- Interesting set of interviews with Fred Armisen, Steve Albini, and Godfrey Reggio about creativity [youtube]
- Cyryl Ryzak on the difficulties faced by the Polish left in the precarious coalition that defeated the far-right PIS party in Dissent
- David Roth on Ron DeSantis’s politics of cruelty in Defector – thought this was a good read on the day Ronnie boy quit his presidential campaign
- Bert Hubert on his blog pleading for leaner software
- A very cool video on Bob Reynold’s youtube channel gathering advice from a bunch of modern jazz greats on what they learn from each other and how to find your own sound [youtube]
Month: January 2024
The Link Zone 002
On my list this weekend:
- Walter Benjamin’s On The Concept of History and The Author as Producer both over on Marxists.org
- A ravelry pattern that’s like a Penguin classics book cover.
- A silly number of films noir available on Open Culture
- 2600 is the original hacker zine – not new but new to me
- Darryl Li on the change in the debate about genocide in Dissent.
New music:
- Mount Matsu by Yin Yin
- Cloudward by Mary Halvorson
Blogging is back(?)
Over the past week, there’s been a flurry of activity across my social feeds talking about restarting blogs, continuing blogs, lamenting blogs are dead, and talking about blogging in the year of our demise 2024. My own blogging practice is pretty modest compared to some other people, but it feels that this is the moment that writing on one’s own website is going to make a big return.
Twitter is dead – last I checked, it’s mostly fascists and AIs arguing with each other and Elon. Facebook has been dead for years. The other places that could replace them aren’t really as good, and honestly, maybe that’s a good thing. I, for one, want a slower more considered internet. I want to see things that other humans tell me are worth seeing, and while a bit of algorithmic help is alright, everything is pretty awful these days.
The thing that I think could make the moment last is if we make a conscious effort to connect with others. This is why blogs died when Facebook and Twitter became huge. They connected us and made conversations (sometimes) very easy. Blogging could do this too, it used to. It can.
The Link Zone 001
Changing what I’m calling my link dump posts since “Information Diet” suggests a notion of online writing as mere “content” which is stupid. So it’ll just be The Link Zone from now on. An occasional kind of thing, I think.
- Mask On Zone is a website of strategies and tactics for avoiding surveillance at protests.
- Colin Marshall writes about Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog at Open Culture
- Anil Dash wrote about how the internet might get weird again for the Rolling Stone
- Good Enough Lab is an online collective that makes fun little online apps (helpful for making the internet weird, as per Anil Dash)
- Giles Turnbull, on his blog, on how the indie web might make more of a come back
These posts tap into my own recent thinking about my online footprint. While the big platforms were never amazing, they have become particularly bad. I’d like to make my own Internet presence a bit slower, more considered, and immune to the nonsense that the platform overlords would impose on us.
The blog is on a wordpress hosted blog now, which is by far the simplest way I know of making this happen, but I think it’s time to start thinking more seriously about self-hosting, and possibly even setting up my own server to run the page from. I would welcome any suggestions on resources for making the latter part of this happen.
Ian Penman’s Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors
I just finished Ian Penman’s bio-reflection on Reiner Werner Fassbinder, Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors. It’s a weird one. Partly a biography, a critical assessment of RWF’s work, memoir, a book on art. It’s many things. It’s incredibly good.
I can’t quite classify it, it’s not quite what Michael Winkler would call an exploded non-fiction, and it’s not quite what Olga Tokarczuk would call a constellation novel (well, for a start, this isn’t a novel). But it is somewhere between those two theories of the book. It’s a myriad fragments, each revealing either something about RWF or about Penman or about the relationship between the two.
At the end, you get an image of Fassbinder in your head that is perhaps quite hard to shake. I’ve never consciously watched one of his movies, though I might have seen one without realising it was by him. We’ll watch his Marriage of Maria Braun (1978) later this weekend, maybe tonight or tomorrow. I might post about it too (the other film we’ve got queued up is Passolini’s Salo (1975). It might be a good double feature, or not. There are always other distractions.
Books read in 2023
2023 was a big year of reading good books. Bolded are the books that stood out to me as memorable when I looked over the list.
1. Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming – Laszlo Krasznahorkai
2. Sallow Bend – Alan Baxter
3. Mona – Pola Oloixarac
4. Cotter’s England – Christina Stead
5. Wolves and Other Stories – Bhuwaneshwar
6. Prose – Thomas Bernhard
7. Where We Are – Alison Flett
8. Cold Enough for Snow – Jessica Au
9. Septology – Jon Fosse
10. A Foul Wind – Justin Clemens
11. In Watermelon Sugar – Richard Brautigan
12. Conversations (vol. 1) – Jorge Luis Borges and Osvaldo Ferrari
13. New Australian Fiction 2020 – Rebecca Starford (ed.)
14. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
15. Served Cold – Alan Baxter
16. Shirley – Ronnie Scott
17. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State – Friedrich Engels
18. Bear – Marian Engel
19. Conversations (vol. 2) – Jorge Luis Borges and Osvaldo Ferrari
20. Conversations (vol. 3) – Jorge Luis Borges and Osvaldo Ferrari
21. Labyrinths – Jorge Luis Borges
22. The Aleph – Jorge Luis Borges
23. Água Viva – Clarice Lispector
24. The Passion According to GH – Clarice Lispector
25. Vanity Unfair – Zuzana Cigánová
26. Exploring Degrowth – Vincent Liegley and Anitra Nelson
27. Pages from the Diary of a Jackass – Ante Dukič
28. Raving – McKenzie Wark
29. Wage Labour and Capital & Wages, Price and Profit – Karl Marx
30. Wall – Jen Craig
31. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism – Max Weber
32. Leave Me Alone – Harry Reid
33. The Right to be Lazy and Other Studies – Paul Lafargue
34. The Mandarins – Simone de Beauvoir
35. Hour of the Star – Clarice Lispector
36. The Feminist Subversion of the Economy – Amaia Pérez Orozco
37. Against Interpretation and Other Essays – Susan Sontag
38. The Magpie Wing – Max Easton
39. If Beale Street Could Talk – James Baldwin
40. Blood and Guts in High School – Kathy Acker
41. Hurricane Season – Fernanda Melchor
42. A Writer of Our Time – Joshua Sperling
43. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction – Walter Benjamin
44. Landscapes – John Berger
45. A Life – Simone Veil
46. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
47. Perdido Street Station – China Miéville
48. The Society of Spectacle – Guy Debord
49. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell – Susanna Clarke
50. Audition – Pip Adam
51. Annihilation – Jeff Vandermeer
52. Authority – Jeff Vandermeer
53. Acceptance – Jeff Vandermeer
54. This is how you lose the time war – Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
55. Vivian Maier Out of the Shadows – Richard Cahan and Michael Williams
56. Neuromancer – William Gibson
57. Count Zero – William Gibson
58. Sound Within Sound: A History of Radical Twentieth Century Composers – Kate Molleson
59. Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life – Zaragoza Butcher-McGunnigle
60. Mona Lisa Overdrive – William Gibson
61. Burning Chrome – William Gibson
62. The Mad Fiddler – Fernando Pessoa
63. Vertigo – W.G. Sebald
64. New Australian Fiction 2023 – Ed. Suzy Garcia
65. Paradise Estate – Max Easton
66. Terminal Boredom – Izumi Suzuki
67. Satantango – Laszlo Krasznahorkai
68. The Rum Diary – Hunter S Thompson
69. Every Man for Himself and God Against All – Werner Herzog (trans. Michael Hofmann)
70. Piranesi – Susanna Clarke
71. The Palliative Society – Byung-Chul Han (trans. Daniel Steuer)
72. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
73. Doppelganger- Naomi Klein
74. The Fifth Season – NK Jemisin
75. The Obelisk Gate – NK Jemisin
Philosophy After Dark 