Tel Aviv: Mythography of a City by Maoz Azaryahu (2007, Syracuse University Press). I can't really tell you why... yet. I'll tell you how it is as I go, however.
What are you reading?
Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
The Incomplete Age
Clearly, "completion" as a concept has been a challenge for me lately, as I have tried to make great strides with my dissertation while on a leave of absence from work. Every moment I am not typing great and meaningful things is laden with guilt. Even when I have been writing away at chapters, I've allowed a drought of posts here on my poor, infant blog to cause me no end of remorse and bad feeling.
So, wrapping these emotions up with the novel that I have recently begun to read, The Book of Dave, by Will Self, I found myself puzzling over a web-era phenomenon this morning: that is, all the languished, obsolete blogs that have been started then abandoned by well-intentioned folks across the past decade. The picture below is a screen-grab of the first blog I ever started, which was born - and died - in May of 2005. It only ever had one post, in which I referenced all the things I'd write about: film, travel, politics on either side of the border, life between Toronto and Los Angeles, etc. Poor Exorbitant City might have met a similar fate were it not for today's flurry of inspiration. (Of course, it likely will yet.)
The descriptor given atop the page on my first blog informed my non-existent readership that this blog was to be "the only solution to a peripatetic, transnational, time-sapped existence in which i am never everywhere at once." The chosen design was garishly pink. Somehow, I recall sorting out the code to give the website a custom icon to appear in the navigation bar... that's still the way it appears in my Mozilla bookmarks list, though I guess the uploaded image has died a natural death, since it does not seem to load that way any more. The few scraps of writing to be found on the page are over-wrought, if sincere and, well, well intended.
I cannot make this blog disappear from the web. The email account to which it was tied is dead, so I cannot find the way to access "the dashboard" for the corresponding user and delete it. So out there it stays, floating on the net waiting for nothing in particular except my periodic checks to see if it is still there.
Or, perhaps, waiting for some future researcher to come along and sweep it into a net with thousands of other samples from The Incomplete Age. This is where The Book of Dave is no doubt taking over my thinking. The novel is, in part, about the radical attempts at interpretation (and the resulting misinterpretation) of a London cabbie's notebooks -- written during our epoch -- by a post-apocalyptic English society centuries after. His histrionic rantings are taken as nothing short of scripture and tremendous social consequences follow from that.
But think about it for a moment: all the detritus out on the web now... those very personal, well-intended blogs started to commemorate a group or a university seminar, to help keep people in touch over long distances, to document a love of experimenting with different recipes involving stout ale, and what-have-you, that got off the ground and then fell into neglect. Are these the cave drawings that anthropologists of some future era will sift through trying to understand that cryptic period in which the web exploded into life? What will they deduce? That we were a society with great promise and a tremendous affinity for beginnings, but with very , very poor follow-through? That we didn't clean up the virtual mess we made any better than the environmental one? That some of us misunderstood the word peripatetic? Will we be labeled "The Incomplete Age," laughed at beside the Stone, Industrial or even early Electronic ages for our megalomania and lassitude? All because I can't delete that old blog or may, one day, let this one die?
So, wrapping these emotions up with the novel that I have recently begun to read, The Book of Dave, by Will Self, I found myself puzzling over a web-era phenomenon this morning: that is, all the languished, obsolete blogs that have been started then abandoned by well-intentioned folks across the past decade. The picture below is a screen-grab of the first blog I ever started, which was born - and died - in May of 2005. It only ever had one post, in which I referenced all the things I'd write about: film, travel, politics on either side of the border, life between Toronto and Los Angeles, etc. Poor Exorbitant City might have met a similar fate were it not for today's flurry of inspiration. (Of course, it likely will yet.)
The descriptor given atop the page on my first blog informed my non-existent readership that this blog was to be "the only solution to a peripatetic, transnational, time-sapped existence in which i am never everywhere at once." The chosen design was garishly pink. Somehow, I recall sorting out the code to give the website a custom icon to appear in the navigation bar... that's still the way it appears in my Mozilla bookmarks list, though I guess the uploaded image has died a natural death, since it does not seem to load that way any more. The few scraps of writing to be found on the page are over-wrought, if sincere and, well, well intended.
I cannot make this blog disappear from the web. The email account to which it was tied is dead, so I cannot find the way to access "the dashboard" for the corresponding user and delete it. So out there it stays, floating on the net waiting for nothing in particular except my periodic checks to see if it is still there.
Or, perhaps, waiting for some future researcher to come along and sweep it into a net with thousands of other samples from The Incomplete Age. This is where The Book of Dave is no doubt taking over my thinking. The novel is, in part, about the radical attempts at interpretation (and the resulting misinterpretation) of a London cabbie's notebooks -- written during our epoch -- by a post-apocalyptic English society centuries after. His histrionic rantings are taken as nothing short of scripture and tremendous social consequences follow from that.
But think about it for a moment: all the detritus out on the web now... those very personal, well-intended blogs started to commemorate a group or a university seminar, to help keep people in touch over long distances, to document a love of experimenting with different recipes involving stout ale, and what-have-you, that got off the ground and then fell into neglect. Are these the cave drawings that anthropologists of some future era will sift through trying to understand that cryptic period in which the web exploded into life? What will they deduce? That we were a society with great promise and a tremendous affinity for beginnings, but with very , very poor follow-through? That we didn't clean up the virtual mess we made any better than the environmental one? That some of us misunderstood the word peripatetic? Will we be labeled "The Incomplete Age," laughed at beside the Stone, Industrial or even early Electronic ages for our megalomania and lassitude? All because I can't delete that old blog or may, one day, let this one die?
Sunday, January 20, 2008
ABD ("Always Be Doing [something]")... Easier Said...?
The watery disaster that has befallen our home (and this past week's sundry ironically related disasters, such as repeated water-outages) have run amok with my writing momentum. Yesterday was an abysmal day in that regard; today is slightly better, so far. I had set this past Friday as a chapter deadline... I have to re-schedule that deadline for this Thursday and try and try and try. 
I did, however, find myself organizing my thoughts in a chart today... its completion sent me into paroxysms of quietly self-deriding laughter over my sheer delight at the false sense of accomplishment it brought. I wonder if I ought not to have chosen a career as a statistician?
In other news, I had a tremendously lovely dinner at a friend and colleague's home last night... where I got my first-ever glimpse of his ludicrously lovely home office, and the simply astonishing library of books on film culture, history and theory that he has meticulously organized there. It made me more jealous than was rational. Having been fairly recently separated from the bulk of a formerly shared film library, I have to decide whether to try to build up a personal reference library from scratch, or whether to adopt the philosophy that owning less and borrowing more is the way to live (at least until I have a professor's salary and on-campus office). For now, just about as many books as will fit on the shelf of my desk seems to be my plight/state/fate.
Now if only my desk had an actual floor underneath it still, as opposed to raw, crumbly, stained, recently flood-saturated concrete...
I did, however, find myself organizing my thoughts in a chart today... its completion sent me into paroxysms of quietly self-deriding laughter over my sheer delight at the false sense of accomplishment it brought. I wonder if I ought not to have chosen a career as a statistician?
In other news, I had a tremendously lovely dinner at a friend and colleague's home last night... where I got my first-ever glimpse of his ludicrously lovely home office, and the simply astonishing library of books on film culture, history and theory that he has meticulously organized there. It made me more jealous than was rational. Having been fairly recently separated from the bulk of a formerly shared film library, I have to decide whether to try to build up a personal reference library from scratch, or whether to adopt the philosophy that owning less and borrowing more is the way to live (at least until I have a professor's salary and on-campus office). For now, just about as many books as will fit on the shelf of my desk seems to be my plight/state/fate.
Now if only my desk had an actual floor underneath it still, as opposed to raw, crumbly, stained, recently flood-saturated concrete...
Saturday, January 12, 2008
What I Am Reckoning with Today...
... intellectually, rhetorically and emotionally: Paul Virilio's 2004 treatise (released in an English translation by Julie Rose in 2005), City of Panic. Written in the shadow of 9/11 and the new Gulf war/the war on terror, but also linking brilliantly to the increasing bunkerization of societies (urban and otherwise), the still inadequately understood ramifications of virtual/networked culture, the intermittent urban blackouts of the past decade and even the X Prize (recently considered in a totally different, more positive light here), City of Panic is a typically perspicacious Virilio text, if an atypically bleak one.
The following two passages, among the more dire, sum up the book's urgent primary argument with some concision:
Describing NYC, Baghdad, Jerusalem, Hong Kong but also explicitly all cities: “CITIES OF PANIC that signal, more clearly than all the theories about urban chaos, the fact that the greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century has been the city, the contemporary metropolis of the disasters of Progress.” City of Panic, 90, emphasis in the original
“FORECLOSURE, EXCLUSION… Megalopolitan hyperconcentration is now topped not only with mass hyperterrorism, but also a panicky delinquency that is dragging the human race back to the original dance of death. The city once more becomes a citadel, in other words, a target for all terrors, domestic or strategic.” City of Panic, 95, emphasis in the original
Grim observations but from a prescient thinker on cities, culture, militarism ... and on the militarization of both cities and culture. Once we get past the rhetorical challenges I refer to at the beginning of this post ("megalopolitan hyperconcentration"?), must we de facto accept the challenging conclusions Virilio draws? Are cities doomed, and citizens everywhere along with them?
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