 48, pp. 74-117; PDF available upon subscription to JSTOR).

• Jan 25, 2010 link notes tagged: art technology communication toy author book writing philosophy psychoanalysis memory